This lecture deals with a wide variety of strategies used by Latin
American artists in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. During the high period of
modernism in the 20s through the 40s artists were invested in creating
works of art which had recognizable national elements. By the 50s in
Mexico, for example, artists became weary of what they saw as a
non-relevant national iconography that had guided the creation of muralism
and the Mexican School. Artists of the Ruptura (Rupture) movement like
Lilia Carrillo investigated
non-objective painting whereas the great draftsman Jose Luis Cuevas
remained faithful to the figure to make social criticism.
Regarding lyrical abstraction we shall see a diversity of approaches
through figures such as the Brazilian artist Tomie Ohtake who was a member
of the Seibi Group (Japanese Artists of Brazil) and the Peruvian Fernando
de Szyslo. The international current linked to "new figuration"
accounted
for many of the works of Antonio Berni (whose art we have seen in another
context) and the Venezuelan Jacopo Borges, whose highly expressionist
canvases may be related in part to the spirit of Willem DeKooning as well
as the Art Brut movement embodied by Jean Dubuffet. The lively gestural
quality of his art is paralleled by that of the Colombian Alejandro
Obregon.
A discussion of figurative art and the communicative nature of the human
body inevitably leads us to consider such a figure as Colombian
painter/draftsman Luis Caballero and Nicaraguan Armando Morales.
Pop art had very specific consequences in Latin America although the
dead-pan nature of North American or British Pop, with its implied
criticism of consumer societies had a quite different resonance in Latin
America. Artists like Cuban Raul Martinez, Brazilian Antonio Henrique
Amaral, Venezuelan Marisol and Colombian Fernando Botero are all
associated with this significant movement in the 60s, 70s and even into
the 80s.
