PAN-AMERICAN POSTERITY
THE PERMANENT COLLECTION OF THE ART MUSEUM OF THE AMERICAS
– Abigail McEwen, Phd
“Latin American art was, and to a certain degree still is, a forgotten art,” José Gómez Sicre reflected near the end of his trailblazing tenure at the Organization of American States (OAS). “My objective to promote the art of Latin America and the Caribbean outside of its parochial sphere was nevertheless clear and strong.”1 A quarter-century later, amid swelling public and scholarly interest in Latin American art, his field-defining curatorial legacy remains a touchstone for contemporary discourse on the arts of the Americas. Appointed Chief of the Visual Arts Section of the Pan American Union (PAU) in 1948, Gómez Sicre advanced a hemispheric vision of Latin American art over the following three-and-a-half decades, marshaling a panoramic exhibition program that promoted the values of international modernism and, to a lesser extent, of the Cold War United States.2 In his heyday of the 1950s and 1960s, he championed a slate of young artists, envisioning their emergence across a transnational network of “reception points” spanning the Americas and beyond.3 The mobility of Latin American art across national borders remains no less relevant today in the twenty-first century, in light of shifting patterns in migration and capital flows and the concurrent rise of international biennials and art fairs, signs of an au courant cosmopolitanism no longer tethered to the ideological messianism of years past. Amid tidings of a post-American world, the historical imbrication of Latin American art, cultural diplomacy, and hemispheric identity takes on new meaning at a time of global revisionism and institutional critique.
To speak at all of Latin American art today is to acknowledge Gómez Sicre’s foundational role at the PAU. The museum’s collection is testament not only to the modernist values that he endorsed, but also to an expansive model of American art, stretching from Canada to the Southern Cone. In group shows and numerous career-defining solo exhibitions, he advanced a consistent, if idiosyncratic canon underpinned by abstraction—geometric and gestural—and augmented by steady support for folk and neo-figurative painting.4 The field of Latin American art has advanced considerably since the early 1980s, bolstered by wider institutional validation and the breakdown of dated stereotypes—around the irrational and exotic, the ethnographic and neocolonial—that characterized some early scholarship.5 This revamped critical landscape has yielded new narratives of Latin American modernism, no longer seen in a derivative position to the European avant-garde, and drawn attention to artists and movements long marginalized and little known. As Latin American art circulates in this postmodern and increasingly global context, the formative role of its first collections and curators—the PAU and Gómez Sicre foremost among them—warrants updated study. In revisiting the place of the AMA | Art Museum of the Americas and its permanent collection in contemporary discourse, four focal points emerge: Cold War revisionism, Pan-American identity, geometric abstraction, and Cuban art. All issuing from Gómez Sicre’s original curatorial project, these areas of research bear a special, historical connection to AMA today and bridge the institution’s past, present, and future.
FROM THE BEGINNING
The history of the exhibition program dates to 1917 with the creation of an Education Section within the PAU, but the arrival of Gómez Sicre accelerated its activity and, soon thereafter, the growth of its permanent collection. Temporary exhibitions, formally initiated in 1946, were initially housed in a gallery (remodeled in 1960) in the Main Building of the OAS; they moved to their present home—formerly the residence of the OAS Secretaries General and re-christened the Museum of Modern Art of Latin America—in 1976. (The museum was renamed the Art Museum of the Americas in 1991.) The backbone of Gómez Sicre’s curatorial practice, these monthly exhibitions showcased artists from across the Americas, constituting an up-to-the-minute history of modern Latin American art. More than 2,500 artists exhibited at the PAU before 1985, an astonishing figure that underlines the breadth and ambition of the museum’s coverage.6 In addition to painting and sculpture, the museum showed a diversity of media: crafts, textiles, ceramics, photography, architecture, printmaking, silverworks, woodcuts, and cartoons. A modest catalog, usually in the form of a half-fold brochure, accompanied many of the early exhibitions; hundreds of summary introductions, authored mostly by Gómez Sicre, provide a sustained account of his curatorial point of view.
The PAU became a nexus for Latin American art, a destination for artists traveling to and from the United States and Europe and a bellwether for the field as it began to take shape. Solo exhibitions brought early publicity to such artists as Fernando Botero (1957), José Luis Cuevas (1954), Edgar Negret (1956), Alejandro Otero (1948), and Fernando de Szyszlo (1953). At a time when women artists faced widespread discrimination, Gómez Sicre regularly promoted them, organizing exhibitions for, among many others: Olga Albizu (1965), Lilia Carrillo (1960), Raquel Forner (1957), Elsa Gramcko (1959), María Martínez-Cañas (1982), Tomie Ohtake (1968), María Luisa Pacheco (1957), and Fanny Sanín (1969). The “Latin American” appellation first appeared in the 1947 exhibition Contemporary Latin Americans, comprised of sixteen works each representing a different country, among them Cândido Portinari’s Return from the Fair (1940), the first work to enter AMA’s permanent collection and a gift from Gómez Sicre. “This show demonstrated the existence of a truly universal, and not merely costumbrista, indigenist, or folkloric, art in America,” Gómez Sicre observed, and it set a precedent for the exhibitions that followed.7 That hemispheric mentality surfaced in contemporary surveys—First International Exhibition of Latin American Photography (1949), Contemporary Drawings from Latin America (1959), Esso Salon of Young Artists (1965), Art of the Americas (1966)—and in the curatorial attentiveness to artists from historically overlooked countries in the Caribbean and Central America alongside those from well-established centers in Mexico and South America.
The broad, inter-American purview articulated in the PAU’s series of temporary exhibitions was assured institutional longevity, and with it historical validation, with the decision to establish a permanent collection of Latin American art. In 1957, at the behest of the Mexican ambassador Luis Quintanilla, the OAS authorized an acquisitions fund, designed to allow the purchase of works from its own exhibitions. Primarily focused on young artists who held solo shows at the PAU, the collection included early donations from Roberto Matta, Amelia Peláez, and René Portocarrero and, later, negotiated gifts including Joaquín Torres García’s Constructive Composition, donated by Nelson Rockefeller. At the time of its first display in 1960, the fledgling collection was supplemented by targeted loans to ensure a well-balanced representation of the field, and the installation included works by Emilio Pettoruti, Oswaldo Guayasamín, Wifredo Lam, and Diego Rivera. “Incomplete though it is,” wrote the reviewer for the Washington Post, “the group forms a fine foundation on which to build a really important collection of Latin American art.”8 By the time of its inaugural installation at the Museum of Modern Art of Latin America in 1976, the permanent collection represented 198 artists who epitomized the international and modernist—that is, the “exportable”—values that Gómez Sicre championed under the aegis of the Cold War-era OAS. Notwithstanding the inevitable oversights and exclusions, notably of Mexican Muralism and Brazilian Neoconcretism, the collection documented the rise of Latin America’s avant-garde and its postwar boom, its narrative of hemispheric solidarity and reciprocity, no less than of democracy and capitalism. Of course this ideological fervor propelled the PAU, but by the end of Gómez Sicre’s tenure in the 1980s—followed soon after by the fall of the Berlin Wall—the collection stood at a crossroads, its diplomatic mandate fundamentally altered and diminished. Its present reappraisal, within an art-historical landscape lately more cognizant of Latin American and Latino art, suggests a number of timely interventions into the field.
COMING IN FROM THE COLD WAR
In the past two decades, Cold War studies have seen renewed attention, particularly from the perspective of Latin America and the Global South. Revisionist accounts of postwar American art gained momentum with the publication of Serge Guilbaut’s book How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (1983), which examined the political utility of American Abstract Expressionism and its complicity with an anti-Communist agenda.9 To wit, these studies have elaborated on the co-optation of the New York School, headlined by Jackson Pollock and cited for its brash individualism and freedom of expression, by the CIA as an insignia of the U.S.-led “free world” and its cultural, no less than its ideological, authority. The exhibitions Cold War Modern: The Domesticated Avant-Garde (the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, 2001) and Cold War Modern: Design 1945-70 (Victoria and Albert Museum, 2008) periodized the art and design of the era, reframing their national and international contexts. The implications of this scholarship have reverberated in the emerging field of Latin American art history—a legacy of Gómez Sicre—and its critique of modernism’s entrenched Euro- and North-American bias. Making Art Panamerican: Cultural Policy and the Cold War (2013) by Claire F. Fox highlighted the institutional function of the PAU in relating its exhibition program to values of liberalism and developmentalism, a narrative illustrated in her exhibition Libertad de Expresión: The Art Museum of the Americas and Cold War Politics (Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art at the University of Oklahoma, 2013). Two books published in 2012, Darlene Sadlier’s Americans All: Good Neighbor Cultural Diplomacy in World War II and ¡Américas unidas! Nelson A. Rockefeller’s Office of Inter-American Affairs (1940-1946), edited by Gisela Cramer and Ursula Prutsch, shed light on the origins of the Cold War mentality. The Museum of Modern Art underlined the transatlantic nexus of postwar developments in the exhibition Transmissions: Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America, 1960-1980 (2015). Past Futures: Science Fiction, Space Travel, and Postwar Art of the Americas (Bowdoin College Museum of Art, 2015), curated by Sarah Montross, explored countercultural and utopian conceits of the Space Age. The cultural phenomenon of the Cold War endures in AMA’s permanent collection, evidenced particularly well in its cache of work by José Luis Cuevas and of neo-figuration in general.
Hailed as Mexico’s boy wonder in the 1950s, Cuevas spearheaded the reinvention of Mexican art in the postwar period, repudiating the entrenched social realism and Communist sympathies of the Muralists with existentialist (and Cold-Warring) subjectivity and expressionism. Gómez Sicre singled out “the conscious analysis and interpretation of reality, with an avoidance of political themes” in his introduction to José Luis Cuevas: Drawings, the artist’s first solo show in the United States.10 His phenomenal early success, at the age of twenty, eclipsed the fading legacy of the Muralists—Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros—and cast him first among Gómez Sicre’s protégés. (The absence of the Muralists, excepting two works on paper, in AMA’s collection reflects Gómez Sicre’s political posturing; he favored Tamayo, their nemesis, and later Cuevas.) An exemplary “young American artist,” Cuevas ascended to international and commercial success, exhibiting in Paris and entering the collection of the Museum of Modern Art; his drawings, typically of the marginalized and outcast—sex workers, psychiatric hospitals, abattoirs—engaged the graphic tradition of artists from Goya to Toulouse-Lautrec. Gómez Sicre doubled down on Cuevas at the end of his career, with two paired exhibitions in 1978—A Backward Glance at Cuevas: Drawings and Prints, 1944-1977 and Chasing Cuevas with a Camera: Photographs by Daisy Ascher of Mexico—and New Work of José Luis Cuevas in 1982. The resurgence of the Muralists in the 1980s—no less, the ascendance of Frida Kahlo—overshadowed Cuevas at mid-career and ever since; his humanism and Cold War politicking, once viewed as revitalizing and charismatic, found declining purchase in later years, inseparable from its erstwhile associations with Washington. His presence in AMA’s permanent collection is nevertheless significant, comprised of numerous self-portraits and the major series Homenaje a Picasso (1973) and Barcelona Series (1981). As postwar Mexican art receives new attention, from such scholars as Luis Castañeda and George Flaherty, Cuevas is ripe for a new reckoning, beginning with his relationship to Gómez Sicre and the PAU and as part of larger re-evaluations of cultural politics in the 1960s.11
The exhibition Neo-Figurative Painting in Latin America: Oils (1962) surveyed the hemispheric rise of figuration, endorsing the trend and identifying many of its most important protagonists. Against an international backdrop of figure painting, from Willem de Kooning to Jean Dubuffet, Gómez Sicre introduced a new generation, among them: Cuevas; Fernando Botero (Colombia); Armando Morales (Nicaragua); and three of Argentina’s Otra Figuración group: Romulo Macció, Luis Felipe Noé, and Jorge de la Vega. These “leading painters,” he wrote, “in treating the human figure, envelop it in the uncertainty or despair which they find characteristic of our age.”12 The anxieties of the age, from post-Peronist Argentina to the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua to La Violencia in Colombia, informed their work, which varied in style from the agonistic brushstrokes of Deira to the dramatic color of the Colombian Alejandro Obregón. Gómez Sicre’s support extended from a stream of solo exhibitions—for example, Obregón (1955); Morales (1962); de la Vega (1963)—to major acquisitions, among them Obregon’s Estudiante muerto (El velorio) (1956); Morales’s Guerrillero muerto VIII (1962); and Deira’s Tempo (1964). If for Gómez Sicre the sublimation of revolutionary politics to formal values distinguished this art from a dogmatic socialist realism, its radicality has come to new light in recent scholarship from Patrick Frank, Andrea Giunta, Joan Marter, and David Craven.13 In reclaiming agency within fraying Cold War narratives, Latin American figuration is increasingly better understood in its varying local contexts, from Mexico to Argentina, as well as in the rise of the New Left in Latin America, a relationship that complicates the curatorial work of Gómez Sicre at the PAU and casts its collection in differently ideological terms.
PAN-AMERICAN PURVIEW
“This year, possibly more than any previous period, has brought an intense interest in all things Pan-American,” declared the magazine Art in America as it introduced a dedicated Pan-American issue in Fall 1959. “Here in America there can be no return to the old insular concept of a strictly regional art fenced off by geographical, political and cultural limitations.... Let [an ‘art of America’] be identified not as the art of two Americas, North and South, but of one America.”14 The Pan-American zeitgeist of the 1950s, escalated by the Cuban Revolution (1959) and John F. Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress (1961-71), prompted large-scale exhibitions of Latin American art in the United States—at the PAU and elsewhere—that continued the cultural diplomacy initiated under the Good Neighbor Policy (1933-45).15 Spirited by celebrations of Pan-American Day (April 14) and the Pan-American Games, inaugurated in 1951, the promise of hemispheric collectivity beckoned brightly. “Rich in tradition, Latin America is using the international language of art much as it is used in the United States,” Gómez Sicre wrote at the time. “Diverging from the concept that Latin American art must be touristic or superficial or picturesque,” he continued, “there are many artists—with more or less the same intentions and the same ambitions as the modern United States painter—who have been working in a progressive manner and with deep intellectual feeling. It seems most important that these artists be given recognition so that the work they have produced, and are producing, can be viewed at least as widely as have the exhibits of Latin American art of the more superficial type.”16 This universalism, and its inherent utopian undertow, sustained the PAU exhibition program through the postwar period, faltering only in the late 1960s amid new political radicalism and the growing rebellion against high modernism, seen in the emergence of conceptual, performance, and intermedial arts over which Gómez Sicre demurred.
Fifty years later, the historical phenomenon of Pan-Americanism has seen new accountings, spurred not by ideological determinism but rather by a more egalitarian hemispheric consciousness chastened by flawed developmentalism and the decline of American exceptionalism. Style is no longer the shibboleth of Pan-American identity, and emerging scholarship has focused on the social and cultural histories of American art, elaborating transatlantic and transpacific connections and illuminating the arts of lesser-known countries, particularly in the Caribbean. This hemispheric and dialogical point of view is traced to the sixteenth century in Edward Sullivan’s book The Language of Objects in the Art of the Americas (2007), which moves beyond Latin American essentialism to consider the intercultural mobility and transmission of art. The exhibition Boundless Reality: Traveler Artists’ Landscapes of Latin America from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection (Hunter College and The Americas Society, 2015) and its related publication edited by Katherine Manthorne take a similarly long and geographically expansive view of the Americas. Scholars such as Angela Miller and Breanne Robertson have revisited the uses of ancient American sources in the modern era; the recuperation of indigenous sources and transhistorical continuities is similarly seen in studies of the early modern period, a growing field that merits analysis in its own right.17 Michael Wellen has studied the “museum-making” project at the OAS specifically, and the architectural expressions of Pan-Americanism emerge in Designing Pan-America: Architectural Visions for the Western Hemisphere (2011) by Robert Alexander González.18 A shared thread across these and other studies is the decentered position of the United States and the ensuing emergence of new—inverted and alternative—hemispheric paradigms of modernity.
An early example of this critical inversion came in Torres García’s call for a School of the South, founded in 1935, the year after his return to Uruguay, and his propagation of geometric abstraction in the Southern Cone. Accompanied by his emblematic upside-down map of South America, in which he asserted a Pan-Americanism issuing from the continent’s southern tip, his manifesto insisted upon the prior originality of the indigenous American inheritance and the autonomy of its avant-garde. Gómez Sicre welcomed the exhibition Torres García and his Workshop to the PAU in 1950 and later organized a solo show, Joaquín Torres García (1874-1949) of Uruguay (1961), which anticipated the addition of Constructive Composition to the permanent collection two years later. The Taller Torres García and its progeny were featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions and entered the permanent collection; notable holdings include José Pedro Costigliolo, Adam and Eve (1947); José Gurvich, Adam and Eve (1963); Estuardo Maldonado, Memory of Forms (1963); Manuel Pailós, Constructivism (1976); María Freire, Vibrante (1977); and Lincoln Presno, Serie del círculo: círculo texturado (c. 1980). Torres García and historical Constructivism in general found diminished purchase in the late, postmodern decades of the past century, but his recuperation began in earnest with the exhibition El Taller Torres García: The School of the South and its Legacy (Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery, 1992), curated by Mari Carmen Ramírez. He was a critical nexus of Ramírez’s acclaimed exhibition Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2004) and the subject of a solo show at the Museum of Modern Art, Joaquín Torres García: The Arcadian Modern (2015). Torres García modeled his theory of Constructive Universalism on an integral American universe, evolved through the merging of indigenous and modernist sources. His embodiment of Universal Man—the geometricized figure that appears frequently in his paintings—evokes the “Pan-American Man” championed by Gómez Sicre, a parallelism that suggests the prevalence, and continuing contemporaneity, of the hemispheric worldview.
If American art is moving toward such a transcontinental model, the Caribbean remains a significant lacuna. Gómez Sicre consistently exhibited artists from island nations, both in group contexts—notably, Fine Art of the Caribbean (1957) and Contemporary Art from the Caribbean (1972)—and in numerous solo shows. Although he favored Cuban artists, as discussed below, he cast a wide net, featuring artists from larger nations—for example, Rafael Ferrer and Julio Rosado del Valle (Puerto Rico, United States), Jaime Colson and Antonio Toribio (Dominican Republic), Joseph Jean-Gilles and Georges Liautaud (Haiti)—as well as those from such smaller regions as Antigua, Curaçao, Suriname, and Trinidad and Tobago. This regional focus has continued in more recent decades, seen in the acquisition of works by, among others: Domingo Batista (Dominican Republic), Owen Minott (Jamaica), Víctor Vázquez (Puerto Rico), and Ronnie Carrington (Barbados). After years of isolation, Caribbean art is lately the subject of new scholarship, led by Erica Moiah James, Abigail Lapin Dardashti, Krista Thompson, and Lindsay J. Twa, among others.19 The exhibition Caribbean: Crossroads of the World was exhibited in El Museo del Barrio, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Queens Museum of Art in 2012; Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago, curated by Tatiana Flores, is part of the Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative (2017). As Caribbean art ascends to a greater stage, AMA’s collection and archives stand to offer unique historical insight into the region; transnational in scope and amassed over years of curatorial research, its holdings reflect the region’s stylistic and creative diversity and its multiple cultural identities. The recuperation of the modern Caribbean within Pan-American art history would be inconceivable without the early initiatives of the PAU, whose precedence in this area naturally facilitates its continuing involvement and support.
CUBAN COUNTERPOINT
Cuban art has long held exceptional status due to its geographical location within the Caribbean, from the time of the Spanish empire through the Cold War, and its artistic avant-garde found early support at the PAU under Gómez Sicre. “Modern Cuban painting, of course, is still in its infancy but is nevertheless well prepared to make a sincere and worthy effort to attain new and greater achievement in the world of plastic art,” he declared in his pioneering survey Pintura cubana de hoy/Cuban Painting Today in 1944. “The modern movement leads the way in Cuba for all her enterprising painters to follow.”20 Published on the occasion of the landmark exhibition Modern Cuban Painters, organized by Alfred H. Barr, Jr. for the Museum of Modern Art, his bilingual text was the first to take stock of Cuba’s modern movement, launched in 1927 and flourishing two decades later. Beginning with Cuban Modern Paintings in Washington Collections (1946), the PAU introduced the Cuban vanguardia to Washington with exhibitions dedicated to, among others: Felipe Orlando (1947), Cundo Bermúdez (1948), Luis Martínez Pedro (1951), Roberto Diago (1953), Agustín Fernández (1954), Hugo Consuegra (1956), René Portocarrero and Raúl Milián (1957), and Servando Cabrera Moreno (1959). Gómez Sicre was the de facto gatekeeper for Cuban art in the United States and elsewhere—for example, as curator of the Cuban delegations to the São Paulo Biennials in the 1950s—and its leading authority. Cuba’s suspension from the OAS from 1962 to 2009 complicated his relationship with the island and its artists; his support for the pre-revolutionary vanguardia and, later, the Cuban artists in exile, remained strong.
As diplomatic relations have eased between Cuba and the United States in recent years, public and scholarly interest in Cuban art—no less its market—is surging. The arts of post-revolutionary Cuba languished for decades in isolation from much of the rest of the world, and their recuperation and exposure over the past decade, in scholarship and through creative institutional collaborations, are beginning to break down old historical barriers and misinformation. Since the emergence of the Volumen Uno generation at the beginning of the 1980s and the advent of the Havana Biennial (1984), contemporary Cuban art has risen to international prominence with its artists—from José Bedia and Flavio Garciandía to Los Carpinteros and Tania Bruguera—drawing critical acclaim and visibility. Publications by Luis Camnitzer, Gerardo Mosquera, Rachel Price, and Rachel Weiss have very ably documented the post-revolutionary generation; the latter’s recent monograph To and from Utopia in the New Cuban Art (2010) set out a definitive history of Cuban art in the 1980s and 1990s.21 Two major anthological exhibitions opened in 2017: Wild Noise/Ruido Salvaje at the Bronx Museum and Adiós Utopia: Dreams and Deceptions in Cuban Art Since 1950 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Cuba’s pre-revolutionary art history has seen commensurate gains, from nineteenth-century studies by Paul Niell to work by Joseph Hartman and Susanna Temkin on the early twentieth century; Alfredo Rivera and I have published on the art and architecture of the 1950s and 1960s.22 A number of Cuba’s historical vanguardia have been revisited within broader American and international contexts: Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight (Whitney Museum of American Art, 2016), Wifredo Lam (Centre Pompidou, 2015), and Rafael Soriano: The Artist as Mystic (The McMullen Museum of Art, 2017). As Latino art makes similar inroads, Cuban art stands to gain greater exposure in comparative and diasporic contexts, seen already in such exhibitions as Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art (Smithsonian Museum of American Art, 2013), curated by E. Carmen Ramos and anticipated at the fledgling American Museum of the Cuban Diaspora in Coral Gables, founded in 2017.
AMA presently holds approximately ninety works by Cuban artists that encompass more than a century of modern and contemporary art. From the costumbrista painter Víctor Patricio de Landaluze to the postmodern expressionism of Carlos Alfonzo, the collection spans multiple media and generations, with longstanding strengths in the vanguardia artists. Among its highlights are Marpacífico (1943) by Amelia Peláez; Amigas (1937) by Ponce de León; Sonata de la Piedra y de la Carne (1967) by Mario Carreño; Las Tres Gracias (1975) by Agustín Fernández; Nave flotante (c. 1979) by Rafael Soriano; and the 960-square-foot ceramic tile mural executed by Cundo Bermúdez at the OAS General Secretariat Building, inaugurated in 1984. The museum re-engaged Cuba in the 1980s, debuting the early photography of María Martínez-Cañas in 1982; the acquisition of works by Alfonzo and Mario Bencomo, representing the Miami exile generation, brought the collection into a new era. Martínez-Cañas has continued to ply Gómez Sicre’s legacy in her most recent series, Rebus + Diversions, begun in 2016; assemblages drawn from his archive, the works knit together photographs, exhibition materials, and ephemera into a conceptual puzzle that probes the history of Cuban (American) art and her place within it. In the milestone exhibition (Art)Xiomas – CUBAAHORA: The Next Generation (2016), curated by Gabriela García Azcuy, AMA displayed work by fifteen young Cuban artists, re-opening its historical connection to the island. As Cuban art reconciles its revolutionary and diasporic histories, AMA is well positioned to resume its past role as a promoter of Cuban artists and, in that way, to connect its institutional legacy to the present day.
GLOBAL GEOMETRY
While Gómez Sicre was alert to the rise of geometric abstraction in Havana in the 1950s, the movement found little traction at the PAU—no doubt for political reasons after 1959—relative to the postwar boom of Latin American artists in Paris. A transatlantic phenomenon, geometric abstraction spread from the Taller Torres García and the São Paulo Biennial, founded in 1951, to Europe and back, commingling with the School of Paris and the emergence of Op and Kinetic art at the Galerie Denise René and the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles. This history is well documented at the PAU, beginning with the exhibition of Alejandro Otero’s abstracted Coffee Pots in 1949 and continuing through two important group exhibitions: Venezuelan Painting Today (1966), which featured geometric work by Carlos Cruz-Diez, Elsa Gramcko, Alejandro Otero, Mercedes Pardo, and Jesús Rafael Soto, among others; and New Art of Argentina (1965), which included Julio Le Parc, Luis Tomasello, Eduardo Mac Entyre, Miguel Ángel Vidal, Sarah Grilo, Rogelio Polesello, Ennio Iommi, and Gyula Kosice. Although the Brazilian Neoconcretists Lygia Clark and Lygia Pape exhibited in group exhibitions, in 1963 and 1960 respectively (and Ivan Serpa in a solo show in 1954), Gómez Sicre personally favored the lyrical abstraction embraced by artists such as Manabu Mabe, a preference likely embroiled in Cold War narratives around Abstract Expressionism.23 He was nevertheless an early exponent of non-objective art from Colombia, giving early solo exhibitions to Edgar Negret (1956), Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar (1956), and Omar Rayo (1961). From Buenos Aires to Caracas to Bogotá, geometric abstraction signaled the utopianism of postwar modernization, and its young protagonists embraced the “international style” of Gómez Sicre’s Pan-American project.
After the decades-long disillusionments of developmentalism and the rise and fall of military dictatorships, geometric abstraction from Latin America has seen an extraordinary resurgence, its idealism revisited through social-historical and sometimes polemical hindsight. The groundbreaking exhibitions The Experimental Exercise of Freedom: Lygia Clark, Gego, Mathias Goeritz, Hélio Oiticica, and Mira Schendel (Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1999) and Geometric Abstraction: Latin American Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection (Fogg Museum, 2001) led the way for innumerable shows in the following decade, among them: The Geometry of Hope: Latin American Abstract Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection (Blanton Museum, 2007); Suprasensorial: Experiments in Light, Color and Space (Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2010); and América Fría: La abstracción geométrica en Latinoamérica (1934 - 1973) (Fundación Juan March, 2011). Solo and gallery shows soon followed, with points of convergence around Brazilian Neoconcretism and Venezuelan Op and Kinetic art; Concrete Cuba (David Zwirner, 2015) incorporated Havana’s avant-garde, and Constructive Spirit: Abstract Art in South and North America, 1920-50s (Newark Museum, 2010) shed light on hemispheric connections.24 A new generation of scholars such as Mariola Álvarez, Mónica Amor, Adrian Anagnost, Ana Franco, Jennifer Josten, Adele Nelson, Irene Small, and Megan Sullivan, among many others, have brought critical interventions to bear on historical abstraction, illuminating its institutional and transnational networks as well as its political agency.25 In these emerging cultural and social art histories, the grid and the monochrome are seen as historically contingent, neither absolute nor autonomous—and removed from the formalist, Cold-Warring agenda that had once shaped their reception in Washington.
Geometric abstraction remains a cornerstone of AMA’s collection today, and the museum’s holdings reflect its rich patrimony in this area, the caliber of which has long superseded the politics of its origins. From Venezuela, exemplary works by its principal figures include Coloritmo 34 (1957-58) by Otero, Escritura Hurtado (1975) by Soto, and Physichromie no. 965 (1977) by Cruz-Diez. Argentina is similarly well represented, from the Madí movement—Gyula Kosice’s Pintura Madí (1947) and Aerolito Madí (c. 1988)—to the lesser-known Arte Generativo movement led by Eduardo Mac Entyre, Ary Brizzi and Miguel Ángel Vidal. Works by Ramírez Villamizar (Composición mecánica, 1957), Negret (Aparato mágico, 1959), Rayo (Aspecto lunar, 1960; Vaso vertical, 1961), and Fanny Sanín (Acrylic No. 6, 1979) highlight Colombian abstraction. Drawn from AMA’s permanent collection, the exhibition Constellations: Constructivism, Internationalism, and the Inter-American Avant-Garde (2012) showcased the breadth and variance of geometry across the Americas as it charted hemispheric affinities and points of inflection. Alongside the familiar names, the exhibition revisited artists from peripheral sites—the Panamanian Coqui Calderón, the Bolivian Rudy Ayoroa, the Paraguayan Enrique Careaga—and brought them into transnational dialogues around light, movement, and space. No doubt the grid has supplanted the palm tree as the calling card of modern Latin American art, in ways that bear out Gómez Sicre’s disdain for the touristic stereotypes of years past and his promotion of “international art.” The collection is primed for further interventions that reconsider the universalism of geometry, the politics of its recent revival, and the import of its present-day ubiquity.
FROM HERE TO POSTERITY
The study of modern and contemporary Latin American art has bloomed in the decades since Gómez Sicre’s appointment at the PAU, encompassing Latino art in the United States—a development cultivated at AMA today—and finding traction in Europe and around the world. Amid the expansion and achievements of the field, attention has recently turned to historiography and to the reassessment of the longstanding canon, narratives, and methodologies that have defined its scholarship. At a moment of stock-taking and reflection about the identity of Latin American art and its national and hemispheric dimensions, this archival turn has seen intensified efforts to recover and preserve primary documents, notably through Documents of 20th-century Latin American and Latino Art: A Digital Archive and Publications Project, begun in 2002 by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The project includes a selection of the Gómez Sicre Papers at AMA; inventoried in 2015 and now publicly available, his papers—thirty boxes of correspondence and writings—provide documentary traces of the origins of modern Latin American art.26 The foundational work of Gómez Sicre and his contemporaries, including Marta Traba, Mário Pedrosa, Jorge Romero Brest, and Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, is, moreover, increasingly recognized not only within Latin American art history, but within that of global modernism as well.27 Traba, the noted art critic and co-founder of the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá, authored the PAU’s last major collection catalog, Museum of Modern Art of Latin America: Selections from the Permanent Collection (1985). “There are occasional breaks, splits, or interruptions brought about by outside forces,” she concluded of the trajectory of Latin American art, “but the tradition is ever ready to assert its existence and its individuality.”28 A steward of that tradition, AMA has overseen the growth and evolution of the field across the Americas and well into the twenty-first century, work that continues today.
The institutional history of AMA, embedded in the origins of Latin American art history, lives on in its own extensive archives. Country and artist files contain a rare trove of documents gathered from across the Americas: newspaper clippings, photographs and slides, correspondence, and catalogs. Annick Sanjurjo compiled the museum’s exhibition history from 1941 to 1985; indexed by country and artist, the two-volume publication documents the magnitude of the curatorial project undertaken by Gómez Sicre and reproduces his catalog texts and exhibition checklists. The museum’s audiovisual program, begun in 1959, includes slides, films, and video cassettes on an array of topics—agriculture and architecture, dance and craft—as well as approximately forty-seven documentary films produced under Gómez Sicre. Narrated by such figures as Joan Crawford and Dolores del Río, the films profiled artists—among them Torres García, Armando Reverón, and Soto—and heritage sites around the Caribbean. An essential component of the museum’s holdings, its archive—files and films, in addition to the resources at the adjacent OAS Columbus Memorial Library—is an essential corollary to the permanent collection and to the museum’s posterity.
“As regards the art of our hemisphere,” Gómez Sicre reflected at the end of his career, “I am thoroughly optimistic.” In the exhibition program and the permanent collection that he assembled at the PAU, he “promoted the art of Latin America and the Caribbean outside of its parochial sphere” and tapped young maestros who “combined universal aesthetics with transformed elements of a surviving heritage,” articulating a Pan-American idea of modernism. “To promote this art still in its developing stages,” he considered of his role, “first it was necessary ‘to discover’ what each country had to offer. There was a need to set marks and develop criteria. That was a very rewarding task for me.”29 AMA marked the centenary of his birth in 2016 with the year-long exhibition José Gómez Sicre’s Eye, drawn from the permanent collection, and a scholarly symposium that celebrated his contributions to the field. The metahistory of the museum, encompassing the entirety of its collection and archive, underlines its centrality to the study of modern and contemporary Latin American art today. A legacy of the long decade of the 1960s, the permanent collection mirrors the cultural and political angst over the Cold War and inter-American solidarity, the utopianism of geometric abstraction, and the crux of revolutionary Cuba. As AMA opens its collection to new generations of scholarship, it carries the legacy of Latin American art history forward, embracing its storied past while bringing together emerging artists and ideas from across the Americas.
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1 José Gómez Sicre, foreword to Contemporary Latin American Artists: Exhibitions at the Organization of American States, 1965-1985, ed. Annick Sanjurjo (Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow Press, 1993), v.
2 The Pan American Union was formally reconstituted as the Organization of American States in 1948. The Main Building of the OAS General Secretariat in Washington, D.C. (17th Street and Constitution Avenue, NW), where the gallery existed before moving in 1976 to the former residence of the OAS Secretaries General, retained the name of the PAU. That usage is retained here.
3 Gómez Sicre, “Nota editorial,” Boletín de Artes Visuales 5 (May-December 1959): 2.
4 See Marta Traba, Museum of Modern Art of Latin America: Selections from the Permanent Collection (Washington, D.C.: Organization of American States, 1985).
5 See Mari Carmen Ramírez, “Beyond ‘The Fantastic’: Framing Identity in U.S. Exhibitions of Latin American Art,” Art Journal 4 (Winter 1992): 60-8.
6 Three exhibitions were held between May 1941 and December 1944, before Gómez Sicre’s appointment; see Contemporary Latin American Artists: Exhibitions at the Organization of American States, 1941-1964, ed. Annick Sanjurjo (Lanham, Md.: The Scarecrow Press, 1997), 1-3. For more on the history of the collection, see Maria Leyva, “The Museum of Modern Art of Latin America: A Guide to its Resources,” in Artistic Representation of Latin American Diversity: Sources and Collections (Albuquerque: SALALM/University of New Mexico, 1993), 417-27.
7 Gómez Sicre, “Art Activities in the Pan American Union,” Bulletin of the Pan-American Union 7 (July 1947): 384.
8 See Leslie Judd Ahlander, “Pan American Opens ‘Permanent,’” The Washington Post, March 27, 1960.
9 Guilbaut’s book built on earlier texts by Eva Cockcroft and Max Kozloff, among others, and preceded the strident history, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: New Press, 1999), by Frances Stonor Saunders.
10 Gómez Sicre, José Luis Cuevas: Drawings, July 14-August 16 (Washington D. C.: Pan American Union, 1954).
11 See Luis M. Castañeda, Spectacular Mexico: Design, Propaganda, and the 1968 Olympics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); and George F. Flaherty, Hotel Mexico: Dwelling on the ’68 Movement (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016).
12 Gómez Sicre, Neo-Figurative Painting in Latin America: Oils, April 13-May 6 (Washington D.C.: Pan American Union, 1962).
13 See Patrick Frank, Painting in a State of Exception: New Figuration in Argentina, 1960-1965 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2016); Andrea Giunta, Avant-Garde, Internationalism, and Politics: Argentine Art in the Sixties (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007); Abstract Expressionism: The International Context, ed. Joan Marter (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007); and David Craven, Abstract Expressionism as Cultural Critique: Dissent During the McCarthy Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
14 Jean Lipman, “Where is America?,” Art in America 3 (Fall 1959): 20.
15 See, for example, Thomas M. Messer, The Emergent Decade: Latin American Painters and Painting in the 1960’s (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966).
16 Gómez Sicre, “Trends—Latin America,” Art in America 3 (Fall 1959): 23.
17 See Breanne Robertson, “Forging a New World Nationalism: Ancient Mexico in United States art and visual culture, 1933–1945” (Ph.D diss., University of Maryland, 2012); and Angela Miller, “‘The Soil of an Unknown America’: New World Lost Empires and the Debate over Cultural Origins,” American Art 3/4 (Summer-Autumn 1994): 8-27.
18 See Michael Wellen, “Pan-American Dreams: Art, Politics, and Museum-Making at the OAS, 1948-1976” (Ph.D diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2012).
19 See Erica Moiah James, “Speaking in Tongues: Metapictures and the Discourse of Violence in Caribbean Art,” Small Axe 16, no. 1 (March 2012): 119-43; Krista Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics: Photography, Tourism, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); and Lindsay J. Twa, Visualizing Haiti in U.S. Culture, 1910-1950 (Burlington: Ashgate, 2014).
20 Gómez Sicre, introduction to Cuban Painting of Today (Havana: María Luisa Gómez Mena, 1944), 20.
21 See Luis Camnitzer, New Art of Cuba (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003); Holly Block and Gerardo Mosquera, Art Cuba: The New Generation (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001); Rachel Price, Planet/Cuba: Art, Culture, and the Future of the Island (London: Verso, 2015); and Rachel Weiss, To and from Utopia in the New Cuban Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).
22 See Paul Niell, Urban Space as Heritage in Late Colonial Cuba: Classicism and Dissonance on the Plaza de Armas of Havana, 1754-1828 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015); Joseph R. Hartman, “Modern Dreams: Building Machado’s Cuba, 1925-1933,” (PhD diss., Southern Methodist University, 2016); Susanna V. Temkin, “Un arte social y revolucionario (A Social and Revolutionary Art): Marcelo Pogolotti and the International Avant-Garde)” (PhD diss., New York University, 2016); Alfredo Rivera, “Revolutionizing Modernities: Visualizing Utopia in 1960s Havana, Cuba” (Ph.D diss., Duke University, 2015); and Abigail McEwen, Revolutionary Horizons: Art and Polemics in 1950s Cuba (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016).
23 For more on the ideological considerations of these exhibitions, particularly the exclusion of Brazilian Neoconcretism, see Delia Solomons, “Installing Latin American Art for Cold War Culture: U.S. Exhibitions (1959-1967)” (Ph.D diss., New York University, 2015).
24 Recent exhibitions of Brazilian art include: Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art, 1948-1988 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2014); Lygia Pape: A Multitude of Forms (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2017); Hélio Oiticica: The Body of Color (Houston: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2006); Hélio Oiticica: To Organize Delirium (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Museum of Art, 2016); and Dimensions of Constructive Art in Brazil: The Adolpho Leirner Collection (Houston: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2007). For Venezuela, see: Soto: Paris and Beyond, 1950-1970 (New York: Grey Art Gallery, 2012); Carlos Cruz-Diez: Color in Space and Time (Houston: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2011); and Resonant Space: The Colorhythms of Alejandro Otero, ed. Rina Carvajal (Milan: 5 Continents Editions, 2014).
25 See Mariola V. Álvarez, “Neoconcretism and the Making of Brazilian National Culture, 1954-1961” (PhD diss., University of California, San Diego, 2012); Mónica Amor, Theories of the Nonobject: Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, 1944-1969 (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016); Adrian Anagnost, “Contested Spaces: Art and Urbanism in Brazil, 1928-1969” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2015); Ana M. Franco, “Edgar Negret and Eduardo Ramírez-Villamizar: Transnational Encounters and the Rise of Modernism in Colombian art, 1944-1964” (Ph.D diss., New York University, 2012); Jennifer Josten, “Mathias Goeritz and International Modernism in Mexico, 1949-1962” (Ph.D diss., Yale University, 2012); Adele Nelson, “The Monumental and the Ephemeral: The São Paulo Bienal and the Emergence of Abstraction in Brazil, 1946-1954 (Ph.D diss., New York University, 2012); Irene Small, Hélio Oiticica: Folding the Frame (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); and Megan Sullivan, “Locating Abstraction: The South American Coordinates of the Avant-Garde, 1945-1959” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2013).
26 The Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas at Austin also holds Gómez Sicre’s papers; his photographic archive is held by María Martínez-Cañas.
27 See “Forum on Latin American Criticism,” Art Journal 4 (Winter 2005): 82-93.
28 Traba, introduction to Museum of Modern Art of Latin America, 18.
29 Gómez Sicre, foreword to Contemporary Latin American Artists, v.
