Twentieth-Century Art of Latin America

by Barnitz, Jacqueline

• ISBN13: 9780292708570
• ISBN10: 0292708572
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-03-01
• Publisher: Univ of Texas Pr

Summary

The twentieth-century art of Latin America is art in the western tradition, and its leading figures--Wifredo Lam, Roberto Matta, Diego Rivera, Joaquín Torres-García, to name only a few--have achieved international stature. Yet much of the writing about this art has offered either a victimized view of an art tradition dominated by foreign models or a romanticized view of what Latin American art should be. This pathfinding book, by contrast, seeks not to "invent" Latin American art but to look at it from the points of view of its own artists and critics.Drawing on some forty years of studying and teaching Latin American art, Jacqueline Barnitz surveys the major currents and artists of the twentieth century in Mexico, the Caribbean, and South America (including Brazil). She progresses chronologically from modernismo and the break with nineteenth-century academic art to some of the trends of the 1980s, setting each movement within its historical and cultural contexts. This grand survey of modern Latin American art will thus be the essential guide to a vibrant art tradition, as well as a vital teaching tool. Lavishly illustrated with color and black-and-white reproductions of major works, it will be useful to artists, collectors, historians, writers, and social scientists, as well as art historians.

Author Biography

Jacqueline Barnitz is Professor of Modern Latin American Art at the University of Texas at Austin.

Table of Contents

Preface	xvii
Acknowledgments	xxi
Introduction and an Overview of the Nineteenth Century	1	(12)
PART I
Modernismo and the Break with Academic Art, 1890--1934	13	(29)
The Avant-garde of the 1920s: Cosmopolitan or National Identity?	42	(33)
Social, Ideological, and Nativist Art: The 1930s, 1940s, and After	75	(28)
Surrealism, Wartime, and New World Imagery, 1928--1964	103	(24)
Torres-Garcia's Constructive Universalism and the Abstract Legacy	127	(16)
PART II
New Museums, the Sao Paulo Biennial, and Abstract Art	143	(23)
Functionalism, Integration of the Arts, and the Postwar Architectural Boom	166	(23)
Geometric, Optical, and Kinetic Art from the 1950s through the 1970s	189	(26)
Concrete and Neoconcrete Art and Their Offshoots in the Brazilian Context	215	(21)
Neofiguration, Representational Art, Pop, and Environments: The 1960s and 1970s	236	(33)
Political Art: Graphic Art, Painting, and Conceptualism as Ideological Tools	269	(29)
Some Trends of the 1980s	298	(17)
Notes	315	(41)
Timeline	356	(2)
Map	358	(1)
Selected Bibliography	359	(14)
Index	373