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Abstract
This article aims to provide a basic framework to enable the analysis of various issues related to the artistic exchanges between Latin America and the United States in the context of “Pan-Americanism”, from the outbreak of World War II to the early 1960s. We will attempt to reveal, in a succinct and necessarily general manner, an extremely complex web of issues, eras, places and aesthetics, involving multiple figures and institutions from the entire American continent, who were motivated by very different political, economic, and cultural interests. Various exhibitions and publications from this era bear witness to these exchanges and the fluctuations occurring within this web of relationships, which were not always easy.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Claire F. Fox, Making Art Panamerican: Cultural Policy and the Cold War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013); Andrea Matallana, Nelson Rockefeller y la diplomacia del arte en América Latina (Buenos Aires: EUDEBA, 2021). These books are essential resources for understanding, exploring and expanding upon the issues addressed in this paper.
2 President James Monroe’s doctrine invoked the idea of “America for Americans”; in reality, however, this declaration referred not to the inhabitants of the continent as a whole, but only to people from the United States. Roughly speaking, this marked the beginning of the appropriation of the term “Americans” as a label intended exclusively for those from North America. The Monroe Doctrine dictated that any European interference in the American continent would be regarded as an act of aggression against the United States, with the latter adopting a clearly paternalistic stance or acting in the self-appointed role of “big brother”.
3 Fabiana Serviddio, “Los murales de Portinari en la Sala Hispánica de la Biblioteca del Congreso de los EE.UU.: construcción plástica de una identidad panamericana,” in Cuadernos del CILHA, año 12, núm. 14 (Mendoza: Centro Interdisciplinario de Literatura Hispanoamericana, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad Nacional de Cuyo, 2011): 126.
4 See: Fabiana Serviddio, “Relatos nacionales y regionales en la creación de la colección latinoamericana del MoMA,” in A contracorriente, Vol. 16 No. 3 (Raleigh: North Carolina State University, Spring 2019), 380; Serviddio, 2019a: 380; Eva Cockroft, “The United States and socially concerned Latin American art,” in The Latin American Spirit: Art and Artists in the United States, 1920–1970, ed. Luis Carcel (New York: Bronx Museum of the Arts, 1989), 184–221; Miriam Basilio, “Reflecting on a History of Collecting and Exhibiting Work by Artists from Latin America,” in Latin American & Caribbean Art. MoMA at El Museo, ed. Miriam Basilio et al (New York: El Museo del Barrio and The Museum of Modern Art, 2004), 52–68.
5 Portinari went on to win high-profile commissions in the US, most notably a series of murals for the Hispanic Room at the Library of Congress in Washington (1941), which he completed following a prestigious solo show entitled Portinari of Brazil at MoMA in 1940 and, later, the murals at the United Nations building (1953).
6 Barbara Haskell et al., Vida Americana. Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925–1945 (New York: Whitney Museum, 2020).
7 Serviddio, “Relatos nacionales,” 375.
8 Thomas J. Watson, “Preface,” in Contemporary Art of the Western Hemisphere (New York: International Business Machines Corporation, 1941), unnumbered.
9 Serviddio, “Los murales de Portinari,” 128.
10 Fabiana Serviddio, “Until we win la guerra. Transformaciones en la obra de Molina Campos a contraluz del panamericanismo,” Panambí, Valparaiso, No. 8 (June 2019), 80.
11 Un Hemisferio unido carteles = Um hemisferio unido cartazes = United hemisphere posters (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1942).
12 Gabriela A. Piñero, “El tránsito entre el proyecto de un ‘Arte Americano’ (1920–1930) y la fórmula de un ‘Arte Latinoamericano’ (1950–1970),” A contracorriente, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Raleigh: North Carolina State University, Winter 2014): 1–21.
13 Antonio E. De Pedro, “Viviendo en el diseño de lo contradictorio. Marta Traba y el arte latinoamericano en el contexto de la Guerra Fría,” in Antonio E. De Pedro (coord.) El arte latinoamericano durante la Guerra Fría: figurativos vs. abstractos (Tunja: Universidad pedagógica y tecnológica de Colombia, 2016), 229–265.
14 Marina Vázquez Ramos, “La Sociedad de Arte Moderno y el proyecto de unidad continental,” in Dafne Cruz Porchini, Claudia Garay Molina & Mireida Velázquez Torres (coord.), Diplomacia cultural en México durante la Guerra Fría. Exposiciones y prácticas artísticas, 1946–1968 (Mexico: Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, 2021), 111–121.
15 De Pedro, “Viviendo en el diseño,” 242.
16 José Gómez Sicre, “Trends—Latin America,” Art in America, vol. 47, No. 3 (New York, Autumn 1959), 22. Translator’s note: consulted in: Giunta, Vanguardia, internacionalismo y política, 331.
17 Nadia Moreno Moya, Arte y juventud. El Salón Esso de artistas jóvenes en Colombia (Bogotá: Idartes/La Silueta, 2013), 106.
18 Jonathan Harris notes differences between the terms “international” and “universal”: the former has American, clearly state-ideological connotations of the Cold War, while “universal” encompasses a wide variety of political perspectives. See: Jonathan Harris, “‘Internacional’ contra ‘Universal’. El pacto posterior a 1945, la modernidad y el futuro global del arte y de la estética del arte,” in Crítica(s) de arte. Discrepancias e hibridaciones de la Guerra Fría a la globalización, ed. Paula Barreiro López & Julián Díaz Sánchez (Murcia: CENDEAC, 2013), 30.
19 De Pedro, “Viviendo en el diseño,” 241–242.
20 It is not insignificant that the 14th São Paulo Bienal in 1977 was the first time that the Grand Prize had been awarded to Latin American artists: Argentina’s Grupo de los Trece.
21 Fabiola Martínez Rodríguez, “Haciendo frente a la abstracción: las políticas transnacionales de la Escuela Mexicana durante la Guerra Fría (1950’s),” in Atlántico frío. Historias transnacionales del arte y la política en los tiempos del telón de acero, ed. Paula Barreiro (Madrid: Brumaria, 2019), 410.
22 Meneghetti, Arístides. “La pintura colombiana. Cómo funciona ‘la máquina gigantesca’ de Gómez Sicre,” El Espectador-Vespertino, Bogotá (23 June, 1959). Quoted in: Marco Polo Juárez Cruz & Adriana Ospina Jiménez, “Un anfitrión incómodo. José Gómez Sicre y la construcción de la modernidad latinoamericana desde el Museo de Arte de las Américas,” XLVI Coloquio Internacional de Historia del Arte (Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2022). Lecture on the YouTube channel of the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas (Institute of Aesthetic Research) at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, UNAM (National Autonomous University of Mexico) on 30 September, 2022.
23 Alessandro Armato, “Una trama escondida: la OEA y las participaciones latinoamericanas en las primeras cinco Bienales de São Paulo,” Caiana: Revista de Historia del Arte y Cultura Visual, No. 6 (Buenos Aires, 2015), 33–39.
24 Armato, “Una trama escondida,” 40.
25 Armato, “Una trama escondida,” 38.
26 Due to her marriage to the Colombian journalist Alberto Zalamea.
27 Alessandro Armato, “José Gómez Sicre y Marta Traba: historias paralelas,” in Synchronicity; Contacts and Divergences in Latin American and US Latino Art, 19th Century to the Present (Austin: University of Texas, 2012), 118–127.
28 Marta Traba, La pintura nueva en Latinoamérica (Bogotá: Ediciones Librería Central, 1961), 18.
29 Alessandro Armato, “La ‘primera piedra’: José Gómez Sicre y la fundación de los museos interamericanos de arte moderno de Cartagena y Barranquilla,” Revista Brasileira do Caribe, Vol. XII, No. 24 (São Luis, January–June, 2012), 381–404.
30 Ibid.
31 Armato, “Una trama escondida,” 40.
32 Marta Traba, Dos décadas vulnerables en las artes plásticas latinoamericanas 1950/1970 (Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno editores, 1973), 87–153.
33 Thomas M. Messer, The Emergent Decade: Latin American Painters and Painting in the 1960’s (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966).
34 Juan Acha, Las culturas estéticas de América Latina (Reflexiones) (Mexico: UNAM, 1994), 160.