V.1.10 DIGITAL ARCHIVE 1065350
This is Waldo Rasmussen’s “Introduction to an Exhibition,” published in the catalogue Latin American Artists of the Twentieth Century, commissioned by the Comisaría de la Ciudad de Sevilla and organized by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) under the aegis of its International Council in celebration of quincentennial of the “Discovery” of the Americas (on view June 6–September 7, 1993). Rasmussen (born 1928)—the director of the museum’s International Program since 1969—presents a broad history of MoMA’s exhibiting and acquisition of modern Latin American art from its inception in 1929. He tracks his own relationship with Latin American art since joining the museum in 1954 and reflects on the people and events which shaped the institution’s commitment to this field. After nearly forty years of informed contact with the region, Rasmussen’s essay offers a much less stereotypical perspective on Latin American art than some of the other exhibitions profiled in this anthology. The author questions MoMA’s decision to present the work of Latin American artists in a separate gallery beginning in the 1950s through the museum’s renovation in 1964; instead, he advocates for the works to be shown together with those of their North American and European counterparts as part of a broader, more inclusive politics of display. This excerpt is taken from the essay’s original publication [Waldo Rasmussen, “Introduction to an Exhibition,” Latin American Artists of the Twentieth Century (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1993), 11–17].
. . .
For a North American curator, selecting work for a broad survey of modern Latin American art is a delicate undertaking, especially in the aftermath of the quincentennial commemorations—celebratory, critical, or mournful—of the European discovery of the new world.1 Thus, it is particularly important that curatorial and institutional positions are made explicit at the outset. The Canadian critic Bruce Ferguson has suggested that exhibitions are a form of language spoken by art museums to an audience, but that in order for this communication to be reciprocal, questions regarding an exhibition’s aims, its “hopes and desires,” the audience to which it is directed, and the intentions of the exhibition’s curator should be articulated. Ferguson has noted that it is especially useful to ask whether an exhibition “admits to its own necessary contradictions and multi-plicities.”2 It is the aim of this essay to stimulate dialogue through a discussion of the origin and purpose of the exhibition Latin American Artists of the Twentieth Century. A twofold narrative—both institutional history and autobiography—is required by this approach. Having evolved from personal experiences that extend back some thirty years, this project intersects with The Museum of Modern Art’s longer history of some sixty years of involvement with Latin American art, a history that shapes the present exhibition and, I hope, one that may in turn be illuminated by it.
The Museum of Modern Art was the first institution outside Latin America to exhibit and collect the art of that region. In 1931, only two years after its founding, the Museum presented an exhibition of Diego Rivera’s work that was attended by nearly 57,000 visitors, a record-breaking number.3 This was the second one-person show held at the Museum (the first was of the work of Henri Matisse), and only its fourteenth exhibition. Rivera was, in many respects, a logical choice; he was among the most famous and influential artists in the world in the early 1930s, and in 1928 he had met Alfred H. Barr, Jr., soon to become the Museum’s first director, while both were visiting the Soviet Union. Abby Aldrich Rockefeller (Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, Jr.), one of the three founding patrons of the Museum, was a great admirer of Rivera’s work and provided a grant that enabled the Museum to invite the artist to paint seven fresco panels especially for the exhibition.4 Only one of these, EI agrarista Zapata [The Agrarian Leader Zapata] of 1931, entered the Museum’s collection; it was purchased in 1940 through the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Fund. In 1933 an exhibition of ancient art from Latin America, American Sources of Modern Art (Aztec, Mayan, Incan), was the first in a series of ethnological shows held at the Museum. Art in Our Time, the exhibition inaugurating the Museum’s new building in 1939, included works by Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Candido Portinari.5 Latin American exhibitions at the Museum in 1940 included Portinari of Brazil, a one-person show of works by the Brazilian social-realist painter and muralist,6 and Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art, an early “blockbuster,” which filled the entire Museum with material ranging from pre-Columbian sculpture and colonial paintings to works by contemporary artists, with folk art shown in a “Mexican market” in the Museum’s garden.7 In 1944 Modern Cuban Painters was shown at the Museum and afterward seen in twelve cities in the United States.8 The Museum’s Department of Circulating Exhibitions, begun in 1933 under the direction of Elodie Courter, sent Latin American exhibitions throughout the United States during this period, beginning with Three Mexican Artists (Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros) in 1938 and 1939. Between 1938 and 1946 twelve Latin American exhibitions were circulated.
. . .
I moved to New York in 1954 to study at the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University; soon after arriving I was hired by Porter McCray and joined the staff of The Museum of Modern Art’s International Program. At that time it was circulating in Europe a major exhibition of American art, Modern Art in the United States: Selections from the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art. It was in many ways a successor to the 1938 exhibition of American art sent to Paris, once again representing all of the Museum’s curatorial departments. On this occasion, however, American paintings and sculpture, especially Abstract Expressionist works, were received with much greater enthusiasm. During the remainder of the 1950s the International Program focused on sending recent American art abroad.
In New York in the 1950s there was an entire gallery in The Museum of Modern Art devoted to works by Latin American artists, chiefly the Mexicans Rivera, Orozco, Siqueiros, and Tamayo. This was a feature of the “permanent” installation of the collection until the building was remodeled in 1964. Works by [Roberto] Matta were always on view in the galleries devoted to Surrealism, and Wifredo Lam’s La Jungla [The Jungle] of 1943 was given a prominent position in the Museum’s lobby by Alfred Barr, a hanging of arguable merit that has persisted to the present day. Latin American exhibitions of note in the 1950s included Ancient Arts of the Andes, directed by René d’Harnoncourt in 1954,9 Latin American Architecture since 1945 in 1955, and the 1957 retrospective of Matta’s work, which was the first exhibition at the Museum organized by William Rubin,10 who later became director of the Department of Painting and Sculpture. In 1961 Orozco: Studies for the Murals at Dartmouth College was shown at the Museum and afterward circulated in the United States and Scandinavia.
During its first decade the international Program assumed responsibility for sending exhibitions representing the United States to major international festivals, including the Venice Biennale and the São Paulo Bienal, there being no government agency charged with this function. Unlike the venerable Venice Biennale, which was begun in 1895, the São Paulo Bienal was a recent addition to the art festival circuit, established as a means of acquainting the Brazilian public with international developments in modern art, as well as providing Brazilian and other Latin American artists with an exhibition forum. At the urging of Nelson Rockefeller, before the International Program was established, the Museum organized the exhibition representing the United States at the first Bienal in 1951, a presentation of 124 works by fifty-eight artists, selected by a committee drawn from The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Brooklyn Museum, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. For the second [São Paulo] Bienal in 1953, the Museum sent Picasso’s Guernica of 1937 (then on long-term loan to the Museum from the artist) to a special exhibition honoring the artist; and a large exhibition of works by Alexander Calder, organized by René d’Harnoncourt, which received great acclaim. With the aid of a subsidy from the International Program, the San Francisco Museum of Art sent an exhibition of the work of West Coast artists to the third Bienal in 1955.
I first traveled to Latin America accompanying the United States representation prepared for the fourth Bienal in 1957, the exhibition Jackson Pollock: 1912–1956, which had just closed at the Museum. Along with the Pollock retrospective was a group show of the work of five painters (James Brooks, Philip Guston, Grace Hartigan, Franz Kline, and Larry Rivers) and three sculptors (David Hare, Ibram Lassaw, and Seymour Lipton). I supervised the assembly, packing, and shipment of the exhibitions and assisted Porter McCray with their installation. Barr was the United States Commissioner for the [Third São Paulo] Bienal and also served on its international jury, which gave a special citation to the Pollock exhibition.
The fourth Bienal featured works by a number of emerging Latin American artists including Frans Krajcberg (who received first prize for a painting by a Brazilian artist), and artists working in various styles of geometric abstraction— among them Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, Sérgio Camargo, Edgar Negret, Alejandro Otero, and Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar, who are included in the present exhibition and book. I must admit, however, that at the time I was too absorbed by Abstract Expressionism to respond very strongly to their work, which today I greatly admire. More important to me was the experience of Brazil itself, to which I felt an immediate connection, and my first exposure to the international art world. In retrospect, the most positive aspect of the Bienal as an art event for Brazilians may have been juxtaposing exhibitions of work by established artists (including a group show of Bauhaus artists and shows of works by Marc Chagall, Paul Delvaux, René Magritte, Ben Nicholson, and Egon Schiele) alongside works representing contemporary developments in a wide range of styles. The [São Paulo] Bienal provided an unparalleled opportunity for Latin American artists to show their work in an international context. The fly in the ointment, however, was a system of awarding prizes that created a false sense of nationalist competition, which I feel was very damaging to the artists.
The next project for the International Program in which I was engaged was a major exhibition devoted to Abstract Expressionism in America. The New American Painting was organized at the request of the museum directors Willem Sandberg of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Robert Giron of the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, and Arnold Rüdlinger of the Kunsthalle in Basel. The exhibition was directed by Dorothy C. Miller, curator of Museum Collections, with the help of the poet Frank O’Hara, who was on the staff of the Museum until his death in 1966. I assisted with the show’s organization and its installation in Basel, where the exhibition—which was shown jointly with the Pollock retrospective—had its inaugural presentation in 1958. The response to The New American Painting was extraordinary. European critics acknowledged that the United States had produced a new kind of painting, signaling the graduation of American art from a provincial role to a position of central importance in the modern movement. For the first time in our history, American artists had invented a plastic language capable of altering the course of art; its influence spread internationally. During the following years, a series of one-person exhibitions of work by Abstract Expressionist artists—[Franz] Kline, [Mark] Rothko, Robert Motherwell, [David] Smith, [Willem] de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, and Barnett Newman—was circulated by the International Program in Europe. It was deeply satisfying to be associated with those exhibitions and to play an active role in gaining respect for the achievements of the American Abstract Expressionists. It is my great hope that the present exhibition and book will make a similar contribution to the understanding and acceptance of work by Latin American artists.
* * *
In 1962 the International Program changed direction. After a decade of organizing the official United States representations to international festivals, including those of São Paulo, Venice, Tokyo, and New Delhi, The Museum of Modern Art announced that it would no longer undertake that role and encouraged the government to assume responsibility for it. The Museum gave its International Program an expanded charge, sending circulating exhibitions on wider itineraries. In this elaboration of earlier Museum policies, Latin America was a particular priority as a part of the world still lacking major public collections of modern art. Therefore, funds were raised specifically for exhibitions to circulate in Latin America, and prominent Latin Americans were invited to join The International Council. Following the resignation of Porter McCray, and with the counsel and encouragement of René d’Harnoncourt and The International Council’s president, Elizabeth Bliss Parkinson (now Mrs. Henry Ives Cobb), I began to direct the International Program.
Abstract Drawings and Watercolors U.S.A. was the first of more than forty exhibitions in many fields of modern art, architecture, photography, and film that have since been circulated by the International Program in Latin America. It was selected by the art historian and critic Dore Ashton and represented Abstract Expressionism with works by Pollock, de Kooning, [Arshile] Gorky, Kline, and Motherwell; geometric abstraction in works by Burgoyne Dillier, Fritz Glarner, and Ludwig Sander; and the younger neo-Dada generation with pieces by Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. Besides introducing recent developments, this exhibition’s tour to twelve cities in 1962 and 1963 established what were to become long-term working relationships with museums and cultural institutions throughout Latin America. Other milestone exhibitions in the series included The School of Paris: Paintings from the Florene May Schoenborn and Samuel A. Marx Collection, shown first at the Museum and in 1966 at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City, where it was installed by René d’Harnoncourt. It included forty-five paintings by fourteen artists, among them six by [Henri] Matisse, fourteen by [Pablo] Picasso, six by Georges Braque, and others by Giorgio de Chirico, Juan Gris, Fernand Léger, Joan Miró, Amedeo Modigliani, and Chaim Soutine. In 1968 From Cézanne to Miró presented a range of painting by European masters from the late nineteenth century to 1940, lent by seven museums and twenty private collectors in the United States. Its tour to Buenos Aires, Santiago, and Caracas established attendance records and made it possible for many in those cities to see original works by modern masters for the first time. In 1971 and 1972 Surrealism, drawn from the Museum’s collection, traveled to six countries, including a showing in Santiago at the invitation of President Salvador Allende. One-person exhibitions circulated in Latin America have included selections of paintings by Josef Albers (1964–65) and Hans Hofmann (1964); sculpture by Jacques Lipchitz (1964) and Alexander Calder (1970–71); and prints and drawings by Gorky, Miró, Motherwell, and Picasso. Latin American Prints from The Museum of Modern Art toured ten cities in 1974 and 1975. Major exhibitions during the 1980s included Four Modern Masters: De Chirico, Ernst, Magritte, and Miró in 1981 and Contrasts of Form: Geometric Abstraction, 1910–1980 in 1986, which presented works drawn from the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and The Museum of Modern Art, including ones by the Latin American artists Marcelo Bonevardi, Negret, Rivera, and Jesús Rafael Soto. Both exhibitions were circulated to Buenos Aires, São Paulo, and Caracas.
As I traveled to a number of countries with the Museum’s exhibitions in the 1960s, I was able to meet many of the artists in those countries and view their work, and I was profoundly affected by the powerful art created during that period. In Venezuela the kinetic art of Alejandro Otero, Carlos Cruz-Diez, and Jesús Rafael Soto was gaining widespread acceptance. Their work was championed by Miguel Arroyo, who built the collection of the Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas with great daring and taste, acquiring, for instance, Jacobo Borges’s Ha comenzado el espectáculo [The Show Has Begun] in 1964, the year it was painted, as well as a great collection of the works of Armando Reverón. Arroyo was also the first museum director in Latin America to begin to acquire a wide range of art from Latin American countries other than his own. Among the many exhibitions I saw during Arroyo’s tenure, the installation of Gego’s Reticulárea in 1969 was especially magical.
Another innovative museum director during this period was Marta Traba, who directed Bogotá’s Museo de Arte Moderno when it was located on small galleries in the Universidad Nacional. An ardent feminist and a brilliant critic, Traba encouraged an entire generation of gifted young artists, including Beatriz González, whose enamel portrait of Simón Bolívar was the first in a series of ironic tributes to national heroes, and Ana Mercedes Hoyos, then beginning a series of geometric abstractions, a series whose later works appeared to dissolve into pure light. The Colombian Fernando Botero, living in New York throughout the 1960s, had already sold his Mona Lisa, a los doce años [Mona Lisa, Age Twelve] of 1959 to The Museum of Modern Art. His success, in spite of his independence from international influences, was an inspiration to artists even younger than he.
In Buenos Aires during the 1960s the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella was one of the most provocative and stimulating avant-garde centers of music, dance, theater, and the visual arts anywhere in the world. It was under the direction of Jorge Romero Brest, a former director of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes and a great teacher and influential critic. He was also an international figure in the arts, frequently serving on art commissions and juries around the world. It was at the Instituto in 1964 that I first encountered the Nueva Figuración group of artists—Jorge de la Vega, Luis Felipe Noé, Ernesto Deira, and Rómulo Macció—and felt immediate sympathy for their work, related as it was to my own predilection for contemporary expressionist painting. Other artists reacting against the dominant tradition of Argentine geometric abstraction during this period included Marta Minujín, with her early Environments and Happenings, and those practicing local variants of Pop art (Delia Cancel, Juan Stoppani, and Susana Salgado).
New approaches to Conceptual art were formulated by artists in several countries, notably Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark in Brazil and Víctor Grippo in Argentina. Other prominent Conceptual artists came to the United States during the 1960s; Liliana Porter and Luis Camnitzer are two of particular importance to me. Many of the aforementioned artists created affecting political statements during the most repressive periods of military dictatorship in their countries.
A contemporary and close friend of René d’Harnoncourt’s since his early days in Mexico was Fernando Gamboa, who directed the Mexican government’s international exhibitions for many years. During the 1970s he was director of the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City, where he presented several shows from the International Program to supplement his own exhibitions of Mexican art. The critic Mário Pedrosa was a crucial figure in the development of art in Brazil; he served as Secretary General for the 1961 São Paulo Bienal, to which the International Program had sent exhibitions of the work of Motherwell, Reuben Nakian, and Leonard Baskin.
In 1966 Alfred Barr traveled to the Bienal in Córdoba, Argentina, and selected a group of works by Latin American artists exhibited there that were later acquired by The Museum of Modern Art. These acquisitions included works by Jorge Eielson of Peru, Rodolfo Mishaan of Guatemala, and Eduardo Mac Entyre, Rogelio Polesello, and César Paternosto of Argentina. In 1967 the exhibition Latin American Art: 1931–1966 presented these and other works from the Museum’s collection.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Latin American artists continued to be featured occasionally in exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art. Information—the first important exhibition of Conceptual art, organized by Kynaston McShine in 1970—was one of the very few international surveys of its time to include artists from outside Europe and the United States.11 Among the Latin American artists represented were Hélio Oiticica, with an installation, Cildo Meireles, the New York Graphic Workshop (Luis Camnitzer, Liliana Porter, and José Guillermo Castillo), and Marta Minujín. In 1971 The Artistas Adversary: Works from the Museum Collection included Orozco’s fresco Dive Bomber and Tank of 1940, which had not been on view for many years, as well as works by Botero, Marisol, Rivera, Antonio Ruiz, and Siqueiros, and a print section featuring the popular graphics by the Mexican satirist José Guadalupe Posada and those of the Taller de Gráfica Popular [People’s Graphic Workshop] of Mexico City from the 1930s and 1940s. The Projects series of exhibitions by contemporary artists, begun in 1971, has included installations by Luis F. Benedit (1972), Porter (1973), Rafael Ferrer (1974), Meireles (1990), Guillermo Kuitca (1991), and Felix Gonzales-Torres (1992). A Happening by Minujín, titled Kinappening, took place in the Museum’s sculpture garden in 1974. Mexican Art: Selections from The Museum of Modern Art was shown in 1978. The Department of Photography mounted shows of works by the Mexican master Manuel Álvarez Bravo in 1956 and 1971, and in 1979 the Projects series included Martín Chambi and Edward Ranney, in which photographs of social life in Cuzco during the 1920s and 1930s by the Peruvian Chambí were shown with the American Ranney’s photographs of Inca monuments and the Peruvian landscape. The Department of Architecture and Design organized The Architecture of Luis Barragán, an exhibition of work by the brilliant Mexican architect, in 1976,12 and Roberto Burle Marx: The Unnatural Art of the Garden, featuring the work of the Brazilian landscape architect, in 1991.13 Deborah Wye, curator in the Department of Prints and Illustrated Books, organized Committed to Print: Social and Political Themes in Recent American Printed Art (1988), which presented political art by both Latin Americans working in the United States and American Latino artists, including Rupert García, Luis Cruz Azaceta, Camnitzer, Juan Sánchez, Marisol, Josely Carvalho, Alfredo Jaar, and Luis Jimenez.14 In 1991, Art of the Forties, an interdepartmental show drawn from the Museum’s collection, exhibited Orozco’s Dive Bomber and Tank after a twenty-year absence from public view and temporarily moved Lam’s Jungle from the lobby to the exhibition galleries.15 Works by Frida Kahlo, Matta, Siqueiros, Tamayo, and Joaquín Torres-García were also included.
It is important to record these events, but if we consider that Latin American artists have been included in only fourteen exhibitions at the Museum during the past twenty years, it is clear that interest in Latin American art has not exactly been flourishing recently, nor has the situation been appreciably different in other major museums in this country and Europe. It was this relative indifference to Latin American art that first led me to develop a project for a major exhibition of this art, which I hoped might help redress the situation. Having been strongly influenced by Stanton [L.] Catlin’s Art of Latin America since Independence,16 held in 1966 at the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, I envisioned an exhibition that would represent a still wider range of the visual arts in Latin America of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including photography as well as painting and sculpture. Feeling that Europe might be more receptive than the United States to such an exhibition, I proposed it in 1976 to John Drummond, and then director of the Edinburgh international Festival, and he accepted it with enthusiasm for a showing in 1981. But after more than two years of preparation, numerous difficulties made it necessary to cancel the project.17
After so long a period of neglect by cultural institutions of the United States and Europe, Latin American art has been examined in retrospectives of works by individual artists and the subject of several survey exhibitions during the past few years. The present exhibition is perhaps the most ambitious of the latter efforts, as it represents the work of more than ninety artists with over three hundred examples, beginning in 1914 with the first generation of Latin American modernists and extending to contemporary artists, including Latino artists working in the United States today.
In organizing the exhibition I have sought to present a broad view of the many complex strands in the work of Latin American artists, stressing on international perspective by grouping the works chronologically rather than by nationality; it is important to counter the strong tendencies toward nationalist interpretation. I do not assume that Latin American artists share a common identity that can be defined easily or that separates them from other Western artists, and I have therefore avoided concepts—such as those that stress the exotic, folkloric, surrealist, or political—that reduce the complexity of the artists’ contributions. Instead, I have attempted to explore the intensely rich body of work by Latin American artists as inclusively and openly as possible.
The survey format was selected for the exhibition and publication because I felt it could best provide a broad historical view of the context in which the work of Latin American artists has developed. The very scope of the survey format implies certain limitations and dangers, especially, in Guy Brett’s words, “the inevitable oversimplification and homogenization of another reality.”18 Despite my affinity for the work of Latin American artists, the selection remains an outsider’s mapping of a vast area, with the strengths and weaknesses that implies. I have attempted to counter some of the limitations of the survey form by representing many of the artists with several works or large-scale examples. Nevertheless, a number of important figures in the history of Latin American art could not be included. An important aim of this exhibition and the publication that accompanies it is to stimulate further study and research in this field, especially scholarly studies of neglected individual artists and specific periods and movements in Latin American art.
In many ways I have conceived of the exhibition in relation to the Museum of Modern Art’s collection—not only to place works from it in the overall context provided by this survey, but in a sense to provide a kind of ideal collection by featuring major artists of earlier generations who are not and, in many cases, can never be represented in the Museum’s collection. This is not to point a finger at what Barr called, with reference to collecting, “the sins of omission,” which he felt were much more serious than “the sins of commission” because they could not be rectified; rather, it is with the hope that this exhibition and publication will generate new interest at the Museum of Modern Art and elsewhere in collecting and researching Latin American art.
As noted above, during the 1950s Latin American works from the collection, primarily those by Mexican artists, were shown in a separate gallery. I am far from advocating a return to this arrangement. I hope that in the future more works by Latin American artists will be incorporated within the international context of the Museum’s collection, so that Torres-García, for example, may be presented as part of the Constructivist tradition in which he was an important innovator, and that Mexican works of the 1930s and 1940s may be shown together with their North American counterparts. Similarly, I hope that Latin American artists will increasingly find open to them inclusion in major international exhibitions and publications. My deepest dream is for Latin American artists to join more fully the world community of artists on the terms of equality and dignity they deserve.
1
Earlier versions of Latin American Artists of the Twentieth Century were shown in Seville, Paris, and Cologne in 1992–93. The first of these showings was commissioned by the city of Seville as part of its Columbus quincentennial celebration. See Artistas Latinoamericanos del siglo XX / Latin American Artists of the Twentieth Century, essay by Edward J. Sullivan (Seville: Comisaría de la Ciudad de Sevilla para 1992, 1992); Art d’Amerique Latine 1911-1968 (Paris: Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, 1992); Amériques Latines: Art contemporain (Paris: Hôtel des Arts, 1992); and Marc Scheps, ed., Lateinamerikanische Kunst im 20. Jahrhundert (Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1993).
2
Bruce Ferguson, “Dialogues in the Western Hemisphere: Language, Discourse, and Culture” (paper delivered at the conference “Artistic and Cultural identity in Latin America” the Memorial da America Latina, São Paulo, September 22–25, 1991).
3
See Diego Rivera, introduction by Frances Flynn Paine, notes by Jere Abbott (New York: The Museum of Modern Art and W. W. Norton, 1931); Hayden Herrera, Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo (New York: Harper & Row, 1983), 131; and Diego Rivera: A Retrospective (New York. W. W. Norton; Detroit: Detroit Institute of Arts, 1986), 79.
4
Rivera’s history with members of the Rockefeller family continued when in 1932 he was commissioned to paint a mural for the lobby of the RCA building at Rockefeller Center, then under construction. Painted the next year, Man at the Crossroads Looking with Hope and High Vision to the Choosing of a New and Better Future commented explicitly on the evils of capitalism and the benefits of socialism and included a portrait of Lenin. When Nelson A. Rockefeller asked that the portrait be removed, Rivera refused and scandal ensued when he was dismissed from the project. The mural was covered, and in 1934 it was destroyed. Rivera re-created the composition on a wall at the Palacio de BelIas Artes in Mexico City. See Diego Rivera: A Retrospective, 85–89.
5
See Art in Our Time (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1939).
6
See Portinari of Brazil (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1940).
7
See Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1940).
8
See “Modern Cuban Painters,” Museum of Modern Art Bulletin 11, no, 5 (April 1944): 1–14.
9
See Wendell C. Bennett, Ancient Arts of the Andes, introduction by René d’Harnoncourt (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1954).
10
See William Rubin, Matta (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1957).
11
See Kynaston McShine, ed., Information (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1970). Kynaston McShine is now senior curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture.
12
See Emilio Ambasz, The Architecture of Luis Barragán (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1976).
13
See William Howard Adams, Roberto Burle Marx: The Unnatural Art of the Garden (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1991).
14
See Deborah Wye, Committed to Print: Social and Political Themes in Recent American Printed Art (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1988).
15
See Art of the Forties, essay by Guy Davenport, introduction by Riva Castleman (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1991).
16
See Stanton L. Catlin and Terence Grieder, Art of Latin America Since Independence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966). [SEE DOCUMENT IV.2.4]
17
Essays by Latin American art historians had been commissioned for a planned accompanying publication, and much hard work had been done, when there arose difficulties in fundraising and in obtaining the cooperation of several Latin American governments. In addition, a proposed European tour, following the Edinburgh showing, had been accepted by only one institution, the Kunsthalle in Düsseldorf. The essays were eventually published in Damián Bayón, ed., Arte moderno en América Latina (Madrid: Taurus Ediciones, 1985).
18
Guy Brett, “Preface: Assembly,” in Transcontinental: Nine Latin American Artists (London and New York: Verso, 1990), 5.