Latin American Avant-Garde
Modern Art
Strategies of Modernity: “swallowing,”
“inversion,” and “re-appropriation”
Francisco Laso (Peru), Dweller in the Cordillera, 1855
Tarsila do Amaral (Brazil), Abaporu, 1928
Academic versus Avant-Garde painting.
Why do these paintings look different?
Intro: European modern art
(a reminder)
Claude Monet, Impression (Sunrise), 1873
Claude Lorraine, Landscape with Apollo and Mercury, 1645
Modern art is a revolution in form and content
Paul Signac, The Gulf of Sainte Tropez, 1892 - Pointillism
compare Henri Matisse, Luxe, Calme, et Volupté, 1904 early Fauvism
From Pointillism to Fauvism – increasing freedom from mimetic illusionism
Both Van Gogh & Gauguin appropriated
Japanese perspective and composition
Vincent Van Gogh, Plum tree in Bloom
(after Hiroshige), oil on canvas
1887 (painted in Paris)
Paul Gauguin, Vision After the Sermon:
Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, 1888
(painted in Pont Aven)
Henri Matisse, Woman with a Hat (Madame Matisse), 1904-5
(right) Matisse, The Green Stripe (Madame Matisse), 1905
Fauvism – arbitrary color, gestural and obvious brush stroke –
Rules of Western (Renaissance mimetic academicism) style painting
are broken in favor of the modern artist’s individual feeling-idea-expression
Modern art was transformed by the influence of non-Western art.
In the early 20th century the primary source was African tribal sculpture
“It is as if someone had drunk kerosene to spit fire."
(right) Picasso, Reservoir at Horta, summer 1909, with photograph of the
Spanish town by the artist . Development of Cubism – arbitrary light and
architectonic space that ignores the rules of scientific linear perspective.
Proto-Cubism
Emilio Pettoruti (Argentina 1892-1970)
Argentine Avant-Garde was launched in 1924 with the founding in Buenos
Aires of Martin Fierro, a cosmopolitan artist magazine and a controversial
exhibition of paintings by Emilio Pettoruti later the same year.
Martin Fierro’s manifesto – “…we are in the presence of a NEW SENSIBILITY
and of a NEW COMPREHENSION” and “new means and forms of expression.”
(caps in original)
Luigi Russolo, Dynamism of an
Automobile, 1913, oil,
Italian Futurism
Emilio Pettoruti, Dynamism, graphite,
1915, Argentine Futurism
(left) Emilio Pettoruti, Harlequin, 1925, oil on canvas, 27 in H, Synthetic
Cubism. Painted in Buenas Aires (Pettoruti returned to Argentina in 1924)
(right) Pablo Picasso,Three Musicians, 1921, Synthetic Cubism
“Only Modern art moves and arouses us,
saying lively things, things that are our
own, things that show us the way to
tomorrow.”
Plays a bandoneon, an accordion-like
instrument used in tango ensembles.
- Pettoruti, “The Situation of the
Modern Artist,” 1968
Latin American Avant-Garde
Modern Art
Strategies of Modernity: “swallowing,”
“inversion,” and “re-appropriation”
(left) Tarsila do Amaral (Brazil, 1886-1973), Self-Portrait, oil on paper, 15
in. H, 1924
(right) Amaral, Portrait of Oswald de Andrade, 1922.
Tarsila do Amaral, Self Portrait, oil on canvas, 30 in. H. 1920(?)
Amaral studied in Paris 1920- June 1922
and December 1922 to December 1923
Avant-garde modern art and rejection of academic art
Post-Impressionist style – the brushstroke is obvious and gestural, an
impression is captured rather than strict mimetic illusionism, but the palette
is “local” (realistic) and the figure is foreshortened and shaded to give a
traditional illusion of three dimensionality.
(left) Anita Malfatti (Brazilian, 1889-1964), La Boba, 1915. Amaral’s friend
in Sâo Paulo, Malfatti was in Berlin between 1910-1915. Malfatti’s 1917
exhibition in Sao Paulo, provoked hostility and scandal.
(right) Ernst Kirchner (German Expressionist) Self-Portrait as Soldier, 1916
Anita Malfatti, The Yellow Man, 1915-16, charcoal and pastel on paper, 61 X
45.5 cm, Sao Paulo, Brazil
Cover of catalog from art exhibition from the Semana de Arte Moderna (Week
of Modern Art), an arts festival in São Paulo, Brazil, from February 11 to
February 18, 1922 organized by Mário de Andrade and the Group of Five. The
illustration is by Emiliano di Cavalcanti.
“I am deeply Brazilian and I am going to
study the taste and the art of our country
people. I hope to learn with those who
have not been corrupted by the
academies. To be a Brazilian artist is not
to paint only Brazilian landscapes and
farmhands.”
-
Tarsila do Amaral, 1923 (Paris)
Amaral, Central Railway of Brazil, 1924, oil, 56 in. H, Sâo Paulo
compare Fernand Léger (French Cubist, 1881-1955) The City, 1919
Embrace of modernity? Colonial Cubism?
“Cubism is the military service of the artist. To be strong, every artist should
go through it”
- Amaral
Poetry exists in facts. The shacks of saffron and
ochre among the greens of the hillside favelas,
under cabraline blue, are aesthetic facts.
We have a dual heritage – the jungle and the
school. Our credulous mestizo race, then
geometry, algebra and chemistry after the baby's
bottle and herbal tea.
Oswald de Andrade
Pau-Brazil Poetry manifesto 1924,
(left) Tarsila do Amaral, Black Woman, 1923, oil, (painted in Paris)
Compare with 1920 self portrait (center)
(right) Constantin Brancusi (Romanian) Blonde Negress, 1926
Western Primitivism – is this primitivism a re-appropriation of
primitivism?
(left) Amaral, Abaporu (“Man who eats” in Tupi-Guarani),1928, oil, 33 ½ in H
Inspired Oswald de Andrade’s “Anthropophagite Manifesto”: cannibalism as a
metaphor for Brazil’s transformation of European culture
Strategy of “Swallowing”
Amaral, Antropofagia, 1929, oil, 50 in. H
“No one has penetrated as well as she did the wildness of our land, the
barbarian which is each one of us, the true Brazilians who are eating with all
possible ferocity the old culture of importation, the old unusable art, all the
prejudices,”
Oswald de Andrade for Amaral’s first exhibition in Brazil 1929.
Joaquín Torres-García (Uruguayan painter and
sculptor, 1874-1949)
Returned to Montevideo in 1934 after a 43-year
absence in Madrid, Barcelona, Paris, and New
York.
“Constructive Universalism” and Abstraction
Joaquín Torres-García, New York, 1921
Torres-Garcia, Constructive Painting (The Cellar), 1921
(left) Joaquín Torres-García, Composition, 1932, oil on canvas, 28 x 20"
(right) Piet Mondrian, Still Life with Ginger Jar, 1912
(lower right) Mondrian Tableau, 1921 (Neoplasticism)
Torres-Garcia met Mondrian in Paris in 1929. New use of the grid with pictographs would be
the basis of his Universal Constructivism when he returns to Montevideo in 1934
“I have said School of the South: because, in fact, our North looks South.
For us there must not be a North, except in opposition to the South… This
correction was necessary; because of it we know where we are.”
Strategy of “inversion”
JOAQUÍN TORRES-GARCÍA, 1943
DRAWING, COVER PAGE MAP OF SCHOOL
OF THE SOUTH, MONTEVIDEO, EL TALLER
TORRES-GARCIA, 1958
Universal Constructivism of Torres-Garcia was influenced by Andean preconquest art based on geometric patterns. Compare Inca woven tunic (left),
c. 1476-1534 with Torres-Garcia, Composition, 1932 (right)
Gate of the Sun, Bolivia, 500 C.E.
Joaquin Torres-Garcia, Cosmic Monument, 1938,
made of separate pink granite blocks. Cube,
sphere, and pyramid on top represent the most
timeless and stable of geometric forms. A plaque on
the ground nearby has incised on it the cardinal
points reversed, so “sur” (south) appears at the top
and “norte” (north) at the bottom.
Strategy of inversion
Joaquin Torres-Garcia, Cosmic Monument, 1938, pink granite, Parque Jose
Enrique Rodo, Montevideo.
Lam, academic study
painted in Madrid, 1925.
Lam spent 18 years in
Europe (1923-41) before
creating his signature
paintings in Cuba during
WWII.
Wifredo Lam in Marseille waiting to escape
to the Caribbean from Nazi France, 1940
Lam in Havana studio, 1947
Wifredo Lam (Cubanborn French Painter,
1902-1982) , The
Jungle, 1943
gouache on paper
mounted on canvas, 94
1/4 x 90 1/2“
“. . .beings in passage
from a vegetal state to
that of an animal still
charged with vestiges
of the forest”
- Wifredo Lam
Strategy of Re-appropriation
(left) Wifredo Lam, The Casting of the Spell, 1947, oil on burlap, 43 1/8 x 36 in
(right) Picasso, Woman in a Chair, 1929
“I wanted with all my heart to paint the drama of my country, but by thoroughly
expressing the negro spirit, the beauty of the plastic art of the blacks. In this way
I could act as a Trojan horse that would spew forth hallucinating figures with the
power to surprise, to disturb the dreams of the exploiters.” (Lam)
Aesthetic of NEGRITUDE – AIME CESAIRE
Wifredo Lam, The Idol,
1944, oil on canvas, 158 X
127 cm, Caracas