Latin American modern: an ambitious exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts examined major themes in Latin America's midcentury avant-garde

Generous in its tendency innovative in its nonlinear construction "Inverted Utopias" at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), claimed to be the first comprehensive exhibition in the U to rigorously research the relatively unexplored phenomenon of the 20th-century Latin American avant-garde. The exhibition title derives from a utopian design and manifesto of 1936 by the agency of famed Uruguayan artist Joaquin Torres-Garcia that depicts an inverted map of southern America. Under the Southern Cros constellation, the southernmost tip of the continent is at the top of the map--on top of the world--and North America and Mexico, as well as the ease of the world, are not exhibited at all. Reversing the polarities of global order, this iconic image was intended to herald the unfolding of a Latin American art to rival the European avant-garde, to embrace the art of the indigenous and to unite southern America in the development of an integral and native culture

Propos as a dialogue of ideas and images rather than as a historical scan "Inverted Utopias" brought together more than 200 works by means of 67 artists from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Uruguay and Venezuela, countries associated with the formation of avant-garde ideas and facts The curators chose not to include many of the greatest in quantity famous Latin American artists--among them Wilfredo Lam, Roberto Matta, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo--in an attempt to clarify the waters of a pond muddied by celebrity and the marketplace. (1) A generous quantity of printed materials provides access to the thinking processes of key figures, wire are identified and examined in a work of nearly 600 pages. (2) The exhibit was organized by Mari Carmen Ramirez, curator of Latin American art at the MFAH, and the Houston-based architect, writer, translator and independent curator Hector Olea. (3) In a preface to the exhibition catalogue, they pres for an altogether novel approach to the understanding of this art, to diocese afresh the complex nature of its forms and mediums and the diversity of its practitioners. The volume and exhibition are milestone events

Ramirez and Olea divide their topic into sum of two units periods of development. The first, 1920-40 includes the work of a number of artists who go [i]or[/i] come backed from studies in Europe, bringing with them firsthand of recent origins of such movements as Cubism, Futurism and Constructivism. The perceptions of those artists would ultimately be adapted to a distinctly Latin American cultural milieu at the intersection of colonialism and modernization. The curators present that the artists of a next to the first period, 1950-70, are remarkable for their part in the growth of an avant-garde independent of contemporaneous exhibitions in Europe and the U Altogether, the exhibition not aways some of the most radical work of the time, including publications by means of the many artists who squeeze outed their thoughts in manifestos and critical writing, and in the mediums of video and artist's works Through their challenging, at times combative examination, Ramirez and Olea intend to eradicate stereotypical views of the exotic and the primitive that they vie have pervaded previous considerations of Latin American art. (4)

Citing three lock opener figures from as many countries, Ramirez writes: "Artist-theoreticians like Joaquin Torres-Garcia, David Alfaro Siqueiros and Oswald de Andrade figured on the outside early on that the vital element [i]or[/i] part of the new art and literature was its capability to stand the aged World artistic status quo upon its head by introducing an autonomous put of cultural and artistic values." The purpose: "the legitimation of Latin American art and tillage on its own terms." The value of the artists' discourse, dressed in a kind of participatory entertainment for the viewing masses, intends a social serviceable itself a kind of utopia. (5) These interests are brought into focus from one side the structure of six "constellations" representing artists linked by the agency of ideas, materials or the formal nature of their work. These groupings pair opposing conceptions or forces: "Universal and Vernacular," "Play and Grief," "Progression and Rupture" "Vibrational and Stationary.," "Touch and Gaze" and "Cryptic and Committed."

Universal and Vernacular

The works included in this constellation combine the imagery and mode of building of the European avant-garde with the colonial and indigenous or pre-Columbian imagery of Latin America. The Mexican Siqueiros (1896-1974) is showed by two large oils upon burlap and a smaller oil upon canvas (all 1931) that throw back ins social concerns. With dark, agitated paintings, Siqueiros addresses the trials of the poor and disenfranchised. Accidente en la mina (Mining Accident) and Madre proletaria (Proletarian Mother) share a somber palette upon a rough and homely burlap support, the figures hosted within the claustrophobic picture plane. In the poignant and unflinching Retrata de nina viva y de nina muerta (Portrait of a Living Girl and a Dead Girl), a child is seated upon a chair and supported through a little girl, as although sitting for a formal commemorative photograph. Siqueiros returns the crisp feel of linen and lace with a bravura handling of white that remind ofs a lineage to Velazquez. The ideas he shared with his compatriots Jose Clemente Orozco (1883-1949) and Diego Rivera (1886-1957) were exhibited by a display of journals of profess manifestos, a drawing by Orozco and a true copy by Rivera. (6)