Latin American Visual Arts in the 1920S

On the Cusp: Latin American Visual Arts in the 1920s

(Spine Title: Latin American Visual Arts in the 1920s)

(Thesis Format: Monograph)

Andres Villar

Graduate Program in Visual Arts

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

The School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies The University of Western Ontario London, Ontario, Canada

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CERTIFICATE OF EXAMINATION

Supervisor Examiners

Dr. Bridget Elliott Dr. Juan Luis Suarez

Supervisory Committee Dr. Veronica Schild

Dr. Sarah Bassnett Dr. Odile Cisneros

Dr. Juan Luis Suarez Dr. Cody Barteet

The thesis by

Andres Villar

entitled:

On the Cusp: Latin American Visual Arts in the 1920s

is accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor in Philosophy

Date Chair of the Thesis Examination Board

u Abstract

This dissertation examines how the visual arts of the southern Americas were transformed during the 1920s, a period that was understood by the artists of the time as one of cultural openness and opportunity. In contrast with other studies of the so-called called vanguardias or avant-gardes, this thesis approaches the artworks of early 1920s as epistemological tools that were used by artists to represent the cultural complexity of the continent. The argument is developed by concentrating on four artists from the regions with the largest and arguably most important urban centres in the southern Americas:

Mexico, Brazil, and the Southern Cone.

The first two chapters of the thesis establish a framework and a context for the study: chapter 1 examines some of the underlying key terms of the methodology, which is contrasted with other approaches to the vanguardias; and chapter 2 presents a brief historical prelude to the ruptures and continuities that characterize the art of the 1920s.

Chapters 3 to 6 are devoted to specific case studies: chapter 3 looks at the work produced by Jean Chariot during the early years of the Mexican muralist movement; chapter 4 analyzes the paintings created by Pedro Figari after he retired from Uruguayan politics;

Chapter 5 explores the art made by Xul Solar in the periods before and after his return to

Argentina; and chapter 6 examines the artworks produced by Tarsila do Amaral during her so-called "Pau-Brasil" phase.

The artists mentioned above, all of whom have become enshrined in the canon of

Latin American art, are associated with the changes in the visual culture of the 1920s.

iii This study suggests a new approach to the visual arts of the period by proposing that their work is emblematic of a continent-wide response to cultural complexity.

Keywords: visual arts, painting, avant-garde, Latin America, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico,

Uruguay.

iv Acknowledgements

Many people helped bring this thesis to fruition. As my advisor, Bridget Elliott has been one of the most important in making this happen. She provided the necessary support and freedom of action that made it possible for me to explore the issues the way that I did. I would also like to thank the other members of my committee, Sarah Bassnett and Juan Luis Suarez. They have been helpful teachers, guides, and constructive critics throughout the years I have known them. I also want to thank the faculty, staff, and fellow students at the Department of Visual Arts, all of them essential members of a creative collective. During my research trips I received much help from scholars and staff at various institutions. In many instances the interactions were brief—the retrieval of a file, a referral to an appropriate person— but every interaction was an important step of the journey. I thank all those anonymous benefactors at libraries and archives who are unobtrusive but essential participants in the research process.

A few other people were especially important and deserve to mentioned by name.

I received a warm welcome and outstanding support from Bronwen Solyom at the Jean

Chariot Collection, University of Hawai'i. Bron's knowledge of the material was invaluable, as was her help in securing copies of documents even after I had returned to my home in Ontario. It was a pleasure to meet John Chariot, who gave me a tour of his father's work in Honolulu. Bron and John embody the best of the Aloha Spirit. I would also like to thank Clara Bargellini and Julieta Gaitan Ortiz for being very generous with their time and providing me with valuable information to guide my research; Patricia

v Artundo for making room in her busy schedule to meet with me; William Penfield Rey, who received me as a friend and suggested lines of investigation with respect to

Uruguayan visual culture; and to Judith Crosignani at the Museo Pedro Figari.

vi Table of Contents

Certificate of Examination ii

Abstract iii

Acknowledgements v

List of Illustrations viii

Introduction: Vanguardias and Change 1

Chapter 1 - Spectre of Change: Towards a Theory of Latin American Visual

Culture in the 1920s 19

Chapter 2 - Image of the Nation: The Birth of the Latin Americas 46

Chapter 3 - Arrival and Redemption: Jean Chariot's Massacre at the

Templo Mayor 80

Chapter 4 - The Projection of Memory and Duration: Pedro Figari's Painterly

Pursuit of the Ideal 104

Chapter 5 - A Negative Phantasmagoria in the River Plate: Xul Solar

and a Neocriollo Image for the Americas 128

Chapter 6 - Art for Export: Tarsila do Amaral's "Pau-Brasil" Paintings 149

Epilogue: The Avant-Garde Artist as an Apprentice Tourist 174

Illustrations 182

Bibliography 229

Vita 253

vii List of Figures

Fig. 1 Jose Clemente Orozco, Cortes and Malinche (1923-1926) 182

Fig. 2 Eighteenth-century illustration depicting a phantasmagoria 183

Fig. 3 Eighteenth-century illustration of a magic lantern 183

Fig. 4 Juan Cordero, Columbus Before the Catholic Sovereigns (1850) 184

Fig. 5 Jose Obregon, The Discovery of Pulque (1869) 184

Fig. 6 Felix Parra, Bartolome de las Casas (1875) 185

Fig. 7 Felix Parra, Scene From the Conquest (1877) 185

Fig. 8 Leandro Izaguirre, Torture of Cuauhtemoc (1893) 186

Fig. 9 Plan of San Juan de la Frontera (Mendoza), Argentina (1562) 186

Fig. 10 Jose Maria Velasco, The Metlac Ravine (1893) 187

Fig. 11 Jose Maria Velasco, View of Mexico City From Cerro Santa Isabel (1892) 187

Fig. 12 Saturnino Herran, Flora (1910) 188

Fig. 13 Saturnino Herran, The Tehuana (1914) 188

Fig. 14 Saturnino Herran, Frieze of the Ancient Gods (1914) 189

Fig. 15 Saturnino Herran, Coatlicue (1918) 189

Fig. 16 Juan Manuel Blanes, The Two Roads (c.1875-1878) 190

Fig. 17 Juan Manuel Blanes, Yellow Fever (1871) 191

Fig. 18 Angel Delia Valle, The Return From the Raid (1892) 191

Fig. 19 Argentina's pavilion at the 1889 Paris Exposition. Picture of the building in Buenos Aires in 1900 192

Fig. 20 Victor Meirelles, Moema (1866) 193

Fig. 21 Jose Maria Medeiros, Iracema (1884) 193

viii Fig. 22 Rodolfo Amoedo, The Last Tamoio (1883) 194

Fig. 23 Victor Meirelles, The First Mass in Brazil (1861) 194

Fig. 24 Pedro Americo, Battle of Aval (1877) 195

Fig. 25 Pedro Americo, The Proclamation of Independence (1888) 195

Fig. 26 Victor Meirelles, Battle of Guararapes (1879) 196

Fig. 27 Almeida Junior, Departure of the Expedition (1897) 196

Fig. 28 Almeida Junior, Man From the Countryside Cutting Tabacco (1893) 197

Fig. 29 Almeida Junior, The Guitar Player (1899) 197

Fig. 30 Jean Chariot, The Massacre at the Templo Mayor (1922-1923) 198

Fig. 31 Diego Rivera, Creation (1922-1923) 198

Fig. 32 Jean Chariot, Don Pancho (1922) 199

Fig. 33 Jose Guadalupe Posada, Calavera of the Streetsweepers (n.d.) 199

Fig. 34 Xavier Guerrero, Masthead for El Machete (1924) 200

Fig. 35 Diego Rivera, Portrait of Adolfo Best Maugard (1913) 200

Fig. 36 Adolfo Best Maugard, Self-Portrait (1923) 201

Fig. 37 Cover and sample pages from Adolfo Best Maugard's drawing method 202

Fig. 38 Fernando Leal, The Feast of the Lord of Chalma (1922-1923) 203

Fig. 39 Edward Weston, Pulqueria (1926) 203

Fig. 40 Pedro Figari, The Arrival (n.d.) 204

Fig. 41 Pedro Figari, Pericon (n.d.) 204

Fig. 42 Sketches drawn by Figari during the Almeida trial (1894-1898) 205

Fig. 43 Pedro Figari, Stupidity (1918-1919) 205

Fig. 44 Pedro Figari, Greed(\9\%-\9\9) 206

ix Fig. 45 Pedro Figari, Chimes For Prayer (1925) 206

Fig. 46 Pedro Figari, Candombe (n.d.) 207

Fig. 47 Pedro Figari, Candombe (n.d.) 207

Fig. 48 Pedro Figari, Towards the Governor's House (n.d.) 208

Fig. 49 Pedro Figari, Visiting the Governor (n.d.) 208

Fig. 50 Pedro Figari, African Nostalgia (n.d.) 209

Fig. 51 Pedro Figari, In Society (n.d.) 209

Fig. 52 Pedro Figari, Presentation (n.d.) 210

Fig. 53 Pedro Figari, Uncertainty (n.d.) 210

Fig. 54 Pedro Figari, Criollo Dance (n.d.) 211

Fig. 55 Pedro Figari, Maternity (n.d.) 211

Fig. 56 Pedro Figari, Vigilance (n.d.) 212

Fig. 57 Pedro Figari, Textile Industry (n.d.) 212

Fig. 58 Pedro Figari, Indians (n.d.) 213

Fig. 59 Pedro Figari, The Old Market (1890) 213

Fig. 60 Jose Cuneo, Largo Hill (La Aguada) (1918) 214

Fig. 61 Cover of the magazine Teseo, 1924 214

Fig. 62 Cover and sample page from Figari's book The Architect (1928) 215

Fig. 63 Norah Borges, cover for Jorge Luis Borges's book of poems Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923) 216

Fig. 64 Xul Solar, Puerto azul (1927) 216

Fig. 65 Xul Solar, Mundo (1925) 217

Fig. 66 Xul Solar, Pais (1925) 217

x Fig. 67 Xul Solar, Tlatloc (1923) 218

Fig. 68 Xul Solar, Nana Watzin (1923) 218

Fig. 69 Xul Solar, Lady Diaphanous (1923) 219

Fig. 70 Tarsila do Amaral, Abaporu (1928) 220

Fig. 71 Tarsila do Amaral, Antropofagia (1929) 220

Fig. 72 Cover of first issue of the magazine Klaxon (1922) 221

Fig. 73 Tarsila do Amaral, Veneza (1923) 221

Fig. 74 Tarsila do Amaral, A Negra (1923) 222

Fig. 75 Tarsila do Amaral, A Cuca (1923) 222

Fig. 76 Tarsila do Amaral, Caipirinha (1923) 223

Fig. 77 Tarsila do Amaral, Estudo (Academia no.l) (1923) 223

Fig. 78 Tarsila do Amaral, Carnaval em Madureira (1924) 224

Fig. 79 Tarsila do Amaral, E.F.C.B. (Brazilian Railroads) (1924) 224

Fig. 80 Tarsila do Amaral, Sao Paulo (1924) 225

Fig. 81 Tarsila do Amaral, Sao Paulo (Gazo) (1923) 225

Fig. 82 Tarsila do Amaral, 1924 illustration for Blaise Cendrars's book Feuilles de Route 226

Fig. 83 Mario de Andrade, Veneza. Em Santarem. Junho, 1927 (E o hotel) 31 de maio. To be or not to be Veneza. Eis aqui estao ogivas de Santarem 226

Fig. 84 Tarsila standing before her painting Morro da Favela (1924) at her exhibition in the Galerie Percier, Paris, 1926. Tasila's painting Sao Paulo (1924) is partly visible in the background. 227

Fig. 85 Tarsila do Amaral, Morro de Favela (1924) 227

Fig. 86 Tarsila do Amaral, Self-Portrait (1924) 228

xi 1

Introduction

Vanguardias and Change

It was like the enchantments told about in the book ofAmadis, because of the high towers, cues, and other buildings, all of masonry, which rose from the water. Some of our soldiers asked if what we saw was not a dream. It is not to be wondered at that I write it down here in this way, for there is much to ponder over that I do no know how to describe, since we were seeing things that had never before been heard of, or seen, or even dreamed about.'

Bernal Diaz del Castillo (1568)

Graft the world into our republics; but the trunk must be that of our republics.2

Jose Marti (1891)

Any painter who, as an individual, can be relatively adequately grasped within the categories of artistic schools will not be one of the great painters, because ideas of art (for this is what notions of artistic schools are) cannot be directly expressed in art without becoming impotent.3

Walter Benjamin (1917)

'Bernal Diaz del Castillo, The Bernal Diaz Chronicles: The True Story of the Conquest of Mexico, trans, and ed. Alvert Idell (Garden City, NY: Dolphin Books, 1956), 148. 2"Injertese en nuestras republicas el mundo; pero el tronco ha de ser el denuestras republicas." Jose Marti, "Nuestra America," originally published in El Partido Liberal, Mexico on January 30, 1891, in Jose Marti, Nuestra America (Caracas: Editorial Ayacucho, 2005), 34. 'Letter to Gerhard Scholem, October 22, 1917, in Walter Benjamin, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910-1940, ed. Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adomo, trans. Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), 101. 2

The first Europeans who arrived in the Americas were overwhelmed by a landscape of new images. Chronicles written by the conquistadores repeatedly reference their encounters with novelty that defied textual description other than the term "marvel."

This origin marked by the marvelous laid the foundations for how images of the continent were to be constructed in the centuries that followed, and paved the way for what would later be characterized as a war of images.4 Decades after the conquest, Fray Diego Duran used oral accounts and written testimony to reconstruct the Aztec defeat in the wake of

Cortez's invasion. Like Bernal Diaz's chronicle, Duran's The History of the Indies ofNew

Spain, which he composed in the 1570s, is filled with references to the power of images, but of images created by those who were vanquished. The codices that Duran used as references and that he described as "paintings" were full of images in tension with those transported from Europe by the conquerors.5 This tension would endure throughout the three centuries of colonial rule, in spite of continuous evangelization and a strict control by the Iberian monarchies.6 Images and culture transported to the Americas from Europe were adopted —but also resisted and subverted— by the indigenous inhabitants, and by the different groups that emerged from the syncretism and hybridity of colonization, a

4See Serge Gruzinski, Images at War: Mexico From Columbus to Blade Runner (1492-2019), trans. Heather MacLean (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001). 5Duran constantly refers to the codices as "paintings." See Fray Diego Duran, Historia de las lndias de Nueva Espaha e islas de la tierra firme (Mexico: Editorial Porrua, 1967), xxx-xxxiii. 6In this thesis I use "southern Americas" and "Latin America" interchangeably. Neither term is exhaustive, culturally or geographically, nor wholly adequate, but I tend to favour "Southern Americas" since it suggests heterogeneous geographies and broadly shared colonial and post-colonial histories (and geopolitical circumstances) that the term "Latin America" does not. 3

process of duplication that Serge Gruzinsky has called the "Chaos of Doubles."7 With

Independence, the construction of images adequate to the new nations would be formulated by the local, Europeanized elites. Moulded from the ideology of the

Enlightenment, these images increasingly acquired the status of historical documents as they became foundational "snapshots" of a national imaginary.8 The artists who produced them continued to look across the Atlantic for models, but they also tried to incorporate motifs that would define their art as originating in the Americas. There was, in addition to the domain of trained artists who produced "official" art for institutions, a wider field of visual culture that had persisted since colonial times: portraits, religious images, and other objects created for a more informal audience.9 The field of images became increasingly dense with the development of photography, the proliferation of newspapers and magazines, and the introduction of mechanically reproduced images at the end of the nineteenth century. By the dawn of the twentieth century this new visual horizon would coincide with the rapidly changing social, economic, and political circumstances that affected how visual artists began to look at their environment.

In the following chapters I will examine four artists whose work is emblematic of how the visual arts in Latin America were changing during the 1920s. Why did artists begin to portray things differently, and why did they do so at the beginning of this particular decade? To put it simply: because artists of the time construed their period as one in which they had an opportunity to formulate a new art for their regions.

7Gruzinski, Images at War,; 5. 8Dawn Ades, Art in Latin America: The Modern Era, 1820-1980. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 7. "Ibid., 10. 4

Nevertheless, in pursuing this grandiose, Utopian project they were confronted with a

cultural complexity that intruded into the artwork itself. These two notions —opportunity

and complexity— are mutually implicated themes that recur throughout this study of

visual arts in the southern Americas.

Latin American artists of the 1920s operated at a time when new technologies

were facilitating rapid cultural exchanges across the Atlantic. Just how quickly ideas

travelled in the first decades of the twentieth century can be seen in the speed with which

Filippo Tomassi Marinneti's "Futurist Manifesto" was disseminated. Marinetti's text was

published in Le Figaro on February 1909, and only a month later the well-known

Nicaraguan writer Ruben Dario (1867-1916) had translated it and reviewed it for the

newspaper La Nation of Argentina. At the time, Dario was already an established cultural

figure of international stature, a role model for younger artists. Dario suggested that a

type of futurism had already been proposed by the Catalan poet and essayist Gabriel

Alomar and by the Uruguayan writer Armando Vasseur, and therefore described the

Italian writer's text as derivative, a critique that was echoed by the Chilean avant-garde

poet Vicente Huidobro (1893-1948).10

Dario and Huidobro reacted in a manner that highlights the complex context of

the Latin American avant-garde —or the vanguardias, as they are known in Spanish.

These two writers were responding to Marinetti's idea of the "new" that positioned them

as "old," but they were also criticizing a European movement by suggesting that Spanish and Latin American writers had anticipated its vision. Alomar and Vasseur had indeed

l0Luis Mario Schneider, El estridentismo o una literatura de la estrategia (Mexico: Ediciones de Bellas Artes, 1970), 14-16. 5

used the word "futurism," yet what they had described and the manner in which they

described it was very different from the radical aesthetic rupture and call to arms so

emblematic of Marinetti's performative manifesto. The responses to Marinetti by Dario

and Huidobro were symptomatic of a "peripheral" resistance to the gravitational pull of

the centres, a stance that would become an important characteristic of vanguardist

projects in the southern Americas.

Regardless of Dario's and Huidobro's criticism, Marinetti's future-oriented

rhetoric influenced many of the movements that emerged in Latin America during the

1920s. The emphasis on the "new," however, was tempered by an equally strong desire to

incorporate the continent's cultural traditions, a characteristic that surfaces in the

nationalist strains of much artistic and intellectual production of the time. This

examination of the local would paradoxically come to undermine the "national" artistic

projects in subtle but far-reaching ways, for the notion of a new art for southern Americas

brought to the surface the tensions and paradoxes of defining what was modern or

traditional, foreign or local in countries where immigration, modernization, and

urbanization were accentuating cultural heterogeneity and making it difficult to construct

simple images of the nation. Artists from Latin America were also aware of how the

global expansion of capital and technology were connecting their countries to a larger

geopolitical framework in what was a prelude to our current age of globalization.

Manifestos written by intellectuals in different parts of the continent in the 1920s reflected attempts to recast the balance between tradition and novelty, a project that had recent antecedents in landmark texts such as "Our America," (1891) by the Cuban Jose 6

Marti (1853-1895), and Ariel (1900), by the Uruguayan Jose Rodo (1872-1917). In other

words, although the vanguardists spoke the language of transformation, they were

embedded in societies that were defined both by rich local traditions and a colonial

legacy. Such fragments of history and memory would continue to inform and challenge

ideas of modernity in the southern Americas.

Looking at the generation of artists working in the period before the First World

War, Maijorie Perloff maps a geography in which "[t]he Europe of the avant-guerre was

a field of action whose center was Paris but whose circumference, by way of the French

language, took in Petersburg as well as London and New York."11 George Yudice has

suggested that PerlofFs circumference is too small, even for the first two decades of the

twentieth century.12 Like Dario and Huidobro before them, artists and writers such as

Diego Rivera, Joaquin Torres-Garcia, and Cesar Vallejo were active in Europe before the

First World War, and extended the radius of the avant-garde field to the American

continent. The transatlantic connection also involved movement in the opposite direction:

Jose Ortega y Gasset, Marcel Duchamp, Blaise Cendrars, Marinetti, and Le Corbusier

were some of the European intellectuals who travelled to the southern Americas between

the World Wars. Given the complex nature of transatlantic cultural migration, PerlofFs

assessment that "the American response to Futurist poetic was delayed by at least a

decade" ignores differences between avant-garde programs on both sides of the

"Maijorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986), xviii. 12See George Yudice, "Rethinking the Theory of the Avant-Garde from the Periphery," in Modernism and Its Margins: Reinscribing Cultural Modernity from Spain and Latin America, ed. Anthony L. Geist and Jose B. Monleon (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1999), 54. 7

Atlantic.13 Moreover, the term "American" in this passage is rather limited: it refers to movements in the United States but excludes those of the southern hemisphere, where attempts to forge a new culture were based on the reinterpretation of tradition, however such tradition was defined. This is a fundamental qualitative difference that is obscured when treating the vanguards as a reenactment of European movements by constituting them as peripheral, delayed, and derivative.

As Enrique Dussel and Walter Mignolo have suggested, since the encounter of

1492, Latin America and Europe have been inextricably bound in a complicated relationship known as modernity.14 It is an asymmetrical relationship in which the "New

World" was for a long time subjugated by an anthropological gaze directed from the "Old

World." The idea that Latin America is a pale shadow of Europe is of course not new, but the notion that Western culture was degenerating, which seemed to be confirmed by the

First World War, created an opportunity for Latin American intellectuals to invert the perspective and engage in projects of "national regeneration."15 One of the best-known texts extolling this ideal of "racial" renewal is the essay "La raza cosmica" (1925) by the

Mexican philosopher and politician Jose Vasconcelos (1882-1959). In this short tract, written with the rhetoric and style of a manifesto, Vasconcelos suggested that the races of the world would mix in the southern Americas to form a world-renewing people.

Vasconcelos, who would be the driving force behind Mexican muralism, conceived his

"PerlofF, xx-xxi. l4See Enrique D. Dussel, The Underside of Modernity: Apel, Ricoeur, Rorty, Taylor, and the Philosophy of Liberation, trans. Eduardo Mendieta (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1996); and Walter Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America (Maiden, MA: Blackwell, 2005). 15Nancy Leys Stepan, "The Hour of Eugenics Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991), 36. 8

idea of a "cosmic race" in great part as a response to the pessimistic assessments of

European culture found in texts such as Max Nordau's Degeneration (1892) and Oswald

Spengler's The Decline of the West (1918-1923).

The sense of being on the verge of transformation was unlike any that had arisen

since Independence in the early nineteenth century, and was linked to a shift in

geopolitics, to the speed of global communications, and to changes in the rapidly growing

cities. As Raymond Williams has persuasively suggested, modernism is correlated with

the growing urban centres of Europe at the dawn of the twentieth century.16 This was

certainly the case in South America, where the first wave of concerted vanguardist

activity was concentrated in major cities, such as Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and Sao

Paulo.

Studies of the Vanguardias

This study approaches the artistic production of the 1920s as a continental

phenomenon. It is a perspective that has been particularly fruitful in Latin American

literary studies, as seen in texts such as Los vanguardismos en America Latina (1976) by

Oscar Collazos; El futurismoy la vanguardia literaria en America Latina (1982) and

Manifiestos, proclamas y polemicas de la vanguardia literaria hispanoamericana (1988)

by Nelson T. Osorio; Las vanguardias literarias en hispanoamerica (1986) by Hugo

Verani; and Las vanguardias latinoamericanas: textos programaticos y criticos (1991) by

Jorge Schwartz.

l6Raymond Williams, "Metropolitan Perceptions and the Emergence of Modernism," in The Politics of Modernism (London: Verso Books, 1989), 37-48. 9

Comparative analyses have also been produced outside Latin America. Two examples of such studies are Nicola Miller's recent book Reinventing Modernity in Latin

America: Intellectuals Imagine the Future, 1900-1930, published in 2008; and a slightly older book by Vicky Unruh, Latin American Vanguards: Art of Contentious Encounters, published in 1994. Unruh's book argues insightfully for interpreting vanguardist work as a response to the environment of the southern Americas, rather than as a simple imitation of models emanating from Europe. Following Terry Anderson, who suggested a set of criteria that defines the historical period of the European avant-garde, Vicky Unruh has suggested four common characteristics to the literary vanguards of the southern

Americas:

(1) that Latin American vanguardism was a continental development and should

therefore be examined comparatively; (2) that the vanguards provoked significant

changes in prose fiction and drama as well as poetry and, in fact, frequently

challenged generic divisions; (3) that manifestos and manifesto-style texts

constituted a primary outlet for vanguardist critical and creative expression; and

(4) that Latin American vanguardism as a whole was simultaneously international

and autochthonous in its orientation, as artists interacted with European avant-

garde currents in keeping with their own cultural exigencies.17

With some qualifications that take into account the change in media, Unruh's points also apply to the visual arts. They are an important acknowledgement that the vanguardist phenomenon occurred across the continent at more or less the same time, and that it was

"Vicky Unruh, Latin American Vanguards: The Art of Contentious Encounters (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: The University of California Press, 1994), 9-10. 10

complex and open to outside sources, rather than contained and "easy" to describe as either imitative or idiosyncratic. It is also undoubtedly true that the visual artists of the period challenged and transgressed formal boundaries. The artists that I will be examining achieved their "significant changes" in the work of art by adapting modernist techniques, but they also incorporated formal elements from the wider domain of Latin

American visual culture. The effort to reconfigure form and content so as to create new local art is perhaps the feature that distinguishes vanguardist production from that of their nineteenth-century predecessors. This new emphasis led to changes in how the artwork looked, what it was meant to signify, and how it did so.

An issue stressed by Alfredo Bosi in the introduction to Schwartz's book Las vanguardias latinoamericanas: textos programdticos y criticos is that the term vanguardias encompasses a variety of practices. According to Bosi, it is difficult to look for a concerted programme even within one group, since members did not always exhibit a uniformity of aims that made their collective project consistent as a "rock crystal."18

Because many Latin American artists in the 1920s pursued a hybrid notion of the modern, and because the artworks produced across the continent were quite diverse, it is undoubtedly problematic to consider all this material under the overarching category of avant-garde production, particularly if European artists and movements are used as reference points. Jeffrey Weiss has criticized Peter Burger's highly influential book The

Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974) for a similar type of analytical simplification. Weiss suggests that the European historical avant-gardes were too varied to be contained within

1'Alfredo Bosi, "La parabola de las vanguardias latinoamericanas," in Jorge Schwartz, Las Vanguardias latinoamericanas: textos programdticos y criticos, trans. Estela dos Santos (Madrid: Catedra, 1991), 15. 11

the generalizations made by Burger, and that creating "prescriptive definitions of

convenient terms such as modernism and the avant-garde serve mostly to provide a false

sense of security, dulling our intuitive grasp of predominating incongruities and

conflicts."19 Bosi and Weiss are right to note the variety of practices encompassed by

what might be considered avant-garde or vanguardist work. Nevertheless it is striking

that throughout the continent, and during the same period, artists changed how artworks

looked, even if this change was manifested in multiple ways.

Comparative studies in the visual arts have appeared less frequently: in a 1975

article Elizabeth Wilder Weismann declared that there were virtually no continental Latin

American art studies at the time she was writing, a situation that had not changed much

since the Hispanic Foundation of the Library of Congress published an annotated

bibliography of the field in 1949.20 Although Weismann concentrated mostly on colonial

art, much of what she stated applied to other periods as well. In Weismann's view,

scholars preferred to approach the art of the southern Americas through the lens of

European art history rather than examining it on its own terms.21 Surveys dedicated to

large areas of the continent were also scarce, she suggested, because art historical

scholarship in Latin America was circumscribed by national boundaries.22

A few years after Weismann's assessment, the Argentine art critic Marta Traba published an article describing the problematic of the "national" in relation to art and its

''Jeffrey Weiss, The Popular Culture of Modern Art, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), xvi. 20See Elizabeth Wilder Weismann, "The History of Art in Latin America, 1500-1800: Some Trends and Challenges in the Last Decade," Latin American Research Review 10, no.l (Spring, 1975): 7—50. 2lIbid., 7-9. 22In spite of this, Weismann suggests that scholars from the southern Americas in the 1970s seemed to be less ideologically invested in nationalism, although she does not elaborate on why this should be the case. Ibid., 17-18. 12

discourse in the southern Americas. Traba was already a well-known contemporary art critic who had written at least one survey of Latin American art: Two Vulnerable Decades in Latin American Visual Arts (1973) (A second such book, Art from Latin America,

1900-1980 was published posthumously in 1994). In the article, Traba contrasted the

Brazilian Semana de Arte Moderna and the modernistas to muralism as it developed in

Mexico in the 1920s and 1930s, suggesting that the Brazilian artists were more motivated by aesthetics than their Mexican colleagues, whose art she construed as socially grounded. It is a distinction Traba summarized by suggesting that the Mexican artists achieved the creation of a political space, whereas their Brazilian colleagues opened up a cultural space.23 The martinfierristas from the same period in Argentina were described by Traba as "national nationalists," for whom locale became a primary concern.24

Nevertheless, the distinctions Traba made are too tidy, since the issues of aesthetics, politics, and locale were examined in all three regions. Individual artists might have stressed some factors more than others, but differences tend to disappear when looking at the artistic production more broadly.

Given what Weismann and Traba described as a nationalist strain of art history in the southern Americas it is perhaps not surprising that some of the most important surveys of Latin American art in the last several decades have been produced outside the continent. As Weismann noted, the inherent danger of surveys is that they inevitably generalize. But the benefit of such a wide-angle view is that it can highlight tendencies in art production that might be theorized away as localized phenomena, thus ignoring the

"Marta Traba, "Artes plasticas latinoamericanas: la tradicion de lo nacional," Hispamerica 8, no. 23/24 (Aug.-Dec., 1979): 45-50. 24Ibid., 51-52. 13

connections to what was happening in other parts of Latin America.

A vehicle that lends itself to comparative analysis is the museum exhibition, and it is indeed here that some of the more important continental analyses of the past several decades have emerged.

One such exhibition was Latin American Art, 1820-1950, organized in 1989 at the

Hayward Gallery in London by art historian Dawn Ades from the University of Essex.

Broadly comprehensive, as evidenced in the show's title, Latin American Art, 1820-1950 was criticized for "the erasure of all national art histories turning the continent into one place."25 Ironically, this was precisely what Weismann had feared as a possible danger of continental surveys. But Ades discovered that this criticism could also end up smuggling a different kind of nationalism through the back door. As Ades notes, this form of nationalism is

a different type of cultural and political essentialism...Working on the Hayward

exhibition in the late 1980s, I encountered for the first time the idea that the art of

a country should be dealt with only by its nationals, with the corollary that art

historians were concerned only with the art of their own country.26

Such territorial claims in scholarship can only hinder more concerted approaches to the culture of the continent, although economic and material constraints that scholars face in the southern Americas are also a contributing factor.

Almost twenty years later, the Fundacion March in Madrid mounted the 2008

25Dawn Ades, "Constructing Histories of Latin American Art," in The Two Art Histories: The Museum and the University, ed. Charles W. Haxthausen. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 42. 26Ibid., 42. 14

exhibition Vasos Comunicantes (Communicating Vessels) with a much narrower scope, concentrating on the art produced during the 1920s and 1930s in the regions examined in this thesis. As the title suggests, the premise of the show was that Latin American artists of the 1920s enacted a fruitful exchange with their European counterparts, an exchange that was dialogical rather than imitative. Luis Martin Lozano organized the exhibition and wrote the article on Mexico for the catalogue, in which he suggested that vanguardist production must be understood as part of an international avant-garde movement.

According to Lozano, a vanguardist impulse was already immanent in the Americas, so that even artists who did not travel to Europe were contributing to an unfolding avant- garde.27 The purpose of the exhibition was not to show Latin American art as "analogous, parallel, or peripheral to the European artistic movements," but rather as an international phenomenon in which artists from the southern Americas searched for their own idioms and enriched their artistic practices by coming into contact with the European avant- gardes.28 The three art historians who wrote texts for the exhibition catalogue concentrated on their own region of expertise, referring only tangentially to the other two geographical areas, a segregation no doubt motivated by the constraints of mounting an exhibition and making its ideas accessible to the public. The show and its supporting catalogue reiterate the idea of rupture in the 1920s without, however, providing a satisfactory narrative as to why this should have occurred at the same time in different parts of the continent.

27Luis Martin Lozano, "Latinoamerica, Europa y las vanguardias: nuevos parametros desde la historia del arte. El caso de Mexico," in Vasos comunicantes: Vanguardias latinoamericanas y Europa, 1900-1950 (Segovia, Spain: Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Esteban Vicente, 2006), 3-4. 28Ibid., 4. 15

An earlier and more ambitious exhibition was organized by Mari Carmen Ramirez and Hector Olea at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid in 1999 with the title

Heterotopias. This same show travelled the following year to the Blainton Museum of

Art at the University of Texas at Austin where Ramirez worked as the curator. Retitled

Inverted Utopias, the show was organized around a small number of topics or thematic

"constellations" that were based on conceptual "oppositions," such as universal and vernacular, cryptic and committed.29 This arrangement was meant to provide an alternative to more traditional chronological shows by stressing common concerns in

Latin American art from the 1920s until the 1990s, thus mapping a thematic trajectory of modernism in the region. In Heterotopias/Inverted Utopias Ramirez and Olea did not provide a historical prelude for the artists and artworks of 1920s, a choice with which they sought to avoid a "teleological model of the history of art" that has traditionally relegated Latin American production to a secondary, derivative role.30 Yet the artists of the 1920s reacted to a history of images and to the styles used to render them. Their belief that representations produced in the past were inadequate to express the complexities of their own time and place impelled these artists to explore new ways of seeing, knowing, and representing.

During the 1920s the visual arts in the three regions examined in this thesis were transformed, I suggest, as artists explored new ways to represent their country's and their

29The titles of the six constellations used to organize the show were: Universal and Vernacular, Play and Grief, Progression and Rupture, Vibrational and Stationary, Touch and Gaze, and Cryptic and Committed. See Ramirez and Olea, Inverted Utopias, xv-xvii. 30Ibid., xvi; Ramirez had also been critical of Latin American art exhibitions that stressed "the fantastic" as emblematic of Latin American visual culture. See Mari Carmen Ramirez, "Beyond 'The Fantastic': Framing Identity in U.S. Exhibitions of Latin American Art," Art Journal 51, no. 4 (Winter 1992): 60-68. 16

continent's cultural complexity. The broad geographic area studied here and the generality of the hypothesis presupposes a certain distance from the level of details in order to see the "big picture." Nevertheless, I will examine the traces of this transformation in the work of four painters who worked in different parts of the Americas: Jean Chariot in

Mexico, Pedro Figari and Xul Solar in the Southern Cone, and Tarsila do Amaral in

Brazil. When looking at their work, I will be asking whether there was a definite difference in the painting they produced in the third decade of the twentieth century. The resounding "yes" that is my answer will be explored in the visual evidence of the surface of the artworks themselves. In other words, a cursory look at the work produced by artists that have been traditionally associated with modernism in the 1920s reveals how new format approaches were used to configure a new way of seeing. Techniques used by artists were varied, and modernist techniques were not unprecedented. For example, although the Semana de Arte Moderna of 1922 is heralded as a pivotal moment in the unfolding of Brazilian modernism, artists such as Anita Malfatti and Lasar Segall had already exhibited works that we can characterize as Expressionist. But it is only in the early 1920s that groups of artists in Mexico, Brazil, and the Southern Cone achieve a self-sustaining momentum for the project of creating ostensibly "new" forms of artistic expression suitable for their local environments. The artists included here played an important role in that early moment or leading edge of change —the "cusp" alluded to in the title of the thesis.

In Chapter 11 will examine some of the important issues raised in this study and the ways they are approached methodologically. Here I describe how different historical 17

developments converge in the artwork as an object which enables us to question what we know and how we know it.

Chapter 2 is a general introduction to the tradition of painting in the southern

Americas after Independence, and particularly in the last third of the nineteenth century in the three regions examined in this thesis. This short, selective introduction to academic painting in the southern Americas at the end of the nineteenth century provides a foundation with which to understand the continuities and the ruptures of the 1920s.

Each of chapters 3,4, 5, and 6 is dedicated to a specific artist active in the early

1920s. The artists I have chosen —Jean Chariot, Pedro Figari, Xul Solar, and Tarsila do

Amaral— are well known. All participated in and are associated with the changes in the visual arts that occurred in that period, and except perhaps for Chariot, these artists are considered major figures in the national narrative of art in their particular homelands. In other words, Figari, Solar, and Tarsila are generally written about as Uruguayan,

Argentinian, and Brazilian artists, respectively, who initiated modern artistic practices in their countries. Chariot has remained a relatively peripheral figure in art historical studies of the post-Revolutionary Mexican "renaissance." Nevertheless, Chariot was an important participant in the first wave of muralism and wrote the first comprehensive account of the "movement." His book The Mexican Mural Renaissance, 1920—1925 (first published in English in 1967) continues to be an important text for anyone who studies the Mexican mural painting.

My aim in this thesis is to describe how Latin American avant-garde artists of the

1920s transformed the work of art, and to suggest how this change responded to a 18

different way of seeing and knowing. The case studies provide an opportunity to examine traces of this continental change, but I am interested in how continuities across these artists' practices can help elicit a new interpretation, or suggest a new constellation, for the concerted change in the visual arts that occurred in the 1920s. 19

Chapter 1

Spectre of Change: Towards a Theory of Latin American Visual Culture in the 1920s

Sensible reality, the evident reality, in the times of the Revolution for Independence, was not, for sure, republican or nationalist. The great achievement of the libertadores consists in having seen a potential reality, a superior reality, an imaginary reality.'

Jose Carlos Mariategui (1924)

During the nineteenth century aesthetic semblance was heightened to the point of phantasmagoria. Artworks effaced the traces of their production, probably because the victorious positivistic spirit penetrated art to the degree that art aspired to be a fact and was ashamed of whatever revealed its compact immediateness as mediated.2

Theodor Adorno (ca.1969)

Origin [Ursprung]. although an entirely historical category, has, nevertheless, nothing to do with genesis [Entstehungl. The term origin is not intended to describe the process by which the existent came into being, but rather to describe that which emerges from the process of becoming and disappearance. Origin is an eddy in the stream of becoming, and in its current it swallows the material involved in the process of genesis. That which is original is never revealed in the naked and manifest existence of the factual; its rhythm is apparent only to a dual insight. On the one hand it needs to be recognized as a process of restoration and re-establishment, but, on the other hand, and precisely because of this, as something imperfect and incomplete. There takes place in every original

'"La realidad sensible, la realidad evidente, en los tiempos de la Revolution de la Independencia, no era, por cierto, republicana ni nacionalista. La benemerancia de los libertadores consiste en haber visto una realidad potencial, una realidad superior, una realidad imaginaria," Jose Carlos Mariategui, "La imagination y el progreso," in Literatura y estetica, ed. Mirla Alcibfades (Caracas: Editorial Ayacucho, 2006), 78; originally published in Mundial, Lima, Peru, December 12, 1924. 2Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic theory (London and New York: Continuum, 2002), 102. 20

phenomenon a determination of the form in which an idea will constantly confront the historical world, until it is revealed fulfilled, in the totality of its history. Origin is not, therefore, discovered by the examination of actual findings, but it is related to their history and their subsequent development,3

Walter Benjamin (1925)

This space and time peculiar to the image is none other than the world of magic, a world in which everything is repeated and in which everything participates in a significant context. Such a world is structurally different from that of the linear world of history in which nothing is repeated and in which everything has causes and will have consequences. For example: In the historical world, sunrise is the cause of the cock's crowing; in the magical one, sunrise signifies crowing and crowing signifies sunrise. The significance of images is magical.

The magical nature of images must be taken into account when decoding them. Thus it is wrong to look for "frozen events " in images. Rather they replace events by states of things and translate them into scenes. The magical power of images lies in their superficial nature, and the dialectic inherent in them - the contradiction peculiar to them - must be seen in the light of this magic.4

Vilem Flusser (1983)

At the very moment the territories of the southern Americas were emerging from colonialism and forging images adequate to the incipient nations, the Industrial

Revolution was spreading dreams of technology and progress to different regions of the globe, and scientific approaches to management and governance were gaining influence in Latin America. The result was the triumph of positivism, which by the end of the

3Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London and New York: Verso, 2003), 45^6. 4Vilem Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), 9. 21

nineteenth century had become the political philosophy in most of the hemisphere.5 Yet in spite of the promises of modernization, social contradictions in the different Latin

American countries became more acute amid the complex relations —social, economic, and political— of a world in which it was increasingly difficult to remain in isolation.

Latin American artists of the early twentieth century responded to and were entangled in this early process of globalization in four important ways: they described the modernization of space and time; they confronted cultural heterogeneity; they acknowledged complexity; and they reconfigured their gaze. These issues are the vertices of a quadrangle that defines what I am calling the epistemological dimension of artworks produced in the 1920s. The nature of that shift is best denoted by two visual metaphors that together describe the tensions inherent in the visual arts of the 1920s: the phantasmagoria and the window pane. The first was often employed to denote illusion, most famously in Marx's conception of the commodity; the second was used by the

Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset in his essay "The Dehumanization of Art"

(1925). Written in the period examined in this thesis, the "Dehumanization" essay exemplifies Ortega y Gasset's aesthetic theory in the mid 1920s. It is, I suggest, a text that from which one can extract a paradigmatic explanation of how artworks changed during this period.

Modernization of Time and Space

Technology was a source of both excitement and anxiety in the early 1900s.

5See Leopoldo Zea, Pensamiento positivista latinoamericano (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1980). 22

Although the possibilities of progress seemed unlimited, the benefits of technology in the nineteenth century had been unequally distributed both internationally and within the borders of Latin American countries. Nevertheless, the artistic generation of the 1920s rekindled an enchantment with the modern which they expressed in language that was indebted to the Futurists. Texts such as Manuel Maples Arce's "Actual no. 1" (1921) in

Mexico; Mario de Andrade's book of poetry, Hallucinated City (1922), and Oswald's

"Pau-Brasil Manifesto" (1924) in Brazil; and the "Martin Fierro Manifesto" (1925) in

Argentina echo F.T. Marinetti's "Futurist Manifesto" of 1909, whose longing for aesthetic rupture with the past is intertwined with a celebration of technology. Many of the young artists of the 1920s projected onto technology a similar desire to change the ostensibly ossified parameters of their own cultural milieu. Even those who might not have been as enthusiastic registered changes that could be seen in the "hallucinated" cities they inhabited. On the one hand, technology had accelerated the transfer of ideas and goods from Europe, binding the former colonies of the southern Americas to an expanding network of global capital. On the other hand, photography, cinema, and the illustrated print media had also begun to disseminate a plethora of images that created a double image of Latin America. Representations of urban centres such as Mexico City, Buenos

Aires, and Sao Paulo seem to suggest that modernity had arrived in the Americas. But it was also a modernity that, for a generation of elites that had sought to impose the positivist tenets of order and progress, was fragmentary and "unfinished," a sentiment rendered more acute as the gaze focused on the countryside of the southern Americas.

Urban spectators were thus presented with a reflexive vision that was both familiar and 23

exotic, a dialectic that was carried over into new media such as film.6 The ensuing contrasts did not fit comfortably within the notions of unified and modernizing national cultures that Latin American countries had attempted to construct in the last decades of the nineteenth century.7

Although artists of the southern Americas were inspired by Futurist rhetoric, many rejected the group's denial of tradition. Instead, the differences that abounded in their homelands suggested one of the central problematics that was to occupy artists of the southern Americas in the 1920s: the project of synthesizing the local and the global into new, modern idioms that could better represent the cultural fabric of the southern

Americas.

The word "modern" and its derivatives can have different, even contradictory meanings, a fact that becomes more obvious as one crosses disciplinary boundaries.8 For example, "modernism" can describe both the iconoclastic style of the Mexican estridentista manifesto and the architecture promoted in Brazil during Getulio Vargas's dictatorial regime of the 1930s and 1940s. Both were imbued with an idealist will-to- order, the former with a spirit of subversion that sought to undermine an ostensible cultural stasis, the latter with a Taylorist rationality adopted to promote economic and

6See Ana M. Lopez, "Early Cinema and Modernity in Latin America." Cinema Journal 40, no. 1 (Autumn, 2000): 48-78. 'The international exhibitions provided a venue in which the idea of "universal progress" was represented. Here, Latin American countries promoted themselves as modern nations open to investment. See Mauricio Tenorio Trillo, Mexico at the World's Fairs: Crafting a Modern Nation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Fernandez-Bravo, Alvaro. "Ambivalent Argentina: Nationalism, Exoticism, and Latin Americanism at the 1889 Paris Universal Exposition." Nepantla: Views from the South 2, no. 1 (2001): 115-139; Noah C. Elkin,"Promoting a new Brazil: National expositions and images of modernity, 1861-1922," PhD diss. (Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, 1999). 8Susan Stanford Friedman, "Definitional Excursions: The Meanings of Modern/Modernity/Modernism," Modernism/modernity 8, vol. 3 (2001): 510. 24

administrative efficiency.9 In both cases "the modern" was used as a rhetorical tool to

configure particular conceptions of time and space that were then layered like a mantle

over a broad cultural geography. In the process, a connection was suggested between

technological change and aesthetic transformation.

The emptying of space and time is a fundamental characteristic of what has come

to be called modernity.10 Always-already culturally inscribed, place became increasingly

dis-placed and, to echo Anthony Giddens, phantasmagoric.11 In its stead, an abstract

notion of space —the very antithesis of place— came to suggest a rationalized stage that

actors inhabit contingently. In such a narrative, empty, homogenous time is structured as

the foundation of a linear History, an organization of past and future through which the

present becomes a stepping stone in a path towards redemption. Images constructed on

this rationalized vision of space and time construe all non-normative cultures as layers to

be shed along the path to progress, preserving only their traces as ethnographic relics.

New technologies that emerged in the nineteenth century contributed to the flattening of

time and space that was also made immanent in the heterogeneity of the growing cities.

In turn, this heterogeneity inspired writers and intellectuals to view the city as the very

embodiment of modernity and a locus of "cosmopolitanism."

The cosmopolis, or universal city, was not a creation of the nineteenth century.

According to Octavio Paz, the poetry of the southern Americas has exhibited a tension

between "cosmopolitanism" and "americanism," or between the global and the local ever

9Mauro F. Guillen, "Modernism without Modernity: The Rise of Modernist Architecture in Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina, 1890-1940," Latin American Research Review 39, no. 2 (2004): 15. '"Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1990), 18. "Ibid., 18-19. 25

since Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz (1648-1695) created her poetry in the seventeenth

century.12 But it is only in the late nineteenth century that the idea of the cosmopolitan

becomes an intrinsic characteristic of the Symbolist-inspired modernist movement known

as modernismo. Jorge Schwartz suggests that in Latin American literature there is an arc

that leads from a mid-nineteenth-century cosmopolitanism that represents the city, to an

avant-garde one in which the heterogeneity of the city is constructed on the page itself.13

A similar transformation occurred in painting, where the canvas changed from being an

illusory representation of events, to a complex juxtaposition of elements that alluded to a

state of things construed as exceptional to the southern Americas. The idea of the

"cosmopolitan" also changed during this representational arc from city to artistic media, I

suggest, as some artists and writers adopted what Rebecca Walkowitz has called a critical

cosmopolitanism: "an aversion to heroic tones of appropriation and progress, and a

suspicion of epistemological privilege, views from above or from the center that assume a

consistent distinction between who is seeing and what is seen.'"4 My suggestion is that

the artists of the 1920s I examine here became more reflexive and critical of their

surroundings —through their art— than their predecessors, so that when I refer to them as cosmopolitan I will do so in a sense that approximates Walkowitz's definition.

Joshua Lund has used the phrase "Latin American exceptionalism" to refer to the notion that the southern Americas are unique and thus require different conceptual tools

I2Octavio Paz, Los hijos del limo: Del romanticismo a la vanguardia (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1974), 183-184. "Jorge Schwartz, Vanguardia y cosmopolitismo en la decada del veinte: Oswald de Andradey Oliverio Girondo (Buenos Aires: Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 1993), 13-23. l4Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 1-32. 26

to examine the continent's reality.15 Two mutually implicated critical strains, suggests

Lund, underlie the discourse about Latin American exceptionalism: the region is

construed as "a space where so-called universal theories of culture or society 'don't fit"';

and the southern Americas are described as "a (geographical and discursive) space from

which 'universal' theories do not emerge.'"6

Exceptionalism is, by definition, one of the defining characteristics of any process

of nation-building, since it is predicated on creating a distinction between those who

belong to a collective and those who do not. In the early twentieth century, the notion of

exceptionalism provided Latin American intellectuals with a way to conceive of a local,

modern culture that was not derived from European or North American models.

Furthermore, many intellectuals in the 1920s went a bit further, I suggest, by proposing

that the cultures of the south were as good, if not better, than the European ones, which

were seen as exhausted and deeply scarred by the First World War. Such cultural de-

centering was still relatively new, since a synchronic approach to cultures had only begun

to emerge in the 1920s, in spite of the primitivist currents in much avant-garde

production. Nevertheless, Bronislaw Malinowski, Franz Boas, and Alfred RadclifFe-

Brown, among others, were younger members of a cohort that was transforming

anthropology by studying cultures comparatively, rather than hierarchically and

diachronically as had been done in the nineteenth century.17 It is important to note,

however, that the idea of equivalence between Europe and the Americas was generally

l5See Joshua Lund, "Barbarian Theorizing and the Limits of Latin American Exceptionalism," Cultural Critique, No. 47, (Winter, 2001): 54-90. 16Ibid., 55. "Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Finn Sivert Nielsen, A History of Anthropology (London and Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 2001), 55-56. 27

grounded in a Eurocentric vision in which the Latin American elites saw themselves as

participants in Western culture. Within their own borders, these elites continued to pursue

policies that would acculturate marginal groups through state-led policies in hygiene and

education meant to improve the local "race."18

Cultural Heterogeneity

Like many of their colleagues at the time, the artists examined in this thesis had

distinct notions about the "primitive" that they incorporated into their work. Moreover,

primitivism lurks as one of the important elements that informs their choices, although

what is understood by primitive varies according to the individual artist.

As Arthur Lovejoy and George Boas attest in Primitivism and Related Ideas in

Antiquity (1935), the notion of the primitive as a counterpoint to normative culture has a

long lineage in the West.19 Yet it is in the nineteenth century that ethnographic collections

in museums make non-Western objects available to a wider Western spectatorship. These

objects begin to be examined aesthetically in the twentieth century with the appearance of

books such as Carl Einstein's Negerplastik (1915), and Marius de Zayas's African Art and

Its Influence on Modern Art (1916), although many artists had already been engaging

with non-Western art and culture decades before these texts were published.20

There are several consequences of primitivism that will be important in relation to

l8For a thorough discussion on Latin American notions of "race" and their relationship to eugenics, see Stepan, "The Hour of Eugenics ''Arthur O. Lovejoy and George Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity (New York: Octagon Books, 1965), xi. 20See Robert Goldwater, Primitivism and Modern Art (Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1986); Colin Rhodes, Primitivism and Modern Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994). 28

art in the southern Americas: first, primitivism incorporates a reflexive anthropological gaze into artistic practices. By looking for inspiration in an "other," artists who engaged with the "primitive" began to question and to reassess their own aesthetic origins in the

West. Second, the adoption of primitivist elements problematized the notion of the artwork itself by questioning its superiority to the objects it was incorporating. These two effects were mutually implicated, for they challenged the notion of art as a privileged domain by suggesting a relativity or equivalence, however tentative, across cultures. This idea of cultural relativity, many times an unintended consequence of artistic choices, questioned not only the boundaries of art, but also those of collectives such as the nation.

The effect of these explorations of the 1920s was that the cultural complexity of the continent began to intrude into the space of the artwork.

If there was a difference between how artists in Europe and the Americas justified their primitivist appropriations, it was that the latter construed their investigation as an archaeology of local traditions they could claim as their own, even if only partially. In other words, although European artists might have looked outside the West in order to

"reinvigorate" their work, Latin America artists described the encounter with the primitive as a re-discovery of the local.21 Indeed, a recurring trope used by intellectuals from the southern Americas is to describe their own brand of primitivism as "natural," and to deny any sense of appropriation, such as Oswald de Andrade did when he declared in a lecture in Paris that "black is a realist element in Brazil."22 Such attempts to

2lOr as Jorge Schwartz has described it for Brazil, "the primitive emerges as an autochthonous irmer force, without any need to import it from abroad," in Jorge Schwartz, "Tupi or Not Tupi: The Cry of Modern Literature in Brazil," in Jorge Schwartz, ed. Da Antropofagia a Brasilia: Brasil 1920—1950 (IVAM Centre Julio Gonzalez, 2000), 546. 22Ibid. 29

naturalize a homegrown primitivism conceal a power differential between the artist and the local "primitives" based on a hierarchy of "high" and "low" art. Furthermore, the

"primitives" in the southern Americas were an undefined and heterogenous group that in any given country or region could include indigenous groups, descendants of African slaves, inhabitants from the countryside, and the growing mass of urban workers. In general they were the disenfranchised groups whose cultural production fell outside the bounds of the artworld and of the elites it served, and who the burgeoning and amorphous category of "the popular." Artists themselves contributed to process of defining what the popular meant, with the mural movement in Mexico as a notable example. When wielded with the purpose of promoting nation-building projects, the notion of the popular implied a relatively unproblematic mixture or hybridity that made the conditions in the southern

Americas exceptional.

Behind the discourse of hybridity was the desire to defuse the original clash of the indigenous and the European by creating a new, exceptionally American identity. Jose

Clemente Orozco's mural of Hernan Cortes and his indigenous translator and lover

Malinche [fig. 1], painted at the former National Preparatory School in Mexico City, is an emblematic image of this particular notion of hybridity. Orozco endows the pair with the theological pathos of the biblical Adam and Eve, and indeed Cortes and Malinche recur as the paramount but conflicted image of the Mexican nation's ambivalent imaginary origin. In the colonial period such mestizos, the offspring of Spanish and indigenous unions, were placed below "white" subjects but above "indians" and slaves in what was a complex racial hierarchy. By the third decade of the twentieth century, the idea of the 30

mestizo had become an implicit element of state-sponsored national identity in Mexico.

Here, mestizaje was redefined as the reason for the country's exceptionalism, and, by

extension, for that of the southern Americas. The outcome, it was suggested, was that

Latin American nations were different, but not lesser than the European ones, a notion of

the Americas that in most cases was still based on an elite, Europeanized view of the

nation. Indigenous inhabitants were generally expected by these elites to acculturate into

the normative culture (a notable exception was Jose Carlos Mariategui in Peru).

Vasconcelos's "La raza cosmica" (1925) is one of the most emblematic texts expounding

the ideal of mestizaje.

During the colonial period "criollo" had also denoted impurity, but of geography

rather than biology, since it was used to describe white colonists and black slaves born on

the American continent.23 For the white criollos in particular this created a

"consciousness of not being who they were supposed to be" [emphasis in original], of being "non-European Europeans."24 It was because they felt disenfranchised that the criollos had rebelled against their colonial powers. Nevertheless, criollos had enjoyed privileges that other inhabitants of the colonial Americas did not have. After

Independence the criollo elites consolidated a hegemony that still looked to Europe for models. It is because of this that the Mexican artists David Alfaro Siqueiros could use the word criollo as a mark of opprobrium in his "Manifesto of the Syndicate of

Revolutionary Mexican Painters, Sculptors, and Engravers" (1923). For Siqueiros, criollos were synonymous with the power that had created social injustice in Latin

23Jose Juan Arrom, "Criollo: Definicion y Matices de un Concepto," Hispania 34, no. 2 (May 1951): 172. 24Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America , 62-63. 31

America and that continued to perpetuate it, an imbalance that could only be rectified by

revolutionary structural changes.

In the Southern Cone criollo denoted the homegrown, a use of the term that is also

common in other parts of the southern Americas. This meaning, which is related to the

notion of creolization, was implied in the colonial usage of criollo, but later came to be

used more broadly to denote a strong connection to the land. In contradistinction to

Mexico, where pre-Hispanic cultures were part of the national imaginary, discourse about

the national in the Southern Cone was virtually devoid of reference to indigenous

cultures. Indigenismo, the celebration of the "indian," was strong only where such

populations continued to be visible majorities, such as in Mexico and the Andean

countries. In Argentina and Uruguay, criollismo espoused the local through its paramount

figure of the gaucho, the cowboy of the south.

Although the terms criollo and mestizo are distinct, both imply a cultural

difference in the southern Americas; criollo by alluding to locale, mestizo by stressing biology. The notion that hybridity was exemplary of the southern Americas would reach its most extreme manifestation in the Brazilian antropofagia movement, which made the cannibal the model for an antagonistic and self-confident collective identity. Criollo and mestizo are also abstractions that can occlude power relations and class conflicts, precisely because they are used to denote an imaginary community linked by blood and place. But collectives, and nations in particular, encompass a wide variety of groups that live side-by-side in a "simultaneous non-simultaneity."25 Rita Felski uses this term to

25For example, Rafael Gutierrez Girardot uses "simultaneous non-simultaneity (simultaneidad de lo no-simultaneo)," which is how he translated the term that Ernest Bloch used to describe Weimar Germany. Gutierrez Girardot used the expression sought to counter "univocal" descriptions of modemismo, the late 32

embrace different conceptions of temporality that are often concealed by overarching narratives of modernism and postmodernism.26 These "other times," or heterochronias, are linked to "other places," or heterotopias, creating literal time-places that Latin

American artists of the 1920s began to reflect upon as they peeled away layers of the ostensible homogeneity of national cultures.27

As Raymond Williams once noted, "culture" is one of the most complicated words in the English language and has a history, like "modern" and its cognates, that includes varied usages across disciplines and "systems of thought."28 In its broad interpretation, "culture" is often used to suggest a coherent, closed system, a view that sociologist Margaret Archer has called the "Myth of Cultural Integration."29 Endemic across the social sciences, suggests Archer, this Myth has its origin in anthropology, where it is exemplified in definitions such as the metaphor used by Evans-Pritchard to describe Azande culture as a "web of belief [where] every strand depends upon every other strand."30 The problem with the Myth of Cultural Integration, suggests Archer, is

nineteenth-century literary movement in Latin America and Spain. See Rafael Gutierrez Girardot, Modernismo: supuestos histdricos y culturales, 2nd. ed. (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1988), 13; Rita Felski uses the same phrase, also inspired by Bloch, although she arrives at it by modifying an English translation of Bloch's term as "synchronicity of the non-synchronous,"which she finds too bound to an evolutionary framework. See Rita Felski, Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 3; Carlos Rincon uses it as the title of his book on globalization and Latin American culture. See, Carlos Rincon, La no simultaneidad de lo simultaneo: posmodernidad, globalizacion y culturas en America Latina (Bogota: Editorial Universidad Nacional, 1995). 26Felski, Doing Time, 3. "For Foucault's account of heterotopia, see Michel Foucault, "Of Other Spaces," trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16, no.l (Spring, 1986): 22-27. Heterotopia was also used as the title for an exhibition of Latin American modern art. See Mari Carmen Ramirez and Hector Olea, Heterotopias: medio siglo sin-lugar, 1918-1968 (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, 2000). 28Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 87. 29 See Margaret Archer, Culture and Agency: The Place of Culture in Social Theory (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 1-21. 30Ibid., 7. 33

that it has "obfuscated" two important analytical distinctions that need to be separated: the notions of "cultural pattern" and of "uniform action."31 Cultural pattern describes a

"logical consensus," understood as "the consistency of our attempts to impose ideational order on experiential chaos"; and uniform action characterizes "causal consensus," which denotes "the success of attempts to order other people. Logical consistency is a property of the world of ideas; causal consensus is a property of people."32 A group may demonstrate a high degree of logical consensus yet have little causal consensus:

For example, this may be especially true where the 'culture' in all its logical

coherence is the prerogative of an elite (priesthood, caste, intelligentsia, estate or

ruling class). Because of this, the non-elites may behave differently (absence of

social uniformity), given that they only have access to more restricted ideas.

Restricted access may give rise to defective or divergent syntheses of the

cultural stock resulting in schism through the differential accentuation of the

cultural elements received. Furthermore, such action is the joint product of the

notions inculcated and the response to enforced inculcation... Power relations are

the causal element in cultural consensus building and, far from unproblematically

guaranteeing behavioural conformity, they can provoke anything from ritualistic

acceptance to outright rejection of the culture imposed.33

Archer's analytical distinction has two important consequences for how we approach the artwork and its context: first, it permits us to define the work of art as a lens through which to examine the systemic aspects of the artists' cultures —what Archer calls the

3lIbid., 4. 32Ibid. "Ibid., 4-5. 34

logical consensus of cultural pattern. The work of art becomes a tool of knowledge that can uncover how causal consensus is constructed, and therefore how it can also be deconstructed. And second, Archer's analytical categories also suggest that culture is an open, complex system, rather than a closed one, however complicated. This complexity is what the artworks of the 1920s will ultimately refer to.

Complexity

The aptly named Complex Systems Theory formulated in the late 1920s by

Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901-1972) was developed to examine the behaviour of systems that are highly complex and which are therefore difficult to study deterministically. More recently, the Nobel-prize physicist Ilya Prigogine (1917-2003) explored equally complex systems that are known as dissipative structures in open thermodynamic systems. In these and in other cases, the analytical tools developed in the so-called sciences of complexity have provided useful ways to describe systems such as weather models, traffic patterns, and demographic trends. In the 1980s the study of complexity found a permanent home at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico under the direction of another physics Nobel winner, Murray Gell-Mann.34 These sciences of complexity are based on the premise that any system that is truly complex cannot be described by the simple addition of its components. In other words, complex systems exhibit properties that seem to emerge from the interaction of the components and not from the components themselves.

34The Institute's website is an excellent source of up-to-date developments of complexity theories: http://www.santafe.edu/ 35

The idea that heterogeneous collectives cannot be described through a simple additive processes is not new. Notions of emergent properties can be found as far back as antiquity, but emergence acquired some of its contemporary meaning only in the late nineteenth century. Emergence was discussed in the 1870s by George Lewes and in the

1920s by Conwy Lloyd Morgan, who credited Lewes with coining the term.35 Henri

Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead later constructed "organicist" and vitalist philosophies that acknowledged Morgan's conception of emergence as a "non-additive process," which Thorstein Veblen also adopted into his own sociological approaches.36

Claus Emmeche, Simo Kjappe, and Frederik Stjernfelt have argued that the concept of emergence gained force when vitalist theories were current, since the idea of emergence proposed to engage with the seemingly mysterious "creation of new properties" in a scientific manner —thus rejecting "vital forces as causes— that reductionism could not adequately explain.37

The idea of a more complex understanding of causality has also been applied to the arts. For example, Stephen Kern has suggested that literature in the nineteenth- century shows a progressive transformation from more simple and direct notions of causality to ones that are more complex. According to Kern, this occurred as writers increasingly rejected the simple cause-and-effect narrative typical of naturalist literature.

Joris-Karl Huysmans's book A Rebours (1884), a book that has been described as lacking

"Geoffrey M. Hodgson, "The Concept of Emergence in Social Science: Its History and Importance," in Thinking Complexity: Complexity and Philosophy, Volume 1, ed. Paul Cilliers (Mansfield, MA: ISCE Publishing, 2007), 37; Claus Emmeche, Simo Kappe, and Frederik Stjernfelt, "Explaining Emergence: Towards an Ontology of Levels," Journal for General Philosophy of Science /Zeitschrift fur allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 28, no. 1 (1997): 85. 36Hodgson, "The Concept of Emergence in Social Science," 37-39. "See Emmeche, Kappe, and Stjernfelt, "Explaining Emergence: Towards an Ontology of Levels," 85- 90. 36

a plot, is one example of a text that avoids a narrative based on a clear linear causation.

But for Kern it is the murder novel, premised as it is on a search for causes, that most

clearly highlights the shift from a nineteenth-century determinism to a twentieth-century

open-ended causation.38 As an example of this shift Kern compares how homicide is

explained in Emile Zola's novels with how it is construed in Andre Gide's book

Lacfadio's Adventures (1914). Homicides have clear psychological and/or sociological

causes in Zola's books; murder is seemingly committed on impulse in Gide's text.39

According to Kern, the steady change from logical and linear to ambiguous and complex

causation seen in nineteenth-century detective novels was produced by the unprecedented

expansion of knowledge during the period. Kern describes the relationship between a

growing amount of information and a heightened sense of complexity as the "specificity-

uncertainty dialectic."40 As Sanford Kwinter has suggested, this increasing awareness of

complexity could also be seen in how "[t]he closed, controlled, mechanical world of

physics was giving way to the approximate, active, and qualitative world of biology as a

model of both scientific and metaphysical explanation."41

A Reconfiguration of the Artists' Gaze

The artists subsumed under the rubric of the avant-garde in the southern Americas were ostensibly concerned with renovating the arts, but they also attempted to balance

38Stephen Kern, A Cultural History of Causality: Science, Murder Novels, and Systems ofThought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 4. 39Ibid., 2-4. ""Ibid., 13. 41 Sanford Kwinter, Architectures of Time: Toward a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2001), viii-ix. 37

such change with an affirmation of local culture. This entailed a determinate series of strategic negations of what had been produced before without, however, completely disavowing the past. As Pierre Bourdieu has suggested,

Because the whole series of pertinent changes is present, practically, in the

latest..., a work or an aesthetic movement is irreducible to any other situated in the

series; and returns to past styles (frequent in painting) are never 'the same thing',

since they are separated from what they return to by negative reference to

something which was itself the negation of it (or the negation of the negation,

etc.).42

Much of the vanguardist rhetoric surrounding the artworks of the 1920s depends on this type of negation that finds novelty in a renaissance of "authentic" values. The continual return to a series of traditions, pictorial or otherwise, and the use of techniques deemed modern has accounted in part for past assessments that have considered the Latin

American avant-gardes as delayed or derivative.

Frameworks used to analyze European artists can also be misleading when applied to those of the southern Americas, which is precisely what George Yudice finds problematic about Burger's theory of the avant-garde. One of Yudice's criticisms is that

Burger, following Marx, suggests "that the critique of any phenomenon is only possible when it has become cognizable by unfolding to its completion," and so the historical avant-gardes could only emerge when the institutionalization of art was recognized as such in late-nineteenth-century aestheticism.43 For Yudice, "it is quite illusory to think

42Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, ed. Randal Johnson (Columbia University Press, 1993), 60. 43George Yudice, '"'Rethinking the Theory of the Avant-Garde from the Periphery," in Modernism 38

that there is any one moment when a form unfolds to completion": such processes are never tidy, and are always open to contestation and further transformation.44 It is important keep this in mind when examining the artists of the 1920s, since, as I have noted above, they were seeking an aesthetic rupture but were also revisiting tradition, however defined. In other words, although at one level we can see a rupture in the visual production of the period, at another level we can also uncover the recurring problematic of how to locate that rupture locally. Yudice also rejects the notion that the avant-gardes in the southern Americas were simply the result of the "'unfolding' of bourgeois art."45

Rather, these artists were also enmeshed in social, economic, cultural, and political conditions which their art responded to, none of which, for Yudice, "can be privileged above the others."46 In other words, I suggest, the artwork can provide us with insights into these other conditions, using it as a surface on which artists left traces of the state of things as they saw them.

Artists of the 1920s responded to developments in other parts of the globe, in particular to what artists were doing in Europe, but they were also deeply affected by and invested in what happened in their homelands. It was the attempt to balance the tension between the local and the global that led them to uncover a complexity that much previous artistic production had attempted to simplify through narratives of an overall cultural unity. The artists I examine in this thesis emerged in a context in which a continent-wide search for novelty expressed a yearning to examine a cultural and Its Margins: Reinscribing Cultural Modernity from Spain and Latin America, ed. Anthony L. Geist and Jose B. Monleon (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1999), 62. "Ibid., 63. 45Ibid., 62-63. "Ibid., 63. 39

heterogeneity that was becoming more visible, particularly in the major Latin American

cities, which were growing so quickly that the Brazilian writer Mario de Andrade could

describe Sao Paulo as a "hallucinated" city.47 Esther Gabara has expressed this expanded

gaze by using the expression "ethos of modernism" to denote a "[fusion of] meditations

on ethics with experimental aesthetics."48 Examining the relationship between

photography and text in 1920s Brazil and Mexico, Gabara suggests that,

A central concern of Latin American modernism was to determine the places of

this ethical responsibility by carefully considering the frontiers of the local...the

space pictured by ethos is the actual space of lands (and nations) represented by

photographs and texts, as well as the space constituted by representation itself, the

framed space of the photograph and the left-to-right space of text49

It was, in other words, a meditation on the nature of image-making, both at the level of

artistic or artisanal practice, and that of the collective.

This reconfigured relationship between the image and an external reality that

appears in material form in the artworks of the 1920s is the result of a double history. One

side of this history stresses what Jonathan Crary has described as the emergence of an

embodied nature of vision that was uncovered by science in the 1820s and 1830s; the

other narrative emphasizes the progressive disenchantment with a realistic representation

that could not do justice to a complex reality.50 The embodiment of vision developed out

47See Mario de Andrade, Hallucinated City. Pauliceia Desvairada, trans. Jack E. Tomlins (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1968). 48Esther Gabara, Errant Modernism: The Ethos of Photography in Mexico and Brazil (Duke University Press, 2009), 2. 49Ibid„ 6. 50See for example ; Jonathan Crary, "Techniques of the Observer." October 45 (Summer, 1988): 3-35; Jonathan Crary, Suspension of Perception (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001). 40

of experiments in physiology, such as those by Jan Purkinje (1787-1869) that demonstrated that afterimages were not strictly ocular but were in fact produced by the body.51 Such developments led to an "increasing abstraction of optical experience from a stable referent."52 In other words, the embodiment of vision suggested that what Crary has called the camera obscura model of vision was too simple to account for how the spectator was positioned in a complex reality.53

The disenchantment with realistic representations is explored by Crary in a more recent article in which he proposed that painting reached a particular limit of verisimilitude in a world with ever-expanding information about an existential manifold whose detail is nearly infinite.54 The painstaking process Theodore Gericault used to produce the Raft of the Medusa (1819), as seen in is numerous sketches of amputated limbs, suggests to Crary that "what is at stake is an apprehension of the numbing disproportion between the limits of human perception and the implacable otherness of the exterior world."55 Gericault's working method of creating increasingly detailed studies was meant to tame the unwieldy amount of information he used to enhance the verisimilitude of the painting. But the sheer amount of information produced by different disciplines was creating a more complex view of the world that undermined the illusory causal connection between the work of art and reality. Gericault's Raft of the Medusa

occupies [an] unstable position between two distinct historical worlds —between

51 Jonathan Crary, "Techniques of the Observer," 13-14. "Ibid., 13-14, 22. "Ibid., 3. 54See Jonathan Crary, "Gericault, the Panorama, and Sites of Reality in the Early Nineteenth Century," Grey Room, no. 9 (Summer, 2002): 5-25. 55Ibid., 23. 41

the enclosed order of reference organized around the rhetoric of the human body

in the art of antiquity and the Renaissance and an unbounded heterogeneous

informational field of journalistic, medical, legal, and political sources of

evidence, testimony, fact, and other guarantees of the real.56

The many optical devices that emerged during the nineteenth century contributed to this

increasing complexity: the panorama, the diorama, the stereoscope, the kinetoscope, and

various other inventions drew attention to the use of sight as both a tool of knowledge

and mechanism of illusion and deception.

One of the recurring optical devices used to describe ways of (un)knowing since

the late nineteenth century was the phantasmagoria [fig. 2], which was developed from

the the magic lantern [fig. 3], The phantasmagoria appeared towards the end of the

eighteenth century, and consisted of a projector that was used to display images on a

screen. The projector was hidden by the screen itself, so spectators could only see the

ghostly projections.57 Karl Marx used the phantasmagoria as a metaphor to describe the

world of commodities, whose illusion is the concealment of the labour that produced

them.58 This metaphor was carried over into Walter Benjamin's writings, particularly in

his unfinished Arcades Project, and was used by Theodor Adorno (as seen in the epigraph

above) to denote the artwork's illusory claim to denote reality without mediation.59

56Ibid., 13. "See Laurent Mannoni and Ben Brewster, "The Phantasmagoria," Film History 8, no. 4 (January 1, 1996): 390-415. 58Susan Buck-Morss, "Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin's Artwork Essay Reconsidered," October 62 (Autumn 1992): 25; Crary, "Techniques of the Observer," 33. 59See Buck-Morss, "Aesthetics and Anaesthetics," 22-24; Susan Buck-Morss, "Benjamin's Passagen- Werk: Redeeming Mass Culture for the Revolution," New German Critique, no. 29 (Spring - Summer 1983): 211-240. 42

Jose Ortega y Gasset's The Dehumanization of Arti The Window Pane vs. The Phantasmagoria

The phrase "the dehumanization of art" is associated with the Spanish philosopher

Jose Ortega y Gasset, who used it in his famous eponymous essay of 1925.60 His aesthetic

theory in the 1920s as it was laid out in that text is important for several reasons. First,

Ortega y Gasset was arguably the best-known philosopher in the Spanish-speaking world

at the time, and his influence on intellectual debate in the southern Americas was

substantial. And second, the essay itself, and particularly its title, elicited negative

responses in different parts of the Americas. For example, in 1928 the young writer Jaime

Torres Bodet, a member of the Contemporaneos group in Mexico City, responded to

Ortega y Gasset's essay with one of his own:

The Dehumanization of Art is a European book, with European data, written for

Europeans. This circumstance might be another merit for he who writes it, but,

surely, it is a danger for the young in America that do not yet dare to dream an art

of their own, free from sentimental legacies and biological slaveries.61

Bodet's outrage is that of the very youth he refers to in the quote above, to whom the important artistic gesture of his time is necessarily one of rupture, as it will be for other artists of the 1920s. It is also a polemic that is phrased, like that of Vasconcelos, using rhetoric that links "race" and culture, and that suggests a Latin American exceptionalism.

'"See Jose Ortega y Gasset, "La deshumanizacion del arte." In Obras Completes, vol. 3 (1917/1925). Madrid: Taurus, 2004, 847-877. 6l"La deshumanizacion del arte es un libro europeo, con datos europeos, escrito para europeos. Podra esta circunstancia ser un merito mas para el que la escribe, pero, de fijo, es un peligro para los jovenes de America que no se atreven a sonar aun un arte propio, libre de herencias sentimentales y de esclavitudes biologicas." Jaime Torres Bodet, "La deshumanizacion del arte," in Contemporaneos (Mexico: Coordinacion de Difusion Cultural, Direccion de Literatura, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, 1987), 87. 43

Bodet sees the term "dehumanization" as evidence that Ortega y Gasset misunderstood

art, particularly that of the Americas, which for Bodet was deeply concerned with social,

and thus human, issues.62

But what did Ortega y Gasset mean by dehumanization? One of the crucial

distinctions between the art of twentieth century and that of the past, suggests Ortega y

Gasset, is how "reality" is conveyed through the artwork. Dehumanization describes this

change as a move away from narrative to medium, or in a well-known metaphor that he

uses in the essay, as a shift from looking at a scene through the window to looking at the

window pane itself.63 Art of the past, suggests Ortega y Gasset, involved a "contained"

subject; modern artists examine the means used to produce such content. By a shift to

means he does not posit a mere reduction to formalism, although a shift to form is

important because it questions the "invisibility" of the picture plane. For Ortega y Gasset,

art is an important tool for knowing the world, and is part of his larger philosophical

system in which "dehumanization" is also used to signify a distillation or "reduction of

means to ends."64 A broader interpretation of means includes the institutions associated

with art and the artwork's social context. Indeed, this is what Vicky Unruh proposes when

she compares Ortega y Gasset's metaphor with Burger's notion of the avant-garde and

suggests that a shift of the gaze towards the surface turns the public "towards, not away,

from lived experience."65 The implication is that the artwork retreats from transcendence, or in Walter Benjamin's terms, has its aura diminished. The work of art is no longer

62Ibid., 85-90. "Ortega y Gasset, "La deshumanizacion del arte," 851. MCiriaco Moron Arroyo, "Las dos esteticas de Ortega y Gasset," Adas del II Congreso de la Asociacion International de Hispanistas (1965): 440. 65Unruh, The Latin American Vanguards, 22. 44

conceived as unitary and self-enclosed, but as a constructed surface on which the process

of its own making is inscribed.

Conclusion: The Artwork As a Tool of Knowledge

We are now in a position to synthesize the different fragments that appear

throughout this chapter into a tentative theory of the 1920s Latin American artwork as an

epistemological tool. In simple terms, the metaphors of the phantasmagoria and the

window pane express a shift during the 1920s in the way the artwork signified its

relationship to the context of its creation. The nineteenth-century academic history

painting had been conceived as a window onto a self-contained world, and this autonomy

had determinate implications for how the work of art was constructed and how artists

came to express the world symbolically. When attention was drawn to the illusion within

the frame and the entrancement of verisimilitude was paramount, the artwork stressed a

phantasmagoric representation that sought to downplay its means as mediation. As Crary

has noted, and as critical responses to the paintings make clear, the burden of

verisimilitude exceeded the capacity of painting to do justice to the "unbounded

heterogeneous informational field." Ultimately, this crisis of the image expressed a

misunderstanding of its capacity to mediate reality.

What does this mean in the context of the Latin American vanguardias in the

visual arts? It creates two far-reaching conditions for artists and their artwork. First, the artwork's magic or power to promote illusion is depreciated. This happens because as means are emphasized, the ends are questioned or made problematic. The illusion that is 45

dissipated is not merely that of a window looking onto a three-dimensional space. Rather, the denial of the phantasmagoric function of the artwork leads to a critique of the work of art itself. The second condition is the result of this reevaluation of the artwork and of the shifting of the gaze onto its surface. For the artists of the southern Americas, this conceptual move entailed a reflexive awareness of what Vilem Flusser called the magic of the image. The magic of the image, suggests Flusser in the quote at the beginning of this chapter, is on the surface because images do not represent events but rather states of things. We can appropriate Flusser's idea to suggest that the artists of the 1920s began to investigate not only how images mediate our interaction with the world, but also how we

(mis)understand this mediation. These two conditions converge on the artworks themselves, for artists examined the image both as a medium of knowledge, and as an exemplar of knowledge itself. In this conjunction Latin American artists of the 1920s began what is a continuing critique of culture and origins. 46

Chapter 2

Image of the Nation: The Birth of the Latin Americas

I dreamed I was a member of an exploring party in Mexico. After crossing a high, primeval jungle, we came upon a system of above-ground caves in the mountains where an order had survivedfrom the time of the first missionaries till now, its monks continuing the work of conversion among the natives. In an immense central grotto with a Gothically pointed roof, Mass was celebrated according to the most ancient rites. We joined the ceremony and witnessed its climax: toward a wooden bust of God the Father fixed high on a wall of the cave, a priest raised a Mexican fetish. At this the divine head turned thrice in denial from right to left.'

Walter Benjamin, "Mexican Embassy," One-Way Street (1928)

There exist today, in our Latin America, cities whose material greatness and cumulative evidence of civilization place them ever closer to membership offirst-rank order in the world?

Jose Rodo, Ariel (1900)

The founders of our new nationalism were, without knowing it, the best allies of the Anglo-Saxons, our rivals in the possession of the continent?

Jose Vasconcelos, "The Cosmic Race" (1926)

The new seduces us not because it is new but because it is different; and the different is negation, the knife that cuts time in two: then and now.4

Octavio Paz, Los hijos del limo (1974)

'Walter Benjamin, "Mexican Embassy," One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: New Left Books, 1979), 51. 2"Existen ya, en nuestra America latina, ciudades cuya grandeza material y cuya suma de civilizacion aparente, las acercan con acelerado paso a participar del primer rango en el mundo," Jose Rod6, Ariely Proteo selecto (Caracas: Editorial Ayacucho, 1993), 60. 3Jose Vasconcelos, "The Cosmic Race," The Cosmic Race: A Bilingual Edition, trans. Didier T. Jaen (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 11. 4"Lo nuevo nos seduce no por nuevo sino por distinto; y lo distinto es la negacion, el cuchillo que parte en dos al tiempo: antes y ahora," Octavio Paz, Los hijos del limo, 18-19. 47

This study begins with the birth of Latin America. This ambiguous entity did not spring directly from Independence in the second and third decades of the nineteenth century, but emerged in the 1850s at the very moment the United States was casting a long shadow across the Americas. One of the earliest appearances of the term "Latin

America" is in the poem Las dos Americas (1857) by the Colombian writer Jose Maria

Torres Caicedo, whose title draws a bold line between so-called Anglo-Saxon and Latin regions of the Americas.5 When Torres Caicedo wrote his poem, Britain and France were aggressively pursuing commercial interests in the southern Americas, the former with diplomacy and guns on the River Plate, and the latter with an outright invasion of

Mexico. Although European countries thereby continued to be seen as a threat to the young republics, it was the increasingly strong United States that seemed to pose a greater challenge. Torres Caicedo's poem responded to this changing balance of power, and since then, the concept of a "Latin" America has hovered as a supra-national entity in the southern Americas, if only as a lingering spectre that serves as a foil for different conceptions of national identity, and as a descriptor of the continent's paradoxical attachment to and removal from Western narratives of history.

5See Arturo Ardao, Genesis de la ideay el nombre de America Latina. (Caracas: Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos Romulo Gallegos, 1980), 65-95; Leopoldo Zea, iPor que America Latina? (Mexico, D.F.: Textos de Ciencias Sociales, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, 1988), 13; Walter Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America, 80. 48

The Southern Americas in the Aftermath of Independence

The period bounded by the downfall of Napoleon and the outbreak of the First

World War was, in James Webb's words, one of "great uncertainty."6 In the southern

Americas it coincided on one end with the battles for emancipation, and at the other with the projects of the 1920s that were cut short by the Great Depression.7 The primary political entity to assert itself during this period was the nation-state. National narratives were constructed to insert these emerging countries into a global History and to create images that could adequately represent the ostensible unity of the communities that lived within determinate geographical boundaries.

The countries of the southern Americas struggled to maintain a sense of internal cohesion in the aftermath of Independence. Progress became an imperative repeatedly pursued by governments in the region between the 1870s and the 1920s as countries became increasingly connected to an international economic and political network. The internationalization of capital and the adoption of export-led growth as economic policy in many Latin American countries were the prelude to our own period of globalization.8

This early globalization and an intensifying nationalism were two elements of a triad through which collective identity was being formulated in the late nineteenth century in the southern Americas. The third was the notion of a "Latin" commonality and a shared colonial legacy, although there were important differences in how this was understood,

6James Webb, The Occult Underground (La Salle, IL: Open Court Publishing Company, 1974), 6. 'Colombia declared its independence on July 20, 1810; Argentina on May 25, 1810; the priest Hidalgo lead an uprising in Mexico on September 16, 1810. These independence movements were precipitated by the Napoleonic invasion of the Iberian Peninsula, which also lead to the transfer of the Portuguese imperial court to Brazil and its own declaration of independence in 1822. Haiti declared its independence from France in 1804. 8See Victor Buliner-Thomas, The Economic History of Latin America Since Independence, 2nd ed. Cambridge Latin American studies 77 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 46-116. 49

particularly in Brazil and to a lesser extent in Argentina.9

The idea that the different countries of the southern Americas were members of a

larger regional collective was an important, if ambiguous, problematic for the former

Spanish colonies, particularly since strife and fragmentation had characterized the

continent's history throughout the nineteenth century. One of the earliest and strongest

advocates for continental political unity in South America was Simon Bolivar, whose role

as commander of the armies that ejected the Spanish forces from the northern part of

South America earned him the title of "the Liberator." Like Torres Caicedo and others

who would promote the idea of a Latin America, Bolivar believed that the political

integration of the southern Americas was a necessary strategy to dissuade foreign powers

from intervening in the region. In his 1819 speech before the Congress of Angostura,

Bolivar suggested that the inhabitants of the southern Americas were neither indigenous

nor European, but rather a "middle species" between both.10 This pronouncement had two

important consequences for the cultural debates that were to emerge in the following

decades. First, the statement epitomized a stream of thought that by the end of the

nineteenth century was to define the southern Americas as constituted by a particular

"race" that was hybrid or mestizo. Second, and more important for the visual rhetoric that

would follow, his emphasis on difference suggested a unique creative potential or

difference that I referred to in the previous chapter as the notion of a Latin American

'Because of its geography, culture, and political history, Brazil tended to look more towards Europe. Many Argentinian intellectuals, such as Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, understood their country as more European than their southern American neighbors. See, Leslie Bethell, "Brazil and 'Latin America'," Journal of Latin American Studies 42 (2010): 457—485. 1 "Bolivar's speech in Angostura, February 15, 1819, in Simon Bolivar, Discursosy proclamas (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 2007), 70. 50

exceptionalism.11

Instead of reading Bolivar's idea of a "middle species" as a rejection of an indigenous or European heritage, one can understand it as a political critique of ideologies in which these two strains are conceived as the pure poles of an ontologized dichotomy of origins. Impurity and difference, suggested Bolivar, were a necessary component of policy in the Americas. The territorial disputes of the nineteenth century quickly demonstrated that Bolivar's project of continental unity was a chimera.

Nevertheless, this separate conceptual space, which had not yet been called Latin

America, increasingly hovered as a ghostly image behind the notions of collective identity that were being formulated in the southern Americas.

Although the Conquest had begun a multi-directional exchange of people and ideas, it was only after Independence and the ensuing project of collective self-definition that artists of the southern Americas began to play an important role in constructing images of the nation. Nevertheless, artists continued travelling to Europe to acquire the credentials needed for a successful career back home. Training in the metropoles had always meant adopting European techniques, styles, and ideas. By the middle of the nineteenth century Latin American artists used such training to create images of local culture. It was at this point that the paradox of expressing local values and embracing global ones emerged in its modern form.

"See Joshua Lund, "Barbarian Theorizing and the Limits of Latin American Exceptionalism." Cultural Critique, no. 47 (Winter, 2001): 54-90. 51

The Nineteenth-Century Gaze in the Visual Arts

Like many of their avant-gardes colleagues in Europe, Latin American artists of the 1920s expressed their goals using a rhetoric of change and renewal. They had been preceded, however, by modemismo, a mostly literary movement that self-consciously defined itself in its very name as modern, and that its practitioners conceived as a rupture with European culture. The loose group of Spanish-American poets and writers who are usually associated with modemismo were influenced by Symbolism and produced work that reflected an increasing anxiety about the rapid social changes of their time.

Modemismo in the visual arts is somewhat more ambiguous, since it is used to describe an eclectic array of artworks exhibiting Symbolist, Impressionist, and Post-Impressionist influences.12 When the Mexican, Brazilian, and Argentinian artists and writers of the

1920s wrote manifestos rejecting the past, they were in great measure rejecting the recent modernista hegemony in arts and letters.

In spite of stylistic changes, Latin American academic art continued to be predicated on an accurate replication of images produced by the human eye, which seemed to correspond to the way photography captured its subjects. Photography challenged painterly realism, but it also provided a tool with which the artist could increase the verisimilitude of the artwork. Many of the academic painters that will be discussed in this chapter used photography either as a documentary tool or as a drawing aid. In addition to photography, visual technologies such as the diorama and the panorama were creating spaces of immersion and illusion that provided experiences of

12See Fausto Ramirez, Modemizacion y modemismo en el arte mexicano (Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, 2008), 8. 52

heightened verisimilitude.13 Yet even as these technologies were being developed, suggests Jonathan Crary, science was transforming the passive model of vision based on the camera obscura to one that took into account how the body translated sensory experience into images.14

From the vantage point of the spectator, these two streams —the visual "acuity" of photography and the embodiment of senses — created an increasing tension that threatened the locus of the painterly gaze. The realistic "windows" depicted in history paintings created a disembodied model of vision, one in which the spectator seemed to occupy an Archimedian point or god-like site from which to observe slices of history rendered "true" through the accretion of minute detail.15 But the increasing embodiment of sight also drew attention to the complexity and the relativity of sensory perception, therefore accentuating the arbitrary nature of the artwork.

Visual rhetoric used in the academic painting of Mexico, the Southern Cone, and

Brazil also helped form a national imaginary in the aftermath of Independence. This process also unfolded in other media, as Doris Sommer has demonstrated in her studies of Latin American literature.16 The romances, or historical novels, that were written across Latin America in the last three quarters of the nineteenth century became what

Sommer calls foundational fictions, texts in which personal narratives of love and conciliation are allegorically intertwined with the nation-building projects that formed the

"Oliver Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion, trans. Gloria Custance (Cambridge, MA and London, England: MIT Press, 2003), 53. l4See Jonathan Crary, "Techniques of the Observer," October 45 (Summer, 1988): 3-35. 15See Jonathan Crary, "Gericault, the Panorama, and Sites of Reality in the Early Nineteenth Century," 5-25. l6See Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). 53

context of their writing.17 History paintings provided a parallel gallery of images portraying a common past that was instrumental in constructing a national narrative, and in some notable cases these images are extracted from the novels alluded to by Sommer

(as is the case with Jose Maria Medeiros's Iracema [fig. ], which references Jose de

Alencar's eponymous novel).

What follows is a brief description of how academic painting, particularly history painting, was used to craft images of the nation that presented the viewer with a particular reality effect by stressing the realism of artist's technique. The illusion of wholeness inside the frame functioned as an allegory of an imagined community, as a phantasmagoria of the nation in which discussions about the mediating role of the image were focused on the artwork's visual accuracy.

Mexico

Fellow citizens: from this day forth let our emblem be liberty, order and progress: liberty as the medium: order as the base and progress as the end: a triple theme symbolized by the triple colours of our beautiful national flag...'8

Gabino Barreda (1867)

In this century, the century of the telegraph and the steamship, the system of artistic and industrial expositions has been adopted in all places, and because they are the vehicle

l7Ibid„ 30-51. 18"Conciudadanos: que en lo de adelante sea nuestra divisa 1ibertad, orden y progreso; la libertad como medio; el orden como base y el progreso como fin\ triple lema simbolizado en el triple colorido de nuestro hermoso pabellon nacional..." Gabino Barreda, "Oracion cfvica," speech pronounced in Guanajuato on September 16, 1867 to celebrate the defeat of Maximilian of Austria, in Leopoldo Zea,Pensamiento positivista latinoamericano (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1980), 296. 54

through which the relative merits of artifacts and works of art is made known, they are at the same time the most powerful stimulus for the creators to advance in their respective fields, to better their financial situation, andfor good taste and perfection to be disseminated among the people, for which reasons, the exhibitions are the complement of modern civilization.19

F. S. Gutierrez, "Revista de la exposition de San Carlos" (1878)

The project of modernization in Mexico that began in the 1870s coincided with the presidency of Porfirio Diaz (1830-1915). Known as the porfiriato, Diaz's tenure was a period of dramatic social, political, and economic changes that came to a close in 1910 with the onset of the Mexican Revolution. The porfiriato is associated with the positivism of the so-called cientificos, the technocrats whose epithet reflected a scientific approach to government that was undermined by corruption, increasing social disparity, and the exclusion of large sections of the middle class from power. The porfiriato was also a time of explosive urban growth, particularly in Mexico City, where old buildings were demolished to make way for the grandiose and eclectic architectural projects so characteristic of the period. Urban renewal was greeted in the press with the enthusiastic belief that such change reflected the character of Mexico as a modern and civilized nation. Erasing remnants from the colonial past was seen as necessary for the nation to progress materially and culturally: "Demolish to reconstruct! This is the lemma to which we have been directed by the thirst for progress and that we must obey in the physical as

19"En el siglo actual, siglo del telegrafo y del vapor, se ha adoptado en todas partes el sistema de exposiciones artisticas e industriales, como que son el vehi'culo por donde se da a conocer el merito relativo de los artefactos y de las obras de arte, son asimismo, el estimulo mas poderoso para que los ejecutores adelanten en su respectivo ramo, mejoren su position pecuniaria, y el buen gusto y perfeccionamiento se difunda en los pueblos, siendo por esto, las exposiciones, el complemento de la civilization moderna." F. S. Gutierez, "Revista de la exposition de San Carlos," La Libertad, Sunday, February 3, 1878, in Ida Rodriguez Prampolini, Critica de arte en Mexico en el siglo XIX: studios y documentos, vol. 2 (Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, Institute de Investigaciones Esteticas, 1964), 417. 55

well as in the moral; in the scientific order as well as in the social order.'*20

Transformation also meant the growth of visual culture that was available to a wider

audience because of the multiplying effect of mechanical reproduction. Street signs

proliferated on the walls of Mexico City reflecting the constant changes in commerce,

entertainment, and with the beginning of the Mexican Revolution in 1910, politics.21

An institution that had survived from the colonial era was the Academy of San

Carlos, the first of its kind in the southern Americas when it was founded in 1781. Since

its inception the Academy had abided by the methods of European institutions. It

classified painting according to a hierarchy of genres, of which the most important one

throughout the nineteenth century was history painting.22 Juan Cordero's Columbus

Before the Catholic Sovereigns (1850) [fig. 4] is an example of the genre that illustrates

Mexico's Hispanic legacy, but episodes from the pre-Hispanic past, such as Jose

Obregon's Discovery of Pulque (1869) [fig. 5], were also common after the middle of the

nineteenth century. So were scenes from the Conquest, such as Felix Parra's Fray

Bartolome de las Casas (1875) [fig. 6] and Scene from the Conquest (1877) [fig. 7], and

Leandro Izaguirre's Torture of Cuauhtemoc (1893) [fig. 8], all of which stressed the

violent encounter between indigenous and Spanish cultures.

The Hispanic and indigenous heritages represented two poles of a continuing

20"jDemoler para reconstruir! Este es el lema a que nos ha conducido la sed de progreso y a el tenemos que ser obedientes lo mismo en lo fisico que en lo moral; lo mismo en el orden cientifico, que en el orden social," qtd. in Julieta Ortiz Gaitan, Imageries del deseo: arte y publicidad en la prensa ilustrada mexicana, 1874—1939 (Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, 2003), 37. 2,Ibid„ 36-48. 22Artistic conservatism within the institution led to increasing student dissatisfaction at the beginning of the twentieth century, but it was not until 1910, on the eve of the Revolution, that a prolonged student strike led to institutional changes. See Jean Chariot, Mexican Art and the Academy of San Carlos, 1785- 1945 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1962). 56

debate regarding the origins of the Mexican nation. Many images created during the porfiriato attempted to reconcile these two cultural roots, but there were also advocates for the precedence of one or the other with respect to national identity. Some Mexicans believed the country's history had begun with the arrival of Hernan Cortez, which is what

Francisco Cosmes argued in his 1894 article "To Whom Do We Owe the Fatherland?"23

Cosmes was acerbically critical of those who were "inconsolable because Cuauhtemoc's feet were burned," an allusion to an enduring image of Aztec resistance that was portrayed in Izaguirre's canvas [fig. 8].24 Yet even those who opposed Cosmes's views tended to conceptualize the contemporary indigenous inhabitants of Mexico as distinct from their historical precursors.25

Regardless of which heritage was emphasized, the constructed time-space of artworks such as those cited above depends on a visual rhetoric that construes the

Mexican landscape as a neutral backdrop for the depicted scenes. A theatrical disposition of space within the paintings denatures specific places associated with determinate cultures and geographies, and Mexico becomes an empty homogenous stage for the unfolding of a national narrative. In his book The Lettered City Angel Rama suggested that the "ordered cities" planted on the American continent contrasted with European

"organic cities" that had taken centuries to grow26 Rama argued that the conquistadores had approached the continent as if it were a tabula rasa, strategically inscribing rigidly

23Rebecca Earle, '"Padres de la Patria' and the Ancestral Past: Commemorations of Independence in Nineteenth-Century Spanish America," Journal of Latin American Studies 34, no.4 (Nov., 2002): 775-776. 24Francisco Cosmes, "^A quien debemos tener patria?," ElPartido Liberal, Mexico, September 15, 1894, qtd. in Ibid., 776. 25Ibid„ 777-778. 26See Angel Rama, "La ciudad ordemada," in La ciudad letrada (Hanover, NH: Ediciones del Norte, 1984), 1-22. 57

formulated plans for urban centres onto a geography that was seen as open for colonization in a way that Europe was not.27 The material city was thus born from a diagrammed order embodied in the maps that were disseminated as templates [fig. 9], so that settlements were preceded by their representation.

The ideal city that the elites used as a template to project their dreams and desires onto the burgeoning nation was expressed, among other things, in the staged compositions of academic history painting. The scenes in these canvases offered discrete images that, like the city plans mandated by the Spanish monarchy, provided signs that were meant to function as synecdoches for the ostensible community that constituted

Mexico. For example, Obregon's Discovery of Pulque (1869) [fig. 5] is an apocryphal event in the pre-history of Mexico that the artist conceived of very much like a diorama.

Enclosed within a hermetic time-space that suggests a discrete fragment of linear history, the image seems both to elevate and to undermine the status of indigenous culture. On the one hand, the scene is endowed with the status of history painting. On the other hand, pre-Hispanic culture is "revived as dead" and purged of most of its associations with contemporary indigenous peoples living in Mexico.28 Neither the ancient Aztecs nor their modern descendants were granted any special claim to the national space, which was being purged of any "primitive" impediments to progress. Indigenous culture is thus only a thin veneer laid over a European conception of history. The space portrayed is a virtual placeholder in which scenes from the Bible or episodes from Antiquity can easily be imagined, and in fact, the generic nature of this space can be seen by comparing it to the

"Ibid., 2-3. 28Mary Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 134. 58

almost identical composition used by Cordero in his Columbus painting [fig. 4].

The tension between Mexico's indigenous and Spanish roots can also be seen in

Felix Parra's (1845-1919) paintings Bartolome de las Casas (1875) [fig. 6] and Scene from the Conquest (1877) [fig. 7]. In these two paintings Parra construes Europe as the

source of both destruction and renewal in the southern Americas, conflating in these

images the ambiguity exemplified by debates such as that triggered by Cosmes's article:

colonialism had begun with the barbarism of the conquistadores, but the Conquest had

also brought the civilization that gave Mexico a normative language, culture, and

religion. Bartolome de las Casas (1484-1566) had arrived in the Americas as a young

child and grew up to become a colonist. Nevertheless, de las Casas soon came to

denounce the cruelty with which the Spaniards treated the indigenous inhabitants and

remained an untiring advocate for indigenous rights throughout the rest of his life. His

role as a defender of the oppressed, which is how Parra depicted him in the painting,

made de las Casas a powerful figure of resistance.

Some spectators responded to Parra's painting in ways that demonstrated a craving

for verisimilitude and accuracy in painting. According to Felipe Gutierrez, who saw the

Bartolome painting at the Academy's exhibition of 1876,

some said that the head of the priest was not like that of his portrait, and that the

painted features, were a bit vulgar; others stated that a man such as Las Casas,

whose priestly tasks obliged him to always work outside exposed to the elements,

should not have had so white and healthy a colour, but should have been darker

and suffering the effects of fatigue; others added, that the indian woman exhibited, 59

through the scarf on her head, a modern hair style, and also that she was too clean.

About this, we will not emit our opinion, and we rather leave it to the good sense

of all the people who saw the painting, because surely many of them have read the

story.29

Gutierrez went on to suggest that Parra should "dispose of that polished and beautiful style of which we have spoken before: that if he is to imitate some masters, he should prefer Velazquez, who has imitated nature the best, with its beauties, its defects and the accidents that constitute it."30 Realism is stressed with regard to material referents that are familiar to the critic and to the audience (skin colour, hair, and clothing), but Gutierrez also establishes a correspondence between text and image. History, or "the story," mediates between image and spectator. Or rather, the phantasmic image inherent in the text adds to the illusory nature of the artwork. Illusory because it approaches the painting as an almost journalistic representation, even as in other parts of the review Gutierrez stresses the work's artistry. This surplus of information creates an ever-expanding horizon that history paintings in the nineteenth century would find it increasingly hard to absorb as they straddled "two distinct historical worlds" of representation separated by the increasing complexity of modernity.31

29"[A]lgunos decian que la cabeza del sacerdote no era la de su retrato, y que la fisonomia pintada, era un poco vulgar; otras decian que un hombre como las Casas, cuyas tareas apostolicas lo obligaban a estar siempre expuesto a la intemperie, no debia tener ese color tan rozagante ni tan bianco, sino que debia ser tostado y maltratado por la fatiga; anadian otros, que la india manifestaba a traves del pano de la cabeza, tener un peinado moderno, y tambien que estaba muy aseada. Sobre este particular, nosotros no emitimos nuestra opinion, y lo dejamos mis bien al buen sentido de todas las personas que vieren el cuadro, porque seguramente muchas de ellas han leido la historia." Felipe S. Gutierrez, "La exposicion de Bellas Artes en 1876," Revista Universal, February 24, 1876, in Ida Rodriguez Prampolini, Critica de arte en Mexico en el siglo XIX, 379. 30Ibid., 380. 3lCrary, "Gericault, the Panorama, and Sites of Reality," 13. 60

Parra's Scene from the Conquest is also constructed as a kind of stage. Here we peer into the frame as if looking at a staging of Mexican history whose unremitting cruelty does not contain any hint of redemption. Because of this, Scene seems to illustrate anti-Hispanist sentiments that were common in Mexico after Independence. But Parra's portrayal also echoes two more recent invasions of Mexico in the nineteenth century: one in 1847, in which Mexico lost a large portion of its territory to the United States, and another in the 1860s, when France imposed Maximilian of Austria as emperor of Mexico.

A continuing fear of invasion undoubtedly reverberates in these canvases, but Parra's paintings also express the deep and unresolved ambivalence of origins that inflected the discourse of Mexican nationalism as exemplified in the Cosmes controversy.

The desire to manage material resources fuelled the need to map and know the territory within the national boundaries. A similar yearning to "know the land" stimulated landscape painting as a medium to depict the characteristic topography of Mexico. The most celebrated Mexican landscape painter of the late nineteenth century was Jose Maria

Velasco (1840-1912), whose representations of the plateau of Mexico City created both a

Romantic vision of the country's geography and a document of its modernization. The

Metlac Ravine (1893) [fig. 10] and View of Mexico City From Cerro Santa Isabel (1892)

[fig. 11] are typical examples of Velasco's work. The train in The Metlac Ravine (1893) is a reminder of the expanding network of railroads that was fuelling Mexico's incipient industrialization and promoting a sense of national cohesion by connecting its urban centres. The rendition of the vista is also analogous to the train's panoramic window through which travellers could view fleeting images of the countryside.32 Velasco's

"See in particular "Panoramic Travel," in Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The 61

paintings nevertheless do not convey the scale of transformation that Mexico City was undergoing as the nineteenth century progressed. From 1858 to 1910 the city grew five fold in area and its population more than doubled, mostly through migration from the countryside.33

As the pre-eminent painter who consistently received good reviews at the fair,

Velasco was a type of cultural ambassador who showed that Mexican artists were capable of producing work on the level of their European peers. As the epigraph by Gutierrez makes clear, the World Fairs had become important arenas for all domains of culture, including art. Visual rhetoric for the promotion of a national image emerged in striking form in the ideal but ephemeral cities created for these international events. With their complex marriage of technology and spectacle, a World Fair was the perfect arena in which to project desirable representations of the country. Like history paintings, these

Fairs were self-contained theatrical spaces which conveyed an artificial vision of the

"concert of nations" that was replicated, or rather, re-negotiated at the level of the pavilions. The architectural styles chosen for the Mexican pavilions at the 1889 and 1900 expositions demonstrate the competing ideals of nationhood that plagued the imagined community of Mexico: the pavilion for the 1889 Paris Exposition was built as an Aztec temple, whereas the one for the Paris Exposition of 1900 was constructed in a neo classical style Greek revival. The change reflected a general conservatism that prevailed in the eclectic architecture of the late nineteenth century and that coincided with the

Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19h Century (Leamington Spa, Hamburg, and New York: Berg, 1986), 52-69. "Ramirez, Modernizacion y modernismo en el arte mexicano, 122. 62

Mexican delegation's desire to represent its country as a modern and civilized nation.34

The Academy, which had remained a conservative institution throughout the nineteenth century, began to be pressured by its students to modernize and to expand its curriculum. The increasing tensions and an ensuing student strike coincided with the outbreak of the Revolution in 1911,35 The resolution of the conflict led to the appointment of a new director, the painter Alfredo Ramos Martinez, who attempted to provide new opportunities by opening an experimental branch of the Academy where students could paint in the open air.36 At the time, a modified version of Impressionism modelled on the so-called luminism of artists such as the Spaniard Joaquin Sorolla was becoming the dominant academic style, and which can be seen in Saturnino Herran's (1887-1918) paintings Flora (1910) [fig. 12] and The Tehuana (1914) [fig. 13].37 The distinctive female dress that had evolved in colonial times in the region of Tehuantepec made it a particularly attractive subject in the quest for visual markers of mexicanidad, or

Mexicanness. Tehuantepec would later become important during the early phase of muralism when, as Secretary of Education, Jose Vasconcelos organized a trip to the region to acquaint Diego Rivera and other artists with a more "authentic" Mexican culture.

Herran also produced artworks using pre-Hispanic motifs, particularly during the last years of his life, when he was working on a mural commission for the National

Theatre, now the National Fine Arts Palace. The building, built in the typically eclectic

^Mauricio Tenorio Trillo, Mexico at the World's Fairs: Crafting a Modern Nation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 192-194. "See Chariot, Mexican Art and the Academy of San Carlos, 154—159. 36Ibid., 160-162. "Ramirez, Modernizaciony modernismo en el arte mexicano, 343. 63

style seen in other parts of the Americas and Europe prior to World War I, was designed

by Adamo Boari, an Italian architect who was awarded other commissions during the

porfiriato. Herran did not manage to execute the mural, but studies for the proposed

work, such as Frieze of the Ancient Gods (1914) [fig. 14] and Coatlicue (1918) [fig. 15],

show that his approach to the subject was not new, as it drew on themes that had appeared

in the work of Parra, Izaguirre, and others.

Herran's portrayals of peasants and workers show him exploring a broader range

of subjects, making his art more complex than Luis Martin Lozano's analysis of it as

simply a response to "Mexico [as] a mixed race society, proud heir to the convergence of

two cultures —Pre-Columbian and Hispanic —which embodied two ways of looking at

the world."38 Rather, Herran's gaze was moving outside the Academy by portraying types

that could be seen in Mexico City, thus problematizing the frame of the work of art and

the notion of its autonomy. By looking for subjects outside the confines of their

institution, artists began to absorb elements of the country's visual culture that had not

been privileged in academic painting before, bridging the visualities of art and the

everyday.

With the outbreak of the Revolution, projects for reforming the Academy were relegated to the background. Artists would have to wait until the 1920s when the enthusiastic patronage of Vasconcelos provided the stimulus for a so-called cultural renaissance.

38Luis Martin Lozano, "Rendezvous with the Avant-Garde," in Mexican Modern Art, 1920-1950 (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1999), 14. 64

Argentina and Uruguay

Terrible specter of Facundo, I will evoke you, so that you may rise, shaking off the bloody dust covering your ashes, and explain the hidden life and the inner convulsions that tear at the bowels of a noble people! You possess the secret: reveal it to us! Even ten years after your tragic death, the men of the cities and the gauchos of the Argentine plains, following different paths in the desert, were saying: "No! he has not died! He still lives! He will return! "39

Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1845)

In 1854 Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1811-1888) published Facundo:

Civilization and Barbarism, an eponymous biographical chronicle of a gaucho leader from the pampas. In this book, Sarmiento constructed a dichotomy between a

"civilization" originating in Europe and the "barbarism" of the gaucho, or cowboy of the

Southern Cone. Like many Argentinians of the ruling class, Sarmiento looked to Europe as the source of cultural sophistication. In the Southern Cone, where the indigenous population was pushed to the geographical margins and conceived in the imaginary as a vanished race, the gaucho became a whitened palimpsest for the indigenous presence lurking under the surface. Sarmiento's book influenced nineteenth-century debates about culture throughout Latin America, as it expressed the goal of national consolidation elites strived for, a totalizing goal in which technological and economic development went hand-in-hand with cultural betterment.

The notion that technological and cultural progress were intertwined took hold in the Southern Cone and other parts of the Americas, where the ideals of progress

39Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism, trans. Kathleen Ross (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2003), 31. 65

presupposed the overcoming of an agrarian legacy inherited from the colonial period and justified the colonization of vast tracts of land that remained relatively isolated from government control. With an increasing influx of immigrants from Europe, the arts, and culture more broadly, were also conceived as important tools for civilizing and naturalizing the heterogenous peoples reaching Argentinian shores. Much earlier, the dichotomy of barbarism and civilization had already informed the conquest of the

American continent and the enslavement of its native inhabitants. In the 1870s, the so- called War of the Desert —the same "desert" mentioned in Sarmiento's epigraph above— described a military push into the pampas during which much of the territory of modern

Argentina was forcibly taken from the indigenous populations living in it.40

Progress for artists in nineteenth-century Latin America meant the creation of an artworld in which they could make a living from their profession. In contrast to Mexico and Brazil, Argentina did not have a permanent institution for training artists until the

Academy of Fine Arts was established in 1878. Many artists travelled to Europe to learn their craft and establish their credentials. However, once back home many could not make a living from their art. Eduardo Schiaffino (1858-1935), who was a painter, an advocate for the arts, and an art historian, would look back at the atmosphere of the 1870s and suggest that the dearth of opportunities turned artists into heroic self-made figures that had to create the public for their work.41 The lack of support for the arts in the

Southern Cone led to a growing urgency among artists and intellectuals to create a system

""Klaus-John Dodds, "Geography, Identity and the Creation of the Argentine State," Bulletin of Latin American Research 12, no. 3 (Sept., 1993): 322-324. 41Laura Malosetti Costa, Los primeros modernos: Arte y sociedad en Buenos Aires a fines del siglo XIX(Argentina: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 2001), 63. 66

that could sustain local cultural production.

The first society of artists, La Sociedad Estimulo de Bellas Artes (Fine Arts

Stimulus Society, or SEBA), was founded by the painter Eduardo Sivori, and would

eventually become institutionalized as the Academy of Fine Arts in 1905.42 The SEBA

was an artist-run attempt to create the conditions for a self-sustaining artworld, and the

first step of a cultural politics grounded in the idea of the "nation."43 A similar process

occurred at the same time in different parts of the southern Americas, since the mid-

nineteenth century was a period of accelerated nation-building in which normative

images of national cultures were being formulated.

Argentina also used the World Fairs to promote an image of the country as

modern and civilized, much as the Porfirian regime was doing during the same period. In

an effort to describe its distinctiveness or exceptionalism, Argentina requested a separate

space on the ground of the 1889 World Fair Exhibition rather than sharing a site with

other Latin American nations, as had been the case in previous fairs.44 Local trade fairs

also played an important role in disseminating the ideals of progress inside the nation.

When Sarmiento became president in 1868 one of his first projects was a national

exhibition in Cordoba, Argentina's second largest city.45 The Industrial Expositions that

would follow in Buenos Aires became important venues for exposing a wider public to

art, since they attracted more people than exhibitions devoted only to art.46

42Ibid., 89. 43Ibid., 26. ^Alvaro Fernandez Bravo, "Ambivalent Argentina: Nationalism, Exoticism, and Latin Americanism at the 1889 Paris Universal Exposition." Nepantla: Views from the South 2, no.l (2001): 117-118. 4SSee Malosetti Costa, Los primeros modernos, 121. "Ibid., 130. 67

Images of the landscape were essential to the construction of national identity in

Argentina and Uruguay, where the dominating geographical feature in the collective

imaginary was the pampas, or great plains of the continental interior. Sarmiento had

described the pampas as the exemplary Argentinian landscape, which it compared to the

North American prairies as described in James Fenimore Cooper's book The Prairie

(1827).47 The southern region of Brazil that borders Argentina had a gaucho culture of its

own, but the gaucho never became a central figure in Brazil to the extent that it did in

Argentina and Uruguay. In Argentina the pampas were a symbol of the nation, while in

Brazil, the Amazon jungle loomed large as the national frontier. As the nineteenth century

progressed, the gaucho became a recurring theme depicted in paintings such as Juan

Manuel Blanes's The Two Roads (c.1875-1878) [fig. 16].

Juan Manuel Blanes (1830-1901), well-known for history, genre, and portrait

painting, left his native Uruguay to apprentice in Italy under Antonio Ciseri, who would

become the teacher of several of the best-known painters of the Southern Cone in this

period. Blanes's style, like that of many other academic artists of the time, developed

towards a realistic rendering overlaid with a thinly veiled moralism. For Blanes, "[t]he

school that some call the latest fad... I and others call realist, unique, the only useful

one."48

Yellow Fever (1871) [fig. 17] was the painting that established Blanes's reputation.

47Katherine E. Manthome, "'Brothers Under the Skin': Blanes's Gauchos and the Delineation of the Frontier Types of the American West," in The Art of Juan Manuel Blanes (Buenos Aires: Fundacion Bunge y Bom, 1994), 154-155. 48"La escuela que algunos llaman de moda y que yo y otros llamamos realista, unica, la sola util," Juan Manuel Blanes in a letter to Angel J. Carranza, May 19, 1872; qtd in Roberto Amigo, "Region y Naci6n: Juan Manuel Blanes en la Argentina," in Juan Manuel Blanes: La Nation Naciente, 1830-1901 (Montevideo: Museo Municipal de Arte Juan Manuel Blanes, 2002), 59-60. 68

It is an artwork resonates on several levels with Felix Parra's Bartolome, which was produced in Mexico at almost the same time. Both are scenes of death, Parra's of the cruelty of conquest, Blanes's of decimation by disease. Although Yellow Fever romanticizes the outbreak with a veneer of heroism, it also exposes social inequality as the darker side of modernization, since the outbreak had been concentrated in the impoverished and crowded immigrant quarter by the port of Buenos Aires.49 The event was still relatively current, since Yellow Fever was exhibited only a year after the outbreak, and Blanes chose to portray an episode inspired by a media account of the death of an Italian immigrant, Ana Bistriani.50 Her depiction and that of her child in the foreground were the focus of much attention in the press, which emphasized the verisimilitude and "stereoscopic" realism of their depiction.51 The main characters or heroes of the depicted drama are the well-dressed male figures seen in the act of entering the room, two lawyers by the names of Jose Roque Perez and Manuel Argerich who had volunteered with the Health Commission and perished during the outbreak.52 The painting's message carries clear religious connotations of martyrdom, and it reiterates a social hierarchy that is echoed in the painting's construction.53 Malosetti rightly characterizes Yellow Fever as a dramatically constructed stage that connects the viewer with the space of the painting, and it is therefore fitting that in Buenos Aires the painting was exhibited in the Teatro Colon, at the top of the main staircase in the foyer.54 The

49Ibid., 61-62. 50Ibid.,61. s,Malosetti Costa, Losprimeros modernos, 76. "Amigo, "Region y Naci6n," 62. "Malosetti Costa, Los primeros modernos, 74—76. ^Ibid., 66-67. 69

number of viewers who went to see Yellow Fever was unprecedented for a work of art in

Argentina, a fact that problematizes the idea that a type of art spectatorship did not exist in the Southern Cone, even if artists complained that there were no buyers for their work.

Vanessa Schwartz has suggested that by examining the "realistic re-presentation of and visualization of everyday life" in late nineteenth-century Paris, one can uncover a

"shared culture...[that] produced a new crowd as individuals joined together to delight in the transformation of everyday life into spectacle while avidly consuming spectacles of a sensationalized everyday life."55 The popularity of Blanes's Yellow Fever suggests a similar phenomenon in Buenos Aires, where such "avid consumption" of a recent episode had been doubly sensationalized: first by the press, and then by Blanes himself.56 Blanes's depiction interpellates the spectator by creating an allegory of collective suffering, sacrifice, and redemption in which the the protagonists conform to specific social roles.

The lawyers, present in all their finery, are members of the educated elite —the Italian immigrants in the darkened room are clearly from a different social class. Yet, the image, with its clear references to the iconography of religious martyr paintings, conveys a narrative of redemption. Yellow Fever thus represents a crisis that is overcome through personal sacrifice and collective will. It is the pictorial analogy of what Doris Sommer called foundational fictions in literature, novels that allegorized a collective unity and sought to promote the nation as what Benedict Anderson called an "imagined

"Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-De-Siecle Paris (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998), 12. 56For example, more than 270,000 people visited the 1879 General Exhibition of Fine Arts in Rio de Janeiro, in part to view "competing" history paintings by Victor Meirelles and Pedro Americo. See Bergstein Rosemberg, Pedro Americo e o olhar oitocentista (Rio de Janeiro: Produces Editoriais Barroso, 2002), 45. 70

community."57

A different image contributing to a national panorama is Angel Delia Valle's painting The Return From the Raid (1892) [fig. 18], which, as its title states, depicts an indigenous group returning from a raid on a frontier settlement. When The Return From the Raid was exhibited, the indigenous peoples of the pampas had already been

"pacified" by the 1879 military expedition commanded by Juan A. Roca that ended the so-called War of the Desert.58 The painting was finished on the anniversary of

Columbus's encounter with the Americas and was exhibited at the Chicago Columbian

Exposition. Although it won a prize there, The Return From the Raid did not attract the attention Delia Valle had hoped for and was read by critics as a "documentary" painting of Argentina's past.59 The image seems to echo Frederick Turner's frontier thesis of 1893, in which he suggested that the period of the American West had come to a close.60 Turner saw the frontier as the most important feature that had defined the character of the United

States as a nation, so it was with some nostalgia that he declared its passing and with it the beginning of a new stage. If Delia Valle's painting alluded to a similar sense of conquest of the pampas it did so with little sense of longing for a passing era.

The four yearly exhibitions at the Ateneo in Buenos Aires that began 1893 provided artists with a venue to expose their art to local audiences, although their work remained difficult to sell.61 Delia Valle's Return From the Raid was exhibited in the

"See Benedict R. O'G. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York, 2006). 58Malosetti Costa, Los primeros modernos, 268. S9Ibid., 283. "See Frederick Jackson Turner's 1893 essay "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," in Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: H. Holt and company, 1920), 1-38. 61Malosetti Costa, Los primeros modernos, 367-369. 71

Ateneo exhibition of 1894, where it competed in popularity with paintings by other important local artists such as Marin Malharro, Eduardo Sfvori, and Ernesto de la

Carcova (whose Without Bread or Work was the show's sensation),62 In the same year of the first Ateneo exhibition, Ruben Dario had arrived for an extended stay in Argentina, where his articles contributed extensively to make local artists visible to a wider public.63

The Ateneo and it supporters finally succeeded in gaining government support to establish the National Museum of Fine Arts (Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes) in

December 1896.64 A decade and a half later the Argentinian pavilion from the 1889 Paris

World Exposition [fig. 19] was transported to Buenos Aires to serve as the venue for the fine arts exhibition at the centenary celebrations of 1910. It was the first exhibition organized by the Argentinian government, and an opportunity for the elites to represent a nation that had moved from barbarism to civilization.65 In 1911 the National Salon of Art was established as a recurring venue that would continue throughout the twentieth century.66 Together with the Museum of Fine Arts, this acknowledgement of "culture" marked the high point of official recognition that artists such as Schiaffino had been struggling for decades to achieve.

62Ibid., 374. "See Ibid., 378-390. "Ibid., 406. 65Miguel Angel Munoz, "Obertura 1910: La Exposition Intemacional de Arte del Centenario," in Tras los pasos de la norma: Salones Nacionales de Bellas Artes(1911-1989), edited by Marta Penhos and Diana Wechsler (Buenos Aires: Ediciones del Jilguero, 1999), 13-14. ""See Marta Penhos and Diana Wechsler, eds. Tras los pasos de la norma: Salones Nacionales de Bellas Artes (1911-1989) (Buenos Aires: Ediciones del Jilguero, 1999). 72

Brazil

I am more a spectator of my century than of my country; the drama, for me, is civilization, and it is being performed on all the stages of mankind, each one connected today by telegraph67

Joaquim Nabuco, Minha Formaqao (1900)

In 1822 Brazil declared its Independence from Portugal. Only a decade earlier,

Brazil had been the seat of the Portuguese court itself, since Emperor Joao VI had

relocated to Rio de Janeiro in order to escape from the Napoleonic invasion of the Iberian

Peninsula. It is difficult to underestimate the impact that such a move had on the

Brazilian city. The Emperor arrived with a retinue of approximately 15,000 people, a

number equivalent to almost a third of Rio de Janeiro's population of 50,000 at the

beginning of the nineteenth century.68 With the temporary transfer of power came an

interest in modernizing the city and updating its infrastructure. As the nineteenth century

progressed, economic expansion and progress became important goals for the country

itself, and coincided with the ascent of positivism, much as was happening in the rest of

the Americas.

Cartography was used to legitimize the statistical images of nation, and to fight

the ambiguity of territorial boundaries that had been an ongoing problem since colonial

67Qtd. in Siviano Santiago, "Worldly Appeal: Local and Global Politics in the Shaping of Modern Brazilian Culture" in The Space In-Between: Essays on Latin American Culture, trans. Ana Lucia Gazzola and Gareth Williams (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 148. 68Jaime Larry Benchimol, Pereira Passos: Um Hausmann Tropical: A renovagao urbana da cidade do Rio de Janeiro no inicio do seculo XX(Secretaria Municipal de Cultura, Turismo e Esportes; Departamento Geral de Documentafao e Informasao Cultural; Divisao de Editora9ao; Biblioteca Carioca, v. 1, 1992), 22- 23. 73

times. The modern map of Brazil unveiled at the national exposition of 1875 was therefore touted as a great achievement because it provided a graphic means to imagine the country's territory as a unity.69 When the map was created in the 1870s, Brazil was still overwhelmingly rural: only 8% of its population lived in cities with more than

20,000 inhabitants. By the 1920s the urban population had increased to only 13%.70

Modernization also meant representing Brazil's indigenous peoples as residues that were being left behind by development, a maneuver Elkins calls "museumification."71 In the process, a hygienic vision of Brazil's indigenous heritage was incorporated into the national imaginary.

Jose Alencar's (1829-1877) book O guarani (1857) popularized the notion that indigenous peoples were an important symbol of Brazilian identity, particularly because

Alencar's book was serialized in the newspaper Diario do Rio de Janeiro.12 The plot of O guarani was driven by adventure and romance, and was a vehicle for a self-contained and harmonious representation of the nation. The book is set in the first years of the seventeenth century and describes the trials of the Guarani protagonist, Peri, who falls in love with Cecilia, a white Brazilian-Portuguese woman. By the end of the novel Peri is able to win Cecilia over, and the couple become an allegory of an Edenic pair from which the Brazilian nation will emerge.73 A similar subtext of intermixing (with the racial roles inverted) was incorporated into Alencar's later book Iracema (1865), whose title is a

69Noah C. Elkin, Promoting a New Brazil: National Expositions and Images of Modernity, 1861- 1922, PhD. Dissertation, 1999, 20-21. 70Jose Murilo De Carvalho, "Brazil 1870-1914. The Force of Tradition," Journal of Latin American Studies 24(1992): 150. "Elkin, Promoting a New Brazil, 23. "Darlene J. Sadlier, Brazil Imagined: 1500 to the Present. (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2008), 145. "Ibid., 145-147; Sommer, Foundational Fictions, 143. 74

thinly disguised anagram for "America." These two books by Alencar were seminal in incorporating Brazil's indigenous past into the unfolding story of the country's history.74

Although the audience for these narratives was relatively small, since Brazil had a high illiteracy rate well into the twentieth century, Alencar's book provided the most important prototype of the noble savage that writers and artists would emulate. Images evoked by Alencar's books made their way into the academic paintings of the time, such as Moema (1866) [fig. 20] by Victor Meirelles, Iracema (1884) [fig. 21] by Jose Maria de

Medeiros, and The Last Tamoio (1883) [fig. 22] by Rodolfo Amoedo. The tone of these paintings is one of nostalgia for a period that has been relegated to history as a type of paradise. Amoedo's The Last Tamoio, which resembles Felix Parra's painting of

Bartolome de las Casas [fig. 6], suggests that the European arrival was a necessary transition from barbarism to civilization. Earlier, Victor Meirelles (1832-1903) had created an image that stressed this same dichotomy in his painting The First Mass in

Brazil (1861) [fig. 23]. Meirelles's painting illustrates what the politician Joaquim

Nabuco later suggested in his memoirs Minha Formaqao (1900): that Brazilian history began with the arrival of the first Europeans, and that only by looking to Europe could the country participate in universal History.75

Meirelles's greatest competitor in the history painting genre was Pedro Americo

(1843-1905), who produced works such as the Battle of Aval (1877) [fig. 24], an episode from the war with Paraguay, and The Proclamation of Independence (1888) [fig. 25]. The

Battle ofAvai was exhibited alongside Meirelles's Battle of Guararapes (1879) [fig. 26]

74Sommer, Foundational Fictions, 144. "See Santiago, "Worldly Appeal," 147-173. 75

at the 1879 General Exhibition of Fine Arts in Rio de Janeiro, where both paintings became the focus of a controversy largely fuelled by the press.76 Pimentel has noted the great quantity of descriptive text that accompanied these paintings and that helped create images of the events represented by the artists even before the spectators confronted the works themselves.77 If the idea of the artist as witness lent the painting credibility through the realism of the representation, the descriptive text emphasized the work's authority by documenting the almost scientific procedure followed by the artist to ensure its accuracy.78 Pro-Americo and pro-Meirelles advocates argued over the degree of realism and correctness of the rendering, a polemic that helped draw attention to the exhibition, which was attended by more that 270,000 people in the 62 days it was open.79

The late-nineteenth-century painter who came to be described as pioneer in creating a Brazilian vision was Almeida Junior (1850-1899). Although Almeida Junior painted history works, such as Departure of the Expedition (1897) [fig. 27], he was better known for his depictions of rural types from his home province of Sao Paulo, such as

Man From the Countryside Cutting Tobacco (1893)[flg. 28] and The Guitar Player

(1899)[fig. 29]. For Rodrigo Naves these paintings are infused with a natural determinism in which the arid landscape and bright sunlight suggest that the ostensible backwardness of Brazil was conditioned by its hostile environment. Almeida Junior's enthusiastic supporters, however, saw in the artist's portrayal of figure and landscape a positive assertion of what was typically local. The desire by Almeida Junior to exalt the on-the-

76Bergstein Rosemberg, Pedro Americo e o olhar oitocentista, 44. 77Isis Pimentel de Castro, "Entre a opsis e a akoe: as marcas de enuncia<;ao na pintura historica e na critica de arte do oitocentos," Historia da historiografia, no. 1 (August 2008): 33-39. 78Ibid., 35. 79Bergstein Rosemberg, Pedro Americo e o olhar oitocentista, 45. 76

spot authenticity of his canvases led Monterio Lobato to describe The Guitar Player as showing a musician in whom "one can feel the beating of the ingenuous heart of our spontaneous musicians, children of the fields and of the open air."80 Such hyperbole would also inflect Luis Martin's 1940 statement (which as Rodrigo Naves has suggested, is "contaminated by [Brazilian] modemismo") that "[t]here is an unmistakable Brazilian spirit in [Almeida Junior's] paintings, all that is unconsciously barbarous and profound, a fatality of viigin land —that no great foreign artist would be able to translate. He is the first classic of our painting."81 Martin, like Oswald de Andrade and Mario de Andrade, saw Almeida Junior as a precursor to the modernistas and those who followed them.

Eclecticism at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century

In 1910, the Porfirian government sponsored a large exhibition of Spanish art as part of the Independence centennial celebrations. The irony was not lost on the young painters at the Academy of San Carlos, who promptly organized a separate counter- exhibition.82 The critical reception and audience tallies demonstrated that this alternative exhibition was a huge success, which induced Justo Sierra, the Minister of Education, to commission a mural for the amphitheater at the National Preparatory School. The task was given to a group of students from the Academy led by Gerardo Murillo, who is better known as Dr. Atl.83 Dr. Atl, whose surname was the Nahuatl word for water, was an

80Monteiro Lobato, qtd. in Rodrigo Naves, "Almeida Junior: o sol no meio do caminho," Novos estudos 12> (Nov., 2005): 141. 8'Ibid. 141-142. 82See 1910: un ano decisivo para el arte mexicano. La exposition de artistas mexicanos (Mexico City: Museo Nacional de Arte, 1991); Jose Clemente Orozco, An Autobiography, trans. Robert C. Stephenson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1962), 26-29; Chariot, Mexican Art and the Academy of San Carlos, 153-154. K1910: un ano decisivo para el arte mexicano, 19. 77

eccentric artist who had recently returned from a sojourn in Europe. A vociferous critic of the Academy, Dr. Atl advocated for the creation of an "autochthonous" art to counter what he considered a Europeanized art training. The beginning of the Revolution ended the mural commission before it had even begun, and the amphitheatre would later become the site of Diego Rivera's first mural commission under Jose Vasconcelos.

Nevertheless, the beginnings of the mural program can be located in this gestational period when the schisms between the orthodoxy at the Academy of San Carlos and the experimentation of an up-and-coming group of artists prepared the ground for the rhetoric of difference promulgated by the so-called vanguardias of the 1920s.

In the early 1900s the routine at the Academy of San Carlos continued to be predicated on the notion of developing a type of photographic eye. Jose Clemente Orozco would recall in his autobiography how in the life classes students were required to reproduce what they saw in detail: "Nature was to be copied with the greatest photographic exactness...And when the students had copied a particular model for a number of weeks, a photograph was made of it and they compared their efforts with this."84 By outbreak of the Revolution in 1910, academic painting in Mexico —and in

Argentina and Brazil— had began to move away from such realist representations that characterized the paintings by Parra, Blanes, and Americo.

As Deborah Silverman and Carl Schorske have suggested, the visual culture at the dawn of the twentieth century expressed a shift in perceiving the world. Silverman notes that in France there was a move towards organic forms, a development she ascribes to both disenchantment with technology and a growing awareness of the complexity of

"Orozco, An Autobiography, 11-12. 78

human reality as it was being uncovered by psychology.85 For Schorske, the eclectic

architecture and art at the dawn of the twentieth century suggested the ascendancy of

"archaistic" visions that turned away from the modern city as opposed to "futuristic"

conceptions that sought to transform it, a trend that Silverman suggests was exemplified

by the conservative architectural turn at the 1900 Paris Exposition.86 Paradoxically, in the

southern Americas this "archaism" coincided with programs of urban renewal that sought

to modernize the cities. For example, in Rio de Janeiro the desire by the elites and their

proxy, the state, to benefit from a more modern and hygienic metropolis were

contemporary with the architectural eclecticism seen in other parts of the hemisphere and

with the appearance of art noveau}1 In Mexico City, the Porfirian regime undertook an

ambitious plan of urban renewal in time for the celebrations of 1910, a project that looked

to Haussmann's Paris as its model.88

Academic painting also took an eclectic turn in the early twentieth century. A

version of Impressionism as exemplified in the work of well-known Spanish painters of the time, such as Joaquin Sorolla, Anglada Camarasa, and Ignacio Zuloaga, became a dominant academic style throughout Latin America, although variants of Symbolism and

Post-Impressionism were also prevalent. In spite of this diversity, painting remained committed to figuration, although some of the artists who would later form part of the

85Deborah Silverman, Art Noveau in Fin-de-Siecle France: Politics, Psychology, and Style (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1989), 1-13. 86Carl Schorske, "The City From Voltaire to Spengler," in Thinking with History: Explorations in the Passage to Modernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 44; Silverman, Art Noveau in Fin-de- Siecle France, 5. 8?Benchimol, Pereira Passos, 205; Rachel Sisson, "Rio de Janeiro, 1875-1945: The Shaping of a New Urban Order," trans. Elizabeth A. Jackson. The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts 21 (1995): 146. 88See Mauricio Tenorio Trillo, "1910 Mexico City: Space and Nation in the City of the Centenario," Journal of Latin American Studies 28, no. 1 (February 1996): 75-104. 79

vanguards were active in the European avant-gardes by the beginning of the twentieth century. The examination of local culture, however, was well under way, laying the groundwork for the artists of the 1920s. 80

Chapter 3

Arrival and Redemption: Jean Chariot's Massacre at the Templo Mayor

A series of layers composed of materials that do not mix —such is the sketch of our history. A compound of races that have not yet become thoroughly combined—such is the social condition of Mexico, notwithstanding that four hundred years ago, the Spaniards, although introducing themselves as a new element of complexity, still brought forth the first organized effort to blend the different peoples into one faith, one rule, one purpose. The blending process is yet unfinished either because human nature opposes such tendencies as are imposed upon it through force or because the conflicting elements are so deeply differentiated that even religion has found the task a hard and lengthy one.'

Jose Vasconcelos (1926)

The girls from some ministries Working at the typewriters, dressed In Tutankh-amen style, with a skirt Open at the side and on the leg a garland Or a new decoration Between Egyptian and modern, as if it were A fresco by Chariot or by Rivera2

El Universal Ilustrado, May 4, 1923

Rhetoric of Change and Renewal After the Revolution

On 31 December 1921, a manifesto with the title Actual no.l appeared on walls in

'Jose Vasconcelos and Manuel Gamio, Aspects of Mexican Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1926), 5-6. 2Charlot quotes the text in Spanish and provides a translation in English. The English version above is my own translation; qtd. in, Jean Chariot, The Mexican Mural Renaissance, 1920-1925 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967), 187. 81

Mexico City announcing the birth of a new cultural movement that came to be known as estridentismo. The manifesto, a strident call for the renovation of arts and culture in

Mexico, was written by a young Mexican poet named Manuel Maples Arce. His proclamation suggested that the traditional arts and letters remained untouched in the aftermath of the great upheaval that was the Mexican Revolution. The Revolution had foregrounded social, political and economic disparities, but these problems were not new.

They reverberated since the Conquest and were exacerbated by imperatives of progress in the nineteenth century. What was different in the first years of the 1920s was a post-

Revolutionary environment where broad change seemed possible. Overt images of political ideology loomed on the horizon, but for many artists these lines had yet to be clearly articulated.3 In the visual arts, Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Jose

Clemente Orozco became the faces of the so-called Mexican renaissance, a title that gave the period art-historical weight. These artists, the Big Three of muralism, still symbolize much of the period's mexicanidad, or Mexicanness. And yet the initial stage of mural painting was defined less by them than by the lesser-known artists that have been written into a supporting role. The dieguitos, as they were sometimes pejoratively labelled to subsume them into Diego Rivera's shadow, did not hesitate to take up the challenge posed by the monumental state-sponsored commissions that so easily came their way.4

3The communist parties in Latin America were founded after the Bolshevik Revolution. The earliest was established in Argentina in 1918; the Mexican Communist Party was founded in September 1919. The party in Mexico was promoted by foreigners, including Bertram D. Wolfe, Rivera's future biographer, who would be a member of its executive committee in 1924 and 1925. The artists Rivera, Siqueiros, and Xavier Guerrero were elected to the executive committee in 1923. Rollie E. Poppino, International Communism in Latin America: A History of the Movement, 1917-1963 (London: The Free Press of Glencoe; Collier- Macmillan, 1964). See in particular "The Rise of the Communist Parties," 55-65; Bertram D. Wolfe, The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera (New York: Stein and Day, 1963), 150-151. 4For more on the dieguitos see Chariot, The Mexican Mural Renaissance, 150-162; for a description of some early muralists see also Wolfe, The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera, 154-161. 82

Enmeshed in the Mexican visual culture of the 1920s, these younger artists created

images that emerged as an afterimage to the porfiriato.

The importance of the dieguitos was highlighted by Jean Chariot (1898-1979) in

his book The Mexican Mural Renaissance, 1920-1925, the first comprehensive text on

the early mural movement.5 A dieguito himself, Chariot was hired to work as Rivera's

assistant but soon managed to secure a commission of his own. The resulting work was

his Massacre at the Templo Mayor (1922-1923) [fig. 30], the first painting to be

completed in the early stage of muralism at the National Preparatory School, and for a

brief time, with Rivera's Creation (1922-1923) [fig. 31], the public face of this state-

sponsored project.6 More important, Massacre is symptomatic of a change in visual

practices by a younger generation of artists who were acquainted with and open to the

experiments of avant-garde production in Europe, but who also responded to a wide array

of visual culture, both traditional and modern, in their own environment.

Jean Chariot: The Redemption of Arrival

Jean Chariot was born and brought up in France, and moved to Mexico in 1921

when he was in his mid-twenties. Why did Chariot choose Mexico as a destination? In

the early nineteenth century his great-grandfather had travelled to Mexico City, where he

married a Mexican woman. Chariot's grandfather, Louis Goupil, was bom and lived part

'First published in English in 1963, with a second, corrected edition in 1967; published in Spanish in 1985 as El renacimiento del muralismo mexicano (Mexico: Editorial Domes, 1985); Baciu suggests that it was Vasconcelos who instigated the writing of the book. See Stefan Baciu, "Un estridentista silencioso rinde cuentas." La Palabray el Hombre 47 (Jul.-Sept., 1968): 450. 'Chariot quotes several articles in newspapers and magazines where the two artists are referenced as a shorthand for the decorations at the Preparatoria. Chariot, The Mexican Mural Renaissance, 187. 83

of his life there, eventually marrying a Mexican woman himself; in his middle age Louis moved to Paris, where Chariot came to know him.7 Louis's stories and the objects in his apartment introduced the young Chariot to different facets of Mexican visual culture that anticipated the much more complex heterogeneity of Mexico itself.8 Chariot's great-uncle and Louis's brother, Eugene Goupil, acquired an even more impressive set of texts and codices that was later donated to the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. Now known as the

Aubin-Goupil collection, it was a fraction of a much larger set amassed by Lorenzo

Boturini Benaducci (1702-1755) in eighteenth-century Mexico.9 Boturini's collection was confiscated by the colonial authorities in 1743, and it became property of the Mexican state after Independence; nevertheless, many of its objects made their way to private collections throughout the years.10 A large number of these important documents were smuggled out of Mexico in 1840 by Joseph Marius Alexis Aubin, who sold them to

Eugene Goupil in 1889." As a young teenager Chariot was able to access the collection at the Bibliotheque Nationale to examine the pre-Hispanic codices that had been in his great-uncle's possession.12

Mexico was therefore part of Chariot's heritage, and Mexican culture a source of interest long before he travelled there. But it is his membership in the Mexican art scene that makes Chariot an important nomadic figure through which to examine the transformations that took place in the 1920s. A sense of being-in-passage instilled in

'Ibid., 178-180. "Ibid., 179. 9Jose Luis Martinez H., "Jean Chariot y la coleccion Boturini-Aubin-Goupil," in Mexico en la obra de Jean Chariot (Mexico: Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, 1994), 38. l0Ibid., 38-40. "Ibid., 40-41. 12Charlot, The Mexican Mural Renaissance, 179. 84

Chariot, more than in some of his better-known Mexican colleagues, an epistemological humility and a sense of being both an observer and a participant, a perspective described by Rebecca Walkowitz as a critical cosmopolitanism.13 Chariot's in-betweenness or liminality, his closeness to and estrangement from different aspects of Mexican culture, required a tactical positioning that led him to identify with parts of the social project inherent in his colleagues' goals of artistic reform. Reactions to the social contradictions in Mexico were also informed by his Roman Catholic faith, which contributed to his critical cosmopolitanism and to a common ethical ground with fellow artists such as

Rivera and Siqueiros, who soon moved to the political left.14 Chariot was also a prolific writer throughout his life. His book on the mural movement is a first-hand account that remains an important reference text for anyone interested in this period.

Chariot met his first Mexican colleagues at the Open Air School in Coyoacan shortly after his arrival. The School was one of several modelled on the Santa Anita extension of the Academy of San Carlos established by the painter Alfredo Ramos

Martinez shortly before the Revolution. The Santa Anita experiment had been a short lived attempt to reform the teaching of the visual arts by creating Impressionist-inspired plein air opportunities for the students, but it established a popular creative venue that was emulated in the post-Revolutionary years. At Coyoacan Chariot met Fernando Leal, who later became a fellow muralist at the National Preparatory School. Impressed by

l3See Walkowitz, Cosmopolitan Style. l4The Syndicate and its publication El Machete were important products of the artists' activism. Nevertheless, some of them —notably Orozco— were not attracted to communism. See Chariot's chapter "The Syndicate" in the Mexican Mural Renaissance, 241-251; Bertram Wolfe's suggests that "The point of contact was [Chariot's] admiration of the humble common folk, women servants and burden bearers whose labors he delighted to represent monumentally within a tiny compass, and a strain of primitive Christian anticlericalism that mingled with his piety," Wolfe, The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera, 159. 85

woodcut prints Chariot had produced in France and brought to Mexico, Leal quickly began experimenting with the medium.15 Chariot's print Don Pancho (1922) [fig. 32] is typical of what he and Leal produced at the Open Air School and shows how a woodcut can produce bold effects with very simple means. Wood was also an economical medium, so it soon spread as artists who adopted it in Coyoacan became teachers in other regions.16

The bold graphic effects of the woodcut connected this medium to a rich history of Mexican printmaking in newspapers, posters, pamphlets, and magazines. Arguably the most important of the printmakers from this tradition was Jose Guadalupe Posada (1852-

1913). His workshop had been located a short distance from the Academy of San Carlos, but the public for what was produced at these two sites could not be more different.

Calavera of the Streetsweepers (n.d.) [fig. 33] is a typical example of what Posada created for the Vanegas Arroyo studio in Mexico City. Such prints were designed to appeal to a wide audience and were distributed as broadsides sold on street corners.

In spite of the popularity of his prints, Posada was virtually forgotten after he died and was only "re-discovered" in the 1920s by Chariot and his fellow artists.17 The masthead created by Xavier Guerrero for the newspaper El Machete (1924) [fig. 34] shows the influence of the printmakers at Coyoacan, but it also demonstrates how the woodcut could emulate the "primitive" quality of Posada's popular prints, thus absorbing

l5"Reminiscences: Fernando Leal," in Chariot, The Mexican Mural Renaissance, 166. ,6John Ittmann, "Open Air Schools and the Early Print Workshops" in Mexico and Modern Printmaking: A Revolution in the Graphic Arts, 1920 to 1950, ed. John Ittmann (Philadelphia Museum of Art and McNay Art Museum, San Antonio; New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), 90-91. "Lyle W. Williams, "Evolution of a Revolution" in Ittmann, Mexico and Modern Printmaking, 4; Chariot also wrote about Posada, see Jean Chariot, "Jose Guadalupe Posada: Printmaker to the Mexican People," in Jean Chariot, An Artist on Art (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1972), 162-173. 86

that particular stream of popular culture into the evolving project of Mexicanness.18 El

Machete was published by the Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters, and Sculptors, an organization spearheaded by Siqueiros at the Preparatoria in late 1922.19 Created as a collective expression of the artists working at the Preparatoria, the Syndicate emulated similar organizations going back to the Diaz regime and was one of the many unions created in the 1920s.20 The Syndicate published its manifesto in poster form on 9

December 1923. At the end of 1924 the group dissolved and El Machete became a publication of the Communist Party of Mexico.21 The change in El Machete paralleled the transformation of muralism as a whole from a project imbued with a post-Revolutionary ambiguity and openness to one associated, for the most part, with political critique.22

Posada is important not only because he was anointed as a precursor by the visual artists who were attempting to define mexicanidad, but also because his work exemplifies, as Thomas Gretton has argued, how the notion of "the popular" was a contested terrain that was in flux at the beginning of the twentieth century23 In pre-

Revolutionary Mexico the notion of "the popular" was only beginning to be formulated, and in this context the materiality of Posada's prints, suggests Gretton, promoted a type of

18John Ittmann, "Open Air Schools and Early Print Workshops," 90. "Chariot, who calls it the Syndicate of Revolutionary Painters, Sculptors, and Engravers of Mexico, states that it was created between September and December, 1922. See Chariot's chapter "The Syndicate," in The Mexican Mural Renaissance, 241—251; Deborah Caplow translates it as The Syndicate of Revolutionary Painters, Sculptors, and Printmakers. Deborah Caplow, Leopoldo Mendez: Revolutionary Art and the Mexican Print (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007), 29. 20Charlot, The Mexican Mural Renaissance, 241-242. 21 According to Chariot, the Syndicate published seventeen issues of El Machete between March and November, 1924. Chariot, The Mexican Mural Renaissance, 244. 22Orozco being the most prominent member to reject left-wing ideology. In fact, he used his apocalyptic imagery to create acerbic critiques of ideology across the political spectrum. "See Thomas Gretton, "Posada and the 'Popular': Commodities and Social Constructs in Mexico before the Revolution," Oxford Art Journal 17, no. 2 (January 1, 1994): 32-47. 87

visual rhetoric that interpellated specific segments of Mexico City's population.24

Yet the changes that were leading towards the incorporation of popular visual culture into the academic art were not new. We have seen that academic artists had been exploring local themes up and into the Revolution. One artist who adopted local motifs into his art was Adolfo Best Maugard, who had studied in Europe and whom Rivera had depicted as a dandy [fig. 35]. Best Maugard had been interested in Persian miniatures at the beginning of the twentieth century, but he became interested in pre-Hispanic visual culture when he illustrated Manuel Gamio's book Forjando Patria (1916). Best Maugard went on to explore more popular forms of art and craft and adopted them into his art to create a highly decorative naif style, as seen in his Self-Portrait (1923) [fig. 36].

But perhaps the most far-reaching project that Best Maugard worked on was a drawing method designed to be taught in primary schools throughout Mexico. The Best

Maugard Method was published by the Secretariat of Education during Vansconcelos's tenure and continued to be used in schools for several decades thereafter. It was a project whose convergence of art and education succinctly represented Vasconcelos's project of using culture as a unifying national force. Best Maugard's book was based on a method in which students learned simple geometric shapes and slowly progressed to more complex forms [fig. 37]. The simple patterns he designed, Maugard suggested, were derived from what were recurring motifs found in popular arts and crafts, which had developed as mixtures of all the cultural streams that had flowed into the country.25 The method therefore represented a mestizo cultural history as the Mexican nation's authentic

24Ibid. "See Adolfo Best Maugard, Metodo de dibujo: tradition, resurgimiento y evolution del arte mexicano (Mexico City: Departamento Editorial de la Secretaria de Educacion, 1923), 1-18. 88

expression and put forth a map for its future development. The Maugard method sought a

return to first principles ostensibly found in popular arts and crafts in order to forge a

new, authentic Mexican visual culture:

Let us not forget that we are forming the first part of our art and our main goal has

been to collect that tradition so that, once it has reemerged (which we are

beginning to see today), it can continue its evolution; we are in the moment of

greatest simplicity, the one that in the history of art corresponds to the prehistoric

period and the beginning of the historic one; therefore, we have to exclude all

complication and begin with the greatest simplicity, but within the strict limits of

Mexican sentiment, to take it later to its greatest flowering.26

In a rhetorical flourish that Vasconcelos would appreciate, school children and the

Mexican people become indistinguishable. Culture was an essential tool for this

messianic vision of resurgence and flowering to succeed, and Best Maugard's method

provided an excellent way of inculcating it.

Chariot and his fellow artists were also looking for languages adequate to the

projects they were being given, although their explorations were more catholic and in

some cases less didactic than those of Best Maugard. For example, the estridentistas

commissioned prints from Chariot for the group's publications and exhibited them at their

meeting place, the Cafe de Nadie, the name used by the estridentistas for the Cafe

26"No olvidemos que estamos formando la primera parte de nuestro arte y nuestro principal proposito ha sido recoger esa tradicidn para, logrado su resurgimiento (que hoy estamos ya viendo), continuar su evolution; estamos en el momento de mayor simplicidad, en el que corresponde en la historia del arte al periodo prehistorico y principio del historico; por lo tanto, tenemos que excluir toda complicaci6n y comenzar con muchisima simpleza, pero dentro de los limites estrictos del sentimiento mexicano, para mas tarde llevarlo a su mayor florecimiento." Ibid., 23. 89

Europa in Mexico City. According to Chariot, the estridentistas were excited by his

woodcuts because he "was doing strange things in art, by their standards."27 The same

works conveyed different meanings for the artists of the Open Air School than they did

for the estridentistas: primitive and Mexican for the former, modern and cosmopolitan for

the latter. But these multiple meanings reflected the appropriation of a variety of visual

material by artists as they searched for new vocabularies. Moreover, many of the young

artists and intellectuals did not distinguish between Cubism, Futurism, and other currents

in European art.28 It was common for art that seemed challenging or subversive to be

labelled Cubist, Futurist or even estridentista; critics were particularly promiscuous in

their use of terminology, especially when disparaging artwork they did not like29

Nevertheless, Vasconcelos supported the artists and did not censor their work. The

curious mixture of vanguardism and official culture was in full evidence at the official

inauguration of Rivera's Creation, where in addition to speeches by government officials

the audience was also regaled with Maples Arce's long estridentista lecture.30

The Arrival of Redemption: the Murals at the National Preparatory School

In the aftermath of the Revolution, radical social change was a raw, unfulfilled

27Peter Morse, Jean Chariot's Prints: A Catalogue Raisonne (Honolulu: The University of Hawaii and The Jean Chariot Foundation, 1976), 23. 28Stefan Baciu, "Un estridentista silencioso rinde cuentas," 453. 29For example, an article announcing the unveiling of Rivera's Creation was titled "Un decorado cubista se inauguro en la Preparatoria," El Universal, March 10, 1923, 9; An editorial referred to the murals at the Preparatory School as estridentista. Although ostensibly advocating for an objective judgement, the newspaper defends the public's right to declare "as we have heard with terrifying frequency: I don't like it...because it's ugly." "Pintura oficial," El Democrata, June 2, 1923. '"According to the journalist, the speech by Maples Arce lasted for ninety minutes, during which time he contrasted Rivera's "frankly estridentista style" with the art produced at "the brothel" that was the Academy. "Un decorado cubista," 9. 90

desire for much of the Mexican population. The language of muralism developed as a reflection —both as image and thought— of this desire. Armed conflict had ostensibly ended in 1917 with a new constitution. Nevertheless, the political stability needed for cultural projects was achieved only when Alvaro Obregon (1880-1928) became president in 1920. The pivotal figure behind an aggressive program of educational expansion and cultural stimulus was Jose Vasconcelos (1882-1959), a politician and philosopher whose thought developed against the backdrop of the porfiriato. As a young man, Vasconcelos had opposed the institutionalization of positivistic thought that had inflected all aspects of

Mexican society for more than fifty years.31 In 1920 Vasconcelos was appointed head of the newly formed federal Secretariat of Public Education (SEP), a post that gave him the necessary authority to pursue his program of educational reform. Although he was also a philosopher and developed an elaborate philosophical system he called aesthetic monism,

Vasconcelos is perhaps best known for his essay "The Cosmic Race" (1925), in which the southern Americas are described as the home of a future "fifth race," the reinvigorated hybrid of all global races.32 "The Cosmic Race" follows a tradition of Utopian texts such as "Our America" (1895) by Jose Marti and Ariel (1900) by the Uruguayan Jose Rodo.

Like these two writers, Vasconcelos suggested that the southern Americas had particular concerns that differed from those of the United States and Europe, and "The Cosmic

Race" was his own manifesto for a type of Latin American exceptionalism. According to

Vasconcelos, the cosmic race would also evolve intellectually and culturally, and he conceived of the arts as important tools for this enterprise. As Secretary of Education

''Patrick Romanell, "Bergson in Mexico: A Tribute to Jose Vasconcelos," Philosophy and PhenomenologicalResearch 21, no. 4 (June, 1961): 501-505. 32See Jose Vasconcelos, The Cosmic Race. 91

Vasconcelos funded as many cultural projects as he could, including the program of

public art that came to be known as muralism.

The first murals commissioned by Vasconcelos were painted by Roberto

Montenegro and Jorge Enciso for the Church and Convent of San Pedro and San Pablo in

Mexico City. Montenegro designed most of the decorations, including a stained glass

window that was inaugurated by Vasconcelos in June 1921 before the rest of the work

was completed.33 In spite of being the first mural project under Vasconcelos's tenure,

many art historians consider muralism proper to begin with the paintings a short distance

away at the National Preparatory School, which is known today as the cultural centre

Antiguo Colegio San Ildefonso. The distinction, which began in the 1920s and continued

with subsequent scholarship, originated in a narrative of muralism as a truly new,

nationalist phenomenon. Works that looked more traditional or "decorative" were

relegated to a secondary role and became precursors to those of the more "heroic" stage.34

Yet a search for Mexicanness was not new, since Mexican themes had been an implicit

subject of artworks in one form or another since at least the middle of the nineteenth

century. However, the search for local content intensified at the beginning of the

twentieth century as artists experimented with a variety of techniques and the possibilities

suggested by traditional crafts. Similar aesthetics steeped in the pathos and ethos of an

Americanist vision were explored by artists in different countries of the southern

Americas during the 1920s.

The Mexican artist with the most experience and media exposure was Diego

"Chariot, The Mexican Mural Renaissance, 97. 34Julieta Ortiz Gaitan, Entre dos mundos: los murales de Roberto Montenegro (Mexico: Institute de Investigaciones Esteticas, Universidad Autonomade Mexico, 1994), 13-14. 92

Rivera, and thus his first mural commission, Creation [fig. 31], attracted the most attention. Rivera had been immersed in Cubism during his Paris years, but he began to re- explore a more naturalist representation shortly before his return to Mexico. The imagery in Rivera's Creation illustrates aspects of Vasconcelos's philosophy, but the neoclassical allegorical images also show the influence of a return to figuration by artists such as

Picasso and De Chirico, who were exploring more classical forms at the moment of

Rivera's departure from Europe.35 More important, Creation also attests to Rivera's trip to

Italy in 1920 —at the urging of Vasconcelos— during which he studied Italian

Renaissance painting, particularly church frescos. Yet even in the aftermath of a return to figuration, the lessons Rivera learned from Cubism were apparent in the construction of the figures, a point he stressed in interviews and that was reiterated in articles on his work.36 Nevertheless, Rivera's Creation was overwhelmed by its Italian references and by

Vasconcelos's ideas.37 Like the first murals by Orozco and Siqueiros that followed it at the National Preparatory School, Creation was a Janus-faced artwork looking more to the past than to the future.38

35Clara Bargellini, "Diego Rivera en Italia," Anales del Institute de Investigaciones Estetica XVII, no. 66 (1995): 88; Chariot, The Mexican Mural Renaissance, 128-130; For an account of the return to order in the post-war European avant-garde see Kenneth Silver, Esprit de Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant- Garde and the First World War, 1914-1925 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). 36For an interiew with Rivera see Juan del Sena, "Diego Rivera," , April 6, 1922, qtd. in Chariot, The Mexican Mural Renaissance, 139-140; Pedro Henriquez Urena, "En la Orilla: Notas sobre Diego Rivera," Azulejos I, no. 2, (Sept. 1921): 22-23, in Moyssen, La critica de arte en Mexico, 560-561. "Bertram Wolfe used Rivera's notes to give a lengthy description of the symbolism in Creation. See Wolfe, The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera, 135-138; Chariot quotes from a similar description published in "Las Pinturas," Boletin de la Secretaria de Educacion Publico, 1 (1923): 363, qtd. in Chariot, The Mexican Mural Renaissance, 136-137. 38Charlot states that the "Byzantine hue...left Vasconcelos unconvinced." Chariot, The Mexican Mural Renaissance, 143; Bertam Wolfe, Rivera's first biographer, called it a "valiant but a false start" in a chapter with an equally revealing title: "A Byzantine Detour." Wolfe, The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera, 140; or more recently, Lozano wrote the mural off as "unsuccessful—a pretentious post-Cubist, Byzantine-tinged allegory reminiscent of Picasso's neoclassical period." Luis Martin Lozano, "Mexican Modern Art: Rendezvous With the Avant-Garde," in Luis Martin Lozano, Mexican Modern Art, 1910-1950 (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1999), 24. Chariot's The Massacre at the Templo Mayor

I have described various facets of Chariot's environment upon his arrival in

Mexico City to suggest that some of the tensions from that critical moment in Mexican history emerge in Chariot's first commission, the Massacre at the Templo Mayor [fig. 30].

Chariot's painting is important for several reasons. It was the first work to be completed in fresco technique and one of the first works to be unveiled at the Preparatoria. Muralism therefore achieved its initial notoriety partly through Massacre. Although muralism is now a phenomenon closely associated with Mexico and Mexicanness, the fact that

Chariot was a "foreigner" did not escape the attention of critics who decried the

"modernist" alterations to the colonial building.39 Massacre was also one of the first paintings of the group at the Preparatoria to reach a tentative formal solution foreshadowing the language of murals that would follow. In it Chariot created a visual language that was at once cosmopolitan, critical, and local.

The event depicted in Massacre is based on an episode from the Conquest as described by Fray Diego Duran in his sixteenth-century text Historia de las Indias de

Nueva Espana e islas de tierra firmed Chariot used Duran's description of an incident in which unarmed Aztec nobles from Tenochtitlan were killed by conquistadores under the command of Pedro de Alvarado. The massacre led to a revolt that forced the Spanish out of the city and nearly led to their defeat. In the introduction to Duran's chronicle, Angel

Garibay mentions the author's constant recourse to visuality, in particular to the

"paintings," the codices of the conquered indigenous peoples.41 The codices were

"Chariot, The Mexican Mural Renaissance, 186-188. ••"See Fray Diego Duran, Historia de las Indias. 41Throughout his book Duran repeatedly refers to the codices as paintings. Angel Garibay, 94

important sources of information in the early aftermath of the Conquest, and friars sought to translate and compile as much as they could from them. Nevertheless, in 1577 Philip II ordered the confiscation of aboriginal texts and prohibited anyone from writing "things having to do with the superstitions and the way of life of the natives, in any language."*2

As Serge Gruzinski has suggested, the Conquest of the Americas initiated a war of images; Christian representations were pitted against idolatrous ones, which were considered false images.43 Fearing their epistemological import, the Spanish authorities destroyed many codices so that the culture encoded in them could not be transmitted.44

Like the period after the Revolution, the aftermath of the Conquest had been a time of possibility when, in spite of the subjugation of the indigenous population, languages and cultures coexisted for a short period in a precarious balance; indigenous scribes absorbed techniques from their conquerors, and the possibility of a more balanced transculturation, or at least a more equal interaction, seemed possible 45 The moment of relative openness was foreclosed during the idolatric suppression by the Spanish authorities and through attrition of memory with the passage of time.46 Practices that were not effaced survived by being incorporated into hybrid practices within the cultural expressions of the conqueror.

The wall opposite Chariot's Massacre contains just such a scene of syncretism,

"Introduction," in Duran, Historia de las Indias, xxix-xxi. 42Georges Baudot, Utopia and History in Mexico: The First Chroniclers of Mexican Civilization (1520-1569), trans. Bernard R. Ortiz de Montellano and Thelma Ortiz de Montellano (Niwot, CO : University Press of Colorado, 1995), 501. 43Serge Gruzinsky, Images at War, 45-47. "See mention by Garibay on page xxx-xxi, and Duran's reference on page 6, in Duran, Historia de las Indias de Nueva Espaha. 45William Rowe and Vivian Schelling, Memory and Modernity: Popular Culture in Latin America (London and New York: Verso, 1991), 20. "Ibid., 20-24. 95

The Feast of the Lord of Chalma (1922-1923) [fig. 38] by Fernando Leal, another of the so-called dieguitos and Chariot's friend since they had met at the Coyoacan Open Air

School. Because they shared a stairwell, these two murals were initially conceived as complementary paintings: Massacre depicts the Conquest and The Feast celebrates the continuation of pre-Hispanic beliefs under the veneer of Christianity, what the anthropologist Anita Brenner, who lived in Mexico in the 1920s, termed "idols behind altars."47 Leal and Chariot, however, used different formal and technical solutions to create the paintings, which resulted in murals that look very different from each other.48

Leal's The Feast is similar to his easel work, which was painted in an Impressionist- derived style reminiscent of artists such as the Mexican Saturnino Herran and the

Spaniards Joaquin Sorolla and Igancio Zuloaga. The crowded scene in The Feast is also depicted in a somewhat realistic perspectival space, as can be seen in some of the orthogonals in the upper left-hand side of the painting and in the stage-like setting of the celebration. The temporal continuity of the scene enhances its sense of theatricality and gives the painting an organic unity.

In contrast to The Feast, and befitting the exploratory character of muralism's first stage, Chariot's painting is more experimental. Although the visual elements used in it were not exceptional, their configuration was a prescient example of what would appear in later murals by Chariot and others. Chariot incorporated into Massacre formal features derived from Cubism and Renaissance painting, much as Rivera was doing with

Creation. But unlike Rivera, Chariot was able to juxtapose a collage of multi-temporal

47See Anita Brenner, Idols Behind Altars: Modern Mexican Art and Its Cultural Roots (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2002). The book was first published in 1929. 48See "Reminiscences: Fernando Leal," in Chariot, The Mexican Mural Renaissance, 163-173. 96

elements in tension that reflected the historical and contemporary context of the painting.

According to Leonard Folgarait, the formal aspects of Massacre"s representation "may block any clear access to the subject of the mural to a viewer not accustomed to the syntax of European modernism, therefore also obscuring the deduction of its message as pro-or anti-Conquest."49 However, Chariot used a quote from Duran's text that is difficult to read as anything but a criticism of Spanish cruelty and a denunciation of violence.50

Chariot emphasized this by portraying the attacking Spaniards as a mostly anonymous, dehumanized mass, and by dividing the mural in two, with the attacking force on the right, and the Aztec nobles on the left.

Chariot also conflated chronologically distant styles to portray an event that compresses time and place. Initial drawings for the mural presented a plan based on a strict geometry derived from classical ideals —for example, the golden mean— but also from a somewhat Cubist configuration of the picture plane. A skull-like motif on a shield in the left-hand side of the mural is a quotation from his painting Bullet (1921-1922), a work that Chariot described as a Cubist statement derived from his experiences during the First World War.51 This symbol on the shield acts as a stitch joining a personal recollection with the episode described by Duran in the sixteenth century. The abstract rendering of armour makes some of the figures look like the modern machines or robots of artists such as Fernand Leger and conveys a notion of the darker side of progress that

•"Leonard Folgarait, Mural Painting and Social Revolution in Mexico, 1920—1940: Art of the New Order (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 48. '""...such was the frenzy in the city and the clamor that arose...that it made the mountains resonate and the stones shatter from pain and sorrow..." This is the section of the sentence from chapter LXXV in Duran's book that Chariot quotes on the bottom of the mural (my translation). Duran, Historia de las Indias, 548. 51 John Chariot, Jean Chariot's First Fresco: The Massacre in the Main Temple http://libweb.hawaii.edu/libdept/charlotcoll/J_Charlot/johncharlot.html 97

contrasts with the estridentista celebration of technology. Chariot also pulls the past into

the present by including Leal, Rivera, and himself in the bottom right-hand corner of the

painting. They are accompanied by a blond child and occupy a space whose ambiguity is

accentuated by the head of a figure that is involved in the violent attack but that also

merges into this small group portrait.52 The Cubist flattening of space enhances the

flattening of time, with different spatial and temporal fragments coexisting on the surface

of Chariot's mural as if in a collage, much like Vasconcelos's image of Mexican history as

a "series of layers composed of materials that do not mix."53 Folgarait suggests that by

conflating the Conquest and Revolution, Chariot also drew attention to the

"consolidation, conquest and oppressive treatment of indigenous peoples" during these

two periods.54 Indeed, the episode recounted by Duran and used by Chariot is one that

would have added another layer to the temporal complexity of Massacre, whose portrayal

of violence in struggle for hegemony made it a particularly apt metaphor for the flux of

the post-Revolutionary period.

One interpretation of Chariot's conversion of Duran's text into imagery is that it

meant a return to and validation of the visuality of the original codices. Thus, by

portraying the massacre in Tenochtitlan Chariot ostensibly redeemed the indigenous

manner of rendering information, as seen in the original "paintings" that Duran had

translated to text.55 No doubt Massacre includes traces of Chariot's contact with pre-

"Folgarait, Mural Painting and Revolution, 48. "Vasconcelos and Gamio, Aspects of Mexican Civilization, 5-6. ^Folgarait, Mural Painting and Revolution, 48. "Francisco Jose Galvan Ruiz, Jean Chariot: ocho decadas de herencia mural en el antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso: la Masacre en el Templo Mayor, Thesis, Diploma in Art History (Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, 2004), 64-65. 98

Hispanic imagery, since he admired Mexican codices and saw formal affinities between them and the art of his time.56 Yet images, particularly religious ones, also formed part of the cultural arsenal of Spanish colonization. Visually, Chariot's painting elicits stronger and more immediate references to Renaissance and modern artworks and to images produced in Mexican popular culture. Paolo Uccello's panel from The Battle of San

Romano (c. 1435-1440) at the Musee du Louvre had impressed Chariot in his youth, and it is easy to see how the armour and lances in Massacre could be linked to that painting.57

Uccello is in fact mentioned in Molina's review, in an article by Rivera that alludes to

Massacre, and in a text written by Chariot after he revisited the Preparatoria more than twenty years after completing his painting.58 Like Rivera, Chariot had also learned valuable lessons from Cubism.59 The collage-like handling of shapes and the shallow depiction of space seen in Massacre illustrate why Chariot believed that Cubism, with its

"geometrical and architectural factor," implied a monumental type of painting that did not reach fruition until the Mexican mural work of the 1920s.60 But Chariot and his fellow

""Though I was born and bred in Paris, and did pass through the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, my rattles and hornbooks were the idols and Mexican manuscripts from my uncle Eugene Goupil's collection. They were also my ABC of modern art," Chariot, The Mexican Mural Renaissance, 9-10. "Chariot, The Mexican Mural Renaissance, 180. 58Renato Molina mentions Uccello and "Pietro [sic] della Francesca," see Molina, "El 'Fresco' de Chariot," 48; Rivera also mentions Uccello in reference to Massacre, see Diego Rivera, "Dos Aiios," Azulejos (Dec., 1923), qtd. in Chariot, The Mexican Mural Renaissance, 187; Jean Chariot, "1946: Renaissance Revisited," in Jean Chariot, An Artist on Art: Collected Essays of Jean Chariot (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1972), 389. 59That Chariot was consciously thinking of Cubist strategies is suggested by the description of his work on Massacre: "While I painted far into the night by the light of a raw electric bulb, my spirit was prone to wander and to whisper how such and such hard-won effects were as dazzling as Picasso's." Chariot, The Mexican Mural Renaissance, 184—185. """Though cubism itself failed to follow its mural promises to total fulfillment, it did point the way for the Mexican artist [Diego Rivera]." Chariot, The Mexican Mural Renaissance, 126. Although this is from a passage about Diego Rivera, the composition of Massacre suggests that it could apply to Chariot as well; In the fourth installment of a five-part series on Mexican art written with Siqueiros for die Mexican newspaper El Democrata (under the pseudonym Ing. Juan Hernandez Araujo) Chariot placed Rivera, Siqueiros, and himself in the category of "Painters who imported the latest movements of European art and therefore of the good tradition." Ing. Juan Hernandez Araujo, "El movimiento actual de la pintura en 99

artists also turned to other sources for subjects and techniques, searching for inspiration in products that included ex-voto paintings, crafts, and street murals.61 The paintings on the walls of pulquerias [fig. 39] —bars that served pulque, the fermented drink made from the maguey cactus— were a precedent Chariot and some of the other muralists found particularly appealing.62 Therefore, rather than recapitulating pre-Conquest

Mexican images, Massacre deconstructs Renaissance and Cubist geometries and reconfigures them in response to "popular" visual culture.

It is precisely because Massacre incorporates Cubism's use of flatness that the ambivalence is rendered on the picture plane rather than in the diorama-like illusion of depth. Compared to the self-containment of nineteenth-century academic realist painting,

Massacre's components suggest a complex unity in which the whole is more than just the sum of its parts. A similar image with multi-temporal complexity emerged later in

Rivera's History of Mexico (1929-1935) mural at the National Palace, in spite of the artist's attempt to construct a linear and redemptive narrative. Chariot, who connected these two works because of their common use of history as a subject, alluded to a causal link between them.63 But more important than a shared subject, both works reflect the heterogeneity of the social realm outside their cloistered sites. For Vasconcelos, the solution to this fragmentation was the mestizaje, or hybridity, of "The Cosmic Race," a process that had begun with the Conquest and that for him remained unfinished. Like the idealized city plan used during Spanish colonization of the Americas, it was a construct

Mexico," El Democrata, August 2,1923; qtd in Mexico en la obra de Jean Chariot (Mexico: Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, 1994), 48-49. 6lSee Chariot, "Popular Roots," in Chariot, The Mexican Mural Renaissance, 28—38. 62Ibid., 36-37. 63Ibid., 154. 100

that attempted to supersede differences on the ground.64 In Massacre there is no suggestion that such differences can be overcome. Duran's text on the bottom of the mural reiterates that in Mexico social fragmentation has endured through time, a message the painting projects through both its content and its collage of formal elements. But in contrast to Vasconcelos, Chariot did not see acculturation as a worthy goal. Massacre depicts the undigestible complexity of a colonial heritage that certainly included hybridity, but also carried within it an unyielding indigenous difference, which Chariot celebrated.

A negative review of Massacre written by Renato Molina for the magazine El

Universal Ilustrado and a response to it by Chariot highlight how the mural's composition enacts an aesthetic rupture with important implications for its allegorical import. Molina was Rivera's friend and advocate, and Chariot saw Diego's hand in the tone and language of the article.65 Molina begins his text by decrying the prejudices of Europeans who would still see artists and intellectuals from the Americas as lesser and describes with disdain the "artistic and intellectual mediocrity" that would come as a "civilizing colonist," or worse, as a "conquistador."66 He leaves no doubt that the "immigrant" who arrives in this fashion as if in "land of the blind" is none other than "M. Chariot," to whom he also refers to as "el frances."67 Molina's principal criticisms revolve around the formal characteristics of the mural and its historical accuracy. What bothered Molina more than anything else was the representation of the Aztecs as passive victims of the

64Angel Rama, La ciudad letrada, 1-22. "Chariot, The Mexican Mural Renaissance, 186. "Renato Molina, "El 'fresco' de Chariot en la Escuela Preparatoria," El Universal Ilustrado, April 26, 1923,40. "Ibid. 101

Spanish onslaught, the "degraded" and "idiotic" features painted by Chariot depicting a people lacking "the healthy beauty, intelligence, and goodness" described by the early chroniclers of the Conquest.68 Molina also disliked the general composition of the mural and the rendering of details, such as the anachronistic armour and "carton-like" Aztec clothing capped with "ostrich feathers" that "did not exist" in Mexico.69

But Massacre is more than a simple attempt to represent a historical episode accurately in the manner of realistic nineteenth-century history paintings, whose details were painstaking reproductions of materials and objects portrayed in the work.70 In his unpublished response to Molina's criticisms Chariot states that a disregard for historical accuracy was a conscious choice, noting that "[t]he spectator, satiated by a display of archaeological knowledge, would not look further. I have purposely used anachronism as a hint to the onlooker that the spectacle witnessed is unreal, that it is the hieroglyph for a parallel happening on the intellectual plane."71 To avoid ambiguity Chariot attempted to emphasize sadness and fear in the indigenous figures on the left-hand side and a machine like inhumanity in the attacking Spaniards —a single mass, "a locomotive running full speed"— on the right-hand side.72 This dichotomy, wrote Chariot, was what he saw upon

""Ibid. 69Ibid. 70Which is how Latin American history painters of the last quarter of the nineteenth century (for example, the Uruguayan Juan Manuel Blanes and the Brazilian Pedro Americo) approached their task. Jonathan Crary discusses a similar obsession with detail in Gericault's process of constructing his Raft of Medusa. See Jonathan Crary, "Gericault, the Panorama, and Sites of Reality in the Early Nineteenth Century," Grey Room 9 (Autumn, 2002): 5-25; Roberto Amigo refers to this as tantamount to constructing a historical text to create a "temporal illusion" enhanced through accuracy of representation, Roberto Amigo, "Region y nacion: Juan Manuel Blanes en la Argentina," 60; Also see Liliana Ruth Bergstein Rosemberg, Pedro Americo e o olhar oitocentista. 71Jean Chariot, "Answer to Molina," translated by Jean Chariot; the text is undated but it was probably written shortly after Molina's review. http://libweb.hawaii.edU/libdept/charlotcoll/J_Charlot/johncharlot_appendices.html#APPENDIXII 72Ibid. 102

arriving in Mexico, where he found a confrontation between a "spirituality of the Indian races" and a materialism imported from Europe and the United States.73 The mural does not merely, or especially, seek to portray a historical incident, but rather attempts to foreshadow "the servile state of the Indian race" that would succeed the Conquest.74 The inclusion of the portraits, according to Chariot, refers to "the usual convention that was used by artists dealing with visions of symbolical presentations (e.g., the Apocalypse of

Amiens)."75 And indeed, Massacre is a vision or illumination in which the flattening of history is rendered on the picture plane by appropriating styles and conflating temporalities. With a surface opaque to the penetration of Renaissance perspective,

Chariot's mural enhances the theatricality of the viewer's space by acting as a mirror of the complex Mexico that exists outside the walls of the Preparatoria.

Yet for all its aspirations to being a medium for the masses, muralism produced objects that were mostly enclosed in official institutions. To reach a wider public the mural painters depended on newspapers and illustrated magazines, which competed for publicity, revenue and political clout by adopting the latest technologies of image reproduction in an effort to reach the widest possible audience.76 Magazines in particular were premised on a self-conscious but superficial heterogeneity that understood distraction as a sign of a modern sensibility.77 But they also provided a venue for artists

"Ibid. 74Ibid. 75Ibid. 76See, Julieta Ortiz Gaitan, Imageries del deseo, 40-59. 77 "...el ideal de esta revista es un ideal frivolo y modemo, donde las cosas trascendentales se ocultan bajo una agradable superficialidad (the ideal of this magazine is frivolous and modern, where things that are transcendental hide under an agreeable superficiality)." Carlos Noriega Hope, director of the magazine El Universal Ilustrado from 1920-1934; J.M. Gonzalez de Mendoza, "Carlos Noriega Hope y El Universal Ilustrado", in Carlos Noriega Hope (1896-1959) (Mexico: Institute Nacional de Bellas Artes/ Secretaria de Education Publica, Biblioteca de El Colegio de Mexico, 1959); qtd. Gaitan, Imagenes del deseo, 48. 103

and writers and published up-to-date information on visual culture through interviews, critical texts, exhibition reviews, and reproductions of artworks produced locally and internationally. The issue of El Universal Ilustrado that carried Molina's review of

Massacre included the article "The Day of Tut-ankh-amen" on the Egyptian pharaoh, whose tomb was discovered at the end of 1922, around the time Chariot was working on the mural; a review of a space travel film by Theo Rokenfeller, with stills of extraterrestrial landscapes and of the spaceship "Gigantic"; and it featured an article, translated from the New York Times Magazine, about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's interest in psychic phenomena.78 This conflation of cultures, styles, and temporalities is mirrored in the poetic epigraph at the beginning of this text. The poem, which is from another issue of El Universal Ilustrado, describes a panorama where work, fashion, typewriters,

Tutankhamen, and art follow one another like pictures on the pages of a magazine. It is a curious analogue not only to this type of illustrated magazine, but also to the fragmented juxtaposition of Chariot's Massacre, whose style, "between Egyptian and modern," created a strident and critically cosmopolitan image of Mexico's heterogeneity.

78"E1 'Gigantic' y su viaje cientifico por el universo", "El dia de Tut-ankh-amen", "Por el mundo del misterio: Arturo Conan Doyle y sus investigaciones psiquicas", El Universal Ilustrado, April 26, 1923; for an account of the entanglement of Egyptomania and modernism see Bridget Elliott, "Art Deco Worlds in a Tomb: Reanimating Egypt in Modern(ist) Visual Culture," South Central Review 25, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 114-135. 104

Chapter 4

The Projection of Memory and Duration: Figari's Painterly Pursuit of the Ideal

The Creole, who once formed the whole nation, now prefers to be one of many. So that there may be greater glories in this land, glories must be forgotten. The memory of them is almost an act of remorse, the reproach of things abandoned without the intercession of a goodbye. It is a memory which is rescued, as the Creole destiny requires, for the gallantry and perfection of its sacrifice. Figari is the pure temptation of this memory.'

Jorge Luis Borges (1930)

Don't forget, human, that you are a superior entity inside nature (Don Lazario)2

Historia Kiria, Pedro Figari (1930)

Although known today primarily as an artist, Pedro Figari (1861—1938) was a lawyer by training and did not begin to paint full-time until he was sixty years old.

Seeking to distance himself from his native Montevideo during a particularly difficult period in his life, Figari moved across the River Plate to Buenos Aires where he fraternized with the much younger members of the avant-garde. In 1925 Figari left for

Paris and did not return home to Uruguay until 1933, five years before his death.

Throughout the period that he worked as a full-time artist, Figari produced a veritable

'Jorge Luis Borges, "Figari," originally published in Buenos Aires in 1930, in Samuel Oliver, Pedro Figari (Coleccion "Artistas de America" no. 2; Ediciones de Arte Gaglianone, 1984), 9. 2Pedro Figari, Historia Kiria (Montevideo: Amesur, 1989), 26. 105

catalogue of memory-images of his homeland, each of them a discrete projection originating in the elaborate philosophical system he developed and modified throughout his life.

A son of Italians who found prosperity in Uruguay and a member of a rising bourgeois class, Figari was an example of how immigration had transformed Montevideo by the beginning of the twentieth century.3 Figari chose a career as a lawyer, but he was also active in intellectual and artistic circles. A member of the Montevideo Ateneo, Figari acted as its president from 1903 to 1909. Like its counterparts in other parts of the southern Americas, the Ateneo was conceived as a gathering place for intellectual and artistic discussions. Less formal meetings were also organized at the Figari household, where he and his wife Maria de Castro, both of whom were trained amateur painters, entertained local and international guests, thus pursuing a genteel involvement with arts and culture that was typical of their upper-middle-class milieu.

Despite his comfortable position, Figari was an advocate for social justice who pursued penal reform and the abolition of the death penalty. As Counsel for the Poor in

Criminal and Civil Justice, Figari had been mandated to defend corporal Enrique

Almeida in a highly publicized murder trial that lasted four years (1894-1898). The murder had been precipitated by political tensions between the ruling Colorado party and its nemesis the Blanco, or National party, and the victim was one Tomas Butler, a Blanco.

There was immediate and widespread suspicion of complicity by the police, who in an effort to deflect criticism used dubious testimony to arrest Almeida as the main suspect.4

'Raquel Pereda, Pedro Figari (Montevideo: Fundacion Banco de Boston, 1995), 2-12. 'Victor Luis Anastasia and Walter Rela, Figari, lucha continua (Montevideo: Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Uruguay; Academia Uruguaya de Letras; Libros Gussi, 1994), 9-16; Pereda, Pedro Figari, 18- 106

For Figari, Almeida's trial highlighted the Uruguayan legal system's bias towards social privilege rather than justice. It was a procedure whose overtones of political malfeasance echoed the contemporaneous Dreyfus affair in France. Not only did Figari compare their similar miscarriage of justice, he also decried the general interest given to the French situation across the Atlantic even as the drawn-out legal proceedings he was involved in languished in obscurity.5 In spite the odds confronting the accused, Figari was able to attain a not-guilty verdict, but the trial reinforced his view that the legal and educational institutions in Uruguay urgently needed reform.

Figari's social views were representative of the Battlist reform, named for Jose

Battle y Ordonez (1856-1929), two-time president of Uruguay and the leading political figure in the early decades of the twentieth century. As Francisco Panizza has suggested,

Batlle's institutionalization of democratic politics coincided with Uruguay's "early modernization."6 As was the case in other parts of Latin America, Uruguay was ruled by a tight knit group of oligarchies throughout the nineteenth century.7 But in contrast to its neighboring Argentina, Uruguay had not achieved political stability. The elites in the cities and the caudillos, or populist leaders of the countryside, were in constant conflict, and in the early twentieth century an increasingly active working class movement added to the social tensions.8 Institutionalization of democratic liberalism was therefore an important project for a rising middle class that sought to gain political legitimacy and

19. 'Anastasia and Rela, Figari, lucha continua, 23-24. 'See Francisco Panizza, "Late Institutionalisation and Early Modernisation: The Emergence of Uruguay's Liberal Democratic Political Order," Journal of Latin American Studies 29, no. 3 (October 1, 1997): 667-691. 'Ibid., 669. 8Ibid„ 669-670. 107

defuse social unrest. Batlle sought to claim control of the Bianco-dominated countryside

and a civil war ensued; when it was all over, Batlle was able to assert his authority and

implement the institutional measures that made Uruguay the first welfare state in the

southern Americas.9

Figari and Educational Reform

Figari was for a time a Colorado member of the legislature, where he introduced

bills in 1900 and 1903 that proposed the establishment of an Academy of Fine Arts (the

institution would not be created until four decades later). Figari proposed that an

Academy of Fine Arts would not be limited to creating "great painting and sculpture,"

but would also stimulate crafts, graphic design, and other applied arts that would benefit

local industry.10 He also argued repeatedly for the modernization of the National School

of Arts and Crafts (Escuela Nacional de Artes y Oficios).11 The School had been created

in the late nineteenth century as a correctional institution, but Figari and others sought to

transform it into a truly educational establishment. Appointed director of the School in

1915, Figari attempted to apply some of his social and aesthetic ideals in a controlled

environment, an experiment that ultimately did not achieve what Figari had sought and

whose failure led to his resignation in 1917.12

"Ibid., l0Pedro Figari, "Discurso sobre creacion de una Escuela de Bellas Artes," in Pedro Figari, Education y arte. (Montevideo: Biblioteca Artigas, Coleccion de Clasicos Uruguayos, vol. 81, 1965), 6-7; 10-15. "Anastasia and Rela, Figari, lucha continua, 41-46. l2See "Discurso sobre la creacion de una Escuela de Bellas Artes" (1900), "Informe sobre creacion de una Escuela de Bellas Artes" (1903), "Reorganizacion de la Escuela Nacional de Artes y Oficios. Proyecto de programa y reglamento superior general para la transformacion de la Escuela Nacional de Artes y Oficios en 'Escuela Publica de Arte Industrial'" (1910), in Pedro Figari, Education y arte. (Montevideo: Biblioteca Artigas, Coleccion de Clasicos Uruguayos, vol. 81, 1965), 3-9; 10-15; 16-57. 108

Many of Figari's reforms at the School attempted to promote local crafts and incorporate them into industrial production. Inspired in part by the Arts and Crafts movement, and conscious of John Ruskin's and William Morris's philosophy, Figari suggested that arts and crafts were integral parts of the collective well-being and were valuable beyond the narrow confines within which they had commonly been understood.

Aware that in an ever-expanding global market the choice for Uruguayans was to

"industrialize, or they industrialize us," Figari sought to keep local control of the process rather than abdicate it to foreign capital.13 He was confident about the creative potential of the Uruguayan population, extolling that "[we] must have great faith in the aptitude for work of our race," as he phrased it in the discourse of the time.14 Figari also tried to stimulate the students' interest in regional culture and on one occasion organized a trip to the Museum of La Plata in Argentina to examine indigenous artifacts so that students would incorporate local motifs into the objects produced at the School.15

Figari's defense of local arts and crafts against the encroachment of global industry reflected the turn-of-the-century Latin Americanist strain that feared a "neo- colonial" continental surrender to imported goods and culture. The Uruguayan Jose

Enrique Rodo had suggested just such a critique in Ariel (1900), a book in which characters from Shakespeare's The Tempest were used as allegories of a cultural struggle:

Ariel was used to signify the southern Americas as a "spiritual" force and Caliban to

"Pedro Figari, "Industrialization de la America Latina —Autonomia y Regionalismo," in Pedro Figari, Education y arte, 188. 14"Debemos tener gran confianza en las aptitudes de nuestra raza para trabajar." Figari, Education y arte, 87. ''Gabriel PeluflFo Linari, "Las instituciones artisticas y la renovacion simbolica en el Uruguay de los veinte," in Los veinte: elproyecto uruguayo. Artey diseno de un imaginario, 1916-1934 (Montevideo: Museo Municipal de Bellas Artes Juan Manuel Blanes, 1999), 40-41. 109

embody the United States as its ostensibly "materialist" adversary.16 By suggesting a binary relation between the north and south of the American continent, Arielism, as the strain of thought that developed from Rodo's text came to be called, became an important ingredient of what I have been calling a Latin American exceptionalism. Figari was

Rodo's contemporary and shared his concern to preserve the cultural autonomy of the southern Americas, but unlike Rodo, Figari saw the United States as an example Uruguay could learn from in order to modernize its industry, its educational system, and ultimately its workforce. Yet Rodo's writing, like that of fellow idealists such as Vasconcelos, expresses an aristocratic notion of the intellectual who fears uncontrolled immigration and the masses, even as he suggests that democracy, although still a developing project, was foundational for the Latin American nations.17

Figari's Philosophy

Figari's ideas were constantly revised in many texts throughout his life, but his philosophical system was most fully articulated in Arte, estetica, ideal (1912). In this

l6Shakespeare's The Tempest takes place on a fictional island on which the protagonists are shipwrecked. Much has been written about The Tempest as a play about colonialism. Caliban's name itself is an anagram for cannibal, which has persistently been associated with the Americas since the Europeans first arrived on the continent, and Shakespeare's play was also probably indebted to Montaigne's essay "On Cannibals." The antropofagia movement in Brazil would subvert the image of the cannibal by making the taboo into a totem, as Oswald de Andrade phrased it in his "Manifiesto Antropofago"(1928). In the 1970s the Cuban poet and intellectual Roberto Fernandez Retamar would also invert Rodo's duality by suggesting the oppressed and tortured Caliban was the more appropriate emblem for the southern Americas. See Deborah Willis, "Shakespeare's Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism," Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 29, no. 2 (April, 1989): 277-289; Barbara Fuchs, "Conquering Islands: Contextualizing The Tempest," Shakespeare Quarterly 48, no. 1 (April, 1997): 45-62; Roberto Fernandez Retamar, "Caliban: una pregunta," in Roberto Fernandez Retamar, Todo Caliban (Buenos Aires: Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales, 2006), 19-81. l7Jose Rodo, ArielyProteo Selecto (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacuho, 1993), 30-40. Also see Leslie Bethell, Ideas and Ideologies in Twentieth Century Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 180. 110

book Figari expanded on his idea of unity across matter, what Arturo Ardao described as a "monism or biological unicism in which Life constitutes the principle that gives form to matter and energy."18 Like other so-called vitalist theories, or theories of Life, Figari's philosophy was a response to the Darwinian theory of evolution and a delayed

"counterattack" on a Cartesian philosophical lineage from which "life" had been effaced as a concern.19 This vision reflected a general trend in the philosophy of the early twentieth century exemplified in the work of people such as Alfred North Whitehead,

Felix Le Dantec, and Henri Bergson, whom Figari had read and responded to.20 Figari's own position was somewhere between those of Le Dantec and Bergson: the former proposed a mechanistic, materially based conception of matter, while the latter suggested a metaphysical foundation for life, the elan vital.21 Although strongly rooted in a positivistic materialism, Figari nonetheless incorporated his own metaphysics by associating Life with matter, both organic and inorganic. It is a view that to some extent shares notions of complexity and self-organization in later theories such as those of

Bertalanffy and Prigogine.22

Influenced by evolutionary theory, Figari construed "the Ideal" as an innate human drive to improve individual and communal existence.23 This Utopian notion informed his conception of art as an integrated component of education, a view shared by

18See Rama, La aventura intelectual de Pedro Figari, 13-14; Arturo Ardao, "Prefacio," in Pedro Figari, Arte, estetica, ideal, vol. 1 (Montevideo: Biblioteca Artigas, 1960), xiii. '"Arturo Ardao, "Figari entre Le Dantec y Bergson," Etapas de la inteligencia uruguaya (Montevideo: Universidad de la Republica, 1971), 322. 20Ibid. 2lSee Ibid., 315-327. 22Anastasia and Rela, Figari, lucha continua, 135. 23Pedro Figari, Arte, estetica, ideal, vol. 3, 6. Ill

fellow Uruguayan educational reformers, such as Jose Henriquez Figueira.24 Figari also

believed in the value of "popular common sense," an idea he had derived from Comtian

philosophy.25 This notion of a common sense was at the center of his "primitive"

paintings, but it appeared in his writings as well. His last work, His toria Kiria (1930),

was an elaborate account of an imaginary community, a text reminiscent of Thomas

More's Utopia (1516) that provided Figari with a vantage point from which to effect a

critique of Uruguayan society.

Although in broad terms a philosophical vitalist, we have seen that Figari did not

accept either Le Dantec's materialistic ontology or Bergson's intuitionism. Therefore,

Figari did not fall prey to either a scientism that conceived of culture as an

epiphenomenon, or to an idealism such as that of Rodo or Vasconcelos. For Figari there

was no separation between art and life, as there was for other vitalists such as the French

philosopher Henri Delacroix. True to his interest in biology and evolution and influenced

to some degree by Spencerian sociology, Figari understood culture as a necessary

evolutionary mechanism. The creative drive was a mechanism that helped human groups

survive and thrive in a determinate location, and art, as a manifestation of Life itself, was

a "universal medium for action."26

Figari criticized the unquestioning imitation of foreign models because he believed in an organic connection between culture and its environment. Local traditions of craft and tool making could not be ignored because these had been developed in situ to

24For a summary of Jose Henriquez Figueira's work and its relation to Figari's approach to education, see Anastasi'a and Rela, Figari, lucha continua, 46-64. 25Rama, La aventura intelectual de Pedro Figari, 16. 26Arturo Ardao, "Figari y sus prologuistas: Delacroix y Roustan," Etapas de la inteligencia uruguaya, 351-352. 112

deal with specific problems; the "fine arts" were only an element in this broader set of embodied solutions suited to their time and place:

From the caveman who climbed a tree to pick a fruit, to the refinements of Vatel

and his colleagues; from the loincloth to the most enviable 'toilettes'; from the

rough amphora to the metallic reflections and the beauty of the ceramic of Sevres,

Copenhagen, Meissen; from the hut to the palace or the Gothic cathedral, with its

well-proportioned pointed arch; from the obsidian arrow to the most powerful

cannon; from the dugout to the magnificent 'steamer,' and from the canoe to the

'dreadnought'; from the clumsy, rigid, silhouette, to the canvases by Titian,

Velazquez, and Rembrandt, or the Impressionist audacities; from the shapeless

idol to the Egyptian statues rendered according to Langes's laws of frontality, to

the 'Penseur' by Rodin; from the babble of words used to communicate coarse

emotions, to the clear-cut phrase, into which are poured the most intense and

audacious concepts of thought; from the gruesome prehistoric trepanations with

obsidian flints, to the most extraordinary surgical procedures of our own time;

from the fetish meant to propitiate unknown natural agents, to the work of the

mechanical genius who discovers the laws of movement and equilibrium, and to

the unbelievable feat of the cytologist who, one could say, insinuates himself

through the capillaries to excavate the mysteries of the infinitely small, and to go

back to the source of life, there is only one and the same essential resource with

no more than simple developments. There are no fundamental differences: they

are simply degrees of evolution.27

27"Desde que el hombre de las cavernas trep6 a un arbol para coger un fruto, hasta los refinamientos 113

There is much in this passage that is worthy of scrutiny, but I want to draw attention to the series of juxtapositions that Figari uses to create a distinction between technology and and human creativity per se. Although Figari believed in a definite evolutionary unfolding of human capacity in response to the demands of living in the world, he stressed the value of solutions applied at other times to similar problems. Figari, however, also proposed a notion of cultural evolution that appears quite clearly in the passage above. Culture, in its broadest sense, is that "essential resource" that is in a continual process of transformation and adaptation to specific surroundings. Figari did not advocate for a new beginning with an "erasure" of tradition. Rather, a return to origins —to the eddy in the stream of becoming, in Benjamin's words— was a necessary reflexive act to maintain culture connected to its local roots.28 The idea that cultural adaptation involves both preservation and transformation will have important consequences for how Figari's paintings will be discussed below.

de Vatel y sus colegas; desde el taparrabo hasta las "toilettes" mas envidiadas; desde el anfora tosca hasta la ceramica de reflejos metalicos y los primores de Sevres, de Copenhague, de Meissen; desde la choza al palacio o a la catedral gotica, de esbelta ojiva; desde la flecha de silex hasta los cafiones mas poderosos; desde la piragua al magnifico "steamer", y de la canoa al "dreadnougth"; desde la torpe silueta, rigida, hasta las telas del Tiziano, de Velazquez, de Rembrandt, o las audacias impresionistas; desde el idolo informe hasta las esculturas egipcias sometidas a la ley de la frontalidad de Langes, y de ahi a la Victoria de Samotracia y al "Penseur" de Rodin; desde las palabras balbuceadas para comunicar emociones groseras hasta la frase nitida, en que se vierten los conceptos mas intensos y audaces del pensamiento; desde las terribles trepanaciones prehistoricas, hechas por raspaje con escamas de silex, hasta las mas prodigiosas intervenciones quirurgicas de nuestros dias; desde el fetiche que habia de propiciar a los agentes naturales desconocidos, hasta la obra del genio mecanico que descubre las leyes del movimiento y del equilibrio, y la inveroshnil proeza del citologo que se insinua por vias capilares, diria, para escudrinar los misterios de lo infinitamente pequeno, y para remontarse hasta las fuentes de la vida, no hay mas que simples desarrollos de un mismo recurso esencial. No hay diferencias fundamentals: son simplemente grados en la evolucidn." Pedro Figari, Arte, estetica, ideal, vol. 1, 22-23. 28Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 45-46. 114

Figari's Paintings

Figari's trip to Buenos Aires ended a phase in his life that was filled with disillusionment and defeat. In addition to a troubled tenure at the School of Arts and

Crafts, Figari had had to contend with several personal crises: he had distanced himself from his brother over financial matters; his daughter had died in 1918; and he had separated from his wife shortly after their daughter's death. It was during this period of reversals that Figari began to paint in earnest. The move to Buenos Aires distanced him from the painful circumstances that had surrounded him in Montevideo, but it also permitted him to pursue painting full-time with a certain degree of anonymity. Figari's stay in Argentina was nevertheless relatively brief, as he left for Paris in 1925. Most of his prolific output was created in the French capital at a double remove: through the spatial separation of a voluntary exile, and through the temporal distance of memory.

Figari's canvases are afterimages of the philosophical concerns that pervade all of his writings, which is why Rama characterized Figari's apprenticeship as "essentially ideological."29 The style and the themes he explored varied little, and one can see the language of his mature painting emerges almost fully formed in the early 1920s. This stylistic uniformity tempts one to reductively classify his work into discrete themes that can obscure the philosophical unity that underlies his paintings.30 Concentrating on specific categories of his work to the exclusion of others can also conceal what I suggest is a productive tension that emerges from his work as a whole.

Art was for Figari a medium through which to distill the foundations of human

29Angel Rama, La aventura intelectual de Figari, 12. 30Peluffo Linari, "La construction de una leyenda rioplatense," 14. 115

action that had been obscured by the increasing entropy of modernity. Gabriel Peluffo

Linari suggests that this foundational search emerges in Figari's artwork in the depictions

of "psychological archetypes and cultural conducts of past communities —real or

imagined" through which the artist reflected on a social "loss of direction," and whose

corrective was a modernity grounded in the determinate cultural geography of the

Americas.31 A return to a more fundamental relationship with Life was an important

aspect of his vitalist thought, and therefore his interest in the primitive was also a search

for the origins of the essential attribute of being human and an archaeological

examination of the virtues of "simplicity."32 Peluffo Linari seems to agree with art critic

Marta Traba's assessment that Figari's painting is "unequivocally distant from

primitivism," yet it is difficult to see how Figari's conception of the primitive is

substantially different than that of European artists who looked to peripheral cultures for

an authentic simplicity to offset the complexity of their own contemporary societies33

More suggestive is Peluffo Linari's assertion that Figari's anthropological gaze was

defined by a duality: Figari validated marginal cultures as intrinsic elements of

Uruguayan national identity by incorporating them into his paintings; yet Figari's gaze was still imbued with a certain amount of paternalism and nostalgia.34 Nevertheless, the anthropological gaze that Figari cast on his imagined subjects was distributed equally across his painted scenes of gaucho life, of privileged criollo interiors, and of Afro-

Uruguayan culture. Nostalgia is an essential part of his work inasmuch as it constitutes a

31Peluffo Linari, "La construccion de una leyenda 'rioplatina'," 14-15. "Ibid., 16; Rama, La aventura intelectual de Pedro Figari, 25-29. "Peluffo Linari, "La construccion de una leyenda 'rioplatina'," 22. "Ibid., 21. 116

facet of Utopian "no-place" from which to effect social critique, a strategy that would inform the fictional nation described in his book Historia Kiria.

The idea of criollismo as the exaltation of local roots has, in the Southern Cone, strong associations with the gaucho culture of the rural plains. Nevertheless, the term criollo also implies a causal connection to the land that transcends the gaucho. We have already seen that the term criollo was a legacy from the colonial period, when it had been used to distinguish between those who had been born in the Americas and those who had been born in Spain. In time, criollo came to denote the home-grown in many parts of the

Americas, and in the genre of early twentieth-century literature known as criollismo. the character of the national —and in some senses also the Latin American— was explored.35

The gaucho had been for Sarmiento a symbol of backwardness, a cultural stumbling block on the country's path to progress. But by the end of the nineteenth century, the gaucho had been appropriated as a colourful exemplar of local authenticity.

Gaucho scenes are one of the recurring themes explored by Figari, who also used the term more broadly to define a state of mind or attitude rather than a sociological group. In

1924 Figari wrote a short, exhortatory article for a Uruguayan magazine in which he described how he understood the gaucho:

Some initiatives and some efforts, sustained by "the gaucho," whether rural or

urban —for the one is as gaucho to me as the other as long they have faith in the

aptitudes of the American race and consider it as superior as any other, and as long

as they profess a love for their surroundings, and gratitude to their forbears—

"Maria Cristina Campos Fuentes, "En el pais de la parodia: el criollismo de Addn Buneosayres de Marechal," Chasqui 35, no. 2 (November 2006): 58. 117

some persevering champions of tradition, who, inorganically, and therefore

against greater obstacles, have been struggling to maintain the traces of the criollo

legend, will permit us to reconstruct the poem of America, and to place on the

depth of that vein our civilization, which, confronted by the lessons of the world's

experience, and taking the greatest advantage from it, will reach all the shining

glory, and all the honours and all the efficiencies, without ever stopping from

being ours.36

Figari's statement suggests a double levelling. On the one hand, the city and the

countryside are seen as complementary rather than as antagonistic. In contrast to

Sarmiento, for whom the city would civilize the barbarism of the countryside, Figari

considered both regions as co-constitutive of national culture. Construing the values of

one region as central and other as peripheral replicates, on a local scale, the cultural

hierarchy that artists such as Figari and his contemporaries rejected at the international

level. Figari's "call to arms" is, in a sense, the proclamation of the validity of local culture

and hybridity as the path to take not only in Uruguay but also in the rest of the continent.

By suggesting the validity —or, in Figari's cultural evolutionary thinking, the necessity—

of incorporating criollo traditions into cultural modernism and the modernizing project for the southern Americas, he suggests that countries should pursue a cultural and

36"Algunas iniciativas y algunos esfuerzos, sostenidos por "el gaucho" ya sea rural o urbano -pues para mi es tan gaucho el uno como el otro, siempre que tengan fe en las aptitudes de la raza americana y la consideren tan superior como la que m&s, y siempre que profesen cariiio a su ambiente, y gratitud a sus proceres- algunos empeftosos adalides de la tradicion, que, inorganicamente, y, por lo mismo, con mayores obstaculos, han venido bregando por mantener los rastros de la leyenda criolla, nos permitiran reconstruir al poema de America, y asentar sobre lo hondo de esa veta la civilization nuestra, la cual, frente a las ensenanzas de la experiencia mundial, y por mas y mejor que se aproveche de ellas, podra alcanzar todos los brillos, y todos los honores y eficiencias, sin dejar de ser la nuestra." Pedro Figari, "Autonomia regional," in Pedro Figari, Education y arte, 17. 118

technical transculturation best adapted to local needs. On the other hand, by suggesting that criollo culture is "at least as good as any other," and by embracing tradition as a reflexive strategy that ensures change is adapted to local necessities, Figari suggests, however tentatively, that marginal groups created cultural conditions appropriate to their locales in the Americas. The passage cited above remains ambiguous, since the manifesto-like tone cannot conceal the fact that criollo and "American race" are only suggested but not defined, although they strongly imply cultural categories, rather than racial ones.

The Arrival (n.d.) [fig. 40] and Pericon (n.d.) [fig. 41] are country scenes in

Uruguay that are summarily sketched, in contrast to genre scenes in which the realism of the representation lends credibility and authenticity to the scene, as seen, for example, in

Juan Manuel Blanes's The Two Roads [fig. 16]. It is a style that connects Figari's painted work with the almost forensic style of the sketches he produced during the Almeida trial

[fig. 42]. Indeed, his first impulse on turning to painting in the second decade of the twentieth century was to "document" scenes, but Figari soon decided that "suggestive" means rather than "descriptive" ones were better suited for capturing the "true character" of the Uruguayan scenes he was trying to portray.37 His curious paintings of rocks, such as Stupidity (1918-1919) [fig. 43] and Greed (1918-1919) [fig. 44], were conceived as exercises to practice such art of pictorial suggestion, a synthesis of sign and emotion that he would call a "technique-language."38 The painterly "blur" of images that seem half-

"Written notes by Figari concerning his painting, qtd in Anastasia and Rela, Figari, lucha continua, 240. 38For Figari's account of his rock paintings, see Ibid., 240; "...Logre hacerme una tecnica mia, original, una tecnica-lenguaje...", fragment of a letter to Zum Felde, qtd. in Peluffo Linari, "La construccion de una leyenda 'rioplatina'," Pedro Figari: mitoy memoria rioplatenses/Pedro Figari: Rio de la Plata Myth and 119

glimpsed, and Figari's method of painting from memory endow his work with an evocative, dream-like quality. Chimes for Prayer [fig. 45] captures this element of

Figari's painting in a manner that elicits Jorge Luis Borges's early book of poems Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923). In that book, Borges described his encounter with the rapidly changing Argentinian capital that had supplanted the imagined city of his youth. Figari, on the other hand, takes upon the role of preserving the criollo legend, as described in the passage above, by attempting to freeze flashes of memory in his paintings.

This self-appointed project of constructing a visual poem of memory images is emblematic of Figari's work produced in the 1920s, including his large series of African-

Uruguayan scenes. The two Candombe (n.d.) [fig. 46,47] paintings portray a form of music and dance that has become a national symbol in modern-day Uruguay, but whose origins lie in the development and evolution of African-Uruguayan culture. Candombe is one of a series of musical styles derived from African rhythms brought over by slaves and introduced into Uruguay via Brazil, eventually becoming the foundation of the elaborate carnaval that was performed around Christmas.39 African-Uruguayan communities were divided into several distinct groups that in Montevideo were called

"nations."40 On January 6 —the Day of Kings, as it is known in Latin America— the black communities of Montevideo performed a procession to meet the city functionaries, after which the candombe was performed. Although the black population of Uruguay was

Memory (Caracas: Fundacion Museo de Bellas Artes, 2000), 31; See also Pelufifo Linari's comments, Ibid., 33. 39Abril Trigo, "Candombe and the Reterritorialization of Culture," Callaloo 16, no. 3 (Summer, 1993): 717. ^George Reid Andrews, "Remembering Africa, Inventing Uruguay: Sociedades de Negros in the Montevideo Carnival, 1865-1930," Hispanic American Historical Review 87, no. 4 (November 2007): 695. 120

relatively small, candombe1s effect on nationalist discourse was large. By the end of the nineteenth century, candombe had become a de facto attribute of Uruguayan collective identity, particularly in Montevideo.41 Figari portrayals of candombe endow the cultural performance with a status that was equivalent to other Uruguayan cultural expressions he painted, such as the pericon of the gauchos or the "colonial" dances. One can argue that in this he is more sympathetic than many of his compatriots, including members of the black middle class who were attempting to assert their normalcy within national cultures by distancing themselves from the "primitive" displays Figari represented.42

Towards the Governor's House (n.d.) [fig. 48] shows a group of African-

Uruguayans enacting the Day of Kings procession, and Visiting the Governor (n.d.) [fig.

49] shows them in an interior waiting for an audience. The paintings are almost anthropologically descriptive representations of the yearly ritual, which was a performative, carnivalesque critique of the social order in Montevideo and was at its height in the 1880s when Figari witnessed it.

A painting such as African Nostalgia (n.d.) [fig. 50] alludes to a reconstitution of ritual and memory away from a homeland. The reference to an African nostalgia alludes to displacement and diaspora as inherently important aspects of candombe that cannot, and should not, be erased. This emphasis suggests not only a respect for Uruguayan black culture, but perhaps a certain identification with Figari's life in "exile" and way from

Uruguay.

Figari also depicted criollo scenes from the nineteenth century, such as In Society

4lSee Ibid., 693-726. 42See George Reid Andrews, Afro-Latin America (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004) 117-151. 121

(n.d.) [fig. 51], which with the different scenes seen above map out a distinct Uruguayan

cultural geography. Figari usually painted the different social groups in isolation,

although there are instances when several are included in the same painting, such as

Presentation (n.d.) [fig. 52], Uncertainty (n.d.) [fig. 53], and Criollo Dance (n.d.) [fig.

54]. In these three works the African-Uruguayans stand at the margins of the scene,

outside the social group that is the subject of each painting. They might be nostalgic

memory-images, but they also convey, albeit superficially, a distribution of power that is

generally absent when the groups inhabit separate works.

Some of Figari's more curious paintings are those from the so-called "troglodyte"

series, such as Maternity (n.d.) [fig. 55], Vigilance (n.d.) [fig. 56], and Textile Industry

(n.d.) [fig. 57] The landscape devoid of built structures depicts the state "closer to nature"

Figari wanted to emphasize, and resembles the setting depicted in his paintings of

indigenous peoples, such as Indians (n.d.) [fig. 58]. The depiction of the indigenous

people and their landscape resembles those of the troglodyte series and perhaps reflects

Figari's notion of cultural evolution evident in the quotation above in which he includes contrasts such as the "clumsy, rigid, silhouette," of pre-Historic art and "the canvases by

Titian, Velazquez, and Rembrandt."43 Depicted engaging in everyday activities, the troglodytes seem to suggest Figari's vision of knowing as action, and action as knowing.44

For Figari, the culture of the troglodytes is the most primitive and so the most transparent in its relationship to the environment. The troglodyte paintings are also studies of what he termed an "essential essence" that endures, making these images a pictorial archaeology

43Pedro Figari, Arte, estetica, ideal, 22-23. "Gabriel Pelufo Linari, Historia de la pintura en el Uruguay. El imaginario National-Regional (1830-1930): De Blanes a Figari, 6th ed. (Montevideo: Ediciones de la Banda Oriental, 2009), 63. 122

of the present.The subject is distinct from those of his gaucho and African-Uruguayan

scenes, but Figari's technique creates continuity among these themes, suggesting an

ambiguous pictorial equivalence that is manifested through the facture of the painting

itself.

The flatness of Figari's painting style homogenizes his different themes and

compresses different temporalities. It is as if his figures inhabited a similar type of time

and space and the continuity of technique reiterated their persistence in collective

memory. The notion flatness in Figari's paintings was was addressed by several critics of

the time, who differed on whether this was a positive or negative aspect of his paintings.45

For Pablo Rojas Paz, Figari's technique emulated memory by flattening time, and

permitted viewers to identify emotively and unconsciously to an imagined collective

culture.46 By contrast, Alfredo Chiabra Acosta, an art critic better known as Atalaya, was

troubled by the possibility that the flatness of Figari's images erased the differences

between social groups and created a false sense of familiarity with the types being

portrayed.47 Such disparate readings are not surprising and suggest that, contrary to

Atalaya's assessment and in contrast to the life-like renderings of nineteenth-century

realist paintings, Figari's images are fugitive, defamiliarized portrayals of absent subjects.

Here, Borges's reading of Figari's work as "a pure temptation of a memory" that has been sacrificed so that the criollo (Creole) can be one among many captures both the inherent nostalgia in Figari's subjective vision and the complexity of the context in which it is

45Harper Montgomery, "Rebellious Conformists: Exhibiting Avant-Garde Art in Mexico City and Buenos Aires, 1920-1927," PhD diss. (The University of Chicago, 2010), 104-110. "Ibid., 108-110. 47Ibid., 105. 123

produced.

Form and Content in Figari's Work

The Uruguayan artist Luis Camnitzer has suggested that Figari was anti- colonialist in his thought, but thoroughly Europeanized in his painting. In Camnitzer's words, Figari is "a paradigm of the colonized artist who produces colonized work in spite of his own insights."48 Figari's artistic failure, suggests Camnitzer, was to accept a

"comfortable" stance rather than to pursue "more radical ruptures with the past."49 It does indeed seem curious that Figari, who considered himself an up-to-date thinker and was interested in contemporary life, should have adopted a style of painting resembling the post-Impressionism of Pierre Bonnard (1867-1946), who recognized a kindred vision in the Uruguayan artist's painting.50 Angel Rama notes that Figari was aware of contemporary art developments such as Cubism, which he rejected not because of its

"anti-realism," but because Cubist geometric deconstruction undercut the "dream-like invocation" Figari understood as central to the aesthetic experience.51 Implicit in

Camnitzer's critique, however, is a too rigid conception of rupture informed by an idealized avant-gardism. The dichotomy colonial/anti-colonial is uncomfortably analogous to that of modernist/non-modernist that has in the past painted a picture in which aesthetic revolutions occur at the centre and are merely imitated at the peripheries.

Camnitzer's construal of artistic rupture is also somewhat anachronistic, because in the

48Luis Camnitzer, "Pedro Figari," in Luis Camnitzer, On Art, Artists, Latin America, and Other Utopias (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), 139. 49Ibid. 50Ibid., 139-140. 51 Ibid. 124

early 1920s Figari's artworks broke with formal and thematic conventions that many of

his Uruguayan contemporaries expected from art.

That Camnitzer sees a separation between theory and practice in Figari's art is also

due in part to the latter's position as a liminal figure who straddles two generations.

Figari's viewpoint, as I have stated earlier, is grounded in his positivist upbringing, to

which he brought a metaphysical component, as Ardao suggested. Peluffo Linari is right

in stating that Figari's painting cannot be studied in isolation from all his other

endeavours, and particularly from his philosophy, for all his projects more or less cohere

as philosophical, regionalist, and aesthetic ideas.52 Figari had sought to promote an

"autochthonous consciousness" that would liberate the southern Americas from living a

"reflected, almost ephemeral life" in the image of European civilization.53 Although

Figari's paintings do not constitute a revolutionary aesthetics, they nonetheless suggest an

artistic transculturation, albeit, one heavily weighted by notions of evolutionary

development.

Camnitzer also described Figari as a type of "naif' painter, which was a recurring

description used by art critics who wrote about his work in the 1920s.54 Nevertheless,

Figari's use of what looks like a naif aesthetic was a conscious choice, as noted above, to

construct a type of visual writing that was evocative, and that was based on the simplified

vocabulary and abstracted forms of what he called his technique-language. Paintings

Figari produced earlier in his life, such as The Old Market (1890) [fig. 59], show that

52Peluffo Linari, "La construccion de una leyenda rioplatense," 14. "Pedro Figari, "Autonomia Regional," 199-201. "Camnitzer, "Pedro Figari," 136; For the reception of Figari's work, see Harper Montgomery, "Rebellious Conformists," 100-114. 125

Figari was capable of more detailed and "realistic" renderings.

Other Uruguayan artists from Figari's time had also begun to explore more

abstract shapes on the canvas, initiating what Peluffo Linari has termed "pianist

painting," which, in contradistinction to more realistic approaches, emphasized the

flattening and idealization of natural forms.55 Largo Hill (LaAguada) (1918) [fig. 60] by

Jose Cuneo (1887-1977) exemplifies the geometric abstraction that characterized this

type of pianist work. They are renderings that convey the "look" of reality but that do not

strive for a photographic realism. According to Peluffo Linari, revisions to the Teseo

magazine's layout [fig. 61] demonstrate the shift to this new geometric aesthetic in

Uruguay, and to the new-found graphic possibilities of woodcut and printmaking.56

Figari's paintings show a similar emphasis of flatness and abstraction, but this is a not

merely formalist choice, as the term "planism" seems to suggest Rather, the images that

Figari "projects" onto the painted surface seem to deny their illusory quality so as to highlight their epistemological import.

That Figari understood his painting —and art more generally— as a reflective tool for knowledge in the southern Americas is seen by his reviews of children's drawings from Mexico shown at the Amigos del Arte. In a lecture delivered in Buenos Aires in

1925 and later published with the title "Towards the Best Art of the Americas," Figari stated:

The paintings exhibited at the Amigos del Arte inform us that there are already in

that country hundreds of thousands of children that have a new language,

"PelufiFo Linari, "Las instituciones artisticas y la renovacion simbolica en el Uruguay de los veinte," 42. "Ibid., 45. 126

extensive, and which they own, in comparison to the muteness of our ours, and

who are getting ready to honour the Americanizing task; who knows how many

other initiatives are fermenting even now in these immense territories of

Americas. For now there is much interest to know all this, so as to not fall behind,

which would be more deplorable than ever after having attributed ourselves such

an eminent role in the world developments of the future.57

This view was in keeping not only with his view of the arts, but also with the idea of education Figari had promoted since he was a young lawyer. The children's drawings had been produced using the Best Maugard drawing method [fig. 37], and would have epitomized for Figari the success of an educational system that sought to incorporate a local, traditional visual culture to achieve large-scale visual literacy.

The Architect'. A Synthesis

Figari brought together all the themes he explored during his life in a book from

1928 that he titled The Architect, and that Figari described as a "poetic essay." The title is a tribute to his son Juan Carlos, who had died the year before, but it is also an allusion to a cosmic order. Comprised of text and drawings, The Architect constructs a narrative of human cultural evolution in which text and image [fig. 62] work together to enact a

"language-technique" that synthesizes his life's work. The book is built around a

S7"Las pinturas expuestas en Amigos del Arte nos informan de que hay ya en aquel pais cientos de miles de nifios que tienen un nuevo lenguaje, amplio, propio, frente al mutismo de los nuestros, y que se preparan para hacer honor a la tarea americanizadora; quien sabe cuantas otras iniciativas fermentan ya en estos territorios inmensos de America. Por de pronto hay sumo interns en conocer a fondo todo esto, hasta para no quedar rezagados, lo cual seria mas que nunca deplorable despues de habernos atribuido un papel tan eminente en los desarrollos mundiales del futuro," Pedro Figari, "Hacia el mejor arte de America," in Pedro Figari, Education y arte, 218-219. 127

chronological development of images, from "primitive" human episodes to scenes from

Figari's recent past, and includes all the types that appear in his paintings. It is, in short, an excavation of a Uruguayan "national" culture and of the varied cultures that formed it.

The Architect embodies what Flusser termed the time and space of the image, which are constructed through repetition and in which all elements are mutually significant.58 Its structure is an analogue to Figari's painted work as a whole, in which the ghostlike images of Uruguay deny their phantasmic origin by foregrounding the materiality of their painterly inception. Each artwork is part of a larger image in which each painting signifies every other in the series. This is especially apparent when several of his paintings are seen together, for then their seriality is made visually evident, and a spectator can extrapolate a continuity from determinate images to the whole of his oeuvre.

58Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, 8-9. 128

Chapter 5

A Negative Phantasmagoria in the River Plate: Xul Solar and a Neocriollo Image for the Americas

Xul was a painter of his visions. People admit visionaries from other latitudes and other times, but if visionaries are too close, people deny them.1

Jorge Luis Borges (1963)

Sometime one thinks, while turning on the electrical switch, of the fright felt by the shadows, and we would like to warn them so that they would have time to crouch down in the corners. And sometimes the crosses of the telephone poles, above the houses, have something sinister and one would like to move close to the wall, like a cat or a thief.2

Oliverio Girondo, "Nocturno," (1921)

Xul Solar (1887-1963) was a thinker of totalities whose production covered a wide range of interests: artist, musician, linguist, and mystic are all facets of his personality that are intertwined with and make their way into the delicately crafted watercolours that were his medium of choice. Xul had a catholic inquisitiveness that

"'Xul fue pintor de sus visiones. La gente admite visionarios de otras latitudes y de otras epocas, pero si estan muy cerca, los niega." From a prologue to the exhibition "Homage to Xul Solar," Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires, 1963, Jorge Luis Borges, "Textos sobre Xul Solar, 1949-1968," in Jorge Lopez Anaya, Xul Solar: una Utopia espiritualista (Buenos Aires: Fundacion Pan Klub, 2002), 197. 2"A veces se piensa, al dar vuelta la Have de la electricidad, en el espanto que sentiran las sombras, y quisieramos avisarles para que tuvieran tiempo de acurrucarse en los rincones. Y a veces las cruces de los postes telefonicos, sobre las azoteas, tienen algo de siniestro y uno quisiera rozarse a las paredes, como gato o como un ladron," Oliverio Girondo, "Nocturno," in Veinte poemas para ser leidos en el tranvia (Buenos Aires: Editorial Martin Fierro, 1925) 129

placed him at the centre of avant-garde investigations of culture in the 1920s. In an

interview, Xul described himself, in a language that he created and called neocriollo, as

catrolico: "I am decidedly 'catrolico,' he assured us —or 'astrological catholic'; although

the more exact version that he gave us was ca: Cabalistic, tro: astrological, li: liberal, co:

coistic or cooperator."3 Although his painting was in great part related to his interest in

occult knowledge, Xul considered himself a "realist" painter, as his friend Jorge Luis

Borges once remarked, because the paintings were direct transcriptions of his visions.4

Realism for Xul was not the representation of reality in three-dimensional space, a stance

he rejected in his art from the beginning, but rather a type of testimonial rendering of his

mystical experiences. Nevertheless, Xul was primarily a painter, and the picture plane of

his watercolours was a surface on which the image was stripped of the illusionism of

mimetic transcription in order to explore transcendence and the complexity of being-in-

the-world. This emphasis inverts the phantasmagoric tendency of the artwork by

disclosing, rather than concealing, its capacity to mediate a subjective experience.

Xul's interest in the occult developed against positivism's totalizing claims to a

true knowledge based on a discrete and homogenous "mathematical time" that contrasts

with our "inner, felt experience of time."5 His exploration of the artist's gaze as a source

3"iYo soy decididamente 'catrolico'! 'Catrolico' es un termino 'criol', de mi cosecha: designa al individuo simultaneamente catolico y astrologo," qtd. in Alejandro Xul Solar, Entrevistas, articulosy textos ineditos, ed. Patricia M. Artundo (Corregidor, 2005), 76; Svanascini quotes a more elaborate definition from another interview from the same period: '"Soy catrolico', aseguraba —o 'catolico astrol6gico'; aunque la version mas exacta que dio fue la de ca: cabalista, tra: astrologico, li: liberal, ca: caista o cooperador— qtd. in Osvaldo Svanascini, Xul Solar (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Culturales Argentinas, Ministerio de Education y Justicia, Direction General de Cultura, 1962), 36. 4"Xul me dijo que el era un pintor realista, era un pintor realista en el sentido de que lo que el pintaba no era una combination arbitraria de formas o de lineas, era lo que el habia visto en sus visiones." Jorge Luis Borges, qtd. in Jose Lopez Anaya, Xul Solar: Una Utopia espirtualista, 199. 5 Robert Mark Antliff, "Bergson and Cubism: A Reassessment." Art Journal 47, no. 4 (Winter 1988): 343. 130

of knowledge also coincided with a shift towards abstraction in modern art. Abstraction permitted Xul to recalibrate the function of his painting to complement his esoteric purposes, but although he experimented with abstract forms in his paintings, Xul never surrendered completely to abstraction, as Kazemir Malevich and Wassily Kandinsky had done. In spite of remaining figurative, his paintings inverted the artwork's phantasmagoric impulse because of a double move inherent in Xul's intention: the image was used to mediate his vision, an experience that for Xul was anchored in a "higher" reality; but this implied a withdrawal from the illusory transcription of a perceived reality.

A Criollo Modernity

Xul, whose name was Agustin Alejandro Schultz Solari, belonged to an

Argentinian family descended from German and Italian immigrants. He changed his name to Xul Solar during an extended stay in Europe, to which he had travelled in 1912 and where he remained for the next twelve years. The choice of words for his new name was typical of Xul's interest in language and symbolism: Xul and Solar were homophones for his German and Italian last names, but they also alluded to light (Xul as the inversion of lux) and to the sun, both of which are recurring symbols in his work.6

The journey to Europe brought Xul into contact with a broad spectrum of modern art being produced in Italy, Germany, and England. In Florence he was introduced to the

Futurists by another well-known Argentinian artist of his generation, Emilio Petorutti, who would become an important artistic ally when both returned to Argentina in the

'Mario H. Gradowczyk, Alejandro Xul Solar (Buenos Aires: Ediciones ALBA, 1996), 30. 131

1920s. There is evidence that Xul was acquainted with the work of the Omega

Workshops that were associated with the Bloomsbury group in London, since his abstract

drawings of the time closely resemble some of their patterns.7 Xul was also aware of Die

Brticke and read Wassily Kandinsky's On the Spiritual in Art (1911), but it is Paul Klee's

work that most closely resembles Xul's and that has elicited suggestions of affinity. It is

possible that the two artists met, since Xul lived in Munich for two years and enrolled at

the Miincher Kunstwerkstatte during the time that Klee was there.8 But although some of

their work looks similar, both artists were motivated by very different interests.9

During his time in Europe Xul also developed his growing interest in esoteric

epistemologies and met some of the major figures associated with the occult. On visits to

England Xul befriended Alistair Crowley, with whom he would correspond throughout

the years, and in Germany he attended some of Rudolph Steiner's lectures.10 Xul's interest

in the occult was symptomatic of a widespread fascination with spiritualism that was

evident throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a development that Webb

chronicled in his books The Occult Establishment (1976) and The Occult Underground

(1988). "The occult," suggested James Webb, "is the mirror image of society: an

inevitable mirror image," and however mystical Xul's universe seems to the viewer it is,

in its own way, a flash of this reflection."

7The Omega Workshops (1913-1919) was founded in London by Roger Fry and the Bloomsbury Group. Xul's knowledge of the Omega Workshops is mentioned by Patricia Artundo, in Patricia M. Artundo, "Papeles de trabajo. Introduce ion a una exposition retrospectiva de Xul Solar," in Xul Solar: visionesy revelaciones (Buenos Aires: Malba-Fundacidn Costantini; Sao Paulo: Pinacoteca do Estado de Sao Paulo, 2005), 23. 8Gradowczyk, Alejandro Xul Solar, 54. 9See Cintia Crista, "Nada menos que Klee y Xul: una rave para las esferas," Ramona 35 (Sept., 2003): 58-68. '"Patricia Artundo, "Papeles de trabajo," 23. "James Webb, The Occult Establishment, 10. 132

Webb's uses the metaphor of the mirror to describe the dialectic between rationalism and the occult, but a more apt metaphor would be the afterimage, which also alludes to an inversion but is more suggestive of the manner in which Xul's paintings are connected to the act of knowing. Afterimages are produced by the body, and according to

Jonathan Crary they were one of the major discoveries of the nineteenth century that led to an embodied theory of vision.12 They are "internal" images that contrast with the objectivity of vision represented by the camera obscura model of optics and are therefore in some way closer to Xul's conception of the "realism" of his paintings.13

The interest in esoteric knowledge makes Xul a modern-day mystic whose production is understood as a whole only if, as Patricia Artundo has argued, one "defines him as esoteric and occultist, and from 1924 an 'initiate'."14 Yet I agree with Beatriz Sarlo that one does not have to disregard "the significance of his work as the unfolding of a fantastic imagination" to find threads that link Xul's interests with those of other contemporary artists.15 In particular, Xul's work in the first half of the 1920s can also be understood as a response to the dramatic changes Buenos Aires was experiencing at the beginning of the twentieth century. His paintings therefore encapsulate not only his visions and revelations, but also the traces of heightened complexity that made the 1920s a period of openness and experimentation.

Like other major urban centres in the southern Americas, Buenos Aires grew rapidly at the beginning of the twentieth century. The modernization of the Argentinian

l2See Crary, Jonathan. "Techniques of the Observer," 3-35. l3Ibid. 14Patricia M. Artundo, "Papeles de trabajo," 21. "Beatriz Sarlo, "The Case of Xul Solar: Fantastic Invention and Cultural Nationality," in Art From Argentina, 1920-1994 (Oxford, UK: The Museum of Modern Art Oxford, 1994), 34. 133

capital brought into relief the promises of progress in terms of technological innovation and economic gain, but it also highlighted transformations that were changing the cultural profile of the city. In contrast to urban centres such as Mexico City, where the population grew because of migration from the countryside, Buenos Aires expanded mostly as a result of immigration from Europe. This influx of foreign labour became a central issue in polemics about the changing composition of the population, and by implication of the country's identity. We have seen that similar misgivings had been voiced by the criollo elites at the end of the nineteenth century, and that Blanes's Yellow Fever [fig. 17] depicting the outbreak of the disease in Buenos Aires's crowded immigrant neighbourhoods was a pictorial reflection of this anxiety. In the first decades of the twentieth century the situation was even more complex, since growing social tensions had led to increasing calls for reform and to greater militancy, particularly from workers and youth.16

Many self-proclaimed criollos were equally ambivalent about the change affecting

Buenos Aires and its culture. We have also seen that Borges's Fervor de Buenos Aires — whose cover was designed by his sister, the artists Norah Borges [fig. 63]— is filled with images that allude to the city as he remembered it (or imagined it) at the end of the nineteenth century, even as the poems also hesitantly embrace Buenos Aires's transmutation in the early twentieth century. Borges had begun his aesthetic vanguardism

l6A Student Reform Movement had erupted at the University in the city of Rosario, Argentina, and soon spread to Buenos Aires. Within the next few years the movement gained adherents in many other countries of Latin America. International congresses were organized where student delegates from different countries could meet each other. Communist parties in Latin America begin to in the late 1910s and early 1920s. See Richard J. Walter, "The Intellectual Background of the 1918 University Reform in Argentina," The Hispanic American Historical Review 49, no. 2 (May 1, 1969): 233-253; Rollie E.Poppino, International Communism in Latin America, 55-95. 134

as a member of ultraismo in Spain, a movement that sought aesthetic renovation of

literature, and whose founders emphasized a search for "the new" and rejected the

conventions of their predecessors.17 When Borges returned to Buenos Aires, he founded

an Argentinian version of ultraismo, which stimulated other avant-garde developments,

including the Martin Fierro group.

The martinfierristas, as the members of the group were known, derived their

name from the eponymous magazine they published in the 1920s. Illustrated magazines

had emerged in the United States and soon spread throughout the Americas. They were

emblematic of the expansion of visual culture caused by the modernization of print

media. The Martin Fierro magazine was one of many illustrated periodical that were

published in Argentina at the end of the nineteenth century, and its contributors included

some of the best-known Argentinian avant-garde artists and writers of the period. Their

"Martin Fierro Manifesto," written by Oliverio Girondo and published in the Martin

Fierro magazine in 1925, echoed the language Marinetti had used in his own "Futurist

Manifesto" from 1909. In contrast to the ominous telephone poles that appear in his

"Nocturno," in the manifesto Girondo had extolled the beauty of technology and

suggested that "a good Hispano-Suiza is a much more perfect WORK OF ART than an

armchair from the time of Louis XV.'"8 The contrast between the Hispano-Suiza

automobile and an arm chair is a clear allusion to Marinetti's assertion "that...a roaring

"Juan Manuel Bonet, "Baedeker del ultraismo," in El ultraismo y las artes plasticas (Valencia: IVAM, 1996), 10. 18"...un buen Hispano-Suiza es una OBRA DE ARTE muchisimo mas perfecta que una silla de manos de la epoca de Luis XV." Oliverio Girondo, "Manifiesto Martin Fierro," published in the Martin Fierro magazine no. 4, May 15, 1924, in Sergio Baur, El Periodico Martin Fierro en las artesy las letras, 1924- 1927 (Buenos Aires: Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, 2010), 11. 135

automobile that seems to ride on grapeshot—that is more beautiful than the Victory of

Samothrace."19 Yet in spite of the rhetoric of renovation and modernity, the name of the

Martin Fierro magazine alluded to an eponymous nineteenth-century epic poem about a gaucho that had become, in many nationalist quarters, a heroic type for an Argentinian criollo nationhood grounded in the pampas.20 Girondo had also stated in the "Martin

Fierro Manifesto" that

Martin Fierro believes in the importance of the intellectual contribution of

America, a previous cutting of all umbilical cords. To accentuate and generalize,

onto all the other intellectual manifestations, the independence movement

initiated, in language, by Ruben Dario, does not mean, however, that we will have

to renounce, and even less that we pretend to ignore that every morning we use

Swedish toothpaste, French towels, and English soap."21

The manifesto was an analogue for the Martin Fierro magazine itself, which was a complex hybrid of images and text, and whose heterogeneity juxtaposed poems, articles on local and foreign artists by writers from home and away, reviews, photographs, and advertising.

"F.T. Marinetti, "The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,' in Lawrence S Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman, eds, Futurism: An Anthology (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), 51. 20Martin Fierro is the main character in the eponymous epic poem of gaucho life, Martin Fierro (1872, 1879), written by Jose Hernandez. The Martin Fierro magazine was the second magazine with this name. A previous Martin Fierro (1904-1905) had been published earlier in the century. 21"Martin Fierro cree en la importancia del aporte intelectual de America, previo tijeretazo a todo cord6n umbilical. Acentuar y generalizar, a las demas manifestaciones intelectuales, el movimiento de independencia iniciado, en el idioma, por Ruben Dario, no significa, empero, que habremos de renunciar, ni mucho menos finjamos desconocer que todas las mafianas nos servimos de un dentifrico sueco, de unas toallas de Francia y de un jabon ingles." Baur, Elperiddico Martin Fierro en las artes y las letras, 11. 136

Neocriollo and the Americas

Much like their Mexican and Brazilian contemporaries, Xul and Pettoruti defined a revitalized American art as a hybrid of local and European elements and saw the

Americas as a vital counterpoint to an exhausted Europe.22 Near the end of his European stay, Xul had looked forward to his return to Argentina, complaining in 1921 of being

"increasingly tired of Europe and its civilization."23 In the Americas he saw the redemptive possibility of hybridity, and Xul's evolving neocriollo language (which had grown gradually in his correspondence from Europe in the 1920s as a composite of other languages, mostly Spanish and Portuguese) suggested itself as a new tongue for a renewed continent, a step towards the "spiritual unity" of the southern Americas.24

Xul's exploration of language was part of his "totalizing thought," and must be examined in the context of the explosive creation of new languages between 1880 and

1914.25 Like many of the constructed languages devised at the dawn of the twentieth century, Xul's Neocriollo was premised on the ideal of a lingua franca or a pre-Babel

Adamic language.26 It was a project that reflected other Utopian projects of the nineteenth century, some of which were pursued in religious and esoteric spheres, such as that of

Rudolf Steiner, whom Xul had met in Germany.27

22Patricia M. Artundo, "Los afios veinte en Argentina. El ejercicio de la mirada," CiberLetras 3 (August, 2000), http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/ciberletras/v03/Artundo.html. "Xul Solar, qtd. in ibid. 24Gradowczyk, A lejandro Xul Solar, 31; on 16 May 1924 Alistair Crowley wrote in his diary: "He [Xul] comes from Argentina & tells me that his True Will is to unify South America on Spiritual lines," qtd. in Artundo, "Papeles de trabajo," 26. 2SNaomi Lindstrom, "Xul Solar: Los principios organizadores de su pensamiento totalizador," Hispamerica 9, no.25/26 (Apr.-Aug., 1980)161-164; Alfredo Rubione, "Xul Solar: Utopia y vanguardia," Punto de Vista 10, no.29 (April-July, 1987): 38. 26Rubione, "Xul Solar: Utopia y vanguardia," 38. 27Ibid., 39. 137

Xul's neocriollo was also an engagement with organization and complexity, an

interest that was shared by his friend Jorge Luis Borges.28 Rubione suggests that Xul's

neocriollo is combinatorial in the way Eisenstein defined ideograms as exemplars of

montage.29 In his 1929 essay "The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram,"

Eisenstein had defined both ideograms and montage as the dialectical juxtaposition of

different terms. Neocriollo was also constructed as the combination of fragments of

words that together produced more complex hybrid meanings.30 Although it was designed

as a language for the Americas, neocriollo became less accessible through time, since

Xul constantly transformed it, making it more complex and more difficult to adopt as a

common language.31

An internationalist or cosmopolitan impulse in language had also been advocated

by Ruben Dario, the poet most closely associated with Spanish American modernismo,

and by the Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro. The latter, who was one of the first Latin

American avant-garde poets and the founder of creacionismo, had attempted to unbind

language from the "provincial" boundaries of nations and flags.32 The symbols of the

nation suggested a unity inside the borders of the different countries, but as Huidobro's

statement makes clear, the boundaries were being questioned by his suggestion of a

purpose or meaning in poetry that transcended borders. Flags also appear in Xul's

28Lindstrom, "Xul Solar: Los principios organizadores de su pensamiento totalizador," 161. 29Ibid.; see Sergei Eisenstein, "The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram," in Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, and The Film Sense, ed. Jay Leyda, trans. Jay Leyda (Cleveland and New York: Meridian Books, The World Publishing Company, 1957), 28-44. 30Rubione, "Xul Solar: Utopia y vanguardia," 39 3'Jorge Schwartz, "Silabas las estrellas compongan: Xul y el neocriolloin Xul Solar. Visionesy revelaciones (Buenos Aires: MALBA; Sao Paulo: Pinacoteca do Estado de S3o Paulo, 2005), 64; Rubione, "Xul Solar: Utopia y vanguardia," 39 "See Paula Miranda H., "Poeticas y paises en las vanguardias de Vicente Huidobro y Oswald de Andrade," Taller de Letras, no. 44 (2009): 135-139. 138

paintings of the 1920s, such as Puerto azul (1927) [fig. 64], Mundo (1925) [fig. 65], and

Pais (1925) [fig. 66], where they also seem to question boundaries and suggest his idea of a "spiritual unity" in the southern Americas.

Puerto azul demonstrates Xul's fascination with the city and its architectural structures as a space of communal interaction. The flags of several South American countries, including those of Argentina and Brazil, are evident amid the complex geometry that defines the port and its buildings. The port is a metaphor for Buenos Aires, whose inhabitants are commonly referred to as portehos, or "from the port." Pampas and port enclose the city at either end, yet the significance of the latter takes on other meanings. The port was the point of departure for the meat exports that made Argentina a wealthy nation at the beginning of the twentieth century, but it was also the gateway for the many immigrants that were seen by some as a threat to local culture. Much like the port in Xul's painting, Buenos Aires was construed as a world onto itself, connecting the

Americas to the European continent across the ocean, from which it imported "Swedish toothpaste, French towels, English soap." When Le Corbusier first visited Buenos Aires he approached it by water, and was struck by how the skyline mirrored the city's role as a threshold:

All of a sudden, beyond the first beacons of light, I saw Buenos Aires. The smooth

sea, flat, unlimited to left or right; above, your Argentine sky so full of stars, and

Buenos Aires, that phenomenal line of light beginning at the infinite right and

escaping to the infinite left at the level of the water. Nothing else, except, in the

center of the lights, the trembling glimmer of electricity that expresses the heart of 139

the city. That is all! Buenos Aires is not picturesque or varied. The simple meeting

of the pampa and the ocean, in one line, lit up at night from one end to the other.33

This "simple meeting of the pampa and the ocean" would be more complex and messy than Le Corbusier had imagined on his first encounter. Nevertheless, the sense of Buenos

Aires as a liminal place between geographies is a metaphor that expresses the ambivalence that also appears in Borges's early work, which examines the characters that inhabit the orillas, the "shores" or outer limits of Buenos Aires where the city begins to dissolve into the plains.

Xul's paintings Mundo and Pais allude more directly to geographies and their boundaries. In Mundo the flags of Latin American countries on the back of a dragon

(there is an almost identical version from 1927 titled Drago) are rendered without details, yet most of them can be identified.34 Xul placed two other groups of flags on the left and bottom-right hand sides of the painting: on the left we can see the flags of Italy, France,

Great Britain, and Holland; and on the bottom, those of Spain, Portugal, and the United

States, which are planted at the very edges of the picture and seem to intrude from outside the frame. These latter group constitute a different space, an outside to the Latin

American collection of flags in the centre or a pictorial equivalent to the notion of southern Americas advocated by intellectuals such as Marti and Rodo.

"Le Corbusier, Precisions on the Present State of Architecture and City Planning: With an American Prologue, a Brazilian Corollary Followed by The Temperature of Paris and The Atmosphere of Moscow (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1991), 201. 34The flags of Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay are easily identified because of their colours and geometries. The flags of Colombia, Ecuador, and Venezuela can be recognized because they share a tripartite yellow, blue, and red construction. The blue and white flags are more ambiguous: the one with vertical stripes is probably that of Guatemalan, and one of the two with horizontal blue bands is probably that of Argentina; the remaining flag with horizontal blue stripes could be that of El Salvador, Honduras, or Nicaragua. 140

In Pais we see what at first looks like a variation on the dragon from Mundo.

However, the central figure is the fusion of several of the anthropomorphic figures seen

floating in the bottom of the painting. In its hybridity, this central creature is suggestive

of the complexity of Americas, whose tension between diversity and similarity is also

alluded to in the title of the work itself. Pais, or country, can be interpreted in two ways:

as denoting one of the countries of the Americas whose flags are depicted; or, perhaps

more in keeping with Xul's visions of totalities and of a spiritual unity of the Americas, as

describing a country that encompasses all of the continent. For in Pais Xul added other

flags to the central array, the most suggestive of which is that of the United States.35

Whereas in Mundo the United States had been marked as an outsider, here the North

American country has been included in the collective.

Earlier, Xul had created images that were in keeping with his interests in myths

and other sources of knowledge but that had also alluded more directly to American

sources. As Patricia Artundo has argued, the article Xul wrote about his fellow artist

Petorutti shows that he was thinking in terms of a dialectic between Europe and the

Americas.36 Petorutti was described as "[njeocriollo, a type from those of the future, that

will surpass Europe," thus suggesting that neocriollo was not just a language, but the

modality of a hybrid "race" —a counterpart to Vasconcelos's Cosmic Race— that would

invigorate the Americas.37

35The other flags are those of Costa Rica the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Nicaragua (here clearly marked). 36Patricia Artundo, "Introduction," in Alejandro Xul Solar, Entrevistas, articulos y textos ineditos, ed. Patricia M. Artundo (Corregidor, 2005), 15. ""Neocriollo, un tipo de los futuros, que ultrapasaran a Europa..." Xul Solar, "Petorutti," unpublished and undated manuscript (1923-1924), in Entrevistas, articulos y textos ineditos, 99; my comments follow Artundos's interpretation of the Pertorutti article, Ibid., 14-18. 141

Tlaloc [fig. 67] and Nana Watzin [fig. 68], both from 1923, incorporate words from Xui's language neocriollo and that evoke his pan-Americanist ideal. The titles of the artworks refer to two Nahuatl deities: Tlaloc, who was associated with rain and fertility, and Nana Watzin (also referred to as Nanauatl or Nanauatzin), who was was identified with the sun. The illustrations in pre-Hispanic codices might have inspired Xul's compositional choices, since books on the subject were available in Europe, and at least one exhibition of pre-Hispanic objects had been mounted in London more around the time Xul was there.38 Both Tlaloc and Nana Watzin incorporate words used as visual elements of the composition. As Rubione suggests, the proliferation of constructed languages coincided with the increasing "semantization of the space" of modern poetry that had been occurring since Mallarme, transforming the words themselves into microspaces subjected to montage.39 In these two paintings by Xul, writing and image converge on the surface of the painting to create an image-writing that is very much like a hieroglyph.40

In Tlaloc the words are dispersed in an arc around the figure of the deity, which is composed of a collage of geometric shapes and translucent planes characteristic of many of Xul's works from this period. The word fragments that appear on the right are derived from "Tlaloc," and are playfully arranged around the figure as in a kind of visual fugue.

38See Adriana B. Armando, and Guillermo Fantoni. "Dioses y codices prehispanicos en la obra de Xul Solar." http://www.cienciahov.org.ar/hov37/xulsolarl.htm and http://www.cienciahov.org.ar/hov37/xulsolar4.htm: This was the landmark 1920 exhibition of pre-Hispanic art Burlington Fine Arts in London. See Cyril G. E. Bunt, "American Art at the Burlington Fine Arts Club," The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 37, no. 208 (July 1920): 40-46. 39Rubione, "Xul Solar: Utopia y vanguardia," 39 ^'Trato de que mis pinturas —nos dice Xul Solar— tengan, ademas de los valores plasticos, simbolos efectivos que les den caracter de escritura a los fines de definir y situar los elementos de un arte total y abstracto, cosas que no buscan en general los abstractos modernos." Xul Solar, in an interview with Carlos Foglia, "Xul Solar, pintor de simbolos efectivos," in Entrevistas, articulos y textos ineditos, 82. 142

"Atl" —the Nahuatl word for water— and "Tla" form the ends of a textual trajectory that

encircles the word "agua," which they seem to mirror in their own phonetic symmetry. It

is as if through the montage of the nahuatl fragments Xul had constructed the word

"agua" itself as an ideogram in the manner described by Eisenstein.

In Nana Watzin the words are more directly linked to a narrative. The text alludes

to other deities associated with Nana Watzin, which shows that Xul had studied accounts

of pre-contact mythology.41 Xul has emphasized the Aztec story of Nana Watzin's

immolation at Teotihuacan, a self-sacrifice that according to Nahua mythology had led to

the deity's reincarnation as the sun and permitted the dawn of the last age of creation.42

Renovation is central to this myth of sacrifice, and Xul emphasized this by writing the

word "renovation" to the left of Nana Watzin. In some versions of the sun creation

stories, Tlaloc is given a generating role in the fifth age, with the fourth one having ended

in a cataclysm in which humans were converted into fish (Xul has depicted some in the

bottom of the painting). Xul's self-described fatigue with European culture after more

than a decade away from Argentina might explain why he chose to represent these

deities.43 The myth of renewal to which these deities are associated seems to allude to

Spenglerian notions of the decline of the West and the possibility of renewal in the

41 Adriana B. Armando, and Guillermo Fantoni. "Dioses y codices prehispanicos en la obra de Xul Solar." CienciaHoy 7, no. 37 (1997) http://www.cienciahoy.org.ar/hoy37/xulsolar3.htm; texts on pre- Hispanic and African art were included among the almost three hundred books that Xul took back to Argentina when he returned from Europe. 42The story was transcribed by the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagun in the sixteenth century. Ibid.; Enrique Florescano "Mito e historia en la memoria nahua," Historia Mexicana 39, no. 3 (January 1, 1990): 631; Wayne Elzey, "The Nahua Myth of the Suns: History and Cosmology in Pre-Hispanic Mexican Religions," Numert 23, no. 2 (1976): 118. 43Adriana Armando and Guillermo Fantoni stress the link between Tlaloc and Nana Watzin. Armando and Fantoni"Dioses y codices prehispanicos," http://www.cienciahoy.org.ar/hoy37/xulsolar3.htm; Also see Elzey, "The Nahua Myth of the Suns," 117-118. 143

Americas that informed texts by Rodo, Vasconcelos, Figari, and others.

Xul's interest in Pre-Hispanic culture was a symptom of a desire to return to

Argentina to transform the artworld, a desire he shared with his friend and artist Emilio

Petorutti. That he painted these works in Europe is also emblematic of the Latin

American vanguardist trope of the travelling artist who "discovers" the Americas in

Europe.44 Writing about his painting using metaphors that anticipate the language of

Brazilian antropofagia, Xul called for the end of "the moral tutelage of Europe. Let's assimilate what is digestible, let's love our teachers; but let us not desire to have our only

Meccas across the ocean."45 The passage is from a text about Pettoruti, whose work Xul helped promote and whom he helped to orchestrate a strategic artistic arrival from Europe that culminated in the "event" that was Pettoruti's 1924 exhibition at the Witcomb Gallery in Buenos Aires.46

Above, I mentioned the fugue, suggesting that Xul's play with words and shapes also alludes to the mechanics of musical form. In 1911 Xul had defined himself as a musician and painter, and throughout his life he continued pursue his interest in music alongs with his painting (he was particularly fond of Johann Sebastian Bach's and

Richard Wagner's music).47 Xul had also redesigned the piano to make it easier to learn

"Armando and Fantoni. "Dioses y codices prehispanicos," http://www.cienciahoy.org.ar/hoy37/xulsolar2.htm. The other three artists studied in this thesis share a similar trajectory of finding or elaborating their vision of "home" in Europe: Chariot, who had relatives Mexico, began his journey of discovery exploring Mexican objects in Paris; Figari painted many of his works during his stay in Paris from 1925 until 1933; Tarsila de Amaral painted her first "Brazilian" paintings in 1923 during her second trip to the French capital. 45Xul Solar, qtd. in Patricia Artundo, "Los afios veinte en Argentina. El ejercicio de la mirada," CiberLetras 3 (2000) http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/ciberletras/v03/Artundo.html '•'Maria Florencio Galesio and Paola Melgarejo, "Eduardo Schiaffino: un pionero modemo bajo la mirada de la vanguardia portefla," in Sergio Baur, El Periodico Martin Fierro en las artesy las letras, 1924-1927,46. 47Artundo, "Introduction," 7; Cintia Cristia, "Nada menos que Klee y Xul: una rave para las esferas," Ramona 35 (Sept., 2003): 60-64. 144

and to play, and had created a system that established a link or concordance between

music and colour. This type of crossing into other sensory domains was a legacy of the

late-nineteenth-century interest in synaesthesia, the complex interplay between the

senses. The analogy between paint and music was also prevalent in early twentieth

century art, and particularly in Kandinsky's writings, which Xul had read.48

The City

From very early on in his development as an artist Xul had made his painting a

surface of symbols:

This painter strives, before anything, to create paintings within Expressionism,

and for that he avails himself of Oriental and American poetry and mythology. He

does not translate the objects but rather, one could say, he indicates them through

signs. "After all," he told me, "why not do it that way? We live at a time of

advertising, of indicators, of a profusion of signals. Why not transport that

characteristic to the canvas?...He also provides examples of corporeal

transparencies that exhibit the internal parts of the human organism. To what

degree can all that be picturesque, I do not know, but as far as I am concerned, I

can only appreciate the decorative side of his painting."49

For Xul the return to Buenos Aires meant going back to a city that had changed

dramatically since his departure in 1912. Increased immigration and suburban

48Svanascini includes a brief description of Xul's reconfigured piano, Svanascini, Xul Solar, 35; For a discussion of Xul's interest in Wagner, see Cintia Cristia, "Nada menos que Klee y Xul," 61-64; and Cintia Cristia, "Sinfonias astrales de un wagneriano criollo." Ramona 28 (Jan., 2003): 44-46. 49R. da Souza, "Xul Solar. Proxima exposicion de sus trabajos en Buenos Aires," La Razon, August 17, 1924. 145

development were quickly transforming the material structure and social composition of

Buenos Aires. It was city for whose complexity Puerto azul was a compact symbol, but that for Le Corbusier, whose hygienic version of modernism purged it of all ornamentation and excess, was disconcertingly dissonant with the skyline that had enthralled him when he arrived:

How then can I dare tell you that Buenos Aires, the southern capital of the New

World, a gigantic agglomeration of insatiable energy, is a city that is in error,

caught in a paradox, a city that has no new spirit or old spirit, but is simply a city

from 1870-1929, whose present form will be transient. Its structure indefensible,

excusable but unsustainable...The city? It is the sum of local cataclysms, it is the

addition of things which lack proportion; it is in error. Sadness hangs over it...The

city has suddenly become gigantic: trams, suburban trains, buses, underground

trains make up a frenetic daily mixture. What a waste of energy, what excess,

what senselessness...Buenos Aires is the most inhuman city that I have known:

truly its heart has been martyred. I wandered for weeks like a somnambulist

through its streets without hope. However, where but here can one feel such an

energetic potential, such force, the restless and dynamic pressure of an inevitable

destiny?50

Whereas for Le Corbusier the city was a nightmare or a hallucination, for the martinfierristas it was vibrant metropolis thoroughly exuding modernity. Beatriz Sarlo has suggested that Xul's geometries were a response to the very chaos and heterogeneity

50Qtd. in John King, "Xul Solar: Buenos Aires, Modernity and Utopia," in Green, Christopher, ed. Xul Solar: the Architectures (London: Courtald Institute Galleries, 1994), 13-14. 146

that Le Corbusier described.51 Yet although Xul's urban landscapes are places that are hybrid and that encompass difference, they are also places of coexistence.

Girondo's poem in the epigraph at the beginning of this chapter exemplifies an ambivalence about modernity that spurred the popularity of esoteric practices in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is part of a text from his book Twenty Poems to Be

Read on a Streetcar (1925), whose very title references the transformation technology was producing on the urban fabric and on the routine of the city dweller. As Marshall

Berman has noted, criticism of determinate aspects of modernity and modernization by thinkers such as Marx and Nietzsche were tempered by an admiration for the possibilities inherent in the project of the new.52 The lines in the epigraph from "Nocturno," one of the texts in Twenty Poems, express an unease about technology. Technology had shown its destructive force in the First World War and it was contributing to the transformation of

Buenos Aires. The telephone poles in "Nocturno" are ominous not only because their sinister cross-like presence suggests death, as if the Recoleta had spilled out into Buenos

Aires, but also because they transport ghostly, disembodied voices as if by "magic.53

In contrast to this dark view of technology, Xul's canvases seem to refer to its redemptive possibilities. In addition to the use of abstraction that recalls European vanguardist work, several of Xul's paintings of the 1920s also allude to X-Ray imaging technology, as can be seen in Lady Diaphanous (1923) [fig. 69]. Wilhelm Conrad

5lBeatriz Sarlo, Jorge Luis Borges: A Writer on the Edge, ed. John King (London and New York: Verso, 1993), 11. 52See Marshall Berman,^// That Is Solid Melts Into Air (New York: Penguin, 1988), 15-36. "The Recoleta is the famous cemetery of Buenos Aires. Like the Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, the Recoleta is densely populated with mausoleums and tombs. Many of the masoleums in the Recoleta are elaborate structures with glass doors that give them the appearance of miniature houses. The cemetery is also laid out in "blocks," with "streets" and "avenues" perpendicular to each other, all of which conveys a literal image of a "city of the dead." 147

Rontgen had created much excitement with his discovery in 1895, and the popularity of

the mysterious rays was immediate and widespread: many books and articles on the

subject were published consistently until the mid-twentieth century.54 Before the

deleterious effects of radiation were fully understood, X-Rays had also gained wide

popularity as a new form of photography.55 Their ability to penetrate surfaces and show

concealed structures fascinated many of the Cubists and would have appealed to Xul.

Much later, in 1951, Xul described his muti-faceted production in ways that

illuminate his projects of the 1920s. It was a characterization that appeared in almost

identical format in several articles of the time, demonstrating Xul performing a script he

had developed throughout his life and that summarized his achievements for the

interviewers:

I am the champion of a game that as of yet nobody knows about: panchess. I am

the master of a writing that nobody reads yet. I am the creator of a technique, of a

musical writing that will make it possible to study piano, for example, in a third of

the time that it takes to learn it today. I am the director of a theatre that does not

operate yet. I am the creator of a universal language, the "panlingua," with

numerical and astrological foundations, that would contribute to a greater

understanding among peoples. I am the creator of twelve pictorial techniques,

some of a surrealist type and others that carry onto the canvas the sensory,

emotional world created on the listening by a Chopinian suite, a Wagnerian

prelude or a verse sung by Beniaminio Gigli. I am, and this is what most interests

MLinda Dalrymple Henderson, "X Rays and the Quest for Invisible Reality in the Art of Kupka, Duchamp, and the Cubists," Art Journal 47, no. 4 (Winter, 1988): 324-325. 55Ibid„ 325. 148

me at the moment —apart from preparing for an exhibition of my paintings—, the

creator of a language that appeals insistently to the world of Latin America.56

For Xul, art and the projects he enumerated above expressed a personal search for transcendence, but they also conveyed collective desires and ways of knowing.

Elsewhere in the interview quoted above he had described the world as "convulsed" and had noted that the Americas were a necessary example of "coexistence, of confraternity, of mutual respect, especially between countries with a Latin origin."57 This description returns us to Pais and Mundo, paintings in which Xul had acknowledged heterogeneity, but also tension in the Americas. For in this ambiguous statement he deconstructs collectives and reiterates others (such as Latin America) in a world that is shifting and collage-like, like the surface of his paintings.

56"Soy campeon del mundo de un juego que nadie conoce todavia: el panajedrez. Soy maestro de una escritura que nadie lee todavia. Soy creador de una tecnica, de una grafla musical que permitira que el estudio del piano, por ejemplo, sea posible en la tercera parte del tiempo que hoy lleva estudiarlo. Soy director de un teatro que todavia no fimciona. Soy el creador de un idioma universal, la "panlingua", sobre bases numericas y astrologicas, que contribuiria a que los pueblos se conociesen mejor. Soy creador de doce tecnicas pictoricas, algunas de indole surrealista y otras que llevan al lienzo el mundo sensorio, emocional, que produce en el escucha una suite chopiniana, un preludio wagneriano o una estrofa cantada por Beniamino Gigli. Soy, y esto es lo que mas me interesa momentaneamente —amen de la exposition de pintura que estoy preparando—, el creador de una lengua que reclama con insistencia el mundo de Latinoamerica." Xul Solar, in an article by Gregory Sherwood, "Gente de mi ciudad: Xul Solar, campeon mundial de panajedrez y el inquieto creador de la 'panlingua," Mundo Argentino, August 1, 1951, in Entrevistas, articulosy textos ineditos, 76. "Ibid. 149

Chapter 6

Art for Export: Tarsila do Amaral's "Pau-Brasil" Paintings

lam afraid we have eyes bigger than our stomachs, and more curiosity than capacity. We embrace everything, but we clasp only wind.1

Michel de Montaigne (1580)

I am a Tupi Indian strumming a lute!2

Mario de Andrade (1922)

KLAXON nao e futurista KLAXON e klaxista

Klaxon No.l, May, 1922

Country girl dressed by Poiret The Sao Paulo laziness resides in your eyes Which did not see Paris or Piccadilly Nor the exclamations of the men In Seville To your passing in earrings3

Oswald de Andrade, "Atelier" (1924)

'Michel de Montaigne, "Of Cannibals," Selected Essays, trans. Donald M. Frame (New York: Walter J. Black, 1943), 73-74. 2From the poem "The Troubadour," in Mario de Andrade, Hallucinated City, 23. '"Caipirinha vestida por Poiret/A pregui?a paulista reside nos teus olhos /Que nao viram Paris nem Piccadilly/Nem as exclama?oes dos homens/Em Sevilha/A tua passagem entre brincos," Oswald de Andrade, "Atelier," qtd. in Jorge Schwartz, "Oswald de Andrade y Tarsila do Amaral: las miradas de Tarsiwald," in Naciendo el hombre nuevo...:Fundir literatura, artesy vida como practica de las vanguardias en el mundo Iberico, ed. Harald WentzlafF-Eggebert (Frankfurt and Madrid: Vervuert and Iberoamericana, 1999), 279. 150

In 1917 the artist Anita Malfatti (1889-1964) exhibited a series of paintings in

Sao Paulo whose colours and expressionist-style distortions elicited a strong critical

reaction from the writer Jose Monteiro Lobato. Lobato's review of the exhibition —titled

"Paranoia or Mystification?"— incited Mario de Andrade (1893-1945) and Oswald de

Andrade (1890-1954) to write their own responses in support of Malfatti and of the new

art trends in Brazil.4 The exhibition and the heated exchanges surrounding it became one

of several moments that have been enshrined in Brazilian history as landmark stages in

the local development of modernist culture.5 A second moment was the 1922 Semana de

Arte Moderna organized in Sao Paulo. This week-long multidisciplinary artistic event

was orchestrated by a group of intellectuals that included Oswald de Andrade and Mario

de Andrade, and has long been considered the moment that Brazilian modernism finally

acquired its own momentum. The culmination of this first wave of modernism was

arguably what came to be known as the Movimento Antropofago, which was exemplified

by Oswald's "Manifesto Antropofago" (1928) and its paradigmatic figure of the cannibal.

According to the movement's lore, antropofagia was created in 1928 by Oswald

and Tarsila do Amaral (1886-1973) in collaboration with the poet Raul Bopp (1898-

1984). Tarsila had painted an abstract image of a figure, an image the three friends agreed

4Aracy Amaral, Artesplasticas na Semana de 22, 5th ed. (Sao Paulo: Editora 34, 1998), 99-100. 5See for example Aracy Amaral and Kim Mrazek Hastings, "Stages in the Formation of Brazil's Cultural Profile," The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts 21 (1995): 9-25; Icleia Maria Borsa Cattani, "Places of Modernism in Brazil," Brazil, Body and Soul, ed. Edward J. Sullivan (New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2002), 381: Mario de Andrade, "The Modernist Movement," in Jorge Schwartz, Da Antropofagia a Brasilia: Brasil 1920-1950. (Valencia and Sao Paulo: Institute Valencia de Arte Modemo, MAB-FAAP Museu de Arte Brasileira, 2002), 600. 151

to nameAbaporu (1928) [fig. 70], or "man-eater" in Tupi-Guarani.6 The following year,

with the Antropofagia movement in full bloom, Tarsila painted the eponymous

Antropofagia (1929) [fig. 71], a work that restated the forms she had been experimenting

with in the previous years. The Antropofagia group proposed the cannibal as an

ontological and epistemological model for culture and politics, and in doing so suggested

an exceptionalism founded on a historical and conceptual revision of the now-vanished

Tupi, whom the Europeans had encountered in what is now Brazil. From that

appropriated cultural locus the historical colonial relationship with Europe was inverted

by asserting a philosophical position of ultimate difference: the American antropofago,

according to Oswald's poetic declamation, "had never been catechized."7

Before the advent of the antropofagia group, Oswald and Tarsila had collaborated

on his book of poetry titled Pau-Brasil (Brazilwood) (1924), in which poet and artist

attempted to forge cosmopolitan means for distinctly Brazilian cultural ends. Tarsila had

also produced paintings in a new idiom during her so-called Pau-Brasil stage, named in

allusion to Oswald's book. It was a creative period that had its origins in Tarsila's 1923

trip to Paris with Oswald, a journey that had been a moment of openness and exploration

for both of them. Their stay in Paris began a transformation in their work that reflected a

vision of Brazil characterized by what Haroldo de Campos has called as a "modal

nationalism" —a process-centred vision of collective identity that contrasts with an

6Tarsila do Amaral, "Pau-Brasil Painting and Antropofagia," in Jorge Schwartz, ed., Da Antropofagia a Brasilia: Brasil 1920—1950 (Valencia and Sao Paulo: Institute Valencia de Arte Modemo, MAB-FAAP Museu de Arte Brasileira, 2002), 594-595; Maria Eugenia Saturnini and Regina Teixeira de Barros. Catdlogo Raisonne Tarsila do Amaral, vol. 1 (Sao Paulo: Base 7 Projetos Culturais, Pinacoteca do Estado, 2008), 166-168. 7See Oswald de Andrade, "Manifesto Antropofago," published in the first issue of the Revista de Antropofagia in Sao Paulo, May, 1928, In Schwartz, Da Antropofagia a Brasilia: Brasil 1920-1950,473- 475. 152

ontological nationalism predicated on essentialist myths.8 In the Pau-Brasil paintings the notion of multiple places and temporalities entered Tarsila's field of vision, leading her to create images that problematized the notion of brasilidade, or Brazilianness.

Sao Paulo: Metropolitan Port of the Modernistas

As Brazil's capital, Rio de Janeiro was the country's preeminent city during most of the nineteenth century. By the 1880s, however, Sao Paulo had become the commercial centre of the country, acting as the point of convergence and processing of the coffee that made its way to the nearby port of Santos.9 Looking back on the 1920s, Oswald de

Andrade would attribute the emergence of the modernist movement in Sao Paulo to the city's "industrial consciousness," which he believed had engendered a spirit of competitiveness and a desire for novelty in the arts.10 Haroldo de Campos echoed this assessment by suggesting that it was no coincidence that the modernistas had emerged in industrial Sao Paulo, much as the Futurists had emerged in industrial Milan.11

It was as a tribute to the accelerated rhythm of the modern city of Sao Paulo that

Mario de Andrade composed his collection of poems titled Pauliceia Desvairada

(Hallucinated City) (1922), part of which he recited during the Semana de Arte Moderna.

The manner in which Mario describes Sao Paulo's modernity in Pauliceia is vaguely reminiscent of Futurism's espousal of the new, and Pauliceids "A Most Interesting

8Haroldo de Campos, "Anthropophagous Reason: Dialogue and Difference in Brazilian Culture," in Novas: Selected Writings ofHaroldo de Campos, ed. Antonio Sergio Bessa and Odile Cisneros (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 161-164. 'Annateresa Fabris, O futurismo paulista: Hipoteses para o estudo da chegada da vanguarda ao Brasil. (Sao Paulo: Perspectiva, Editora da Universidade de Sao Paulo, 1994), 14. '"Haroldo de Campos, "Oswald de Andrade Triptych," in Novas: Selected Writings of Haroldo de Campos, 203. "Oswald de Andrade, Obra escogida (Caracas: Editorial Ayacucho, 1981), ix. 153

Preface" is a type of local response to Marinetti's iconoclastic manifesto of 1909. Mario, however, rejected being labelled a Futurist.12 Although Pauliceids performative declamation for cultural renewal shared Marinetti's language of change, Mario wanted to focus on the transient multi-sensorial experience of his contemporary Sao Paulo, rather than its future, which the name of the Italian movement stressed. Mario saw Sao Paulo as an "irradiating fulcrum of a new mode of civilization" whose heterogeneity defined the hallucinatory experience of modernity and required new means of expression.13

In the Pau-Brasil book of poetry Oswald de Andrade had also experimented with form and content. Oswald's poems enacted a "solution" that was laid out in the accompanying "Manifesto de Pau-Brasil," and which consisted in construing the juxtaposition of the local and the global as emblematic of Brazil itself. Tarsila and

Oswald —or "Tarsiwald," as Mario de Andrade called the couple— worked together to integrate the text and illustrations included in the book.14 Oswald played with language by creating short, fragmented images infused with vernacular Brazilian Portuguese, and

Tarsila provided sparse drawings in counterpoint to the book's telegraphic-style language.

In a section titled "Atelier," Oswald described Tarsila by using a series of images encompassing binary concepts that defined the discourses on national identity during the

1920s.15 The epigraph at the beginning of this chapter contains the first stanza, which provides a complex but illuminating description of Tarsila. The figure of the "Country girl in Poiret" evokes Tarsila's privileged social status, yet the sophistication of French

12Mario de Andrade, Hallucinated City, 7. 13Fabris, O juturismopaulista, 3. l4Schwartz, "Oswald de Andrade y Tarsila do Amaral," 277. l5Ibid., 279. 154

couture is juxtaposed with the countryside's implied simplicity, a combination of local and cosmopolitan motifs that will also characterize many of Tarsila's Pau-Brasil paintings.

Paradoxes such as these undermined the notion of art as separate from life, contributing to an awareness of Brazil's cultural complexity. By incorporating elements of the wider visual culture or what she construed as a more "popular" culture, Tarsila began transgressing boundaries that separated artwork from artifact. This, and her self- identification as a "country girl," highlighted the social disparity between the modernistas and the rural inhabitants they encountered on their voyage into the interior.

What began as a formal exploration of means and aesthetic concerns had therefore led to the highlighting of social issues that questioned not only the boundaries of art, but also the circumstances of its makers.

Tarsila was not alone in embodying such cultural paradoxes. The intellectuals who travelled across the Atlantic to Europe, and many of those who stayed at home, wrestled with similar cultural and social divides. Such issues had existed before, but they emerged with more force from the manner in which the modernistas approached them. In the increasing exchange of ideas across the globe, artists attempted to absorb what was local and export it to metropolitan centres as a finished product, rather than as raw, primitivist material for others to use. It was a stratagem through which Brazilian artists meant to level the cultural field on a global scale, but this "democratic" critique could also be levelled at the practices of the Brazilian modernistas themselves. For, much as they sought to challenge European cultural hegemony, the local visual culture to which they 155

appealed questioned their own privileged position in defining the project of brasilidade.

Brazilianness for Export

The history of Alfredo da Rocha Viana Filho (1897-1973), better known as

Pixinguina, exemplifies the tensions between the local and the global that characterized cultural discourse in early twentieth-century Brazil. As one of the best-known musicians of the 1920s, and as member of the group Os Oito Batutas, Pixinguina was at the centre of debates about the Brazilianness.16 Pixinguina's story is also a reminder that popular culture was affecting the arts, a tendency that would intensify dramatically as the twentieth century progressed. In early twentieth-century Rio, jazz was fast becoming the international pop music, much as was happening in other places of the world. Negative reaction by critics to this "foreign" music suggested that the ostensibly authentic music of

Pixinguina and other Brazilian musicians was under threat.17 Os Oito Batutas was financed by Arnaldo Guinle, who sponsored the group's research trips into the countryside ("authentic" Brazilian music was thought, by Guinle and many others, to be grounded in the countryside) and their performances in Paris and Argentina in the early

1920s.18 The success of Os Oito Batutas made these musicians cultural ambassadors for

Brazil, a role at odds with the general dislike of the popular music by the country's elites.

Furthermore, the musicians of Os Oito Batutas were black, which meant they were not members of the privileged social classes in a Brazil, where slavery had been abolished

"See Jose de Menezes Bastos, "Brazil in France, 1922: An Anthropological Study of the Congenital International Nexus of Popular Music," Latin American Music Review 29, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2008): 1- 28. l7Ibid., 5. 18Ibid. 156

less that forty years earlier.19 Nevertheless, the ubiquity of jazz and the growing

popularity of Brazilian choro and samba eventually made the music of Pixinguina and Os

Oito Batutas quintessential^ Brazilian.20 The group was mentioned as a symbol of the

new in the first issue of the modernista magazine Klaxon (1922-1923) [fig. 72] that had

emerged in the wake of the Semana de Arte Moderna.21

Like her fellow modernistas, Tarsila turned to the "popular" as a source of both

aesthetic renovation and brasilidade. The impact of the material culture she encountered

as she travelled throughout Brazil was acknowledged in her paintings and letters to

acquaintances as a return to a type of authenticity. The bright colours of the houses, the

"mural decoration in a modest hotel corridor," these were the everyday expressions of a

Brazil that offered a mode of "return to simplicity and tradition."22 What Tarsila

understood as a return to simplicity was in reality the opening up of her art to a wider

domain of visual culture, a fact that would paradoxically make the function of her work

more complex through references and appropriations.

Like other artists and intellectuals of the time, Tarsila sought representational strategies that incorporated local forms and colours so as to shift away from the

Europeanized gaze Joaquim Nabuco had advocated. As artists confronted cultural complexity they began to propose a contingent rather than an essentialist sense of national, which provided an avenue to deconstruct cultural perspectives that had looked

"Ibid. 20Ibid„ 5-6. 21The 1920s were the "[e]ra of the 8 Batutas, of the Jazz-Band,...of Mutt & Jeff,...Era of Klaxon," Klaxon no. 1, May, 1922, 3. "Tarsila do Amaral, "Pau-Brasil Painting and Antropofagia," 594. 157

to Europe as the true origin and centre of Brazilian culture.23 This is an important characteristic of the paintings Tarsila produced during her so-called Pau-Brasil stage, even though her formal means were derived from contemporary Western trends. The hesitancy in some of the paintings, a characteristic so emblematic of a period of discovery, questions the very avant-gardist borrowings that she uses. The result is the negation of an Archimedean point from which an authentic Brazilianness can be constructed. This is, I suggest, one of the enduring strengths of what she produced at this stage.

Flora Sussekind has suggested that the new media introduced into early twentieth- century Brazil led to a reconfigured "behaviour and perception" to which writers responded ambivalently and with considerable hesitation.24 According to Sussekind, this hesitation resulted from a belief that technology could efface the craftsmanship in writing and other forms of cultural production.25 As a symptom of a perceived misalignment between a recent past and an undetermined future, hesitancy was an expression of a moment of heightened complexity.

The repercussions of a reconfigured vision initiated not only by technology but also by the encounter with cultural heterogeneity can be seen in Tarsila's use of the new formal approaches she had learned in Paris. The changes in style coincided with her

"discovery" of Brazil in Paris and were used more boldly as the 1920s unfolded. In

Tarsila's 1923 painting Veneza [fig. 73] we can already see the simplification of forms

23See Haroldo de Campos, "Anthropophagous Reason: Dialogue and Difference in Brazilian Culture," in Novas: Selected Writings of Haroldo de Campos, 161-164. 24Flora Sussekind, Cinematografo de letras: literatura, tecnica e modemizagao no Brasil (Sao Paulo, Brasil: Companhia das Letras, 1987), 26. 25Ibid„ 28 158

that will become one of the stylistic hallmarks of her career. Mario de Andrade found the painting "displeasing. It is a hesitant, forced and timid painting, lacking color, whose only good quality is perhaps to bring this sentimental curiosity of the steamship into the context of all the classical treatments given to Venice by painters."26 Although his comments allude to Tarsila's technical execution, it is instructive that, like Siissekind,

Mario stresses hesitancy as a characteristic of her encounter with the new. Siissekind had described hesitancy as an ambivalent embrace of technology; for Mario it denotes technical immaturity. On the other hand, Mario sees the modern steamship included in the painting as one of its redemptive features. The ship destabilizes "classical treatments" of Venice, and pre-figures the multitemporal and mutispatial layering of the Pau-Brasil paintings Tarsila produced the following year. A modern steamship in Venice transgresses the unity encompassed by classical, postcard depictions of the city; in Brazilian scenes the insertion of technology will also recapitulate the conflict between local and global culture that had endured since the Conquest.

The Modernistas as Turistas

In addition to exemplifying how Tarsila's painting was changing direction, Veneza also invokes the idea of travel or passage that will become an important catalyst for her work. Following their "encounter" with Brazil in Paris, Tarsila and Oswald would embark on a trip of discovery to the Minas Gerais region in 1924 in the company of other modernistas and the Swiss-French poet Blaise Cendrars (1887-1961). It was a voyage

26Mario de Andrade, qtd. in Maria Eugenia Satumini and Regina Teixeira de Barros, Catalogo Raisonne Tarsila do Amoral, Volume 1, 112. 159

that followed the path taken by explorers several centuries before and that became a type

of cultural re-conquest of Brazil.

Like other artists of her generation, Tarsila had pursued advanced training in

Paris. On her first trip she had enrolled in the Academie Julian, an institution with a

traditional academic routine. After meeting Oswald and the modemistas in Sao Paulo,

Tarsila returned to Paris in 1923 to study with Albert Gleizes, Andre Lhote, and Fernand

Leger, approaching "military training in Cubism" as a necessary rite of passage.27 Blaise

Cendrars introduced Tarsila and Oswald to Parisian intellectuals and helped Tarsila

secure her first exhibition in Paris in 1926.28 Oswald's close friendship with Cendrars in

this period led him to dedicate the first edition of the Pau Brasil book of poetry, which

was published in Paris by Cendrar's own publisher, Sans Pareil, to Cendrars himself "on

the discovery of Brazil."29 It was an acknowledgement that Cendrars had helped Tarsila

and Oswald discover their homeland in Paris as much as during their later trip to the

Brazilian interior.

The journey to Minas Gerais was in one sense a process of transculturation in

which the gaze of the modemistas was challenged and transformed by what they

encountered along the way. Ouro Preto, a town that had preserved the Baroque

architecture and art of colonial times, was one of the highlights of the trip. The re discovery of Brazil's Baroque heritage remained an indelible feature of the group's experience of retracing the steps of the bandeirantes, or Portuguese explorers and

27Tarsila Amaral, qtd. in Aracy A. Amaral, Tarsila, sua obra e seu tempo (Editora 34, Editora da Universidade de Sao Paulo, 2003), 141. 28Aracy A. Amaral, Blaise Cendrars no Brasil e os modemistas (Sao Paolo: Martins, 1970), 2-5. "Oswald de Andrade, Obras Completas, Vol.7, Poesias Reunidas (Rio de Janeiro: Civilizafao Brasileira, 1970), 38, 73. 160

privateers who had made their way into the interior the region during the colonial period.

The modernistas reenacted the conquest as tourists, but their voyage of discovery was

also a metaphor for their desire to conquer and transform the cultural field.

The trip opened up Tarsila's eyes to colours and images that had been ignored

inside the Academy and in the aesthetic domain of the privileged society that sustained it.

The experiences form her journey with Cendrars and the modernistas connected her to a

complex stream of visual culture that operated outside the limited sphere of her training,

and perhaps suggested to her that the process of reconciling local and cosmopolitan

characteristics was a contingent problematic that continuously reconstituted itself, and

that could not be subsumed under a static idea of the nation.

The notions of contingency and process are recurrent themes in Tarsila's

production of the time. The voyage became one of the central metaphors for discovery,

but also for a collective identity that is continually reconfigured in the present. The title

of a recent exhibition of her work, Tarsila viajante, references Tarsila's many travels

throughout her life, but it also describes the juncture of the 1920s Brazilian art as

characterized by an "intense" exchange with the centres.30 In the catalogue for Tarsila

viajante, Aracy Amaral suggested that the modernistas "regressed" in the later 1930s as

their intense interchanges with European art ended. It is true that artists such as Tarsila

became less experimental and more socially committed in their work. With the effects of

the world wide economic crises and the ascendancy of a conservative government with

the Getulio Vargas's military coup, the sense of opportunity that had characterized the

30Aracy Amaral, "Tarsila: anotapSes e viagens/Tarsila: Anotaciones y viajes," in Tarsila viajante/viajera (Buenos Aires: Malba-Fundacion Costantini; Sao Paulo: Pinacoteca do Estado de Sao Paulo, 2008), 15-16. 161

1920s disappeared. But heterogeneity to which Tarsila's so-called Pau-Brasil paintings of the mid 1920s began to allude had suggested that the complexity of Brazil eluded easy characterizations. Her work in the 1930s can perhaps be seen as a politicized development of such discovery of difference.

A Negra (1923) [fig. 74], traditionally described as the work that defined Tarsila as "a pioneer in Brazilian art," was painted during her second trip to Paris.31 Her contact with Gleizes, Lhote, and particularly Leger is evident in how much her painting had changed since her last trip to Paris. A Negra is clearly constructed using various features of the Cubism these three French artists were exploring after the First World War and includes a black figure and a palm leaf that are rendered in a simplified style against a geometric background of coloured stripes. The figure and the leaf will reappear in

Abaporu [fig. 70] and Antropofagia [fig. 71], which were produced dining her so-called antropofagia phase.

The simplified geometry of paintings such as these partly accounts for what Fabris sees as their hieratic quality, which is also characteristic of her other Pau-Brazil works.32

For Fabris, the geometric distillation that Tarsila pursues in this period defuses the inherent social tensions that Tarsila encountered in the Brazilian landscape, expressing the painter's own desire for a modernization that does not require a fundamental social transformation.33 Indeed, the very language used by Tarsila to describe her "discoveries"

3lAracy Amaral, qtd. in Satumini and Teixeira de Barros, Catalogo Raisonne Tarsila do Amoral, Volume 1,90. "Annateresa Fabris, "Forms of (Possible) Modernity," in Jorge Schwartz, Da Antropofagia a Brasilia: Brasil 1920-1950. (Valencia and Sao Paulo: Instituto Valencia de Arte Moderno, MAB-FAAP Museu de Arte Brasileira, 2002), 542. "Ibid. 162

is imbued with a comfortable sense of distance and emphasizes aesthetic transformation

as a separate problematic, even as she describes her artistic explorations as a search for

her own Brazilianness. But rather than achieving that synthesis, I suggest that these

canvases bring to the surface the paradoxes that the project of creating a collective

identity entails. By concentrating on means, or in Ortega y Gasset's metaphor, by looking

at the window pane, Tarsila reverts her gaze towards her art and the social field it

inhabits. Rather than looking out onto the stage of History located in Europe, to use

Joaquim Nabuco's theatrical metaphor, history would now be created in Brazil itself.

The awkward balance between figuration and abstraction seen in A Negra

suggests a struggle for the symbolic field of the canvas that shows how Tarsila was

grappling with the Cubism of her mentors in Paris. The simplification of the figure and

the palm leaf she introduces anticipate the language of her antropofagia paintings, whose

bright colours and simple shapes allude to a naif style that Tarsila was incorporating from

popular visual culture. In contrast to Diego Rivera, who fully immersed himself in

Cubism before returning to figuration for his murals, Tarsila experimented only briefly

with the different styles at her disposal in Paris. The colour strips surrounding the figure

show her experimenting with abstraction, but except for a few efforts at Synthetic

Cubism that look more like exercises, Tarsila remained mostly committed to figural

representation throughout most of the 1920s.

Regina Teixeira de Barros is right in suggesting that Victor Meirelles's Moema

(1866) and A Negra have a good deal in common, even though the artists approached their subjects through different lenses.34 One characteristic both paintings share is the

MRegina Teixeira de Barros, "Tarsila Viajante," in Tarsila viajante/viajera (Buenos Aires: Malba- 163

objectification of a subject that occupies a space distinctly separate from that of the artist.

She approached her subjects "in passing" as an artistic "tourist," but there is an important

tension implicit in Tarsila's gaze that references the social contradiction in Brazilian

society that her own canvases would highlight. The trope of discovering Brazil in Paris

that Tarsila and Oswald cultivated was predicated in no small part on the idea that the

"primitive" that so fascinated avant-garde European intellectuals was for Brazilians a

local matter. In other words, the Brazil that Oswald and Tarsila began constructing during

the Pau-Brazil phase, and continued later with antropofagia, suggested that the journey to

find the origin of an unspoiled primitivism was a journey back home. It is through this

paradoxical maneuver that we must read the modernista trip into the Minas Gerais region.

A Cuca (1924) [fig. 75], also painted in France and reminiscent of the characters

and animals that will appear in her antropofagia paintings, was described by Tarsila as

one of "some very Brazilian paintings" that elicited interest among her colleagues in

Paris.35 Like A Negra, A Cuca emphasizes the exotic, the naif, and the colourful as

somehow quintessentially Brazilian. Both paintings seem to suggest a type of Brazilian

exceptionalism in content but cosmopolitanism in form. Yet there is also an implication

that this formal cosmopolitanism has already been prefigured in homegrown visual

culture, since the abstraction of shapes characteristic of the avant-garde art Tarsila had studied seemed to have affinities with the geometric simplicity she was uncovering in

Brazilian visual culture. This ostensible affinity is one of the rhetorical tools that Tarsila used to fuse local and global aesthetics.

Fundacion Costantini; Sao Paulo: Pinacoteca do Estado de Sao Paulo, 2008), 22. 35Aracy Amaral, qtd. in Saturnini and Teixeira de Barros, Catalogo Raisonne Tarsila do Amaral, Volume 1, 112. 164

The painting Caipirinha (1923) [fig. 76] also shows Tarsila applying the simplified geometrical compositions she had practiced in Paris to a canvas that is meant to represent a Brazilian landscape. The transparency of its European-derived technique that has led critics such as Vinicius Dantas to describe the work as a failed exercise, much as Mario had criticized Veneza,36 Just how close Tarsila's painting was to that of her modernist mentors can be seen in Estudo (Academia no.l) (1923) [fig. 77], which was produced when she was studying with Leger. Jorge Schwartz describes the country girl in the painting with which Tarsila identified as "not dressed by Poiret but by Leger."37 This is in fact an equivalence, as these two facets of Paris are symbolically interchangeable in the virtual "very Brazilian" jungle that Tarsila constructs in the canvas. Although the painting owes much to the Parisian artist, one can already see in Tarsila's choices the beginning of the style associated with her Pau-Brasil work. The bright green vegetation of Caipirinha is part of a visual vocabulary that also prefigures "the jungle" and the

"Tupi" as metaphors for Brazil that appear in Oswald's Pau-Brasil and antropofagia manifestos.

By using a Cubist technique and referencing the Brazilian countryside Tarsila created an image in which the convergence of the local and the imported is meant to exude difference from art produced in the metropolitan centres.38 Later, the antropofagia

36"The result is disappointing...the geometric stylization shapes a banal post-cubist landscape, denoting mainly the complications at effort in composition," Vinicius Dantas, qtd. in Maria Eugenia Saturnini and Regina Teixeira de Barros, Catalogo Raisonne Tarsila do Amaral, vol. 1, 98. "Schwartz, "Oswald de Andrade y Tarsila do Amaral, 286. 38"I hope to learn, in the interior [of Brazil], from those who have not yet been corrupted by the academies," Tarsila do Amaral, a interessante artista brasileira, da-nos as suas impressoes" (Correio da Manha. Rio de Janeiro, 25 dez. 1923), qtd. in Aracy Amaral, ed., Correspondencia: Mario de Andrade & Tarsila do Amaral (Sao Paulo, Brasil: Editora da Universidade de Sao Paulo: Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros, Universidade de Sao Paulo, 2001), 79. 165

group would affirm the "otherness" of the inhabitants first encountered by Europeans in

the territory that would become Brazil, theTupi, as a locus from which to effect a cultural

and political critique.

In Carnaval em Madureira (1924) [fig. 78] the landscape has been transformed

from the "pristine" initial state associated with the Tupi or the sparsely populated one of

Caipirinha to a space where disparate geographic and cultural sites coexist: architecture

and figures are the product of the hybridity of conquest, but in their midst stands a

symbol of modernity whose referent lies outside the Brazilian landscape. Jorge Schwartz

interprets this canvas as the best translation of the oppositions between rural and urban,

local and cosmopolitan that occupy Tarsila and Oswald during this period and sees it as a

visual synthesis akin to the one created the "Manifesto Antropofago."39 But the style

Tarsila constructed in Carnaval is not simply a merging of Paris and Brazil. Rather, the

canvas is a medium onto which Tarsila has transcribed the juxtaposition of difference that

inflects many of the Pau-Brasil works as a group and through which she distilled a

symbolic language developed in tourist sketches during her transit through the Minas

Gerais region.

This painting also connects Tarsila with Blaise Cendrars, the Swiss-French poet

who travelled with the modemistas. Like the writer Guillaume Apollinare and the painter

Robert Delaunay, Cendrars had used the Eiffel Tower as a symbol of modernity,

understanding it as "a synecdoche for the...'prodigious centers of industrial activity spread out over the whole surface of the earth'."40 Cendrars had also given one of his

"Schwartz, "Oswald de Andrade y Tarsila do Amaral, 286. Blaise Cendrars, qtd. in Maijorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment, 207. 166

paintings of the Eiffel Tower to Tarsila when he first met her in Paris in 1923. Yet the pictorial relocation of the Eiffel Tower to Brazil speaks not just of the incorporation of

European culture and technology in the Americas or of Cendrars's induction as an

"honorary member" of the modernista group, but also of how the "progress" that made the iron structure possible is linked to the far-flung domains of the colonial project in unforeseen ways. The transatlantic juxtaposition constructed in Tarsila's canvas points to the material, symbolic, and cultural threads that define globalization, suggesting that in a very real sense the Tower does have roots in Madureira. This is not just because the

Americas provided raw materials for European prosperity and cannibalized Western culture and know-how, but because Brazil cannot be disentangled from the innumerable relations that such intercontinental connections entail. Carnaval gives visual form to the idea that any notion of an original Brazilian cultural autonomy is problematized by the threads of global consumption already present at the moment of the country's inception.

Carnaval is also a reference to the carnival in Rio de Janeiro, which by this point had become an important cultural event in the city. It was a facet of African-Brazilian culture that much like samba —or carnaval and candombe in Uruguay— had been appropriated as an expression of national culture.

Like Carnaval, the painting E.F.C.B. (Brazilian Railroads) (1924) [fig. 79] is also constructed with simple colours and bold outlines, and includes iron structures that allude those of the Eiffel Tower.41 The railroad reiterates a notion of technological ingenuity broadcast on a global scale, for which the Eiffel Tower was a recurring symbol at the beginning of the twentieth century. But when seen in conjunction with Carnaval, E.F.C.B

4lSchwartz, "Oswald de Andrade y Tarsila do Amaral, 285. 167

also portrays the transformation and appropriation of objects and ideas when they were

transported across the ocean to the Americas. The iron structures that litter the landscape

of E.F.C.B. look like fragments of the Eiffel Tower, as if the monument portrayed in

Carnaval had been literally cannibalized and half-digested by the Brazilian environment.

On a formal level, all motifs have been flattened and incorporated into a homogenous

field filled with pictographic symbols that give the canvas the look of a collage of ciphers

or hieroglyphs. Some of the simplified shapes, such as the railroad signals and the wheels

on the railroad wagons, mirror each other and reinforce the image's anti-illusionism.

Their toy-like look also reiterates the ludic quality of Tarsila's Pau-Brasil style and is an

outcome of her primitivist pursuit of simplicity.

Tarsila abstracted the landscape into simplified forms even more directly in other

paintings of the same year, such as Sao Paulo [fig. 80] and Sao Paulo (Gazo) [fig. 81]. In

these works the resemblance to collage is more apparent, particularly in the latter

painting's Cubist incorporation of text as a compositional device. Mario de Andrade was

nevertheless unconvinced by the graphic intrusion of the letters into the visual field. In an annotation on the back of a photograph of Sao Paulo (Gazo) Mario wrote: "Very good.

Where Tarsila discovered herself," but concluded that the letters undermine the work's

aesthetic dimension by evoking the meaning of the word they form, regardless of their constructive function, and thus "literalizing" the painting.42

As Annateresa Fabris has noted, Tarsila's combination of modernist techniques and Brazilian visual devices suggest what Icleia Cattani has called '"uncertain places,' that is, of areas of representation that lie between two formal systems and two cultures, in

42Qtd. in Aracy Amaral, Tarsila: Sua obra e seu tempo, 166. 168

which what is revealed is the permanence of difference and multiplicity in space and

time."43 Fabris also suggests that the paintings are a harmonious blend of contradictions,

but that the "aesthetic flattening" of the paintings does not necessarily render organic

spaces where tension is diffused.44 The tension described by Cattani and Fabris expresses

a cultural complexity that Tarsila was attempting to capture in her paintings and that was

the wellspring from which artists of the 1920s drew material in their quest to reconfigure

cultural expressions. Nevertheless, Cattani's notion of two cultures and two formal

systems echoes the discourse used by intellectuals and artists that reduced the problem of

cultural expression to the dichotomy of the local and the global. Neither of these two

concepts is unambiguous, and any notion of brasilidade is fraught with multiple

collective identities that reside within the countries borders. Therefore, it is the

emergence of a complex, permanent difference and multiplicity that must be stressed as

the "discovery" of cultural projects such as those of Tarsila and the modernistas. The

aesthetic flattening and symbolic equality of her paintings begin to allude to this

complexity outside the frame. In E.F.C.B., for example, Tarsila juxtaposes multiple

historical and cultural layers on the picture plane. The technological infrastructure

referenced in the title, the "natural" vegetation, and the Baroque church in the

background are symbols of different histories that coexist in the country, but also global

exchanges that create both opportunity and pressure to homogenize.

Tarsila made many sketches during the Minas Gerais trip, some of which served as illustrations for Cendrars's book Feuilles de Route. These drawings were produced in a

43Fabris, "Forms of (Possible) Modernity," 542. "Ibid. 169

quick calligraphic style that that was carried over into the simple geometries of her Pau-

Brasil work. In one such illustration [fig. 82] this simplification becomes a form of hieroglyphic drawing. This particular page exaggerates what I suggest is an inherent tendency of her Pau-Brasil paintings to deconstruct visual motifs into a collection of symbols or ciphers.

One has to be careful not to read Oswald's phrase "the jungle and the classroom" into Tarsila's paintings as a type of synthesis. It is also not the "permanent contradiction" that Oswald will reference in the "Manifesto Antropofago," but a give-and-take that involves transformation, difference, and contradiction, a condition akin to what the

Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz came to define as transculturation.45 Tarsila's Pau-

Brasil paintings might seem static, but the geometric simplification that conjoins and flattens temporalities and spaces suggests a porosity of borders on the surface of the paintings in the state of things outside the artwork's frame.

The globalizing culture alluded to in Pau-Brasil would be upended by Oswald through the "polemical" stance of the cannibal. The cannibal will become a symbol of resistance to an encroaching, equally devouring modernity and to the local xenophobia and nationalist anti-modernist jingoism of the Verde-Amarelo group that emerged in the late 1920s. Adherents of antropofagia proposed that "the recovery and resignification" of the cannibalism of the Tupi, one of the peoples on the southern continent when the

Europeans arrived, was key to grounding a modern Brazilian culture.46 Oswald's manifesto literally inverts the noble savage myth of Alencar's O Guarani (a myth that

45See Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint; Tobacco and Sugar (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1947). ^Luis Madureira, Cannibal Modernities (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2005), 13. 170

emerges in Amoedo's The Last Tamoio [fig. 22] and Medeiros's Iracema [fig. 21]) and supplants it with its grotesque and cannibalistic mirror image.

The Tupi had disappeared by the time of the antropofagia movement and thus only existed in archival documentation. For Luis Madureira this means that the movement's '"metaphoric return' to Brazil's authentic 'cannibalistic' roots, then, cannot but assume the form of a treacherous detour through inauthentic and unstable textual regions."47 The issue is not just that the modemistas were constructing a counter-myth to the noble savage by using anthropological texts and dictionaries. Oswald's "Manifesto

Antropofago" rescues Brazil's "first peoples" as forerunners of the country's modernism

—"Tupi or not Tupi: that is the question," as he phrased the problematic (in English) in the manifesto. But Oswald also used the idea of cannibalism as a conceptual tool with which to examine the very same origins that the antropofagos were rescuing. In the opening lines of the manifesto Oswald suggested that antropofagia transcended the country's borders: "Only anthropophagy unites us. Socially. Economically.

Philosophically. The world's only law. The disguised expression of all individualisms, of all collectivisms. Of all religions. Of all peace treaties."48 Assuming a universalism typical of twentieth-century manifestos, Oswald elevated cannibalism into a global phenomenon, a rapaciousness across continents that establishes antropofagia as a movement that, for Madureira, "engages consumption and production on a global scale, and not autonomy, as inescapable factors for cultural definition."49 Haroldo de Campos

47Ibid. 48Oswald de Andrade, "Anthropophagite Manifesto," in Dawn Ades, Art in Latin America, 312. 49Fernando J. Rosenberg, The Avant-Garde and Geopolitics in Latin America (Pittsburgh, PA: The University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), 80. 171

would write that

Oswald's "Anthropophagy"—as I have written elsewhere—is a theory proposing

the critical devouring of universal cultural heritage, formulated not from the

submissive and reconciled perspective of the "noble savage" (idealized following

the model of European virtues in the "nativist" vein of Brazilian romanticism by

authors such as Gon^alves Dias and Jose de Alencar, for example), but from the

disabused point of view of the "bad savage," devourer of whites, the cannibal.

This last view does not involve submission (conversion) but, rather,

transculturation, or, even better, "transvalorization": a critical view of history as a

negative function (in Nietzsche's sense), capable of appropriation and of

expropriation, of dehierarchization, of deconstruction. Any past which is an

"other" for us deserves to be negated.50

What Madureira terms the shift from autonomy to consumption in antropofagia is really

the redefinition of autonomy as consumption, but doing so from the unwavering and

undefeated position of the cannibal. In his Pau-Brasil poems Oswald had not yet

suggested a history predicated on what Campos calls a "negative function" because

whatever notion of Brazilian identity emerges from that book is still complex and conflicted. In antropofagia, the figure of the Tupi was converted into the sole locus of an aggressive identity that seems almost self-generated. It is not the "noble savage" of the nineteenth century but its mirror image that occupies the stage.

A book linked to antropofagia that intensifies the complex juxtapositions

^Haroldo de Campos, "Anthropophagous Reason: Dialogue and Difference in Brazilian Culture," 159-160. 172

characteristic of both Tarsila and Oswald's Pau-Brasil work is Mario de Andrade's novel

Macunaima (A Hero Without Character) (1928). The eponymous hero of the book, who

is a literal blank slate, travels across Brazil, where he encounters a surreal landscape

populated by characters in a constant state of transformation who seem to inhabit a series

of nested borders: between the jungle and the city, between myth and science, and

between "civilization and barbarism." The landscapes he traverses are littered with

undigested fragments from the past. Mario de Andrade seems to suggest that Brazil lacks

an essential nature, that it is constantly in flux, defining itself at every moment. In Sad

Paulo, Macunaima encounters a city thoroughly enmeshed in a global matrix. It is

inhabited by people from different parts of the world who are chameleon-like in an

environment overflowing with hybridity and irreconcilable dissonance. In this book

Mario saw himself as

working through and discovering all I can about the national identity of

Brazilians...The Brazilian has no character. And by character I do not simply

mean a moral reality...[but rather] a permanent psychic identity, manifesting

itself in everything, in the mores, in outward actions, in emotions, in language, in

History.. .in good as well as in evil. The Brazilian has no character because he

has neither a civilization of his own [civilizagao propria] nor a traditional

consciousness.51

As Luis Madureira notes, Nestor Garcia Canclini mentions antropofagia as a precursor of postmodern notions of "decollection and deterritorialization."52 In the Brazilian group and

"Mario de Andrade, qtd. in Madureira, Cannibal Modernities, 92. "Luis Madureira, "A Cannibal Recipe to Turn a Dessert Country into the Main Course: Brazilian Antropofagia and the Dilemma of Development," Luso-Brazilian Review 41, no. 2 (2005): 115; See also 173

in the Argentinian martinfierristas Canclini sees the precursors of contemporary artists who challenge collective and individual identity in Latin America as they open up visual culture to new, contingent, and complex ways of self-understanding.53 But this idea of bricolage is already latent in Oswald's and Tarsila's Pau-Brasil phase. In the hesitancy of the artwork from that period's fragmented vision Tarsila allegorizes the patchwork of tensions that is Brazil itself.

Nestor Garcia Canclini, Culturas hibridas: estrategias para entrary salir de la modernidad (Barcelona: Paidos, 2001), 297-299. "Canclini, Culturas Hibridas, 297-299. 174

Epilogue

The Avant-Garde Artist as an Apprentice Tourist

It would be advantageous to accelerate the liquidation of a mistake that confuses some young artists. It needs to be established, to rectify certain hasty definitions, that not all new art is revolutionary, nor is it truly novel. Two souls coexist in the contemporary world, those of revolution and decadence. Only the presence of the former lends a poem or a painting the value of a new art.

We cannot accept as new an art that brings us only a new technique. That would be to indulge in the most deceptive of the current mirages. No aesthetics can reduce the artistic work to a question of technique. The new technique must also correspond to a new spirit. Otherwise, there is only a change ofparameters, of decoration. And an artistic revolution is not satisfied with formal conquests.'

Jose Carlos Mariategui (1926)

And the world pours into Paris its vast current as into the marvelous concavity of a gigantic golden goblet.2

"En Paris," Ruben Dario (1900)

If there is a simple story to be extracted from the studies outlined in this thesis it is

"'Conviene apresurar la liquidation de un equivoco que desorienta a algunos artistas jovenes. Hace falta establecer, rectificando ciertas definiciones presurosas, que no todo el arte nuevo es revolucionario, ni es tampoco verdaderamente nuevo. En el mundo contemporaneo coexisten dos almas, las de la revolution y la decadencia. Solo la presencia de la primera confiere a un poema o un cuadro valor de arte nuevo. No podemos aceptar como nuevo un arte que no nos trae sino una nueva tecnica. Eso seria recrearse en el mas falaz de los espejismos actuales. Ninguna estetica puede rebajar el trabajo artistico a una cuestion de tecnica. La tecnica nueva debe corresponder a un espiritu nuevo tambien. Si no, lo unico que cambia es el paramento, el decorado. Y una revolution artistica no se contenta de conquistas formales." Jose Carlos Mariategui, "Arte, revolution y decadencia," in Jose Carlos Mariategui, Literatura y estetica, 104. 2"Y el mundo vierte sobre Paris su vasta corriente como en la concavidad maravillosa de una gigantesca copa de oro." Ruben Dario, Peregrinaciones (Paris and Mexico: Libreria de la Viuda de Ch. Bouret, 1901), 23. 175

that, paradoxically, at the historical juncture of the early 1920s artists produced images

that alluded to the complexity of the period. To say that the period was highly complex is

not a mere tautology. Every era that one can examine is, of course, a highly complex span

of events from which interpretations and narratives are extracted. To classify,

discriminate, and draw distinctions is to render more simply what is complex. It is a

necessary step in this process of selection. Rather, what I am suggesting is that

complexity itself emerged as a shadow from the artworks themselves.

Many artists and intellectuals who were active in the 1920s described what

emerged from such an engagement with complexity as a type of rupture, and the literature

dedicated to vanguardias has reasserted this narrative. Indeed, as I have argued above,

change is visually evident in the artworks themselves. However, this new "look" was also

accompanied by an awareness of the artist's role. The visual turn initiated by artists such

as those studied in the previous chapters changed both how artworks were inserted in the

wider visual culture and how they signified their surroundings. Here Peter Burger's

suggestion that the historical avant-garde project sought to eradicate the separation of art

and life acquires new meaning. The "cannibalization" of a wider visual culture, whether defined as popular, indigenous, or local, was justified in the name of creating a modern autochthonous culture. By drawing the image to the surface and denying the phantasmagoric effect of nineteenth-century realism, the artists of the 1920s drew attention to the illusory quality of the artwork and to the social context in which it was created.

As has been suggested throughout this study, the vanguardist impulse in the 176

southern Americas was linked to place through the re-examination of cultural traditions and images. The social context at the beginning of the 1920s was one of flux; it was a period in which a new generation wanted to enunciate its own vision. In addition to such events as World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution, the Americas had had its own upheavals, such as the Mexican Revolution, that demonstrated the conflicted social fabric across the continent. Social relations that had remained virtually frozen within a colonial matrix —having been adopted by the criollo elites after Independence— were now being contested by a rising bourgeois class and by the dynamic heterogeneity of the growing cities where the contrast between social classes was one of the many spectacles of modernity. All these transformations were aesthetic, in the broadest sense of the term: the image of the nation that had been constructed by intellectuals and artists since

Independence was confronted with difference within the country's borders. This heterogeneity that clamored for representation stimulated a new way of creating visual art, which also responded to the formal possibilities explored in early twentieth-century modernism, the expansion of knowledge, and the arrival of new technologies.

Although artists were in part conscious of these transformations as they created art that suited their locales, they were also putting into question the broader notion of the image itself. There were several factors that contributed to this: an interest in "primitive" art, which was reaching its height in the early interwar years; the explosion of media and thus the growth of mass culture; and the desire to construct a "popular" culture, which was a project enmeshed in the search for search for a modern and autochthonous communal identity. 177

Latin American artists' interest in what was construed as popular and indigenous

visual culture in the Latin American context implied a local primitivism, and the

"discovery" of the "primitive" in the metropolitan centres became a common theme

during this period. In Paulo Prado's introduction to the book of Pau-Brasil poetry he

described the genesis of Oswald's text as an epiphany in the French capital:

Oswald de Andrade, on a trip to Paris, from the height of an atelier in the Place

Clichy —the navel of the world— discovered, dazzled, his own country. Upon

returning to his homeland he confirmed, in the enchantment of the manuelina

discoveries the surprising revelation that Brazil existed. That fact, which some

now distrusted, opened his eyes to the radiant vision of a new world, unexplored

and mysterious. "Pau-Brasil" poetry had been created.3

Although the manner in which the idea of discovery worked for the Brazilian

modemistas had its own distinct characteristics, the general concept of a journey outside

that led to the insight recurs time and again in the histories of many artists of the 1920s.

This narrative applies to the intellectuals and artists of the southern Americas, and to

those who arrived who arrived in the Americas from Europe, such as Blaise Cendrars and

Andre Breton. The artists examined in this study are no exception: Chariot's discovery of

Mexico, for example, began with the collections of his relatives in France that stimulated

his later passage across the Atlantic; Figari's visual production was set in motion in

Buenos Aires and later in Paris; Xul began creating his neocriollo and explored

Americanist motifs in Europe; and Tarsila created her painting A Negra, which would lead to Pau-Brasil and later to antropofagia, in Paris.

'Oswald de Andrade, Obras Completas, vol. 7, 67. 178

Prado's statement is a return to Ruben Dario's exaltation of Paris, the "gigantic

golden goblet" quoted in the epigraph above, but in this return the gaze has been

reversed. Rather than discovering their homeland in Paris, Oswald and Tarsila came to

understand that, as Yudice suggests, peripheral cultures "were present in this 'center' in

the form of artists and writers from non-European countries or in the collections of so-

called primitive works brought to western Europe from Africa, America, Oceania, the

Near and the Far Orient."4 In other words, the peripheries were participants in the centre,

contributing to its culture, to its economy, and ultimately to its modernity. This insight led

artists to chart a type of ethnographic and touristic travel —whether they left their own

countries or not— that transformed them into bricoleurs and complicated the notion of

what national culture should be or could be.

Throughout this thesis I have suggested that the art of the 1920s fulfilled a

particular role by serving as an epistemological tool to question how local culture was

being constructed, valued, and mobilized in the southern Americas. In conclusion, how

did the transformation that I have charted for the four artists examined in this study

reflect what I am suggesting is a much broader phenomenon? We have seen that these

artists were consciously seeking particular formal means to describe their environment. In

all four cases this involved the investigation of local visual cultures by reconfiguring

modern artistic techniques. The tendency towards flatness in all their work reflected the

fixing of a gaze on artistic means, what Ortega y Gasset described as an emphasis on the

window pane. This transformed the artwork from a simple allegory contained within its

4George Yudice, "Rethinking the Theory of the Avant-Garde from the Periphery," in Modernism and Its Margins: Reinscribing Cultural Modernity from Spain and Latin America, ed. Anthony L. Geist and Jose B. Monleon (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1999), 54. 179

frame, to an object onto which meaning is drawn to the surface, in all senses of this phrase.

This transformation of the artwork had two important consequences: it produced a reflective gaze that negated the phantasmic impulse of the painted image —or that uncovered realism as a mirage, rather than a mirror, as Oswald de Andrade phrased it; and it stimulated artists to engage with cultural heterogeneity as it emerged on the surface of the artwork.5 By subverting local expectations of what the artistic object should be, artists denied the illusion of the phantasmagoria, an illusion that not only included the artwork but also the Academy, the city, the nation, and even the continent in which these works were created. The aesthetic questions they asked and the manner they went about answering them very quickly led artists to problematics outside the bounds of the artworld. As artists shifted from ends to means, the rejection of the phantasmagoria model of the artwork suggested that the meaning of images was all on the surface as a representation of a state of things.6 And the state of things was one of complexity. In this sense, the artwork was indeed an epistemological tool, since a shift to means drew attention to the artwork's role in representation, and to this representation's role as knowledge.

Two images suggest the complexities uncovered by artists of the 1920s and how these artists came to construct a new art to represent them. The first image is a photograph by Mario de Andrade with an accompanying annotation [fig. 83]: "Venice. In

Santarem. June, 1927 (It's the hotel) 31 of May. To be or not to be Venice. Here are the

5For Oswald's suggestion that realistic representation was a mirage rather than a mirror, see Schwartz, Vanguardiay cosmopolitismo en la decada del veinte, 65. 6Vilem Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, 9. 180

pointed arches of Santarem."7 Mario's playful message suggests several characteristics of the work Tarsila created during her Pau-Brasil period. First, its theme it is a type of return to Veneza, her early painting of Venice that Mario had criticized. In that painting, Tarsila was beginning to explore the modern compositional techniques she had learned in Paris.

Mario interpreted the steamship as a detail that disrupted an overdetermined site of

Western cultural history. He had understood the canvas as Tarsila's attempt to abandon the confines of Cubism and pursue her own style and had judged it as the beginning of a path that would lead to a better synthesis of elements, but whose liminality made the transition transparent to the influences that were being ingested. This transparency is what makes Veneza and Mario's picture of a "Venice in Santarem" apt analogies for

Tarsila's Pau-Brasil phase in general. Like the Eiffel Tower in Tarsila's Carnaval em

Madureira [fig. 78], the Brazilian "Venice" documented by Mario has sprouted in the tropics, complete with Gothic arches in a land with no local connection to that particular history. Santarem is not Venice, and Madureira is not Paris. This acknowledgement is a return to the moments of collective trauma and change that were the Conquest and the

Independence movements. The anxiety of influence that reverberates from these foundational episodes emerges in the Pau-Brasil works and is in great part what stimulated Tarsila and Oswald to pull local culture out from under the long shadow of

"Western civilization."

The second image that exemplifies the complexity of global networks in the 1920s is a photograph of Tarsila taken at her first exhibition in Paris in 1926 [fig. 84]. Tarsila

7"Veneza. Em Santarem. Junho, 1927 (E o hotel) 31 de maio. To be or not to be Veneza. Eis aqui estao ogivas de Santarem." Qtd. in Schwartz, Da Antropofagia a Brasilia, 218-219. 181

stands by her painting Morro de Favela [fig. 85] (one can also see part of Sao Paulo [fig.

80] to her right), looking very much like her self-portrait [fig. 86] and resembling the textual image that Oswald constructed of her in his poem "Atelier." She appears as the emblematic "country girl dressed by Poiret," the very embodiment of the Pau-Brasil paintings' spirit. Yet Morro de Favela intrudes into the picture behind her by suggesting that her comopolitanism is fraught with tensions that her appropriations can only hint at and is challenged by a complexity at the margins of the frame. 182

Illustrations

Fig. 1 Jose Clemente Orozco, Cortes and Malinche (1923-1926), Antiguo Colegio San Ildefonso, Mexico City. 183

Fig. 2 Eighteenth-century illustration depicting a phantasmagoria, in Terry Castle, "Phantasmagoria: Spectral Technology and the Metaphorics of Modern Reverie," Critical Inquiry 15, no. 1 (October 1, 1988): 32.

Fig. 3 Eighteenth-century illustration of a magic lantern, in Terry Castle, "Phantasmagoria: Spectral Technology and the Metaphorics of Modern Reverie," Critical Inquiry 15, no. 1 (October 1, 1988): 33. 184

* '" ( \ f s f

Fig. 4 Juan Cordero, Columbus Before the Catholic Sovereigns (1850), in Dawn Ades, Art in Latin America: The Modern Era, 1820-1980 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 32.

Fig. 5 Jose Obregon, The Discovery of Pulque (1869), in Dawn Ades, Art in Latin America: The Modern Era, 1820-1980 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 34. Fig. 6 Felix Parra, Bartolome de las Casas (1875), in Dawn Ades, Art in Latin America: The Modern Era, 1820-1980 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 35.

Fig. 7 Felix Parra, Scene From the Conquest (1877), in Dawn Ades, Art in Latin America: The Modern Era, 1820-1980 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 34. 186

Fig. 8 Leandro Izaguirre, The Torture of Cuauhtemoc (1893), in Dawn Ades, Art in Latin America: The Modern Era, 1820-1980 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 35.

Fig. 9 Plan of San Juan de la Frontera (Mendoza), Argentina (1562), http://www.smith.edu/vistas/vistas_web/gaHery/detail/foundational_argentina_det.htm, accessed June 6,2011. 187

Fig. 10 Jose Maria Velasco, The Metlac Ravine (1893), in Dawn Ades, Art in Latin America: The Modern Era, 1820-1980 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 107.

Fig. 11 Jose Maria Velasco, View of Mexico City From Cerro Santa Isabel (1892), in Dawn Ades, Art in Latin America: The Modern Era, 1820-1980 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 105. 188

Fig. 12 Saturnino Herran, Flora (1910), in Fausto Ramirez, Modernismo y modernizacion en Mexico (Mexico City: Universidad Autonoma de Mexico, Instituto de Investigaciones Esteticas, 2008), 347.

Fig. 13 Saturnino Herran, The Tehuana (1914), in Fausto Ramirez, Modernismo y modernizacion en Mexico (Mexico City: Universidad Autonoma de Mexico, Instituto de Investigaciones Esteticas, 2008), 366. 189

Fig. 14 Saturnine) Herran, Frieze of the Ancient Gods (1914), in Fausto Ramirez, Modernismo y modernizacion en Mexico (Mexico City: Universidad Autonoma de Mexico, Instituto de Investigaciones Esteticas, 2008), 379.

Fig. 15 Saturnino Herran, Coatlicue (1918), in Jacqueline Barnitz, Twentieth-Century Art of Latin America (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2001), 20. 190

Fig. 16 Juan Manuel Blanes, The Two Roads (c. 1875-1878), in Juan Manuel Blanes: La Nation Naciente, 1830-1901 (Montevideo: Museo Municipal de Arte Juan Manuel Blanes, 2002), 143. 191

Fig. 17 Juan Manuel Blanes, Yellow Fever (1871), in Juan Manuel Blanes: La Nacion Naciente, 1830-1901 (Montevideo: Museo Municipal de Arte Juan Manuel Blanes, 2002), 64.

Fig. 18 Angel Delia Valle, The Return From the Raid (1892) in Guia: Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (Buenos Aires: Asociacion Amigos del Museo de Bellas Artes, 2007), 76. Fig. 19 Argentina's pavilion for the 1889 Paris Exposition. Picture of the building Buenos Aires in 1900, in Alvaro Fernandez Bravo, "Ambivalent Argentina: Nationalism, Exoticism, and Latin Americanism at the 1889 Paris Universal Exposition." Neplanta: Views from the South 2, no.l (2001): 123. 193

Fig. 20 Victor Merirelles, Moema (1866), in Darlene J. Sadlier, Brazil Imagined: 1500 to the Present (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2008), 185.

Fig. 21 Jose Maria Medeiros, Iracema (1881), in Darlene J. Sadlier, Brazil Imagined: 1500 to the Present (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2008), 187. 194

Fig. 22 Rodolfo Amoedo, The Last Tamoio (1883), in Darlene J. Sadlier, Brazil Imagined: 1500 to the Present (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2008), 186.

Fig. 23 Victor Meirelles, The First Mass in Brazil (1861), in Isis Pimentel de Castro, "Os pintores de historia: a pintura historica e sua relapao com a cultura historica oitocentista," Pergaminho 1, no. 0 (October, 2005): 67. 195

Fig. 24 Pedro Americo, Battle of Aval (1877), Museu Paulista, Universidade de Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo.

Fig. 25 Pedro Americo, The Proclamation of Independence (1888), Museu Paulista, Universidade de Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo. Fig. 26 Victor Meirelles, Battle of Guararapes (1879), in Isis Pimentel de Castro, "Os pintores de historia: a pintura historica e sua relafao com a cultura historica oitocentista," Pergaminho 1, no. 0 (October, 2005): 59.

Fig. 27 Almeida Junior, Departure of the Expedition (1897), Museu Paulista, Universidade de Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo. 197

Fig. 28 Almeida Junior, Man From the Countryside Cutting Tobacco (1893), Pinacoteca do Estado de Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo.

Fig. 29 Almeida Junior,The Guitar Player (1899), in Jacqueline Barnitz, Twentieth- Century Art of Latin America (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2001), 36. 198

Fig. 30 Jean Chariot, The Massacre at the Templo Mayor (1922—1923) Antiguo Colegio San Ildefonso, Mexico City, photograph by the author.

Fig. 31 Diego Rivera, Creation (1922-1923), in Jacqueline Barnitz, Twentieth-Century Art of Latin America (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2001), 46. 199

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Fig. 32 Jean Chariot, Don Pancho (1922), Jean Chariot Collection University of Hawai'i at Manoa Library, photograph by the author.

Fig. 33 Jose Guadalupe Posada, Calavera of the Streetsweepers (n.d.), in Posada's Popular Mexican Prints, 273 Cuts By Jose Guadalupe Posada, ed. Roberto Berdecio and Stanley Applebaum (New York: Dover, 1972), 18. 200

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Fig. 34 Xavier Guerrero, Masthead for El Machete (1924), Jean Chariot Collection University of Hawai'i at Manoa Library, photograph by the author.

Fig. 35 Diego Rivera, Portrait of Adolfo Best Maugard (1913), in Guia del Museo Nacional de Arte (Mexico: Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, 2006), 220. 201

Fig. 36 Adolfo Best Maugard, Self-Portrait (1923), in Guia del Museo Nacional de Arte (Mexico: Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, 2006), 221. 202

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Fig. 37 Cover and sample pages from Adolfo Best Maugard's drawing method Fig. 38 Fernando Leal, The Feast of the Lord of Chalma (1922-1923), Antiguo Colegio San Ildefonso, Mexico City, photograph by the author.

Fig. 40 Pedro Figari, The Arrival (n.d.), in Raquel Pereda, Pedro Figari (Montevideo: Fundacion Banco de Boston, 1995), 125.

Fig. 41 Pedro Figari, Pericon (n.d.), in Raquel Pereda, Pedro Figari (Montevideo: Fundacion Banco de Boston, 1995), 95. 205

Fig. 42 Sketches drawn by Figari during the Almeida trial (1894-1898), in Victor Luis Anastasfa and Walter Rela, Figari, lucha continua (Montevideo: Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Uruguay; Academia Uruguaya de Letras; Libros Gussi, 1994), 19-20.

Fig. 43 Pedro Figari, Stupidity (1918-1919), in Pedro Figari: mitoymemoria rioplatenses/Rio de la Plata Myth and Memory (Caracas, Venezuela: Museo de Bellas Artes, 2000), 106. 206

Fig. 44 Pedro Figari, Greed (1918-1919), in Pedro Figari: mitoy memoria rioplatenses/Rio de la Plata Myth and Memory (Caracas, Venezuela: Museo de Bellas Artes, 2000), 106.

Fig. 45 Pedro Figari, Chimes For Prayer (1925), in Dawn Ades, Art in Latin America: The Modern Era, 1820-1980 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 141. Fig. 46 Pedro Figari, Candombe (n.d.), in Raquel Pereda, Pedro Figari (Montevideo: Fundacion Banco de Boston, 1995), 177.

Fig. 47 Pedro Figari, Candombe (n.d.), in Raquel Pereda, Pedro Figari (Montevideo: Fundacion Banco de Boston, 1995), 167. 208

Fig. 48 Pedro Figari, Towards the Governor's House (n.d.), in Raquel Pereda, Pedro Figari (Montevideo: Fundacion Banco de Boston, 1995), 215.

Fig. 49 Pedro Figari, Visiting the Governor (n.d.), in Raquel Pereda, Pedro Figari (Montevideo: Fundacion Banco de Boston, 1995), 214. 209

Fig. 50 Pedro Figari, African Nostalgia (n.d.), in Raquel Pereda, Pedro Figari (Montevideo: Fundacion Banco de Boston, 1995), 171.

Fig. 51 Pedro Figari, In Society (n.d.), in Raquel Pereda, Pedro Figari (Montevideo: Fundacion Banco de Boston, 1995), 253. 210

Fig. 52 Pedro Figari, Presentation (n.d.), in Raquel Pereda, Pedro Figari (Montevideo: Fundacion Banco de Boston, 1995), 273.

Fig. 53 Pedro Figari, Uncertainty (n.d.), in Raquel Pereda, Pedro Figari (Montevideo: Fundacion Banco de Boston, 1995), 265. 211

Fig. 54 Pedro Figari, Criollo Dance (n.d.), in Raquel Pereda, Pedro Figari (Montevideo: Fundacion Banco de Boston, 1995), 130.

Fig. 55 Pedro Figari, Maternity (n.d.), in Raquel Pereda, Pedro Figari (Montevideo: Fundacion Banco de Boston, 1995), 85. 212

Fig. 56 Pedro Figari, Vigilance (n.d.), in El Ser Primario, el Hombre primordial: La Serie de los "Trogloditas " de Pedro Figari (Montevideo: Museo Figari, 2010), 31.

Fig. 57 Pedro Figari, Textile Industry (n.d.), in El Ser Primario, el Hombre primordial: La Serie de los "Trogloditas " de Pedro Figari (Montevideo: Museo Figari, 2010), 39. Fig. 58 Pedro Figari, Indians (n.d.), in Raquel Pereda, Pedro Figari (Montevideo: Fundacion Banco de Boston, 1995), 87.

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Fig. 59 Pedro Figari, The Old Market (1890), in Raquel Pereda, Pedro Figari (Montevideo: Fundacion Banco de Boston, 1995), ll. 214

Fig. 60 Jose Cuneo, Largo Hill (LaAguada) (1918), in Gabriel Peluffo Linari, Historia de lapintura en el Uruguay. El imaginario National-Regional (1830-1930): De Blanes a Figari, 6th ed., Vol. 1 (Montevideo: Ediciones de la Banda Oriental, 2009), 75.

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Fig. 61 Cover of the magazine Teseo, 1924, in Los veinte: el proyecto uruguayo. Arte y diseno de un imaginario, 1916-1934 (Montevideo: Museo Municipal de Bellas Artes Juan Manuel Blanes, 1999), 45. 215

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Fig. 62 Cover and sample page from Figari's book The Architect (1928) 216

JORGE UJB MNKUS i FERVOR DE BUENOS AIRES j 1CMKIIII j Fig. 63 Norah Borges, cover for Jorge Luis Borges's book of poems Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923)

Fig. 64 Xul Solar, Puerto azul (1927), in Mario H. Gradowczyk, Alejandro Xul Solar (Buenos Aires: Ediciones ALBA, 1996), 135. 217

Fig. 65 Xul Solar, Mundo (1925), in Mario H. Gradowczyk, Alejandro Xul Solar (Buenos Aires: Ediciones ALBA, 1996), 125.

Fig. 66 Xul Solar, Pais (1925), in Mario H. Gradowczyk, Alejandro Xul Solar (Buenos Aires: Ediciones ALBA, 1996), 124. 218

Fig. 67 Xul Solar, Tlaloc (1923), in Mario H. Gradowczyk, Alejandro Xul Solar (Buenos Aires: Ediciones ALBA, 1996), 84.

Fig. 68 Xul Solar, Nana Watzin (1923), in Mario H. Gradowczyk, Alejandro Xul Solar (Buenos Aires: Ediciones ALBA, 1996), 85. 219

Fig. 69 Xul Solar, Lady Diaphanous (1923), in Mario H. Gradowczyk, Alejandro Xul Solar (Buenos Aires: Ediciones ALBA, 1996), 93. 220

Fig. 70 Tarsila do Amaral, Abaporu (1928), in Maria Eugenia Saturnini and Regina Teixeira de Barros, Catalogo Raisonne Tarsila do Amaral (Sao Paulo: Base 7 Projetos Culturais, Pinacoteca do Estado, 2008), 167.

Fig. 71 Tarsila do Amaral, Antropofagia (1929), in Maria Eugenia Saturnini and Regina Teixeira de Barros, Catalogo Raisonne Tarsila do Amaral (Sao Paulo: Base 7 Projetos Culturais, Pinacoteca do Estado, 2008), 183. 221

Fig. 72 Cover of first issue of the magazine Klaxon (1922)

Fig. 73 Tarsila do Amaral, Veneza (1923), in Maria Eugenia Saturnini and Regina Teixeira de Barros, Catalogo Raisonne Tarsila do Amaral (Sao Paulo: Base 7 Projetos Culturais, Pinacoteca do Estado, 2008), 111. 222

Fig. 74 Tarsila do Amaral, A Negra (1923), in Maria Eugenia Saturnini and Regina Teixeira de Barros, Catdlogo Raisonne Tarsila do Amaral (Sao Paulo: Base 7 Projetos Culturais, Pinacoteca do Estado, 2008), 91.

Fig. 75 Tarsila do Amaral, A Cuca (1923), in Maria Eugenia Saturnini and Regina Teixeira de Barros, Catdlogo Raisonne Tarsila do Amaral (Sao Paulo: Base 7 Projetos Culturais, Pinacoteca do Estado, 2008), 113. Fig. 76 Tarsila do Amaral, Caipirinha (1923), in Maria Eugenia Saturnini and Regina Teixeira de Barros, Catalogo Raisonne Tarsila do Amaral (Sao Paulo: Base 7 Projetos Culturais, Pinacoteca do Estado, 2008), 98.

Fig. 77 Tarsila do Amaral, Estudo (Academia no.l) (1923), in Maria Eugenia Saturnini and Regina Teixeira de Barros, Catalogo Raisonne Tarsila do Amaral (Sao Paulo: Base 7 Projetos Culturais, Pinacoteca do Estado, 2008), 101. 224

Fig. 78 Tarsila do Amaral, Carnaval em Madureira (1924), in Maria Eugenia Saturnini and Regina Teixeira de Barros, Catalogo Raisonne Tarsila do Amaral Volume 1 (Sao Paulo: Base 7 Projetos Culturais, Pinacoteca do Estado, 2008), 121. •v

Fig. 79 Tarsila do Amaral, E.F.C.B. (Brasilian Railroads) (1924), in Maria Eugenia Saturnini and Regina Teixeira de Barros, Catalogo Raisonne Tarsila do Amaral (Sao Paulo: Base 7 Projetos Culturais, Pinacoteca do Estado, 2008), 124. 225

Fig. 80 Tarsila do Amaral, Sao Paulo (1924), in Maria Eugenia Saturnini and Regina Teixeira de Barros, Catalogo Raisonne Tarsila do Amaral (Sao Paulo: Base 7 Projetos Culturais, Pinacoteca do Estado, 2008), 131.

Fig. 81 Tarsila do Amaral, Sao Paulo (Gazo) (1924), in Maria Eugenia Saturnini and Regina Teixeira de Barros, Catalogo Raisonne Tarsila do Amaral (Sao Paulo: Base 7 Projetos Culturais, Pinacoteca do Estado, 2008), 135. 226

Fig. 82 Tarsila do Amaral, 1924 illustration for Blaise Cendrars's book Feuilles de Route, in Maria Eugenia Saturnini and Regina Teixeira de Barros, Catdlogo Raisonne Tarsila do Amaral Volume 3 (Sao Paulo: Base 7 Projetos Culturais, Pinacoteca do Estado, 2008), 121.

Fig. 83 Mario de Andrade, Veneza. Em Santarem. Junho, 1927 (E o hotel) 31 de maio. To be or not to be Veneza. Eis aqui estao ogivas de Santarem, in Jorge Schwartz, ed., Brasil 1920-1950: de la Antropofagia a Brasilia (Valencia and Sao Paulo: Institute Valencia de Arte Moderno, MAB-FAAP Museu de Arte Brasileira, 2002), 219. 227

Fig. 84 Tarsila standing before her painting Morro da Favela (1924) at her exhibition in the Galerie Percier, Paris, 1926. Tarsila's painting Sao Paulo (1924) is partly visible in the background, in Jorge Schwartz, Da Antropofagia a Brasilia: Brasil 1920-1950 (Valencia and Sao Paulo: Institute Valencia de Arte Moderno, MAB-FAAP Museu de Arte Brasileira, 2002), 169.

Fig. 85 Tarsila do Amaral, Morro de Favela (1924), in Maria Eugenia Saturnini and Regina Teixeira de Barros, Catalogo Raisonne Tarsila do Amaral (Sao Paulo: Base 7 Projetos Culturais, Pinacoteca do Estado, 2008), 127. 228

Fig. 86 Tarsila do Amaral Self-Portrait (1924), in Maria Eugenia Saturaini and Regina Teixeira de Barros, Catalogo Raisonne Tarsila do Amaral (Sao Paulo: Base 7 Projetos Culturais, Pinacoteca do Estado, 2008), 118. 229

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Vita

Name: Andres Villar

Post-secondary The University of Western Ontario Education and London, Ontario, Canada Degrees: 2002-2005 B.A.

The University of Western Ontario London, Ontario, Canada 2005-2007 M.A.

Honours and Canada Graduate Scholarship - Masters Awards: 2005-2006

Ontario Graduate Scholarship 2006-2007

Canada Graduate Scholarship - Doctoral 2007-2010

Related Work Teaching Assistant Experience: University of Western Ontario 2005-2011

Publications:

Villar, Andres. "The Gesamtkunsthaus: Music in A rebours." Image[&]Narrative 16 (2007). http://www.imageandnarrative.be

Villar, Andres. "F.L.U." (artist pages) Blackflash 22 no.2 (2005): 42-44.