MORE THAN JUST A COLD WAR WARRIOR
JOSÉ GÓMEZ SICRE AND THE ART MUSEUM OF THE AMERICAS
– Alejandro Anreus, PHD
José Romualdo Gómez Sicre was born in Matanzas, Cuba on July 6, 1916. He was the fourth and youngest child of General Clemente Gómez (one of the youngest generals of the Cuban War of Independence and the military governor of the province of Matanzas) and Guillermina Sicre, the daughter of Catalonian immigrants. When he was six years old, his father died of cancer of the liver and the family ceased to live in bourgeois comfort and economic security.2 The friendship and occasional gift of a few pesos by his older cousin, the sculptor Juan José Sicre,3 made a substantial difference during his adolescence. Through Sicre, who was a member of the young artistic avant-garde of the country (one of the signers of the Manifiesto Minorista), he first became acquainted with artists – both Cuban and international – who came to Matanzas. The young Gómez Sicre was raised in a liberal and secular environment, typical of the first decades of the Cuban Republic. His father had been an early member of the Partido Liberal and a friend of President José Miguel Gómez. As early as 1934 the young Pepe (the name he would be called by his friends for the rest of his life) organized an exhibition of amateur artists and students at the Liceo de Matanzas. Four years later he would graduate from the Instituto de Matanzas. With his mother and unmarried sisters (his older brother, Clemente was a cadet in the military academy) he would move to Havana to attend university. Two key events marked him profoundly in his development as a young man: the failed Cuban Revolution of 1933 and the Spanish Civil War and fascist victory of 1939. Both confirmed his anti-Batista and anti-fascist tendencies; he would be an active member of the Cuban Committee in Solidarity with the Spanish Republic and would vote for Autentico candidates in the Cuban elections of 1940, 1944, and 1948. Graduating from the university in 1939, Gómez Sicre studied diplomatic and consular law and also took art history classes with Luis de Soto. His classmates included future painter Cundo Bermúdez and future members of the Castro government Carlos Rafael Rodríguez (a distinguished Marxist-Leninist intellectual) and Osvaldo Dorticos (who would serve as President under Fidel Castro until his suicide). In 1941 he completed his doctorate in social, political, and economic sciences from the university.
"I am a man from Matanzas who has a good eye for painting, drawing, sculpture, photography and folk art, and film, yes, especially film. My role as a curator and critic has been to orient, to open doors, to present and promote new artists from Latin America. At most to set up a new standard of artistic values, to help define a new canon.
– José Gómez Sicre in conversation, November 1990
In the next few years Gómez Sicre would begin acquiring catalogs from the Museum of Modern Art in New York through the mail and reading them voraciously. The voice and definitions of modernity of founding director Alfred H. Barr, Jr., would have a lasting impact on Gómez Sicre’s intellectual formation and curatorial practice. At this time he also read the writings on art and culture by both Eugenio D’Ors and José Ortega y Gasset. The fusion of the philosophical, psychological, and the formal from these three sources would be an influence on his art criticism and curatorial activity. In 1939 he became engaged to the very young poet Fina García Marruz; in 1940 she would break the engagement and take up with her future spouse, poet and critic Cintio Vitier. Gómez Sicre’s negative attitude towards the Orígenes group and Catholicism in general was undoubtedly grounded in this personal experience.4 From 1940 until 1943 he made his living as a bureaucrat at the Renta de la Loteria, a corrupt governmental institution, which he would describe as “something like selling marijuana in the daytime and running a brothel at night.”5 These are the years when he assisted in organizing and taking an exhibition of Cuban art to Santo Domingo (1940); traveled to Mexico and met José Clemente Orozco, María Izquierdo, and Luis Cardoza y Aragón; resided at Lupe Marín’s home and had an affair with Lupe Rivera Marín, Diego Rivera’s daughter; met Pablo Neruda in Havana;6 and started publishing articles in El mundo, for which he received no compensation. His writing style developed out of this journalistic practice as breezy and clear, consistently avoiding dense prose and an elitist tone. Most significantly in the context of Cuban art, these are the years when Gómez Sicre became part of the clique around painter Mario Carreño and his wife, the sugarcane heiress María Luisa Gómez Mena, which included painters Cundo Bermúdez, Luis Martínez Pedro, and Felipe Orlando and the writer Enrique Labrador Ruiz.7 These years also included the visit of Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and Edgar Kauffman, Jr. to the island in 1942 (another important visitor the following year was David Alfaro Siqueiros), the development and opening of the Modern Cuban Painters exhibition, and the brief life and early death of Gómez Mena’s Galeria del Prado, where Gómez Sicre served as director for a short time. In 1942 he assisted novelist Alejo Carpentier in organizing exhibitions, as well as a lecture series, of Picasso, Daumier, Lautrec, and Miró at the Lyceum. The works in these exhibitions were borrowed from the inventories of French art dealers Pierre Loeb and Madame Hugo Perls, who were living in Havana at the time due to the Jewish quota on visas from the United States. These exhibitions and their positive reception by Havana audiences influenced the anthropologist Fernando Ortíz to name Gómez Sicre director of exhibitions at the Institución Hispanocubana de Cultura. Decades later Gómez Sicre would recall: “You must understand that just like my published articles in El mundo, this post at the Hispanocubana de Cultura was a voluntary one, as there were no funds for salary or honorariums. You did it out of love of culture and yes, love of country.”8 In the next two years he would write and publish his first book, a short monograph on Mario Carreño under the imprint of Galería del Prado, and Pintura Cubana de Hoy, which would serve as the catalog for the exhibition Modern Cuban Painters when it opened at the Museum of Modern Art in the Spring of 1944. Both were published by María Luisa Gómez Mena, with collectors such as Jorge Mañach, Juan Marinello, Héctor Ayala, and Lydia Cabrera paying for the color plates of the works they owned.9
In the 1980s Gómez Sicre regretted that the original idea of a series of brief monographs on Fidelio Ponce, Carlos Enríquez, Amelia Peláez, Cundo Bermúdez, Luis Martínez Pedro, and René Portocarrero never came to fruition due to the closing of Galería del Prado and María Luisa Gómez Mena’s fickle personality. He did complete a first draft for a monograph on Ponce, but the manuscript was not found after his death.
It can be argued that “the heart of the matter” of these years is the exhibition Modern Cuban Painters at the Museum of Modern Art and its success, followed by a reduced version of the show traveling to sixteen venues in the United States, as well as later to Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Port au Prince, Haiti. At the New York City museum he was mentored above all by Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and also to a lesser degree by Dorothy Miller and James Thrall Soby.10 He audited graduate courses with Erwin Panofsky at New York University and Meyer Shapiro at Columbia University. To Gómez Sicre these were the true art historians, men of great culture and intellectual depth. Over the years he would emphasize that he was a mere curator and art critic, lacking in profundity and method, when compared to either Panofsky or Shapiro.11 Barr was the most decisive influence in the development of José Gómez Sicre as a curator and critic, not just during these years, but I would suggest for the rest of his career. First, he accepted Barr’s chart or family tree of Modern Art, with its roots in Post-Impressionism and the foundational roles of expressionism, cubism, and surrealism in determining the development of art in the twentieth century, and, like Barr, he was interested in the full gamut of the visual expression of the Modern, from painting and sculpture to folk art and photography, as well as film. Gómez Sicre was a formalist, but of the Barr variety, never caring for Greenbergian formalism: “This guy Greenberg is an elitist and a dogmatic one at that. How can he say that the human figure cannot be painted! My formalism comes from Barr, not from him.”12 And since Gómez Sicre’s practice was curatorial and concrete, he favored installing an exhibition that was “clean” with minimal wall text and empty space around the works so they could be properly seen and experienced. Lastly, he believed in creating a core collection of the modern art of Latin America, which would exist as an equivalent to Barr’s Museum of Modern Art. This was obviously realized in 1976 with the opening of what was then named The Museum of Modern Art of Latin America.13
THE VISUAL ARTS SECTION, THE COLLECTION AND THE MUSEUM
In 1946 José Gómez Sicre was appointed by Secretary General Alberto Lleras Camargo, a distinguished Colombian journalist and liberal politician, as a Specialist in the Visual Arts Unit at the Pan American Union in Washington, D.C. He had been recommended for the position to Lleras Camargo by Alfred H. Barr, Jr. His initial task was to organize exhibitions and work on bibliographies and short monographs on Latin American artists.14 In a relatively short time, he transformed what could have been a conventional administrative position into something more complex and dynamic, as described by Claire Fox in her book:
Gómez Sicre maintained a rigorous schedule of rotating exhibitions at the union; served as an ad hoc art dealer; acted as consultant, judge, and tastemaker for numerous Latin American arts events throughout the Americas and Europe; and boosted the international reputation of many artists. He conceived of the Western Hemisphere as an art circuit, framing the PAU arts programs through multinational corporate patronage and Latin Americanist discourses explicitly tied to concepts of universalism, developmentalism, and rebellious, youthful aesthetic.
By the time he began his job at the then Pan American Union, he had accumulated a variety of experiences as a critic and curator, had been active in anti-fascist groups in his native Cuba, and had befriended leading left-wing intellectuals such as Pablo Neruda.16 As Claire Fox convincingly states in her vital text, he was more progressive on cultural and social issues than many of his Cuban contemporaries, who later went on to serve in the post-1959 Cuban government. After 1948, with the Cold War becoming an undeniable reality, Gómez Sicre identified politically with what he perceived as a third position: the progressive liberal, but anti-communist one of Latin American leaders such as Lleras of Colombia, Arévalo of Guatemala, Figueres of Costa Rica, Mora of Uruguay, Betancourt of Venezuela, Grau and Prio of Cuba, Frei of Chile, etc. He detested military regimes and “strong men” like Trujillo and Somoza, going as far as not exhibiting artists favored by those regimes.17
In the foreword to the posthumously published Contemporary Latin American Artists: Exhibitions at the Organization of American States 1941-1964, Gómez Sicre wrote, “In retrospect, as I reflect on my own contribution, I realize that more could have been done. It is like wanting to develop an airplane factory and ending up with a bicycle shop . . . To promote this art still in its developing stages, 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. It is just as gratifying for me to see the unflagging search of our artists to be the raison d’être of this publication. This publication documents the history of the birth of Latin American modern art, and gives evidence of its worth and strength.”18 These sentences make clear his self-imposed task from the start: “to discover” and to “set marks and develop criteria,” in other words to set out, over time and through something like 750 exhibitions and over 2,000 artists, to establish his canon of what comprised the modern art of Latin America. From this process and with the generosity of artists and individuals as well as corporate patrons, Gómez Sicre began to modestly build a collection that would be the corpus of the permanent collection of the Art Museum of the Americas. By the autumn of 1946 Gómez Sicre’s “canonical eye” was at work in bringing a traveling Pedro Figari exhibition to the Pan American Union gallery.19 The Uruguayan modernist had been dead for only nine years but he was already acknowledged as a founding figure of Latin American modernism by Gómez Sicre and others. In 1950 El patio (c. 1935) would enter the nascent permanent collection.20 In 1947 Cândido Portinari exhibited his work at the PAU;21 he had last received attention in the U.S. capital when his murals were unveiled at the Library of Congress in 1941. In 1949, Gómez Sicre would donate a painting given to him by the artist to the permanent collection.22 These two examples signal Gómez Sicre beginning the collection with artists he believed to be foundational figures in the history of the modern art of Latin America. Over the following four and a half decades he would pursue a strategy of acquiring works directly from the solo or group exhibitions he organized at the PAU/OAS gallery through purchase or donation; when this was not possible he would approach the artists themselves or their heirs for an acquisition.23 Still, with practically non-existent acquisition funds, paintings by Figari, Pettoruti, Poleo, Portinari, Mérida, Peláez, Torres García,24 Cúneo, Matta, Kingman, and Presas entered the collection. Other foundational artists could only be represented with graphic works on paper: Orozco and Siqueiros, Segall and Sabogal, Berni and Tamayo, etc. It is noteworthy that in spite of Gómez Sicre’s personal connection with sculpture through his cousin Juan José Sicre, the sculptural component of the collection is spotty, even weak. Bigatti and Sicre, Ortiz Monasterio and Roca Rey, and Negret and Ayoroa are well represented, but there is no work by Curatella-Manes, Peñalba, Zúñiga, Antonio Ruiz, Alfredo Lozano or Hernando Tejada, to mention a few key figures.25 In time the permanent collection would develop particular areas of strength, which reflected Gómez Sicre’s activity as a curator and promoter of Latin American art in the 1950s and 1960s: geometric and gestural abstraction, drawing and printmaking, folk art.
Throughout the twelve years (1979-1991) that I knew Gómez Sicre, and the three that I interviewed him in a formal manner (1989-1991), there were shifts in his canon of modern Latin American art, and yet there were recurring figures and bodies of work that appeared consistently. In the first foundational generation, Figari, Reverón, Torres García, Mérida, Peláez, Pettoruti, Tamayo, and Matta were constant, while Xul Solar, Tarsila do Amaral, and Lam were in and out, and eventually discarded. Indigenismo and art of social content, which he rebelled and campaigned against starting in the 1950s, was a more complex issue; he expressed admiration for Orozco and pre-1950 Siqueiros, Portinari’s production of the 1930s, the woodblock prints of Sabogal, and the paintings of both Kingman and Villacís, as well as Berni’s work before 1945 and after 1960. The rest he unjustly discarded as derivative and mannered, including Oswaldo Guayasamin, the muralists in Colombia (pre-Alejandro Obregón), and the second and third generations of muralists in Mexico.26 The decades of the 1950s and 1960s were when Gómez Sicre was most impactful in terms of the contemporary artists he “discovered” in his travels, exhibited at OAS headquarters in Washington, D.C., and continued to promote and champion. Stylistically this period coincides with abstract expressionism (also identified in Spanish as informalismo), a more optical and minimal geometric abstraction, and an expressionistic neo-figuration. Gómez Sicre was able to identify original and equivalent versions of these international trends throughout Latin America. Many of these artists he would add to his definition and expansion of the canon. Over the years the curator/critic would emphasize in conversation five essential artists that defined trends and became foundational: Alejandro Otero (1921-1990), Alejandro Obregón (1920-1992), Fernando de Szyszlo (1925-2017), Armando Morales (1927-2011), and José Luis Cuevas (1931-2017).27 Gómez Sicre exhibited all of these artists at OAS headquarters, starting with Otero in 1948, Szyszlo in 1953, Cuevas in 1954, Obregón in 1955, and Morales in 1962. Major works by each were acquired for the permanent collection, all but Obregón are represented by more than one work, and in the cases of Szyszlo, Cuevas, and Morales, each has several prints in the collection. Otero’s Coloritmo 34 (1957-1958) is part of the geometric component of the collection, which includes significant artists such as Eduardo Mac Entyre, Miguel Ángel Vidal, Ary Brizzi, Rogelio Polesello (Argentina), Jesús Soto and Carlos Cruz-Diez (Venezuela), Omar Rayo, Edgar Negret and Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar (Colombia), etc. Fernando de Szyszlo’s poetic Cajamarca (1959) is part of the lyrical abstraction component within the collection, including important work by María Luisa Pacheco, Alfredo Da Silva and Oscar Pantoja (Bolivia), Manabu Mabe, Tomie Ohtake, Kazuo Wakabayashi and Yutaka Toyota (Brazil), Anibal Villacís, Enrique Tábara and Estuardo Maldonado (Ecuador), Darío Suro (Dominican Republic), and Julio Rosado del Valle (Puerto Rico), just to mention some of the leading names. The point is that Gómez Sicre used work by each of the artists of the “quintet” as central pieces within the areas of the collection that he built with particular strength: Otero in geometric abstraction, Szyszlo in lyrical abstraction, and in the same way Obregón and Morales for poetic figuration, and Cuevas for both drawing and neo-figuration. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the stylistic paradigms expanded into minimalism, conceptual and performance art, Gómez Sicre’s aesthetic orientation had ceased to be as current. It can be argued that from this moment on and up to his retirement, he continued to reinforce the trends and artists he had promoted as innovative in the 1950s and 1960s. In exhibiting and collecting folk art and photography, he remained more open and current. Over twenty-four folk artists were represented in the collection by the time of Gómez Sicre’s retirement, with many of them exhibiting their works at the OAS during the curator’s tenure. Outstanding examples are Georges Liataud’s Crucifixion (1959), Asilia Guillén’s Héroes y Artistas Vienen a la Unión Panamericana para ser Consagrados (1962), José Antonio Velásquez’ San Antonio de Oriente (1957), and Everald Brown’s Totem (1972). Gómez Sicre’s understanding and presentation of folk art had much in common with Alfred H. Barr, Jr.; these artists represented an alternative modernity, a quirky vision that was not dependent on art schools or avant-garde tradition, but rather more primordial impulses which shared both the real and imaginary experience of their makers, outside of established conventions. On October 14, 1976, the former residence of the OAS Secretaries General opened its doors as The Museum of Modern Art of Latin America. In the brochure printed for the occasion, then Secretary General Alejandro Orfila wrote:
It was in 1957 – nineteen years ago – that the Council of the Organization of American States accepted a proposal by the representative of Mexico, Ambassador Luis Quintanilla, for the initiation of a collection of works by Latin American artists, selected principally from the exhibitions which have been regularly presented in the headquarters building for some three decades. The collection has grown steadily, and has been enriched by donations from private individuals and business concerns interested in promoting worldwide knowledge and appreciation of contemporary art of the Americas. The collection now comprises more than two hundred works, in all media. Painting predominates, but sculpture and drawing are well represented, and there are prints executed in a wide variety of techniques. The ensemble presents an overview of tendencies that have made themselves felt in the hemisphere over the last forty years.
His brief text continues, stressing both the aesthetic and financial value of the works in the collection, the previous lack of space for displaying the collection in a permanent manner, and the fact that the Organization’s Permanent Council had agreed that the new museum’s opening was a tribute to the 200th anniversary of the independence of the host country, and it concludes that the museum will stand as a monument to the bonds of friendship uniting the peoples of the Americas.29 Although there is no mention of Gómez Sicre by name in Orfila’s text, it is obvious that he is the principal architect of this endeavor. The brochure then lists alphabetically all of the artists represented in the permanent collection, starting with Rodolfo Abularach (Guatemala) and concluding with Rafael Zepeda (Mexico). The list contains 192 names. The new museum’s galleries did not exhibit work by all of the listed artists, but a selection reflective of Gómez Sicre’s definition of the canon (and limited by what works were in the collection). The museum’s first-floor galleries focused on “Pioneers and Teachers” and included Figari, Portinari, Torres García, Peláez, etc. The second floor had lyrical and geometric abstraction, figuration, and in the smallest gallery there was folk art. In a sense this was Gómez Sicre’s “mapping” of the art of Latin America as he had developed it through his exhibition program starting in 1946. Over time the installations would manifest variations; smaller representation of “Pioneers and Teachers” combined with artists of the 1950s (Obregón, Otero, Szyszlo, etc.), or geometric abstraction, or works on paper and sculpture, etc. When possible through long term loans from private collectors, Gómez Sicre would “insert” a major oil by Reverón, Lam or Tamayo, Botero or Orozco, yet some foundational artists would only appear in the permanent collection in the print medium.30 THE FIRST CATALOG OF THE PERMANENT COLLECTION
On December 31, 1982, José Gómez Sicre retired from his position as Chief of the Visual Arts section and director of the Museum of Modern Art of Latin America (a few years later the museum’s name would be changed to Art Museum of the Americas). Three years later, in 1985, the first catalog of the permanent collection was published with the title Museum of Modern Art of Latin America: Selections from the Permanent Collection. The project had been in the works since the late 1970s. The catalog contained a foreword by then Secretary General João Clemente Baena Soares, a presentation by acting museum director Rogelio Novey, an introductory essay by the late Marta Traba, and short texts for individual works and sections by Traba and Félix Ángel , with texts on folk art by Herbert W. Hemphill, Jr. and Stanton L. Catlin. The coordinator of the publication was María Leyva and the catalog design and photography were done by Ángel Hurtado, while the editing and translation were by Ralph E. Dimmick, who for years had translated Gómez Sicre’s texts. It was a group effort that reflected the team that had worked with Gómez Sicre for a number of years (Traba being the exception). In Novey’s presentation text he acknowledged Gómez Sicre’s effort in building the collection and advocating for the museum, as well as Traba’s work on the text while she lived briefly in Washington, D.C.31 The areas and works in the catalog were organized in a manner that reflected Gómez Sicre’s ideas about the collection and the canon, with input by both Traba and Ángel. The catalog’s color cover included eighteen postage size reproductions of works in the collection, bookended by photos of the front and back of the museum building. These is a color lithograph by Tamayo, and paintings by Torres García, Benjamin Cañas, Fernando de Szyszlo, Rogelio Polesello, Amelia Peláez, José Antonio Velasquez, Asilia Guillén, Héctor Poleo, Roberto Matta, Cândido Portinari, Carlos Mérida, Joseph Jean-Gilles, Armando Morales, Carlos Cruz Diez, Alejandro Obregón, Kazuo Wakabayashi, and Pedro Figari. Practically all of the artists were part of Gómez Sicre’s canon as built through the collection, and they represent “pioneers and teachers,” “geometric abstraction,” “lyrical abstraction,” ”figuration” and “folk art” – which are the categories used to organize the works inside the catalog. In spite of many images being black and white, this first collection catalog is a significant component of the museum’s holdings; it is the first systematic presentation of the collection in a publication, made accessible to the world at large. Since this first catalog the collection has grown with seriousness and modesty, and the museum has taken on the name Art Museum of the Americas. José Gómez Sicre’s curatorial activity in the 1950s and 1960s coincided with two of the more intense decades of the Cold War, and his aesthetic agenda definitely had common ground with notions of the individual artist and freedom of expression. Yet this collection is not limited by these issues. It attests to his good eye for finding talent and his formal rigor in defining the modern art of Latin America.
___
1 José Gómez Sicre in conversation with the author. This and all other translations from Spanish are by the author.
2 Letter from José Gómez Sicre to the author, November 17, 1989.
3 Juan José Sicre (1898-1974) was Guillermina Sicre’s favorite nephew. Generationally he was a member of the first avant-garde of Cuban art. Sicre studied at the private art school Academia Villate, also at the San Alejandro Academia de Bellas Artes, and later on in Paris under Antoine Bourdelle and in Spain with both Victorio Macho and Manolo Hugué. His most modern works are the portrait busts he executed in the 1920s and 1930s. He taught sculpture at the San Alejandro Academia de Bellas Artes until the 1959 revolution. He is best known for his José Martí monument at the Plaza Civica/Plaza de la Revolución. Sicre died in exile in Cleveland, Ohio.
4 After the breakup with Fina García Marruz, Gómez Sicre went through a profound crisis regarding his sexual identity. Gómez Sicre would marry a young Italian woman in the early 1950s, but the marriage lasted a short time. After this, bisexuality and eventually homosexuality would be his sexual identity. Gómez Sicre refused to discuss any of this with me in every interview I conducted before his death. He was of the generation that believed sexuality was a private thing. Yet his friendships with gay artists such as Cundo Bermúdez and Enrique Grau, were different than with those of us who were not gay. Confirmation of the aforementioned information came from his nephew Horacio Sicre and the sculptor Roberto Estopiñán, whose friendship with the curator/critic dated back to the early 1940s.
5 José Gómez Sicre, interview by the author, March 17, 1989.
6 José Gómez Sicre, interview by the author, March 17, 1989; the friendship with Neruda continued right up to the poet’s death, with Gómez Sicre dining with him when he visited Santiago. Mario Carreño, who lived in Chile starting in the late 1950s, was a friend of both men.
7 From this group Carreño and Bermúdez had been members of the Communist party in the 1930s (Bermúdez remained a member until after World War II), Labrador Ruiz was a fellow traveler who joined the party in the middle of World War II, but left it after the invasion of Hungary in 1957. This is to stress Gómez Sicre’s friendships with life-long leftists.
8 Letter from José Gómez Sicre to the author, November 17, 1989.
9 Letter from José Gómez Sicre to the author, November 17, 1989.
10 Gómez Sicre and Barr became good friends, with the older man mentoring the younger one, and eventually instrumental in the Cuban curator being hired by the Pan-American Union in 1946 to head the Visual Arts Section. After Barr’s retirement due to ill health and Alzheimer’s, Gómez Sicre stayed in touch, phoning and speaking with Margareta Scolari Barr as to Alfred’s health. When I met and interviewed Dorothy Miller in 1984-85, she had very fond recollections of Gómez Sicre, assuring me that Barr had wanted to hire him at the museum.
11 Records demonstrate that he took courses on iconography at NYU and on 19th century art at Columbia. Gómez Sicre would repeat in conversation to this author over the year that listening to Shapiro lecture on Cézanne was “an extraordinary experience” of what art history could be.
12 Letter from José Gómez Sicre to the author, November 17, 1989.
13 Even in the institution’s original name, there is the reflection of the legacy of Barr, Jr., and his New York City museum. Years after Gómez Sicre retired, the then director Belgica Rodríguez, convinced the governing board to change the name to Art Museum of the Americas, which would allow the exhibition of pre-Columbian, colonial and 19th century art from the Americas.
14 Claire Fox, Making Art Panamerican, Cultural Policy and the Cold War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 3-4. Fox’s book is the core work on Gómez Sicre’s most active years at the organization, from 1946 to 1968.
15 Fox, Making Art Panamerican, Cultural Policy and the Cold War, 4.
16 Fox, Making Art Panamerican, Cultural Policy and the Cold War, 16. Throughout my years of knowing Gómez Sicre (1979-1991) he always identified himself as a leftist liberal, and was proud of his friendships with the likes of Neruda, Antonio Berni, Juan Marinello, etc. I believe he was able to survive both the “Red Scare” and “Lavender Scare” at the OAS in the 1950s because his brother, Colonel Clemente Gómez was in the governments of both Presidents Ramón Grau San Martín, and Carlos Prio Socarrás, which protected Gómez Sicre’s position.
17 This political identification was a constant subject of conversation with Gómez Sicre over the years. After he became a U.S. citizen in 1980 he registered as a democrat, but voted for Reagan as he was disappointed with Carter’s handling of the Iran hostage crisis.
18 Annick Sanjurjo, ed., Contemporary Latin American Artists. Exhibitions at the Organization of American States 1941-1964 (Lanham, Maryland: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1997), v.
19 The Figari exhibition was open to the public September 3-22. It was funded by the Council for Inter-American Cooperation, Inc., and the Office of International Information and Cultural Affairs of the Department of State. The exhibition’s brochure reprinted an article by Lincoln Kirstein on Figari that had been published earlier in Magazine of Art.
20 A gift of the Bank of the Republic of Uruguay.
21 Portinari of Brazil, June 30-August 3, 1947, exhibition brochure.
22 Retorno da Feira, 1940, oil on canvas, 39 x 31 ½, depicts an Afro-Brazilian mother and children returning from a fair.
23 In conversations over the years, Gómez Sicre would bring up his “missed opportunities:” a Rivera oil offered by Ruth Rivera, the artist’s daughter (he told her he would send for the work, and she died of cancer before any paperwork was done), a Cavalcanti ink and watercolor, etc. In the early 1980s significant oils by Reverón, Orozco, Tamayo, Lam, and Botero were lent to the museum; Gómez Sicre hoped the works would eventually be donated by the owners, but were they not.
24 Composición Constructivista, a major oil from 1943, was donated by Nelson Rockefeller in 1963.
25 Third generation modern sculptors are well represented by the Chileans Sergio Castillo and Raúl Valdivieso, the Cubans Roberto Estopiñán and Gay García, the Venezuelan Carlos Prada.
26 The only exception he made among the later generations of muralists in Mexico was the painter and architect Juan O’Gorman, whose work in every medium he considered extraordinary.
27 These five artists were constantly mentioned by Gómez Sicre in conversation over the years I knew him. At times he would refer to them humorously as “el quinteto,” the quintet.
28 Alejandro Orfila, The Museum of Modern Art of Latin America, October 14, 1976, exhibition brochure.
29 Alejandro Orfila, The Museum of Modern Art of Latin America.
30 Orozco, Siqueiros and Tamayo are represented by prints, due to their affordability.
31 The Museum of Modern Art of Latin America: Selections from the Permanent Collection (Washington, D.C.: General Secretariat, Organization of American States, 1985), 9-10.
