1920s Transatlantic Encounters: Latin American Artists in Paris
BY MICHELE GREET
Traditionally, the field of Art History has focused predominantly on art produced in Europe. Over the past several decades, with the increased emphasis on globalism and multiculturalism, the field has expanded to include non-European regions. Consequently, Latin American art has begun to achieve long overdue recognition in both museums and academic institutions. The tendency, however, has been to isolate Latin America as a geo-political entity, in the conception of exhibitions, university courses, and scholarly texts as a means of establishing its legitimacy. Studies of Latin American art thus tend to explain images produced in this region as motivated by a desire to promote an authentic national or cultural identity and avoid in-depth consideration of engagement with foreign sources and global interchange for fear of undermining the works’ integrity Nevertheless, global interchange did have a significant impact on Latin American art, especially in the twentieth century. Examining Latin American migration and diaspora populations thus reveals a great deal about the forms Latin American art took in the modern era.
Most Latin American artists were not only aware of the international art scene, but also participated in it directly through extended international sojourns, interaction with visiting artists or intellectuals, and exposure to non-national art collections. These artists’ re-appropriation and transformation of international trends in local journals and galleries served to foster intellectual dialogue regarding the very nature of Latin American modernism. In their travels, Latin American artists came to terms with external prejudices and expectations and reacted to these pressures in their work. Simultaneously, physical distance from their own artistic milieu provided these artists with critical perspective, allowing them to reinvigorate their environment upon their return. This essay will examine Latin American artists’ participation in the international art scene in Paris during the 1920s.
New opportunities for travel allowed Latin American artists greater access to European avant-garde tendencies in the 1920s, with Paris most frequently their destination of choice. After World War I, Paris sought to resume its role as the cultural leader of the world. The city hosted the summer Olympic games in 1924, attracting an international contingent of athletes and spectators. The following year the Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes turned Paris into a showcase for the most recent trends in the decorative arts. By advancing Art Deco, a new aggressively modern style in architecture and design, the exposition aspired to establish the French capital as an arbiter of taste and style once again. Both the Olympics and the exposition brought an influx of foreign visitors to Paris and the exposition, in particular, focused attention on the arts. With its history as a center of artistic experimentation and deep-seated Latin heritage, Paris held a special appeal for Latin Americans artists. In fact, one source noted that there were over seventy-five Latin American artists living and working there in 1925.
Whereas Paris attracted numerous Latin American artists, Latin American culture also intrigued Parisian intellectuals. “Primitive” culture had fascinated the French for decades, beginning with the Ottomans and Western Asia in the early nineteenth century and spreading to Africa and the South Pacific with colonial expansion. Latin America, however, did not become a primary region of interest until the early years of the twentieth century because of archaeological investigations in the region. Unfortunately, the manner in which French intellectuals understood Latin American peoples often paralleled their view of their own colonies in Africa and Asia. By envisioning all these peoples as primitive, exotic, and barbaric in contrast to the modernity, civility, and sophistication of France, they reinforced cultural and ethnic hierarchies. The imposition of this construct on to Latin American cultures had a profound effect on Latin American artists’ experience abroad and forced Latin American artists to confront this primitivizing view of their culture in their work. Consequently, these artists developed various strategies to deal with these biased perceptions, ranging from a complete embrace of European tendencies to bold assertions of their cultural difference.
The increased intellectual presence of Latin Americans in Paris in the early years of the twentieth century also inspired the creation of various journals to address the impact of Latin American culture abroad. In 1910 the Groupement des Universités et Grandes Ecoles de France established the Bulletin de l’Amérique Latine as a forum for the discussion of intellectual, artistic, economic, and social issues relevant to all of Latin America. The journal, which was renamed the Revue de l’Amérique Latine in 1922, published articles by both French and Latin American authors until it folded in 1932. Beginning in 1923, the French critic Raymond Cogniat wrote a regular column for the revue entitled “La vie artistique,” which reviewed exhibitions of Latin American art in Paris. Cogniat set the precedent for French criticism of Latin American art, establishing expectations and determining “originality” by the degree to which the art reflected the native culture of the artist’s country of origin. His review of the “Exposition d’Art Américain-Latin” held in 1924 at the Musée Galliéra, the first comprehensive exhibition of Latin American art at a major French museum, reveals some of his biases. The exhibition’s objective was to present a complete overview of Latin America art from pre-Columbian to modern times, including popular art and artifacts.
Cogniat, however, focused on the contributions of contemporary artists, asserting:
Several times in this review we have remarked on the lack of personality of many American artists. We have noticed, however, that the nations which have a distinctive folklore, characteristic origins, and a climate, vegetation, and countryside, often very different from that which we are familiar with in Europe, that those who have such a past and such examples before their eyes, cannot possibly totally lack originality and it would probably take very little to awaken in them more instinctive tastes, more spontaneous and less encumbered by foreign influences.
Thus, for Cogniat originality does not refer to an artist’s unique vision, but rather to that artist’s willingness to represent “native” characteristics and subject matter in his or her work. Cogniat’s contention that the paintings in the exhibition “lacked originality” is particularly surprising because the pool of artists who contributed to the show included such renowned figures as Alejandro Xul Solar, Emilio Pettoruti, Pedro Figari, and Camilo Egas. Since he expected to be able to identify a “Latin American painting style” that reflected the “exotic” culture of region, he was disappointed when one was not apparent. Each of these artists developed a unique approach to integrating European artistic tendencies with Latin American themes. Whereas the Argentine artists Xul Solar and Pettoruti focused on experimental technique while avoiding direct references to their Latin American heritage, the Uruguayan, Pedro Figari, and Ecuadorian, Camilo Egas, integrated European techniques with local subject matter.
Xul Solar, whose primary influences were Paul Klee and Vassily Kandinsky, employed translucent washes of scintillating color in intersecting geometric planes, always working in a small-scale. With this minimal formal vocabulary he created mythical beings, fantasy architecture, and compound creatures surrounded by secular, religious, and invented symbols, open to a continuous array of allegorical and spiritual interpretations. Pettoruti, on the contrary, painted in a cubist mode throughout his career. While he painted images of the Argentine tango upon his return to his home country in 1924, in Europe, his subject matter consisted primarily of still lifes, figures, and landscapes. Painted in vibrant colors and precise overlapping planes, these images demonstrate Pettoruti’s sophisticated manipulation of cubist techniques, but make no reference to his national origin.
Figari, too, was conversant in European artistic techniques. During his travels in Paris he met the intimists Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard and chose to emulate their loose application of paint and decorative surfaces in his work. Nevertheless, Figari employed this technique to paint the landscapes and architecture of the Río de la Plata region as well as the Creole and black inhabitants of the area. His subject matter therefore distinguished his work from his European counterparts. It was the work of Camilo Egas, however, that caught the eye of European critics. Egas’ images stood out because he painted “several curious Indian types.” Although Egas’ submissions to the show included a self-portrait and two still lifes, in addition to several heads of Indians, it was the paintings of Indians that various reviewers singled out as praiseworthy. Displayed alongside his artwork Egas exhibited a collection of musical instruments, colored tapestries, belts, hats, necklaces, and fabrics, an inclusion that reflected the premise of the show. Although the presence of Indian artifacts normally would have served to negate the hierarchy between fine art and craft, a distinction that many artists of the time were striving to overturn, in the context of this exhibition it tended to reinforce the European notion that all Latin American art derived from the “primitive.” Thus, the association of Egas’ paintings of Indians with “authentic” native crafts differentiated his work from that of his Latin American colleagues. And it was through his “primitivism” that he gained a reputation in Europe.
Since the end of the colonial era, Latin American artists had endeavored to create art that originated from local culture yet was internationally relevant. They were persistently plagued by criticisms that their work was either derivative of European aesthetic models or lacking in international relevance, however. The four artists discussed above demonstrate the diverse strategies employed by Latin American artists to negotiate a place in the international art world. Without an intense intellectual engagement with European prototypes, Latin American modernism could not have taken the forms that it did. It was through the activities of the Latin American diaspora population that this complex interchange between European and Latin American culture evolved. Despite the importance of Paris for Latin American artists in the 1920s, however, circumstances began to change in the
1930s. With social unrest brewing in Europe — Fascist Germany rapidly gaining power, Stalin instigating a purge of intellectuals in Russia, and Spain in the midst of civil war — many Latin American artists began to circumvent Europe and look to the United States for exhibition opportunities and artistic prototypes. New York soon replaced Paris as the destination of choice for Latin American artists, causing a shift in migration patterns and global cultural exchange.
Michele Greet (mgreet@gmu.edu) is assistant professor of art history in the Department of History and Art History (http://history.gmu.edu/). This article was first published in print and citations have been removed due to space limitations, but are available from the author.
