Copyright by Michael Gordon Wellen 2012

The Dissertation Committee for Michael Gordon Wellen certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation:

Pan-American Dreams: Art, Politics, and Museum-Making at the OAS, 1948-1976

Committee:

Andrea Giunta, Supervisor

Jacqueline Barnitz

Frank Guridy

Ann Reynolds

Cherise Smith Pan-American Dreams: Art, Politics, and Museum-Making at the OAS, 1948-1976

by

Michael Gordon Wellen, B.A.; M.A.

Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

The University of Texas at Austin December 2012 Dedication

To LALW, PhD. You have my admiration and my heart.

Acknowledgements

In the course of researching and writing this dissertation I relied heavily on the hospitality, kindness, and good advice of many. My advisor Andrea Giunta was forever generous with her time and enthusiasm, guiding me through the most difficult aspects of writing and research. She helped me keep this project in perspective and showed me how to make productive, scholarly interventions into history writing. For that, she has my eternal gratitude. I am honored to call Jacqueline Barnitz a mentor as well as a cherished friend; she always believed in the importance of my chosen research topics and taught me how to navigate around potential pitfalls in the field. I found I could rely on Ann Reynolds to challenge me to think differently and better about the issues that interested me most in this dissertation. She and Cherise Smith also provided invaluable career advice in the last few years. I am grateful for the guidance provided by Frank Guridy, an outstanding teacher who gave this project his full support. For the past year, I have had the privilege of working with Mari Carmen Ramírez at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. I am immensely thankful for the care she has shown me and for the opportunity to learn from her wisdom and talent. A special thanks to Graduate Advisor Nassos Papalexandrou and Graduate Coordinator Maureen Howell, each of whom gave encouragement and helped resolve the administrative challenges that occasionally cropped up during my graduate education.

This dissertation would not have been completed without the generous financial support of the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, which covered my living and research expenses for four years. The fellowship allowed me to complete invaluable research trips in the United States and Latin America. But also, being selected for the fellowship gave v me confidence about the relevance of my dissertation and provided the impetus to see this project through during those inevitable moments of doubt and insecurity. I also received generous support from the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Fine Arts, the Art & Art History Department, and the Center for Latin American Visual Studies (CLAVIS), for which I am grateful. Quite a few colleagues, librarians, and archivists helped me in my investigations concerning the cultural operations of the OAS. My thanks go to Professor Alejandro

Anreus for his scholarship and insights about José Gómez Sicre and for his comments on early versions of this dissertation. Professor Roberto Tejada also gave valuable feedback in the early stages of this project. I thank him for encouraging me to write with honesty and verve. I am thankful to Professor Claire F. Fox whose scholarship on the Visual Arts Department was another key point of reference for me; she kindly shared research materials that could not be found elsewhere. Professor Florencia Bazzano-Nelson led me to key documents in the José Gómez Sicre papers and historian Stuart Easterling brought my attention to materials on Rafael Squirru in the National Archives; my thanks to them both. The libraries at UT served as a second home to me these past few years. At the Benson Latin American Collection, Jorge Salinas, Christian Kelleher, and the staff at the Rare Book & Manuscript Collection aided me throughout my research. Laura Schwartz,

Boris Brodsky, and Adam Hatley at the Fine Arts Library not only helped me locate books, they welcomed me warmly and kept my spirits high. I wish to express my thanks to my contacts at the OAS. I have great respect for

Maria Leyva, Adriana Ospina, Greg Svitil, and Gabriel Gross at the Art Museum of the Americas. They guided me through the museum’s archives, shared their knowledge about the history of the Visual Arts Department, and connected me with various artists and experts. My thanks also go to Stella Villagran and Beverly Wharton-Lake at the OAS vi Columbus Memorial library, who showed me a forgotten mural by José Luis Cuevas deep in the library stacks. Christopher Shell, James Patrick Kiernan, Rebecca Read Medrano, and George Compton, all current or former staff at Américas magazine, provided me with a broader view of the OAS and its cultural programs. Mary Grothe, daughter of Scott Seegers (who co-founded and frequently contributed to Américas magazine), deserves special mention; she provided me with clippings and materials from her personal archive that gave me a better sense of the magazine’s origins. Ramon Osuna, Félix Ángel, and

Horacio Sicre kindly and candidly shared their experiences working for José Gómez

Sicre, giving me a better sense of the culture of the Visual Arts Division. Artists José Luis Cuevas, Carlos Poveda, Fernando de Szyzlo, David Manzur, and collectors Barbara Gordon, Diane Beruff, and José Martinez Cañas also provided insights into Gómez Sicre’s world. Artist Carlos Alberto Salatino helped me contextualize Rafael Squirru’s work within the cultural climate of Washington, D.C. in the 1960s. And, in 2010, Rafael Squirru himself granted me an interview, for which I am grateful. His daughters Maria and Eloisa Squirru were instrumental in making those arrangements and for providing further information about the critic’s life and work. I owe a great deal to my friends—many of whom I met through the UT Art History Department and through CLAVIS—for encouraging me and consistently giving me good advice. Thank you Erin Aldana, Amethyst Beaver, Doris Bravo, Kency Cornejo, Melissa Geppert, Patrick Hieger, Rachel Mohl, Tatiana Reinoza, Mari Rodriguez, Claire Ruud, Rose Salseda, Alexis Salas, Luis Vargas-Santiago, Gina Tarver, Sebastian Vidal,

Abby Winograd, and Claudia Zapata. My work has benefited from the input of Doris Bravo, Melissa Geppert, Alexis Salas, and Abby Winograd, as well as from my participation in a writing group with Katie Geha and Caitlin Haskell; happily, the Rough Writers—including Andy Campbell, Tara Kohn, Laura Lindenberger Wellen, and vii Chelsea Weathers—let me drop in and out of their writing group. I have the utmost respect for their writing and style, and I consider myself lucky to share in their camaraderie. Special thanks also go to my good friends David Bernard and Roberto, Susanna and Hutch Hill and their daughter Beatrix, Margaret and Ricky Riccardi and their daughters Ella and Melody, for having patiently listened to me and for offering a great deal of laughter, sympathy, and relief. My most avid support came from my family, and I am forever grateful for the love, patience, and generosity they bestowed on me. No one worked harder to reach, understand, and sympathize with me than my parents Carole and Lester Wellen; I am thankful for their constant love, their receptiveness, their creativity, and their penchant for problem-solving. Together Kris and Alex Wellen, Nathaniel and Katherine, encouraged me at every turn and made my life richer. So too did Patrick Armstrong and Jessica Bertani, who put their faith in me. Jennifer Linden-Beck and Brandon Beck became my family while living in Texas. They shared their good humor as well as comforting food and drink, and I love them for it. A special thanks to Betty and Greg Pepetone, Carla and Greg Lindenberger, and their son Jacob, all of whom warmly embraced me with open arms. I love you all. Writing a dissertation means living—at least for a short period of time—on a special plane of human existence. But, to do it while being married to someone also pursuing her doctoral degree takes it to a whole new level of crazy. I am thankful to be a part of that very select category. In fact, I am sure I’d have abandoned my graduate studies long ago, if it were not for the constant motivation and the model of determination, intelligence, and passion set forth by fellow art historian Laura Augusta Lindenberger Wellen. Sometime ago, Laura and I began comparing our pursuit of doctoral degrees to that of two mountain climbers working in tandem. Truth told, I think I viii stole the metaphor from statements made by Georges Braque about his early explorations of Cubism with Picasso. In 1954, Braque recalled: “We saw each other every day and talked a lot…things were said between us that will never be repeated…things that would be incomprehensible today and that gave us much joy and that will die with us… it was like we were like two mountain climbers roped together.” From my view, our joint endeavors resonate with that certain specialness captured by Braque’s statements. My congratulations and love to you, Dr. Laura!

Dora Vallier, “Braque: La Pienture et nous. Propos de l’artistic recueillis.” Cahiers d’art 34, no. 1 (October 1954), 14. ix Pan-American Dreams: Art, Politics, and Museum-Making at the OAS, 1948-1976

Publication no.______

Michael Gordon Wellen, Ph.D.

The University of Texas at Austin, 2012

Supervisor: Andrea Giunta

In the 1950s and 1960s, the Organization of American States (OAS), a multinational political organization headquartered in Washington, DC, attempted to mediate U.S.-Latin American political and cultural relations. This dissertation traces how, in the United States, Latin American art emerged as a field of art historical study and exhibition via the activities of the OAS. I center my analysis on José Gómez Sicre and Rafael Squirru, two prominent curators who influenced the circulation of Latin American art during the Cold War. Part I focuses on Gómez Sicre, who served as head curator at the OAS from 1946 to 1981 and who founded the Museum of Modern Art of Latin America in 1976. I offer an analysis of Gómez Sicre’s aesthetic tastes, contextualizing them in relation to his contemporaries Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Marta Traba, and Jorge Romero Brest. I also discuss his efforts to build a network of art centers across the Americas, indicating how his activities fed into a Cold War struggle around notions of the “intellectual.” Part II examines the activities of poet and art critic Rafael Squirru, who served as Director of Cultural Affairs of the OAS from 1963 to 1970 and who theorized Latin American art in terms of the “new man.” I reconstruct how the phrase “new man” became a point of ideological conflict in the 1960s in a battle between Squirru and his political rival, Ernesto Ché Guevara. Throughout this dissertation, I indicate how Gómez Sicre and Squirru framed modern art within different Pan-American dreams of future world prosperity, equality, and cooperation. By examining the socio-political implications behind those dreams, I reveal the structures and limits of power shaping their influence during the Cold War. My study concentrates on the period from the founding of the OAS in 1948 to the establishment of the Museum of Modern Art of Latin America in 1976, and I contend that the legacies of Pan-Americanism continue to affect the field of Latin American art today. x

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ...... xiii

PAN-AMERICAN DREAMS: AN INTRODUCTION 1

PART I: JOSÉ GÓMEZ SICRE AND THE VISUAL ARTS DIVISION 19

Introduction: A Place for Latin American Art ...... 19

Chapter One: An Eye in Context ...... 28 A Mentor at the MoMA: Alfred H. Barr, Jr...... 31 An Ally, then Adversary: Marta Traba ...... 57 A Distant Rival: Jorge Romero Brest ...... 74

Chapter Two: Intellectuals, Networks, and Centers ...... 80 Building a Pan-American Network ...... 88 A Cultural Space at Home ...... 95 A Workshop Abroad ...... 107 From Network to Center ...... 114

Conclusion: A Museum Personified ...... 118

PART II: RAFAEL SQUIRRU AND THE DEPARTMENT OF CULTURAL AFFAIRS 122

Introduction: Phantom Museums and New Men ...... 122

Chapter Three: The New Man Movement in Buenos Aires ...... 127

Chapter Four: Refiguring the New Man in Washington, DC ...... 138 The Alliance for Progress: Origins, Development, and Mystique ...... 144 Castro and Kennedy as New Men ...... 158

xi Conclusion: The Phantom Museum and the Street ...... 177

AMÉRICAS AND LINGERING DREAMS: CONCLUSIONS 180

Illustrations ...... 198

Appendix A. Documents concerning José Gómez Sicre recovered from a Freedom of Information Act Request ...... 233

Appendix B. Rafael Squirru’s Speech in Quemú Quemú, Argentina, 1966...... 251

Appendix C. Alejandro Anreus’s Last Interviews with José Gómez Sicre ...... 256

Bibliography ...... 281

xii

List of Illustrations

Figure 1. Asilia Guillén, Héroes y artistas vienen a la Unión Panamericana para ser consagrados [Heroes and Artists Come to the Pan American Union to be Consecrated], 1962. Art Museum of the Americas, Washington, DC ...... 198 Figure 2. José Balmes, No, 1965. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston...... 199 Figure 3. “Courtyard of the Pan American Building, Washington, DC,” 1942. Photograph by John Collier. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA-OWI Collection (LC-DIG-fsac- 1a34529) ...... 200 Figure 4. “Washington, DC Under the auspices of the Bureau of University Travel and the National Capital School Visitors' Council, over 200 high school students chosen for their intellectual alertness visited Washington for a week. Students and parrot in the patio of the Pan- American Union.” Photograph by Marjory Collins. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection (LC-USW3-010019-E)...... 201 Figure 5. Partial View of the Gallery for the Permanent Collection of Contemporary Latin American Art of the Pan American Union. Photographer unknown. Reprinted from the Boletín de Artes Visuales 6. January- December 1960.Washington, DC: Pan American Union, frontispiece...... 202 Figure 6. Partial View of the Gallery for the Permanent Collection of Contemporary Latin American Art of the Pan American Union. Photographer unknown. Reprinted from La Union Panamericana en el servicio del arte. Washington, DC: Pan American Union, 1961...... 203 Figure 7. Partial View of the Gallery for the Permanent Collection of Contemporary Latin American Art of the Pan American Union. Photographer unknown. Reprinted from Permanent Collection of Contemporary Art of Latin America. Washington, DC: Pan American Union, 1960...... 203 Figure 8. Alfred Barr, Cubism and Abstract Art (book jacket). New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1936...... 204 Figure 9. “Today’s Art at São Paulo” by José Gómez Sicre. Reprinted from Américas, vol. 10, no. 1 (January 1958), 32-33...... 205 Figure 10. Rogelio Polesello, Faz A [Phase A], undated. Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida...... 206 Figure 11. Hermann Guggiari, Kennedy, 1964. Image reprinted from the inside back cover of Américas, vol. 17, no. 6 (June 1965). Lowe Museum Art Gallery, University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida...... 207 xiii Figure 12. Fernando de Szyszlo, Cajamarca, 1959. Art Museum of the Americas, Organization of American States, Washington, DC ...... 208 Figure 13. Oswaldo Guayasamín, Madre y niño [Mother and Child], 1955. Art Museum of the Americas, Organization of American States, Washington, DC ...... 209 Figure 14. “Art Critic on a Holiday” by Jóse Gómez Sicre. Reprinted from Américas, vol. 2, no. 1. (January 1950), 11...... 210 Figure 15. Detail of “Art Critic on a Holiday,” by José Gómez Sicre. Reprinted from Américas, vol. 2, no. 1 (January 1950), 14...... 211 Figure 16. The Yapeyú ship, date unknown, photographer unknown. Courtesy of Kees Heemskerk, www.shipspotting.com...... 212 Figure 17. Jacqueline Kennedy and Rafael Squirru at the Pan American Union. Photograph by David Chevalier. Reprinted from Américas, vol. 15 no. 2 (February 1963), 16...... 213 Figure 18. Fidel Castro in Matanzas, 1959. Photograph by Grey Villet. First printed in “Liberator’s Triumphal March Through an Ecstatic Island,” LIFE Magazine, vol. 46, no. 3(January 19, 1959), 29...... 214 Figure 19. Leopoldo Presas, El Hombre Nuevo, 1954. Reprinted from Homenaje a Rafael Squirru. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Galería Zurbaran, 2005...... 215 Figure 20. Norman Saunders, New Man, November 1964 (left); Norman Saunders, New Man, September 1965 (right). Original paintings in the Collection of Richard Oberg...... 216 Figure 21. Lincoln Presno, Sketch of the Monument to John F. Kennedy, 1964.217 Figure 22. Lincoln Presno, Monument to John F. Kennedy, c. 2010. Photographer unknown. Photograph courtesy of http://QuemúQuemú.gob.ar218 Figure 23. Stencilled Graffiti along Avenida de Mayo, Buenos Aires, July 2010. Photograph by author...... 219 Figure 24. Screenshot of Agrupacion Hombre Nuevo homepage: http://www.elhombrenuevo.galeon.com/index.html [accessed August 2011]...... 220 Figure 25. Display for Américas’ 60th Anniversary in OAS’s main building, October 12, 2008. Photograph by Juan Manuel Herrera...... 221 Figure 26. Stanislav Szukalski, Maquette for Promerica, 1933...... 222 Figure 27. Fernando Bryce, Américas, 2005. Private Collection, Houston...... 223 Figure 28. Fernando Bryce, Américas, 2005. Private Collection, Houston...... 224 Figure 29. “This Spinning World.” Reprinted from Américas, vol. 4, no. 1 (January 1952), 21...... 225 Figure 30. Fernando Bryce, Américas, 2005. Private Collection, Houston...... 226 Figure 31. “Art Safari” by José Gómez Sicre. Reprinted from Américas, vol. 16, no.11 (November 1964), 16-17 ...... 227 Figure 32. Fernando Bryce, Américas, 2005. Private Collection, Houston...... 228

xiv Figure 33. “The Role of Unions.” Reprinted from Américas, vol. 13, no. 10 (October 1961), 26-27...... 229 Figure 34. “The Role of Business.” Reprinted from Américas, vol. 13, no. 10 (October 1961), 36-37...... 230 Figure 35. Fernando Bryce, Américas, 2005. Private Collection, Houston...... 231 Figure 36. “Chilean hueso (cowboy) and friend.” Reprinted from Américas, vol. 1, no. 3 (November 1949), back cover...... 232

xv PAN-AMERICAN DREAMS: AN INTRODUCTION

Asilia Guillén’s painting Héroes y artistas vienen a la Unión Panamericana para ser consegrados [Heroes and Artists Come to the Pan American Union to be

Consecrated] (1962) shows a row of twenty-one figures on horseback parading through a lush, green landscape (Figure 1). Each carries the flag of a different nation. The leader of the march, a figure seated on a white horse in the lower right corner of the painting, waves the U.S. flag; men with the flags of Brazil, Bolivia, the Dominican Republic, and

Cuba form the tail of the parade. As the horsemen approach the Pan American Union building from the side, about twenty men and women gather on its front steps and patio.

Most are artists carrying white canvases in their hands. Three figures dressed in suits, likely diplomats, stand in the archway of the building and watch the scene unfold. Many of the figures have dark hair except for one seated woman in the foreground, possibly a self-portrait of the artist. Guillén was 75 years old when she painted this work and she kept her hair a natural white.1 Born and raised in Granada, Nicaragua, Guillén was a self- taught artist. In 1962, José Gómez Sicre, head curator at the Organization of American

States (OAS), encouraged her to exhibit her work in a solo show at the institution’s headquarters, the Pan American Union. With his prodding, she agreed to show eighteen of her paintings and to come to the exhibition’s opening in Washington, DC, where she saw all of her works sold before the end of the night. Gómez Sicre was enthusiastic about

1See José Gómez Sicre, “Embroidery in Oils,” Américas vol. 14, no. 10 (October 1962), 17-20. See also Orlando Cuadra Downing, “Exposición de Washington de Asilia Guillén,” Revista Conservador [Nicaragua] vol. 5, no. 23 (August 1962), 22-24. Available online at http://bibliotecageneral.enriquebolanos.org/coleccion_RC/255.pdf [Accessed 16 October 2012] 1 her visit and publicized the exhibition in print and by interviewing the artist on radio programs.2 He also arranged painting commissions for Guillén after the show had sold out. The theme of Héroes y artistas—the OAS as a place of consecration for political heroes and artists—may indicate that Guillén painted the work after seeing the success of her solo exhibition, perhaps as a gesture of thanks to Gómez Sicre and the institution for which he worked. The painting remains in the art collection of the OAS, where it has been reproduced on holiday greeting cards and on the cover of the institution’s magazine

Américas.

In its cheerful depiction of the people of the Americas peacefully coming together, Guillén’s painting resonates with a “Pan-American” brand of utopian thinking.

The terms “Pan-American” and “Pan-Americanism” originated in the late nineteenth century in the United States as government officials and business leaders sought to cultivate political alliances and financial relations with Latin America. Although never a single and cohesive ideology, Pan-Americanism referred to an overlapping set of ambitions and strategies to cultivate political, economic, and cultural bonds across North and South America. In the 1920s, Samuel Guy Inman, professor at Columbia University and one of the earliest to historicize Pan-Americanism, described it as “more of a sentiment and an aspiration than a tangible system....”3 For Inman, Pan-Americanism was characterized by a shared optimism about U.S.-Latin American relations and a desire to

2 One such interview appeared on the HJCK radio program El Mundo en Bogotá. The interview was transcribed and published in “Correo de la Cultura,” El Espectator [Bogota], Domingo 29 de Julio 1962. See artist file for Asilia Guillén, Art Museum of the Americas, Organization of American States, Washington, DC (Hereafter “AMA Archives”). 3 Samuel Guy Inman, Problems in Pan Americanism (New York: George H. Doran, 1921), 219.

2 build unity, understanding, and appreciations of differences between nations. This set of desires could be idiosyncratic, intensely personal, and globally shared all at once. During the twentieth century, “Pan-American” came to describe a variety of activities, programs, and organizations—some private and others governmental—with interests in improving

U.S.-Latin American relations.4 Founded in 1948, the OAS represented the most influential shaper of Pan-American thought at mid-century.5 “After World War II, Pan-

Americanism became virtually synonymous with the Organization of American States,” writes historian Stephen M. Streeter.6

In spite of its characteristic idealism, Pan-Americanism has long been the subject of criticism and distrust. Since the late nineteenth century, intellectuals and political

4 For a listing of Pan American clubs and societies at mid-century, see Pan American Associations in the United States (Washington, DC: Pan American Union, 1955). A more recent list is available in the Directory of Inter-American and Other Associations in the Americas (Washington, DC: General Secretariat, Organization of American States, 1986). 5 The OAS bills itself as the world’s oldest peacekeeping organization, staking its origins in the nineteenth- century ideals of Simón Bolívar, leader of the independence movements that freed the viceroyalty of Nueva Granada from Spanish colonial rule in the 1810s and early 1820s. In launching the struggle towards Latin American independence, Bolívar envisioned a future where the different regions of the New World could consolidate into a single, independent nation. “How beautiful it would be,” he wrote in 1815, while in exile in Jamaica and plotting revolution, “if the Isthmus of Panama should become for us what the Isthmus of Corinth was for the Greeks!” He believed that, united under a single political body, the newly-established American republics could better align themselves against further foreign domination, protect individual rights, and mitigate legal disputes. Between 1819 and1830, Bolívar served as President of Gran Colombia—a vast state formed from what today is Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Panama, and Venezuela. He also carried significant influence with authorities in Argentina, in Chile, and in the Caribbean. As President, he took steps to implement his goal of “American union,” encouraging delegates from each republic to convene in a Panama Congress in 1826. This meeting was the first in a chain of Pan- American Conferences, usually held every 8 to 10 years, out of which the Pan American Union was formed in 1910, and the Organization of American States in 1948. Several examples of institutional literature praise Bolívar and describe the Pan American Union and the OAS as the embodiment of his heroic vision. For example, see Pedro de Alba, “Bolívar Began It” The Rotarian, vol. 56, no. 4 (April 1940), 27-28. Also see Samuel Guy Inman, Inter-American Conferences, 1826-1954: History and Problems, ed. Harold Eugene Davis (Washington, DC: University Press of Washington, 1965). 6 Stephen M. Streeter, “The Myth of Pan Americanism: U.S. Policy toward Latin America during the Cold War, 1954-1963” in Beyond the Ideal: Pan Americanism in Inter-American Affairs, ed. David Sheinin (Westport, CT and London Press, 2000), 168. 3 pundits, especially in Latin America, have warned that Pan-Americanism is, at best, a naïve worldview that dismisses historical and economic differences between the U.S. and

Latin American nations in favor of superficial similarities. At its worst, they argue, Pan-

Americanism served as a smokescreen for U.S. imperialism.7 “Pan-Americanism has always been U.S. led, the friendly face of U.S. dominance in the hemisphere,” writes historian David Sheinin in one of the more recent studies on the subject.8 Critiques of

Pan-Americanism grew during the Cold War as the OAS and its policies increasingly became tainted by associations with the U.S. imperial project. Three events involving the

OAS drew ire particularly from Latin American institutions and individuals: (1) the

OAS’s handling of the Guatemalan Revolution in 1954, in which the institution was pressured by the U.S. to adopt a stronger stance against communism; (2) its instrumental role in implementing economic sanctions against Cuba in 1962 proposed by the United

States (the sanctions were not repealed until 2009); and (3) its creation of peacekeeping troops to aid in the 1965 U.S. occupation of the Dominican Republic. Artist and scholar

Luis Camnitzer sums up the disillusionment many Latin Americans felt towards such Pan

American ideals by saying that “on its superficial merits, it seemed wonderful to have a

7 The critiques of Pan Americanism can be traced as far back as 1889, when José Marti published critical reports on the First Inter-American Conference of the American Republics. See José Marti, Inside the Monster: Writings on the United States and American Imperialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975). The critiques reached new heights in the 1960s and 1970s. Examples include: Juan Miguel de Mora, Carnaval de los gorillas (Mexico: Galvala, 1967). Orlando Suárez Suárez, La jaula invisible: neocolonialismo y plástica latinoamericana. (Havana: Editorial de ciencias sociales, 1986). For a more contemporary critique of Pan-Americanism, see Ricardo D. Salvatore, “The Enterprise of Knowledge: Representational Machines of Informal Empire” in Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.-Latin American Relations, ed. Gilbert M. Joseph, Catherine LeGrand, and Ricardo Salvatore (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 69-106. 8 David Sheinin, “Rethinking Pan Americanism: An Introduction,” in Beyond the Ideal: Pan Americanism in Inter-American Affairs, ed. David Sheinin (Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 2000), 1. 4 common language, a common currency, a common government. We just had not counted on the possibility that the language someday might be English, the currency the dollar, and the government housed in the White House.”9 Other artists expressed their discontent through their work; in 1965, José Balmes created a series of “Santo Domingo” paintings, one entitled No incorporates news clippings detailing the OAS actions in the Caribbean over which the painter has written “No”—merging gestural painting and protest sign

(Figure 2). In music, Cuban folk singer Carlos Puebla wrote “OEA es cosa de risa”

(“The OAS is a joke”), a novelty song that gained popularity in Latin America and in

Europe in the mid-1960s because it tapped into what many left-leaning individuals felt: that the OAS was a pawn of the United States. Likewise, the OAS’s cultural policies, such as its program of Latin American art exhibitions, were assumed to be a supplementary component of an imperialist agenda.

One of the central aims of this dissertation is to trace how, in the United States,

Latin American art as a field of art historical study and exhibition arose from Pan-

Americanism and to show how the OAS codified a region at the same time that it tried to assimilate that place. This dissertation considers the work of two leaders of the OAS cultural section, José Gómez Sicre and Rafael Squirru, each of whom wielded incredible influence in promoting Latin American artists in the United States and who used Pan-

Americanism as a platform from which they drew their power. Even in its heyday, the term “Pan-Americanism” was rarely applied to culture and the arts, operating instead

9 Luis Camnitzer, New Art of Cuba (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), xxii. 5 within discussions of political science, foreign policy, and education.10 By reintroducing the term to the visual arts, I bring light to a rarely studied set of cultural activities at the

OAS and the structures of power framing those activities. Far from open-ended, the Pan-

American ideals forwarded by the OAS rested on a tacit set of values and expectations.

These included an unquestioned endorsement of constitutional democracy as modeled by the United States, free-market capitalism, support of private corporate enterprise, and faith in Christian ideas of charity and good will. In my view, Pan-Americanism was a malleable rhetorical strategy, in which a set of historical actors could effectively imagine diverse kinds of continental solidarity between the Americas. Throughout this dissertation, I investigate concepts of Pan-Americanism that, while generated in

Washington, DC, were consistently chiseled out by Latin Americans, not U.S. policy- makers. Its utopian nature and rhetoric of equality appealed to people regardless of their nationality. Even so, the balance of power at the root of Pan-Americanism always weighed in favor of U.S. models. I set my analysis of Gómez Sicre and Squirru in terms of Pan-Americanism precisely to demonstrate how they formed positions towards Latin

10 Beginning in the 1930s, in conjunction with President Franklin Roosevelt’s “Good Neighbor Policy,” many primary and secondary schools incorporated lessons about Latin American history, national heroes, literature, folk songs, and customs, especially in preparation for Columbus Day (October 12th) and Pan- American Day (April 15th). Some of the first student Pan-American clubs were formed in New York City public schools; the largest was known as the “Student League of the Americas.” For more on this organization, see Donald E. Kitch, “Schools and Pan Americanism” The Phi Kappa Delta, vol. 24, no. 3, Pan-American Intercultural Relationships (Nov. 1941), 124-127, 139. For examples of Pan-American school lessons, see Pan American Day, ed. Hilah Paulmier and Robert Haven Schauffler (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co, 1942). For an outline of a typical Pan-American club and its programs, see William Wachs, “Student Pan American Activity” Hispania 23, no.1 (February 1940), 59-64. In the late 1930s, with World War II looming in Europe, U.S. colleges and universities also developed programs in Inter-American studies, adding courses in Latin American history, political science, literature, and the arts, with the goal of facilitating international trade and building political alliances across North and South America. Bess Goodykootnz describes the reasons behind the University’s expanded efforts in Latin American studies in her article, “Why Education for Inter-American Understanding?” Hispania, vol. 28, No 3. (Aug. 1945), 383-389. 6 American art in anticipation of U.S. tastes and expectations about Latin America, modern art, and the political efficacy of art.

As Guillén’s painting attests, Pan-Americanism could be artistically generative.

But her image also appears tinged with irony. Looking again at her painting, we see that the Pan American Union building stands isolated in a dense and exotic forest, far from its true location in urban Washington. Audiences praised Guillén’s work for its “innocence” and “fantastical” nature, believing she placed the Pan American Union building in a landscape similar to that of her home in Granada. That decision might also be read as a strategic one: if Guillén was to paint the landmarks actually surrounding the OAS—the

Washington Monument, the White House, the Lincoln Memorial—the painting would read very differently. Rather than seeming independent or isolated, the OAS would appear (as it does in actuality) surrounded by U.S. symbols of political power. Guillén painted Héroes y artistas the same year that the OAS enforced one of its most controversial policies to adopt the trade embargo on Cuba. Her decision to paint the horseman carrying the Cuban flag towards the end of the parade, then, seems charged (as does painting the Dominican Republic representative near him). As a Granadan, Guillén may have been wary of the United States’ imperial ambitions: in 1856 U.S. lawyer

William Walker tried to establish Nicaragua as a U.S. colony, naming himself President of the region. He and his troops razed the city of Grenada as they retreated later that year; another of Guillén’s paintings from 1962 shows the historic burning of the city by U.S. troops. Her representation of the OAS, then, might be read as ambivalent.

7 I have titled this dissertation “Pan-American Dreams” to refer to the diverse, yet historically specific imaginings of U.S.-Latin American relations—academic and whimsical, idealistic and ambivalent—in the thoughts of many individuals during the mid-twentieth century. “At times when we believe we are studying something, we are only being receptive to a kind of day-dreaming,” writes Gaston Bachelard.11 Much of this dissertation involves looking at the historical daydreaming of others and considering the socio-political implications behind those dreams. My choice to use the phrase “Pan-

American Dreams” partly stems from rhetoric already in place, historically in documents produced by the OAS and in more contemporary criticism.12 My aim is to suggest the idealism and intangible nature of Pan-Americanism, its strengths and its limitations. Most critiques of Pan-Americanism that utilize the word “dream” do so disparagingly, as a way to emphasize the disconnect between the OAS and political realities.13 Yet such critiques often sell short the complexity and importance of the fantasies, desires, and hopes at the root of the OAS’s activities. Dreams are productive forces, even if they are misguided and contradictory; they are often the initial inspiration for creative acts, for travel, for

11 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. María Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), xxxiv. 12 In a sense, titling this project “Pan-American Dreams” is a bit playful: it carries the same ring as many of the old magazines, books, and primary sources from the 1950s that form the basis of my research. Here I take my inspiration from curatorial approaches evident in the exhibition and catalogue, WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, ed. Cornelia Butler and Lisa Gabrielle Mark (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2007) an exhibition and catalogue where the title riffs on acronyms used by many feminist groups in the 1970s, such as the Women’s Art Coalition (WAC). A new body of scholarship on the cultural and artistic aspects of Pan-Americanism is starting to emerge. See Robert Alexander González, Designing Pan America: U.S. Architectural Visions for the Western Hemisphere (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011) and Claire F. Fox, Making Art Panamerican: Cultural Policy and the Cold War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming). Also see the article by Florencia Bazzano-Nelson, “Cold War Pan- American Operations, Oil, Coffee, and ‘3,500 Years of Colombian Art,’” Hispanic Research Journal 12, no. 5 (October 2011): 438-66. 13 For an example of this kind of criticism see Lawerence E. Harrison, “Waking from the Pan-American Dream” Foreign Policy, no. 5 (Winter 1971-72): 163-181. 8 scholarship. Dreams are also fictitious scenarios loaded with troubling political and power relations. Ultimately, I see the optimism and idealism associated with Pan-

Americanism as inextricably bound up with feelings of dissatisfaction, fear, and failure.

This dissertation is divided into two parts. Part I focuses on the work of José

Gómez Sicre. As head of the Visual Arts Division, Gómez Sicre curated over five hundred exhibitions of Latin American art.14 He regularly published articles in Américas magazine and created his own semi-annual Boletín de Artes Visuales [Bulletin of Visual

Arts]. He lectured and served as judge for various international biennials including the

São Paulo Biennial, the Córdoba Biennial, and the Esso Salon of Young Artists. He also wrote and directed over twenty short documentary films about contemporary Latin

American painters. In 1976, he founded the Museum of Modern Art of Latin America

(now the Art Museum of the Americas), the first museum in the United States to exclusively show Latin American art. In 1994, Peruvian artist Fernando de Szyszlo described him as “the person who really promoted the idea of Latin American art….

Before him, there was Argentinean painting, Colombian painting, Venezuelan or

Mexican painting.”15 Gómez Sicre wielded incredible power in the 1950s and 1960s,

14 All exhibitions are listed in the two volumes of Annick Sanjurjo, ed. Contemporary Latin American Artists: Exhibitions at the Organization of American States, 1965-1985 (Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 1993) and Contemporary Latin American Artists: Exhibitions at the Organization of American States, 1941-1964 (Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 1997). 15 See Patrick Frank, ed. Readings in Latin American Modern Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 150. Others, like art historian Alejandro Anreus have corroborated this perception. See Alejandro Anreus, “José Gómez Sicre and the ‘Idea’ of Latin American Art,” Art Journal (Winter 2005), 83-84; also see Claire F. Fox, “The Hemispheric Routes of ‘El nuevo arte nuestro’: The Pan American Union, Cultural Policy, and the Cold War,” in Hemispheric American Studies: Essays beyond the Nation, ed. Robert Levine and Caroline Levander (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 223-248; also see her article, “The Pan American Union Visual Arts Section and the Hemispheric Circulation of Latin American Art during the Cold War,” Getty Research Journal 2 (2010): 83-106. 9 shaping the dominant tastes of the period. He was considered someone who could make or break an artist’s career.

He also was the subject of various critiques, particularly by those who regarded him as a Cold War hawk. Shifra Goldman, in her book Contemporary Mexican Painting in a Time of Change (1981), examines the history of Mexico’s socially responsive artists of the 1950s and 1960s, in particular the Nueva Presencia group, illustrating the frictions they had with the established Mexican school and with their contemporaries. According to Goldman, these artists had to contend with influential U.S. art institutions and personages, such as Gómez-Sicre, as they sought exposure outside of Mexico. Drawing from Eva Cockcroft’s Artforum article “Abstract-Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold

War” (1974), Goldman argues that Gómez Sicre’s promotion of abstract art, while guised as apolitical, was closely tied to U.S. cultural imperialism, in which U.S. art institutions, the government, and corporations utilized abstract art (especially abstract-expressionism) as propagandistic symbols of American freedom. In particular, she points to overwhelming corporate influences on the 1965 Esso Salon for Young Artists, which was organized by Gómez Sicre and which ignited fierce controversy in Mexico.16 In a separate essay Cockcroft identifies Gómez Sicre as a key contributor to the “intensive campaigns in the United States to destroy [Social Realism] and to promote instead Latin

16 See Shifra Goldman, Contemporary Mexican Painting in a Time of Change (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981; Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), 29-35. Citations refer to University of New Mexico edition. Also see Eva Cockcroft, “Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War” Artforum (June 1974), 39-41. 10 American abstraction of the so-called International Style.”17 In her view, as the OAS became a key destination for contemporary Latin American artists, it also kept their art from entering “mainstream exhibition channels,” such as the New York Museum of

Modern Art (MoMA).18 She criticizes the Pan American Union’s exhibition program saying that it “marked the beginning of the ghettoization of Latin American art.”19

Whether regarded as the figure who popularized Latin American art or who ghettoized it, Gómez Sicre and the exhibition program he led were foundational to the field. In Chapter One, I focus my analysis of Gómez Sicre around the subject of

“aesthetic tastes” as conceptualized by sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. I examine how notions of taste formed the basis of Gómez Sicre’s relationships with other key art critics of his acquaintance—namely, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Marta Traba, and Jorge Romero Brest.

And I show how Gómez Sicre’s tastes, while not limited to abstract art, shared certain characteristics based on U.S.-European parameters of modernism. Through his relationship with these critics, we see Gómez Sicre held a privileged position for defining the aesthetics that characterized Latin American art. But, in his quest to articulate the originality of Latin American art, his critical framework relied wholy on criteria predetermined by comparisons with European and U.S. artistic production. In Chapter

Two, I examine Gómez Sicre’s efforts to build a Pan-American network of art centers, paying particular attention to the cultural activities he hosted at the OAS and at his home in Washington, as well as his creation of the Taller Libre de Arte [Free Art Workshop] in

17 Eva Cockcroft, “The United States and Socially Concerned Latin American Art,” in The Latin American Spirit: Art and Artists in the United States 1920-1970 (New York: Bronx Museum of Art, 1989), 184. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., 194. 11 Caracas, Venezuela. I frame these arts-related activities within the context of mid-century debates in the U.S. and Europe about the figure of the intellectual. In the 1960s, the word

“intellectual” carried immense symbolic power among Latin America’s political and cultural elite. I trace how Gómez Sicre’s uncertain status as “intellectual” eroded his legitimacy from at least two sides: in the McCarthy Era he faced pressures from right- wing conservatives to avoid mixing art and politics, and in the 1960s, many artists and critics sympathetic with the Cuban Revolution saw through Gómez Sicre’s proclaimed apolitical stance. These debates highlight why Gómez Sicre’s activities were (and perhaps still are) treated with suspicion.

Part II of this dissertation focuses on the poet and art critic Rafael Squirru, another key contributor to the cultural arm of the OAS. Squirru was the first to bring an expertise in visual arts to the position of OAS Director of Cultural Affairs.20 Before joining the institution, he founded the Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires in 1956, and worked for the Argentinean government as cultural attaché under President Arturo

Frondizi. At the OAS from 1963 to 1970, Squirru was responsible for overseeing the

Visual Arts Division as well as five other Divisions that comprised the OAS Department of Cultural Affairs: the Music Division, the Division of Education, the Division of

Philosophy and Letters, the Columbus Memorial Library, and Américas magazine. He and his family lived in the Georgetown area of Washington, but Squirru spent much of his time traveling on behalf of the OAS, attending and organizing Inter-American

20 Squirru was preceded by four other Directors of Cultural Affairs, all who worked as professional novelists, journalists, and historians. Dr. Jorge Basadre, from Peru, served from 1948 to 1950; Dr. Alceu Amoroso Lima, from Brazil, served from 1950 to early 1953; Erico Veríssimo, also from Brazil, served from 1953 to 1956; Juan Marín, from Chile, served from 1956 to early 1963. 12 conferences and lecturing.21 He had a strong interest in utilizing literary publications to raise the prestige of the OAS in Latin America. In his first months in his new post,

Squirru proposed buying and freely distributing three literary journals—El Corno

Emplumado from Mexico, El Eco Contemporáneo from Argentina, and Outcry! from

Washington, DC—in an attempt to win over Latin American intelligentsia to a pro-OAS attitude. The plan was rejected ostensibly for budgetary reasons.22 In lieu of that project, he worked with the editors of Américas magazine to give the publication what they called

“a change in accent,” focusing more seriously on visual art, poetry, and literature.23

Under his direction, the OAS also published an English translation of Martin Fierro, the nineteenth-century epic poem by José Hernandez that continues to be a symbol of

Argentinean national pride. Squirru commissioned Catherine Ward to translate the poem

21 The position of Director of Cultural Affairs came with responsibilities to work with the Inter-American Cultural Council and the Committee for Cultural Action. Squirru delivered lectures at the Guggenheim Museum, at various meetings for a Center for Human Understanding (the American Division of the World Academy of Art and Science), and at the Inter-American Meeting of Directors of Cultural Affairs, which were published in Squirru, The Challenge of the New Man: A Cultural Approach to the Latin American Scene (Washington, DC: Pan American Union, Department of Cultural Affairs 1964). Other conference proceedings are published in John Nef, ed. Towards World Community (The Hague: World Academy of Art and Science and Dr. W. Junk N.V., Publishers, 1968). 22 Squirru proposed this project to U.S. Ambassador to the OAS, deLesseps Morrison, and S.N. Wilson, member of the U.S. Coalition of the OAS. In addition to budgetary limits, Morrison and Wilson voiced their concerns about the OAS financing and distributing magazines whose content they could not control. They were also upset that Squirru had not followed the chain-of-command, and had purchased the magazines before receiving approval. With the plan suspended, Squirru gave the magazines away to embassies. As a letter from Wilson put it, “those who had seen the publications were aghast at the type of material included therein, which they said was ‘beatnik,’ and in places obscene.” They were particularly bothered by El Corno Emplumado, which included a poem by Fidel Castro. In August 1963, Wilson’s office encouraged Squirru to instead explore “the idea of having the PAU sponsor its own magazine intended for Latin American intellectuals. In this way contributions could be requested and an outlet could be given to young writers, much of whose bitterness frequently stems from frustrations in obtaining an audience for the products of their pens.” Ward Allan to Rafael Squirru, 10 August, 1963, Record Group 59, Entry A1-3149, box 17, Bureau of Inter-American Affairs/Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary, Subject Files 1961-63, folder “IA Cultural Council,” National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD. My thanks to historian Stuart Easterling for pointing me to these documents. 23 Guillermo de Zéndegui, “New Accent in Américas” Américas, vol. 15, no. 6 (June 1963), inside front cover. 13 and Antonio Berni to illustrate it. He also worked on an Anthology of Latin American

Poetry, fighting for the inclusion of Cuban poets Nicolas Guillén, José Lezama Lima, and

Roberto Fernández Retamar despite protests from anti-Castro groups.24 Interestingly, no one has written about Squirru’s work at the OAS except for his daughter Eloisa Squirru in her biography about her father, ¡Tan Rafael Squirru! [So Very Rafael Squirru!] (2008).

My analysis of Rafael Squirru focuses on his conceptualization of the “new man” as it relates to the creation of art institutions and to cultural diplomacy. In Chapter Three,

I outline the political and cultural meanings he ascribed to the term while creating the

Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires in the 1950s. In Chapter Four, I show how he adapted the term to a broader context while in Washington during the Cold War, a period when Ernesto Ché Guevara promoted a competing vision of the “new man” as a symbol of the Cuban Revolution. The few parallels between Squirru and Guevara are striking: both were born and raised in Argentina (they were only three years apart in age; Squirru was born in 1925, Guevara in 1928), and both used the term “new man” while working for diametrically opposed governmental agencies in Washington and Havana. Their differences of interpretation formed an important, but largely overlooked dialectic of the

Cold War—one that shows how Squirru and the OAS engaged in an ideological global conflict.

24 Rafael Squirru, interview with the author, 1 July 2010. In addition to these book projects, Squirru also mentioned his feelings of accomplishment brought by giving paints and art materials to David Alvaro Siqueiros while the artist was in jail. Eloisa Squirru also discusses the importance of these book projects and the conference papers he gave as Cultural Director. See Eloisa Squirru, ¡Tan Rafael Squirru! (Buenos Aires: Editorial Elefante Blanco, 2008), 137-141. 14 The two parts of this dissertation cover the period from the founding of the OAS in 1948 to the creation of the Museum of Modern Art of Latin America in 1976. The title of this dissertation speaks of “museum-making.” To be clear, this is not a study the

Museum of Modern Art of Latin America/ Art Museum of the Americas, nor a study of museums proper, but instead an investigation of particular museological fantasies.

Throughout the dissertation I highlight Gómez Sicre and Rafael Squirru’s desires to create museums for showcasing Latin American art in the United States, finding value in their interest in building institutions, even if they were unable to attain their goals.

Through a considerate analysis of key terms including “Pan Americanism,” “modern art,” “aesthetic taste,” “the intellectual,” “development,” and the “new man,” I show how these men’s ideological formation resonated with broader Cold War issues of power, cultural exchange, the display of art.

My analysis is based upon archival research, oral histories, and close readings of magazines that the art critics used to transmit their messages and images of Latin

American art across the hemisphere. In 2006, the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American

Collection acquired Gómez Sicre’s personal papers, which consist of 22 boxes (approx. 9 linear feet) of correspondence with artists, as well as manuscripts, personal writings, and ephemera. I also conducted research at other archives including the Art Museum of the

Americas and the OAS Columbus Memorial Library (Washington, DC), the Smithsonian

Archives of American Art (Washington, DC), the National Archives (College Park, MD), the Rockefeller Archives (Sleepyhollow, NY), the Hoover Institution (Stanford, CA), the

Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires, Argentina), and Fundación 15 Espigas (Buenos Aires, Argentina). My work in and about the archives coincides with a moment when the field of art history—and, in particular, Latin American art history—is starting to take what some would call an “archival turn.”25 I have conducted oral histories with OAS employees, with artists who showed at the OAS, and with collectors who knew

Gómez Sicre and Squirru; our conversations helped me uncover details, people, events, and interpretations that had previously gone unrecorded.

This history is important to acknowledge not simply for how it illuminates the past, but also because it helps reveal many assumptions behind contemporary curatorial strategies.

I began this dissertation project in the spring of 2006, partly in response to a debate in my field prompted by the reopening of the Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin. The Blanton holds one of the largest collections of twentieth-century Latin American art in the United States, surpassing that of any other university museum in the country. With the opening of new museum building, curators

Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro and Annette Carlozzi presented pieces from the American and

Latin American collections in an integrated, long-term exhibition known as

America/Américas. In the months before the opening, I listened to and participated in various informal conversations about what it meant for displays of Latin American art to be integrated with art of other regions. The debate became public at a three-day

25 In 2010, Andrea Giunta and Roberto Tejada, together with their students of the Permanent Seminar at UT, organized “Art⇔Archives: Latin America and Beyond,” the second of an annual international forum for graduate students and emerging scholars; the large turnout and variety in paper topics were the signs of a growing body of thought around archives. My participation in the forum helped me develop a theoretical framework for this dissertation and to fine-tune my analysis of Fernando Bryce’s Américas series. 16 symposium organized by the Blanton’s Latin American Art Department called Sin Título,

2006. At the symposium, scholars supporting integration generally argued that Latin

American art’s acceptance into the canon of Western art history was long overdue. Those against integration were concerned that museum visitors might mistakenly read Latin

American art in terms of better-known European and U.S. art movements and, as a result, see Latin American art as derivative.26

The arguments presented at the symposium were not grounded in the history of

Latin American art exhibitions in the United States. This history dates back to 1929 with the founding of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, however, despite the prominence of this institution, there remains little written about its Latin American exhibitions.27 At Sin Título, 2006, there was a shared sense that integration/separation was an unprecedented issue, and that showing U.S. and Latin American art together offered a fresh perspective, from which to better see the modernist traditions they share.

Yet, the precedents for America/Américas can be found in the cultural policies and rhetoric of governmental organizations like the OAS and the Center for Inter-American

Relations in New York (now the Americas Society). Pan-Americanism has underpinned much of the field of Latin American art in the U.S. since the 1940s despite attempts by many scholars and curators to ignore, forget, or sever those ties. America/Américas

26 Webcasts of Sin título, 2006: An International Symposium on Latin American Art in the Global Context, April 27-29, 2006, are available online at: http://theacesbuilding.com/building/blanton/ [Accessed 16 October 2012] 27 For one of the most recent examinations of MoMA’s Latin American collecting practices, see Miriam Basilio et al, Latin American & Caribbean Art; MoMA at El Museo (New York: El Museo del Barrio and The Museum of Modern Art, 2004). Also see Waldo Rasmussen, Fatima Bercht, Elizabeth Ferrer, eds. Latin American Artists of the Twentieth Century (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1993).

17 presents a type of side-by-side display that was not undertaken by OAS. But, in their own ways, Gómez Sicre and Squirru helped create a paradigm of curating and presenting

Latin American art that still resonates today. They traveled widely, organized and participated in art fairs and biennials across the world, embraced corporate sponsorship of art exhibitions, and saw some of the artists they promoted quickly rise to celebrity status—all of this resembles a nascent version of the 21st century contemporary art world and its production of art centers and art stars. Perhaps, the term “Pan-Americanism” may be outmoded, but the conflicts of power engendered and masked by Pan-American rhetoric are still persist in the way Latin American art is defined. I conclude this dissertation with a discussion of several works of art, particularly Fernando Bryce’s drawings Américas (2008), based on the OAS’s magazine of the same name, to consider the legacies of Pan-Americanism and historical memory.

18 PART I: JOSÉ GÓMEZ SICRE AND THE VISUAL ARTS DIVISION

Introduction: A Place for Latin American Art

Days after José Gómez Sicre passed away in 1991, Peruvian artist Fernando de

Szyszlo published an homage to the curator in Lima’s newspaper Oiga, describing him as a pivotal figure in the history of Latin American art: “I sincerely believe that when we speak of this art we can clearly distinguish between two stages: before and after Gómez

Sicre’s presence was felt in the cultural atmosphere of our countries [where] he began fighting…to give a place to the art of Latin America.”28 As early as 1989 Szyszlo claimed that Gómez Sicre was, in fact, the originator of the idea of Latin American art—a claim that he also reiterated in later interviews:

I think that before Gómez Sicre there was Argentinean or Mexican art, Peruvian or Venezuelan art, [and] it was he who had the vision that all those manifestations…had common ties due to the fact that they were the product[s] of individuals… linked by tradition, by heritage, by circumstance and by destiny. Not only the word Latin American art belongs to Gómez Sicre, but the idea contained in the expression.29

In memorializing his friend, Szyzlo was also making a strategic effort to alter the discourse surrounding Gómez Sicre. Gómez Sicre has long been considered a controversial figure by artists and by art historians for the way he bridged politics and art.

In the 1960s, Mexican artist David Alfaro Siqueiros denounced him as a CIA agent,

28 Fernando de Szyszlo, “Pequeño Homenaje José Gómez Sicre,” Oigo [Lima, Peru], 30 July 1991, 57. A copy is available in folder 1, box 16, José Gómez Sicre Papers, Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin (Hereafter, referred to as “JGS Papers.”). All translations from Spanish are mine, unless cited otherwise. 29 Ibid. In his homage, Szyzlo states that the text is slightly adapted from a speech honoring José Gómez Sicre that the artist delivered in Washington, DC in November 1989. 19 accusing him of forwarding a U.S. imperialist project.30 In the 1970s and 1980s, art historians Raquel Tibol, Shifra Goldman, and Eva Cockcroft each voiced similar critiques about Gómez Sicre’s role as a “tastemaker,” arguing that his aesthetic tastes were those of a Cold War hawk; some of these critiques appear in the catalogue for The

Latin American Spirit: Art and Artists in the United States, 1920-70, an exhibition organized by the Bronx Museum of the Arts, which circulated across the U.S. and Puerto

Rico in 1989-90.31 In retrospect, Szyzlo’s homage came at a moment when Gómez

Sicre’s reputation hung in the balance and his activities at the OAS were being heavily criticized.

While rhetorically compelling, Szyzlo’s statements are also somewhat misleading.

Latin American art, whether we consider it as a word, a concept, or a field of cultural production and academic study, has a long and complex history involving a multitude of historical actors working in different parts of the world and across different time

30 No evidence has surfaced proving Siqueiros’ claims. Art historian Alejandro Anreus asked Gómez Sicre directly about Siqueiros’ allegations. See Alejandro Anreus, “Ultimas conversaciones con José Gómez Sicre,” ArteFacto: Revista de arte y cultura en blanco y negro [Nicaragua] no. 18 (Summer 2000), n.p. Reprinted in Appendix C. 31 In the course of my research, I have found the discomfort around Gómez Sicre’s historical status persists. “I thought he was just a bureaucrat,” one classmate commented to me in 2005 when I presented a seminar paper on Gómez Sicre and his arts writing for Américas magazine. More recently, at a conference at the Smithsonian, artist Luis Camnitzer responded to my conference paper about Gómez Sicre and the Taller Libre de Arte with surprise: “I’ve never heard anyone say anything nice about him. I always thought of Gómez Sicre as a treacherous worm.” Camnitzer was a major voice for Latin American artists in New York in the late 1960s who led institutional critiques of OAS and the Center for Inter-American Relations, arguing that these organizations placed the arts within imperialistic political agendas. Together with several other artists he formed the Museo Latinoamericano in 1971, and later, the Movimiento por la Independencia Cultural Latino Americana (MICLA) to rival these institutional programs. His statements about my paper came during the closing discussion of Encuentros: Artistic Exchange between the U.S. and Latin America. October 5-6, 2011. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC. Webcasts of the symposium are available online: http://americanart.si.edu/research/symposia/2011/ [Accessed 16 October 2012] 20 periods.32 Further, Gómez Sicre’s initial interest was in modern art as an international phenomenon. In the 1950s and 1960s, he was one of several critics, including Alfred H.

Barr, Jr., Marta Traba, Jorge Romero Brest, and Rafael Squirru, who were trying to define a distinctly “American” modernism. All were institution builders, creating and/or directing art museums, many of them titled “Museums of Modern Art.” These critics usually couched their projects in terms of the “universal” appeal of art. For example,

Gómez Sicre in his 1959 editorial for the Boletín de Artes Visuales writes, “In this moment, the art of America is not of indigenismos [indigenisms], campesinismos

[farmworkerisms], obrerismos [factoryworkerisms] nor demagoguery. It is the affirmation of continental values of a universal essence.”33 Such evocations of art’s

“universality” may have been meant to read as exuberant and sincere. Today they seem particularly problematic for the manner in which they dismiss any of art’s ties to race and the working class as being outside the universal. In fact, the notion of universality has long been used as both an ideological weapon and shield. As cultural theorist Raymond

Williams writes, claims of universality are deeply tied to experiences of failure: “The formulation of modernist universals is in every case a productive but imperfect and in the end fallacious response to particular conditions of closure, breakdown, failure and frustration.”34 The failure for Gómez Sicre was that throughout his life Latin American

32 For an extensive history of the term “Latin American art,” see Mari Carmen Ramírez, Tomás Ybarra- Frausto, and Héctor Olea, eds., Resisting Categories: Latin American and/or Latino? Critical Documents of 20th-Century Latin American and Latino Art, vol. 1 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2012). 33 José Gómez Sicre, “Nota editorial,” Boletín de Artes Visuales 5 (May-December 1959): 3. 34 Raymond Williams, “Metropolitan Perceptions and the Emergence of Modernism” in Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (New York and London: Verso Press, 2007), 47. Modern art and 21 art would continually be seen as one regional body of work rather than part of the global modernist narrative.

If he wasn’t the inventor of the field, Gómez Sicre along with the staff of the

Visual Arts Division carved out a place in Washington DC for Latin American art to be shown and collected and for its creators to find support for their work and community for their ideas.35 Dozens of Latin American artists were hired as curatorial assistants by

Gómez Sicre. These positions allowed them to travel, exhibit, and study in the United

States. In cases where he could not afford more assistants, he found them other part-time positions at the OAS.36 Ramon Osuna, who served as a curatorial assistant in the 1960s, describes him as the “Diaghilev of Latin American Art,” emphasizing that Gómez Sicre worked behind the scenes to direct and gain acceptance for modern art from Latin

modernism are many things to many people. My own understanding of the concept has been largely shaped by the writings of Raymond Williams, who points out that modernism has a contradictory logic. One of its contradictions is that modernism falsely seems unfixed to time, when in fact it denotes a rather specific period: the early to mid twentieth century. The word “modern” masks a specific set of tastes and aesthetic preferences, presenting them as though they were all-encompassing of a historical period. Another major contradiction is that while modernism is often tied to claims of “universality” or “wholeness,” these ideals mask the reality that the cultural productions of modernism stem from fractures, breakdowns, and particularly local urban roots. Williams also argues that modernism is largely tied to experiences of immigration and exile, built by artists and critics who felt foreign in their surroundings. 35 The department that Gómez Sicre oversaw went through various name changes after its founding. When Gómez Sicre entered the Pan American Union in 1946, he was hired as art specialist within the “Division of Intellectual Cooperation.” With the restructuring of the OAS, his post became alternately referred to as chief of the “Visual Arts Unit” or the “Visual Arts Section.” For clarity, I consistently refer to his department as the “Visual Arts Division,” a title adopted in 1961, for the entire period of 1948 to 1976, before the Visual Arts Division became the Museum of Modern Art of Latin America. 36 In the early 1950s, Gómez Sicre gave Mexican artist José Luis Cuevas a part-time position at the OAS so that he could temporarily live and work in Washington, DC. Between 1958 and 1960, Szyszlo worked for Gómez Sicre. From 1960 to 1968, his assistants were Ramon Osuna and Luis Lustra, who left the OAS to jointly open the Pyramid Gallery in Washington, DC. In the mid-1960s, Gómez Sicre also found work for Costa Rican artist Carlos Poveda as gallery guard. In the 1970s, Angel Hurtado and Félix Ángel each worked in the Division of Visual Arts. In the late 1970s and 1980s, he was also helped by Horatio Sicre, his nephew. 22 America.37 According to Osuna, he had the same violent temperament as the Russian impresario, and like Sergei Diaghilev, Gómez Sicre cultivated an intimate circle of friends, composed of artists, writers, poets, and actors bound by their passion for the arts and their outsider status. Others who knew Gómez Sicre refer to him as “The Gertrude

Stein of Latin American Art,” again an analogy meant to convey his important position as an early patron of modern art and his ability to create a salon culture.38

The department concentrated its efforts on creating monthly art exhibitions, either group or solo shows, which Gómez Sicre initially held in the corridors of the Pan

American Union’s main building. Most shows ran for one month. The openings, staged as after-work events, brought together employees of the OAS, ambassadors and diplomats from neighboring embassies and government organizations, along with their spouses and families. James P. Kiernan, who worked at the OAS in the 1980s, remembers how Gómez Sicre worked the room at these openings: “Gómez Sicre would have an exhibit and would whisper in people’s ears that this artist was going to be famous. He did not make money on these transactions, but bought for himself and for the museum.”39 If artists were in attendance—as was often the case—Gómez Sicre introduced them to the current Secretary General and to local art collectors, arranging sales. He also worked

37 Ramon Osuna, interview with the author, 20 February 2009. 38 Helen Zayani, “Property from the Estate of Dorothy Friestedt Altamirano,” featured on Christies.com beginning 29 April 2011, http://www.christies.com/features/estate-of-dorothy-friestedt-altamirano-1437- 1.aspx [Accessed 16 October 2012] 39 James P. Kiernan, interview with the author, 30 January 2008. 23 with journalists from Washington newspapers and, in some cases, nationally distributed magazines, such as Time, to publicize the exhibits.40

Based on the success of these monthly exhibitions, in 1957 Gómez Sicre persuaded the OAS to create an acquisitions fund, and in 1960, the OAS built a permanent exhibition space. Gómez Sicre and his staff continued to use the main floor corridors for monthly exhibitions, while the permanent gallery, which was located in the basement of the same building, rotated exhibitions of the OAS collection approximately every eighteen months. This permanent gallery accommodated between fifteen to twenty- five paintings at a time, and its entrance contained a small vestibule displaying photography and works on paper.

While the Division of Visual Arts operated these exhibition spaces, the department regularly had to submit to the directives of the Secretary General and accommodate OAS ambassadors wishing to commemorate a significant historical or cultural event with an exhibition. “Pepe would be furious if any ambassador asked him to give an opening for so-and-so,” remembers his friend and art collector Diana Beruff.

She and many of the DC art patrons cultivated by him intuitively knew which exhibitions to attend and which to ignore. “You could immediately tell from [the wording of] the invitation when he didn’t like what he was exhibiting. And I only went to the ones he liked,” says Beruff.41

40 The best-known instance of this concerns the first exhibition of José Luis Cuevas in 1954. See “Art: A Vision of Life,” Time, 16 August1954, available at www.time.com/time/archive 41 Diana Beruff, interview with the author, 15 March 2008. 24 Besides exhibitions, the Division also dedicated itself to regularly publishing magazine articles, pamphlets, and guide booklets about Latin American art. In the 1950s,

Gómez Sicre was a frequent contributor to the OAS magazine Américas; his book Four

Artists of the Americas (1957) reprints four of his longer essays from the magazine. He also oversaw his own publication, the Boletín de Artes Visuales [Bulletin of Visual Arts], a semi-annual review, which ran from 1956 to 1973. Each began with an editorial note in which Gómez Sicre wrote about his ideas on art; these notes were followed by country- by-country listings of past and upcoming exhibitions of modern art from Latin America.

Beruff described the Boletines as her “bibles,” and she avidly collected them all.42 For aspiring artists and collectors, the Boletín reinforced and reassured them that the artists showing at the Pan American Union were part of an ever-growing international circuit.

The Division created a number of serial publications intended to educate readers about Latin American art. These included Art of the Americas, edited by Luis Lastra from

1966 to 1969, which was a small, heavily illustrated publication that similarly gave information about past and upcoming art events and reprinted articles first published in

Américas. The Division also produced a series of seven pamphlets entitled Art in Latin

America Today, each by separate art critics who recounts the history of art of his or her country; most notably, the series includes a monograph on Colombia by Marta Traba and one on Peru by Juan Acha. A third publication was Highlights of Latin American Art, a portfolio primarily designed for teaching, which included images of Pre-Columbian artifacts, textiles, folk art, and contemporary painting and sculpture. Gómez Sicre also

42 Ibid. 25 created a 4-volume Guia de las colecciones públicas de arte [Guide to Public Collections of Art], a Spanish-language guide that outlines the hours, operations, and holdings of museums in the United States and in the Caribbean.

While the Visual Arts Division dedicated itself to educating audiences about Latin

American art through exhibition, publications, and documentary films, its employees also built and maintained an extensive archive about Latin American art, including newspaper clippings, exhibition pamphlets, resumes and various manifestos. These archives (now housed in the administrative offices of the museum) were open to visitors since the 1960s and were used by the office when fielding questions about a certain artist or movement. In 1961, Gómez Sicre described the archives as “certainly the least obvious, but perhaps the most important tasks performed by the Division of Visual

Arts,…record[ing] the fruitful activity of many thousands of artists from across the continent.”43

Whether or not Gómez Sicre intended to define Latin American art, and whether or not he successfully did so, his many different undertakings cumulatively offer one of the first working models of the field. In the following two chapters I situate his writings and activities within their original contexts to understand what that model was. Chapter

One offers a sustained overview of Gómez Sicre’s aesthetic tastes, connecting and comparing his tastes with those of Barr, Traba, and Romero Brest. I show how these critics started on common ground in the 1940s and 1950s, and chart how they diverged

43 La Unión Panamericana al servicio de las arte visuales (Washington, DC: Pan American Union, 1961), under “Los archivos de la división de artes visuales.” 26 ideologically and aesthetically in the 1960s. Chapter Two discusses the contested nature of the intellectual—a debate that affected Gómez Sicre at mid-century. I set my discussion of the intellectual in relation to Gómez Sicre’s efforts to build a Pan-American network for artists and their work.

27 Chapter One: An Eye in Context

In 1991, art historian Alejandro Anreus asked Gómez Sicre, “Who is José Gómez

Sicre?” He answered, “A guy from Matanzas [Cuba] who likes to look—with care, with passion—but also with clarity, with objectivity. A few things that I like to see, or to look at, are paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, and films—above all, films.”44 Gómez

Sicre prided himself on his vision. He claimed to have a photographic memory, a mind defined by sight.45 If Gómez Sicre regarded his own eyes very highly, the feeling was reinforced by comments made by those around him. During his lifetime, he was repeatedly praised in terms of his eye, the eye of a connoisseur: “He has an unerring eye for the original and fresh, as opposed to the official and traditional,” wrote art critic

Leslie Judd Ahlander in her column for the Washington Post in 1962.46 Many of his surviving friends concur: “The good thing about Pepe is that he had a wonderful eye,” says José Martinez Cañas, an early collector of Cuban art who befriended Gómez Sicre in the 1960s, “I mean nobody that I have ever met had a better eye than Pepe for Latin

44 Anreus, “Ultimas conversaciones con José Gómez Sicre,” reprinted in Appendix C. 45 The eyes so concerned him that he even wrote a short story where the protagonist (a thinly veiled stand- in for author himself) is abducted by the Cuban government under Fidel Castro and subjected to retinal experiments. Gómez Sicre’s unpublished story is written in the first person. The protagonist and he are the same age and from the same city. In a key passage, a German scientist explains to his prisoner why he has been arrested: “I want to inform you—he now said to me with a more humane tone of voice—that you have been selected to carry out a painless experiment concerning the human retina’s ability for assimilation and its faculty for incorporating moving images with a certain permanence. That is to say, how the retina records…images in action. Cinema is most specific. Principally, cinema [when it is] administered from early childhood onward, as is your case, in which you were taken to the movies with a certain regularity between four and five years old. He opened the folder and verified, ‘Between 1920 and 1921.’” Gómez Sicre, untitled document beginning with “Cuando por la tarde llegaba del colegio…,” folder 3, box 4, JGS Papers. 46Leslie Judd Ahlander, “A Success Story at Pan American” The Washington Post, 1 April 1962, G6. Available online through ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The Washington Post (1877-1995). 28 American art. And it was something that Alfred Barr noticed and this is why Alfred Barr used him as his source.”47

In the cases above, statements about eyes, vision, looking, watching, etc. all carry meanings well beyond physiological processes. “The ‘eye’ is a product of history reproduced by education,” writes sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, “This is true of the mode of artistic perception now accepted as legitimate, that is, the aesthetic disposition, the capacity to consider in and for themselves, as form rather than function, not only the works designated for such apprehension, i.e., legitimate works of art, but everything in the world, including cultural objects which are not yet consecrated—such as, at one time, primitive arts, or nowadays, popular photography or kitsch—and natural objects.”48

Bourdieu’s statements about the “eye” appear early in his famous text on taste,

Distinction: A Sociological Critique of the Judgment of Taste (1984). The “eye” and

“taste” operate in the same way: both are metaphors that seem to naturalize our preferences as the result of basic sensory perceptions (the “eye” refers mainly to the visual, just as “having an ear” refers to music, while “taste” refers to a broad spectrum of preferences that includes both music and visual art). 49 In our day-to-day lives, we may think of our personal tastes as idiosyncratic, as inclinations entirely unique to each of us.

47 José Martínez Cañas, interview with the author, 31 August 2009. 48 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 3. 49 It should come as no surprise that just as some of Gómez Sicre’s colleagues remarked about his “eye” while others described him as a “tastemaker.” These words “tastemaker” and “eye” tended to have contrasting connotations. “Tastemaker” usually came from a critical perspective, suggesting Gómez Sicre had the power to shape other people’s preferences, but that this was a power he did not deserve, and that his influence favored the trendy; the “eye” suggests a more positive meaning: one who is perceptive and has foresight about the quality and/or value of a work of art, whether it be monetary value, historical value, or both. 29 What Bourdieu’s book powerfully shows is that our preferences are not as personalized as they might seem. Our tastes are not “natural,” but instead are socially constructed—the products of history and education. Bourdieu makes it clear that taste—especially in terms of cultural matters—follows a specific logic, that it forms a bond between social groups, either as a shared value or as a point of contention. Taste not only separates one socio- economic class from another, it also creates internal divisions within each class. Again

Bourdieu: “Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier. Social subjects, classified by their classifications, distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make, between the beautiful and the ugly, the distinguished and the vulgar, in which their position in the objective classifications is expressed or betrayed.”50

To speak of Gómez Sicre’s “eye” is to speak of his aesthetic tastes—tastes that are not entirely unique to him, but that classify and/or distinguish him among his peers.

Scholars have referred to Gómez Sicre’s tastes in passing but they have never been the subject of detailed analysis. One reason for this is the social nature of taste; tastes cannot easily be described in isolation; they are the silk of a wider social web, the way one relates with others. What follows is an analysis of Gómez Sicre’s main aesthetic beliefs as they relate to his contemporaries Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Marta Traba, and Jorge Romero

Brest.

50 Bourdieu, Distinction, 3. 30 A MENTOR AT THE MOMA: ALFRED H. BARR, JR.

The relationship between Alfred H. Barr, Jr.—the founding director of the

Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA)—and Gómez Sicre is of historical importance, not only for its influences on Gómez Sicre’s life and his aesthetic tastes but also because it was a link with significant cultural cache. On the most basic level, their friendship lent legitimacy to Gómez Sicre’s position, making him a curator connected to the most prestigious institution for modern art in the United States. My goal here is to suggest that the connections ran deeper than that: the two men shared similar aesthetic tastes, adopted similar rhetoric about modern art and its historical origins and applied similar formalist methodologies in their exhibitions and in building permanent collections for museums they directed. Gómez Sicre spoke of Barr as “a friend and a teacher.”51

Their most frequent contact occurred in the 1940s, though Gómez Sicre occasionally sought him out during the 1950s and 1960s. He explains: “If I presented an artist of great promise, [of] genuine talent, in the OAS gallery, I would let Barr know and he’d ask me to hold one or two works for the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, and he’d buy them. That’s what happened with [José Luis] Cuevas, [Armando] Morales, [Alejandro]

Obregón, and others.”52

The two met in Havana in the summer of 1942, during Barr’s eight-day visit to

Cuba. Earlier that year, the MoMA had begun a new initiative, the Inter-American Fund,

51 Anreus, “Ultimas conversaciones con José Gómez Sicre,” reprinted in Appendix C. 52 Ibid. Gómez Sicre also discusses showing works to Alfred Barr in the Boletín de Artes Visuales. He writes that “after 1947, [with Barr] again in charge of the museum’s collections, I saw him only when I wanted to present him with works by a certain Latin American artist. I would personally take them from Washington.” José Gómez Sicre, “Al lector,” Boletín de Artes Visuales 16 (January-June 1967): 9. 31 set up to increase the museum’s holdings in art from Latin America. The fund was a war time project created in the weeks following the bombing of Pearl Harbor; although its funder wished to remain anonymous, by all indications the Inter-American Fund was launched by Nelson Rockefeller (who was a member of the MoMA Board of Directors and who had been serving as head of the U.S. Office of Inter-American Affairs since

1940) in an attempt to gain Latin American support for the Allied cause.53 With travel to

Europe dangerous and logistically difficult, the museum turned its attention to the

Americas. Barr and fellow MoMA curator Lincoln Kirstein separately spent the summer of 1942 traveling through Latin America, learning the field, searching for acquisitions, and contacts; Kirstein traveled predominantly through South America, Barr spent six weeks in Mexico before going to Havana.

In Cuba, Barr stepped into a small and fiercely divided art scene, where Gómez

Sicre was already a somewhat polemical figure. Gómez Sicre had first become involved with the arts in the late 1930s, while still a law student at the University of Havana.

Cundo Bermúdez, a fellow classmate in the law school and a practicing artist, introduced

Gómez Sicre to Mario Carreño and Felipe Orlando—painters who were disenchanted with the paintings coming out of Havana’s San Alejandro National Academy of Art. In a lecture on the history of Cuban art that Gómez Sicre delivered later in his career, he

53 Barr openly acknowledges the strong influence World War II had on the MoMA’s collecting practices. See Barr, Alfred H. "Foreword," The Latin-American Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, edited by Lincoln Kirstein, 3-4. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1943. ICAA Documents of 20th-Century Latin American and Latino Art Digital Archive. http://icaadocs.mfah.org [ICAA Record ID: 838005] [Accessed 21 February 2012] 32 recounts seeing in February 1937 an exhibition of Bermúdez’s paintings for the first time.

The works were

hanging on trees in Albear Park, the link between old Havana and the new downtown area. A group of friends who had no other place to exhibit had decided to hold an open-air show there. There were no galleries to speak of in the capital at that time. Artists sometimes exhibited in furniture showrooms, at other times out on the street. In this case, they had chosen the park named for the engineer who had provided the city with running water and a statue [that was surrounded] by trees (alas, not laurels!) whose trunks provided a place to hang their works.54

Inspired by his friends, Gómez Sicre began his foray into art writing and was soon writing reviews for the Havana newspaper El Mundo.55 In 1939, he began curating exhibitions at Havana’s Lyceum and Lawn Tennis Club.56 With the help of Mario

Carreño, he convinced María Luisa Gómez Mena—a wealthy heiress and one of the only collectors of contemporary art on the island—to finance Havana’s first commercial gallery of modern art, the Galería del Prado.57 The gallery, created in 1942 and managed

54 José Gómez Sicre, “Cundo Bermudez,” folder 29, box 1, JGS Papers. Gómez Sicre also refers to this exhibition in Cuban Painting of Today, trans. Harold Biddle (Havana: María Luisa Gomez Mena, 1944), 151. 55 He most likely began writing art criticism during a break in his education between 1935 and 1937 when the University of Havana’s law school was temporarily closed due to strikes. Gómez Sicre discusses his work for El Mundo in his interview with Anreus. Anreus, “Ultimas conversaciones con José Gómez Sicre,” reprinted in Appendix C. Mario Carreño also worked in the newspaper business, primarily as an illustrator. See Gómez Sicre’s essay on the artist, folder 16, box 2, JGS Papers. According to José Luis Cuevas, Gómez Sicre also wrote for Avance, a daily newspaper started in Havana in 1938 and directed by Jorge Zayás. José Luis Cuevas, Gato Macho (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1994), 569. 56 In 1943 he was invited by anthropologist Fernando Ortiz to curate exhibitions at the Institución Hispano- Cubano de Cultura (Institution of Hispanic-Cuban Culture). Both of these curatorial positions were unpaid, and to earn a living, Gómez Sicre also worked in the offices of the national lottery (some of his earliest notes on contemporary art are written on the backs of paper with the Renta de la Lotería logo). For some of his writings on the back of lottery paper, see “Breve Historia Confusa,” an article on the life of Fidelio Ponce, located in folder 17, box 1, JGS Papers. 57 In the late 1930s and 1940s, there were only three notable collectors of contemporary Cuban art. They were: Lydia Cabrera, an anthropologist and specialist in Afro-Cuban religious practices who promoted the work of artist Wifredo Lam; Ramón García Osuna, Sr., a diplomat who worked between Havana and the Cuban embassy in Washington, DC; and María Luisa Gómez Mena. Gómez Sicre became close with both Osuna, Sr. and with Gómez Mena, who at the time was married to Mario Carreño. 33 by Gómez Sicre, was located at 44 Paseo de Prado, a famous promenade for shopping and strolling in downtown Havana. “During the year that it remained open, it sold absolutely nothing,” Gómez Sicre later claimed.58 He was being modest. In fact, Gómez

Sicre was a skillful art dealer. In November 1942, Alfred Barr wrote, “I am delighted to hear of the success of your gallery. María Luisa wrote that you sold ten paintings in three days, which must be nearly a world’s record.”59

The Galería del Prado became a central base for one of several rivaling artistic groups in Havana. If one pole consisted of Gómez Mena, Gómez Sicre, and artists

Carreño, Bermúdez, and Orlando; another pole centered around poet José Lezama Lima

(1910-1976) and writer José Rodríguez Feo (1920-1993), who founded the literary magazine Orígenes (1944-1956). This influential magazine published modern Cuban poetry and prose, and included reviews of exhibitions and theoretical writings on aesthetics. In addition to publishing some of Lezama Lima’s poetry and his writings about art, Orígenes frequently included contributions from art critic Guy Pérez-Cisneros, writer Cintio Vitier, and poetess Fina García Marruz.60 Images by Amelia Peláez, René

Portocarrero, Wifredo Lam and other artists of the Cuban vanguard consistently appeared on the covers of the magazine.61 The magazine garnered a wide readership in Latin

58 Ibid. 59 Alfred Barr, Jr. to Gómez Sicre, 2 November 1942, folder 2, box 7, JGS Papers. 60 For a recent analysis of the art criticism that emerged from this rivalry, see Alejandro Anreus, “José Gómez Sicre versus Guy Perez Cisneros: ‘Lo cubano en las artes plásticas’” in Cuba Futures: Arts and Culture in Contemporary Cuba (edited by Mauricio A. Font). Bildner Center for Western Hemisphere Studies, 2011, 233-244. Available online at http://www.cubaproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/Arts- and-Culture-Final.pdf [Accessed 22 February 2012] 61 According to art historian Luz Merino Acosta, Wifredo Lam, while friendly with Lezama Lima, represented a third “strong and independent pole,” separate from both the Orígenes group and the Galeria 34 America and served as an important venue for Spanish-language translations of writing from the U.S. and from Europe.

The Galería del Prado group and the Orígenes group each believed their country lacked a respectable venue for the dissemination and critical study of literature and art, and each sought to rectify the situation. They disagreed, however, on what cultural values were most important, which artists of the Cuban vanguard represented those values, and how to most effectively write about art. Gómez Sicre and Lezama Lima, the centers of each group, generally disliked each other and conflicted in their aesthetic tastes, their world views, and their opinions about questions of colonialism.62 At the turn of the twentieth century, Cubans who had been seeking independence from Spain since the del Prado. Luz Merino Acosta, “Orígenes: Otra cara de la modernidad,” in La revista Orígenes y la vanguardia cubano, ed. Teresa del Conde (Madrid: Turner, 2000), 27. 62 Moreover, there were sharp social and economic class divisions between them. Gómez Sicre’s middle- class upbringing and his self-taught study of art separated him from Lezama Lima and his circle—many of whom who had been educated in Paris. Gómez Sicre disliked the clique-ishness of the Orígenes group and he complained bitterly about their elitism. He later wrote: I never exchanged words [with Lezama Lima], although I saw him with certain frequency when I lived in Havana. Lezama presided over his devotees in a bookstore situated on O’Reilly Street. Also, at night, I saw him sitting along the Prado…while various acolytes encircled him and soaked up all they heard. I never went to listen in his tertulias and I admit we did not get along, and I always avoided personal contact. Lezama pontificated in a heavy aristocratic fashion, in which I never felt legitimately included. If one had not been reading Valery or Malermé, he or she was dismissed. In matters of visual art, I observed absolute confusion. This distanced me from him further. In the Origenes group, the PAINTER was one such Maríano Rodríguez, a creator of audacious art that today, happily, is insignificant and destroyed in its entirety. [René] Portocarrero was, with his vacillations, timidity, mysticism, the DRAUGHTSMAN. Alfredo Lozano was the SCULPTOR and denied the significance of all pre-existing sculpture in the country, José Ardévol, was the MUSICIAN. None of the three today hold a position of importance in our culture’s process. They were, more or less, leaders that profoundly “respected” Lezama, who in each encounter, would pester them with some thesis he had extracted from the thousands of books he consulted and read, although could not always digest. Lezama, it seems unnecessary to declare, was the POET….I was well-intentioned and taking my first steps into art criticism [at that time]. I read a lot, but without erudition, and in my insignificant writings I did not cite any esoteric thinker in France. My strength, I now see clearly, consisted in that I paid equal attention to the plastic artists that emerged in our panorama, and apart from admitting the superiority of Amelia Peláez over the rest of the movement, I believed in the contributions of Ponce, Carlos Enríquez, Cundo Bermúdez y Mario Carreño. José Gómez Sicre to Israel Rodríguez, 16 November 1983, folder 3, box 5, JGS Papers. 35 1870s, found themselves a colony of another empire—the United States. By most historical accounts, the cultural exchange between the two countries flourished until the

1959 Cuban Revolution. In the 1930s and 1940s, many Cubans willingly embraced the democratic ideals at the heart of U.S. government; they admired the efficiency of country’s institutions and schools, the modernity of its cities and public transportation, and desired the consumer goods made in the United States—the clothing, the beauty products, the food and alcohol, but also Hollywood movies and baseball.63 Gómez Sicre was part of this group; he saw potential in U.S. influence. In contrast, Lezama Lima and his circle resisted such influence on Cuban culture. Even their magazine’s title, Orígenes, suggests a search for Cuban heritage and cultural originality. For Lezama Lima, Cuban culture was more heavily indebted to Spain than the United States. But, above all, he believed that the country possessed its own hybrid culture, and he employed the concept of the baroque to describe Latin America’s cultural complexity and exceptionalism, a theme he later expounded in his book, La expresión americana (1957).64

63 Here I rely upon the work of historian Louis A. Perez, who details the cultural bonds between the U.S. and Cuba in his book, Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality, and Culture (New York: Harper Collins & University of North Carolina Press, 1999). His argument that Cuba served as a testing ground for U.S. imperialism appears in his book, Cuba in the American Imagination: Metaphor and the Imperial Ethos. (University of North Carolina Press, 2008). 64 Unfortunately, La expresión americana (The American Expression) has not been translated into English. For an introduction to Lezama Lima and his poetry, see Ernesto Livon-Grosman, “Transcending National Poetics: A New Reading of José Lezama Lima” José Lezama Lima: Selections (ed. Ernesto Livon- Grosman), Poets of the Millennium Series (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), XI-L. For information about La expresión americana, see Brett Levinson, Secondary Moderns: Mimesis, History, and Revolution in Lezama Lima’s American Expression (Lewisburg: Associated University Presses, 1996), available online through Google books. A further discussion of Orígenes magazine and its opposition to U.S. colonialism and the “American way of life,” is available in James Buckwalter-Arias, Cuba and the New Origenismo (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell and Brewer Inc., 2010), 195- 196. 36 Barr’s 1942 visit brought many internal artistic disputes to a head as these factions rivaled for his attention and the possibility of having their work associated with the MoMA. Barr likely sensed the tensions; he later wrote to Gómez Sicre that he “had no interest in Cuban art politics, but had tried to make a fair though hasty study of Cuban art.”65 Barr may have wished to refrain from engaging in “Cuban art politics,” or favoring one group over another, but in the end his choice was clear: with the help of

Gómez Sicre and the Galeria del Prado, the MoMA mounted the Cuban Painting of

Today exhibition in 1944 (its catalogue was funded by Gómez Mena).66 Barr also encouraged Gómez Sicre to pursue an M.A. degree in art history at New York University, and helped him secure a tuition scholarship. “To my mind it is not actually a degree that would be useful for you so much as a chance to live in New York for a while, get to know the museums and private collections[,] dealers and artists,” Barr explained to him.67

65 Alfred Barr, Jr. to Gómez Sicre, 12 December 1944, folder 2, box 7, JGS Papers. 66 Gómez Sicre edited the catalogue accompanying the MoMA exhibition, arranged the loans, framing, and transportation of works from Cuba, and helped to install the works at the museum’s galleries that year. Controversy about the MoMA’s selection of artists for the Cuban Painting of Today exhibition continued after the show left New York to travel through the U.S. and abroad. The main dispute concerned the work of Wifredo Lam, who had been included in the catalog but not in the exhibition. Rumors circulated that Lam had refused to participate in the exhibition because of his dislike for Gómez Sicre and Gómez Mena. This dispute with Lam is well-documented in the MoMA and Gómez Sicre archives. For further information also see Todd Florio, “MoMA #255: “Modern Cuban Painters”: Promulgating Cuban Modernism,” Toddflorio’s Blog, 29 May 2009, http://mcp1944.wordpress.com/2009/05/29/moma-255- %E2%80%9Cmodern-cuban-painters%E2%80%9D-promulgating-cuban-modernism-by-todd-florio/ [accessed March 2010]. As late as 1945, Barr was encouraging Lam and Gómez Sicre to make amends (a peace he said would be “for the good of Cuban painting”), but to no avail. Alfred Barr to José Gómez Sicre, 16 February 1945. 67 Alfred Barr, Jr. to José Gómez Sicre, 23 July 1943, folder 2, box 7, JGS Papers. At NYU, Gómez Sicre studied under Erwin Panofsky, famed scholar of iconography and the Renaissance. Barr also encouraged him to take courses at Columbia with Meyer Schapiro, describing him to Gómez Sicre as “a very brilliant teacher, more brilliant, in fact, than any teacher of history of modern art at New York University.” Alfred Barr, Jr. to José Gómez Sicre, 22 December 1943, folder 2, box 7, JGS Papers. Schapiro, whose early scholarship concerned Romanesque sculpture, garnered high esteem among art historians in the 1930s for his writing on leftist politics and modern art. In 1937, he co-founded the Marxist Quarterly and in it published “The Nature of Abstract Art,” which remains his best-known essay. 37 So why did Barr take an interest in Gómez Sicre? Perhaps, it was because Gómez

Sicre was in the right group of moneyed art patrons; he was working at an art gallery and could easily be brought into the growing international museum-gallery-academy network—a network that Barr was already comfortable working with in Europe. More importantly, they shared a set of curatorial methods and ideas about modern art. Both men approached art formally through notions of quality and international standards. As

Barr turned attention southward to Latin America, he struggled with a particular form of culture shock: his knowledge and skills assessing the merit of art—so well-honed in

Europe and the U.S.—held little traction. In 1945, he remarked that, despite his hopes,

“objective judgments” of Latin American contemporary art were difficult because of what he called a “problem of standards.”68 To Barr’s mind, the problem was the complete absence of standards. Essentially, he was concerned that the U.S. had taken interest in

Latin American art initially for political reasons, albeit altruistic ones, and not for the quality of the works themselves.69

In Gómez Sicre, Barr found an art professional that embodied his sense of

“objective” methodology. Barr writes that upon first meeting Gómez Sicre, he found him

68 See Alfred H. Barr, Jr., "Problems of Research and Documentation in Contemporary Latin American Art." In Studies in Latin American Art: Proceedings of a Conference held in the Museum of Modern Art New York, May 28-31, 1945, edited by Elizabeth Wilder, 37-43. Washington, DC: The American Council of Learned Societies, 1949. Available online: ICAA Archives #833746 [Accessed 27 February 2012]. 69 As Gómez Sicre helped prepare Cuban Painting of Today, Barr expressed to him his belief that Latin American art previously received little recognition in the U.S. because of this issue of quality: “As you can guess, there have been in this country during the past several years a great many exhibitions of Latin American art, some of which unfortunately have been very mediocre indeed. As a result, there has grown up in people genuinely interested in painting a certain prejudice or [skepticism] about the art of the other American republics. I say this to you in confidence and quite frankly for our Museum intends to maintain its interest in Latin American art whenever the quality of that art seems to us to justify the interest.”Alfred Barr, Jr. to José Gómez Sicre, 16 October 1943, folder 2,box 7, JGS Papers. 38 to be “a very remarkable man, [who combined] intelligence and knowledge with extraordinary fairness and disinterested appreciation of a great variety of artists and of art.”70 He continued to vouch for him throughout the 1950s; for instance, telling Nelson

Rockefeller about his “unique qualifications as a man with a very wide knowledge of

Latin American art, an exceptional lack of bias, and a good critical gift based on

European and North American standards.”71 Gómez Sicre shared Barr’s concerns about issues of “quality”; in a 1959 article for Art in America he pinpointed the problematic tendency to equate Latin American art with “that orthodox, descriptive taste of a souvenir of a holiday across the border or a memento of a honeymoon”—a tendency he attributed to “the failure (within various countries) to establish a set of artistic values that recognizes and includes—rather than ignores—some of the interesting new art movements.”72 He also expressed concern that judgments of quality were being sacrificed to regional politics: “My personal feeling is that with few exceptions some of the group shows sent out officially are of dubious quality and are produced under the pressure of what is termed ‘democratic intervention’ by all the artists active in the participating country.”73

Just as Barr saw someone who shared his sense of standards, Gómez Sicre found a curatorial role model. He described Barr as having a “total lack of prejudice in judging art,” explaining that when he brought works to him, Barr

70 Alfred Barr, Jr. to José Gómez Sicre, 16 August 1942, folder 2, box 7, JGS Papers. 71 Alfred Barr, Jr. to Nelson A. Rockefeller, 13 July 1952, folder 1227 Museum of Modern Art, Books - Latin America,1953, box 125, Record Group 4: Projects (Hereafter “RG4”), Nelson A. Rockefeller Papers, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York (Hereafter “NAR”). 72 José Gómez Sicre, “Trends-Latin America” Art in America, vol. 47, no. 3 (1959), 22-23. 73 Ibid. 39 attentively observed the work, changing position as he searched for suitable light; he repeatedly returned to [a work], approaching carefully and, if it provoked his interest, finally he would ask about the artist and the country of origin, or for any additional information about his/her personality. The same…with whether the artist was mature or young, from a powerful country or a small and poor one. What mattered was what the work posed to him.74

Both Barr and Gómez Sicre were curators who insisted on judging a work entirely on its inherent formal qualities, putting aside politics, personal relations, or other extenuating circumstances (Whether they actually abided by these principles has long been the cause of debate).

Another common aspect of their formalist approaches concerned the ways they chose to physically display art. From the Cuban Painting of Today exhibition onwards,

Gómez Sicre adopted Barr’s innovative style of installing exhibitions—a style now so commonplace we take its historicity for granted: white or neutral-colored walls, works hung horizontally in a row, arranged chronologically and thematically, rather than by size or symmetry; sculptures and three-dimensional works placed on white bases; the creation of wall labels explaining the relationships across works in the room.75 Gómez Sicre praised Barr for his curatorial method, noting that Barr “knew how to see; he was brilliant with his installations and exhibitions.”76 When he came to Washington in 1946, Gómez

Sicre’s central task involved curating monthly art exhibitions in the institution’s main

74 José Gómez Sicre, “Al lector,” Boletín de Artes Visuales 16: 9 75 Margaret Scolari Barr, art historian and Alfred Barr’s spouse, explained his innovations to exhibition practices during an oral history interview with Paul Cummings. See Oral history interview with Margaret Scolari Barr concerning Alfred H. Barr, 1974 Feb. 22-May 13, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Transcript available online: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history- interview-margaret-scolari-barr-concerning-alfred-h-barr-13250#transcript [Accessed 27 February 2012]. For further analysis of Barr’s method of installing exhibitions, see Mary Anne Staniszewski, Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998). 76 Anreus, “Ultimas conversaciones con José Gómez Sicre,” reprinted in Appendix C. 40 building. The original space, however, was not ideal for displaying art: sandwiched between the meeting room for the OAS general assembly and a lush sky-lighted courtyard, which contained tall palm trees, tropical plants, and two chattering parrots, the art space could easily be overlooked (Figure 3). Visitors relished attention on the birds, as indicated by photographs by Marjory Collins for the U.S. Farm Security Administration

(Figure 4). Gómez Sicre later told Anreus, “I had to make the parrots disappear—they maintained that picturesque and exotic image of the Americas that is so dear to the gringos. I was going to transform the section and gallery into a serious place to exhibit modern art.”77 For over a decade, he made do with the space given to him. Eventually, he persuaded the OAS to create a white-walled exhibition space in the building’s basement in 1960.78 This permanent gallery accommodated between fifteen and twenty-five paintings at a time. Installation shots show a Barr-inspired installation of the permanent collection in place (Figures 5-7). For Gómez Sicre, it was important not only to have a

“modern” exhibition space, but also to publicize it. The Boletín and other pamphlets, such

77 Alejandro Anreus, interview with José Gómez Sicre, 21 February 1991, referenced and translated in Alejandro Anreus, “Teaching it to the Gringos: José Gómez Sicre’s Definitions of Latin American Art,” a conference paper delivered at the Examining the State and Practice of “Latin American” Art History: Language, Structure, and Content session, College Art Association Annual Conference, 23 February 2006, Boston; a copy of the conference paper is in the possession of the author. The first parrots to the Pan American Union arrived in 1930, when U.S. Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson brought his pet parrot, named “Old Soak” to be watched by a co-worker while he went to London naval meeting. The press reports that the bird, bored with his surroundings, would repeatedly say “‘Hello, Old Soak! Hello, Old Soak!’ punctuating each self-congratulation with a shriek that split the silence of the patio and cut into the air of busy offices. Nothing could stop him; visitors only made him more self-assertive” “Stimson’s Old Soak Vexes His Guardians,” The Florence Times-News [Florence, AL], vol. 7, 17 Feb 1930, 1. Available online in the archives of news.google.com [accessed March 2010]. The birds were ultimately removed by Secretary General Alejandro Orfila, perhaps under Gómez Sicre’s prodding. 78 According to the brochure La Unión Panamericana al servicio de las arte visuales, Gómez Sicre and his staff continued to use the corridor gallery for monthly exhibitions, while the permanent gallery, which was located in the basement of the same building, rotated exhibitions of the collection approximately every eighteen months. 41 as Permanent Collection of Contemporary Art of Latin America (1960) and La Union

Panamericana al servicio del arte [The Pan American Union at the Service of Art]

(1961) circulated different images of the gallery. Together the images offer a composite view of the gallery—which was modest—as well as a view of some of the works Gómez

Sicre’s prized: Joaquín Roca Rey, Maqueta para Prisionero Política Desconocido [Study for the Unknown Political Prisoner] (1952); Oswaldo Vigas, Gran Signo [Imposing Sign]

(1956); María Luisa Pacheco, Composición (1960); Fernando de Szyszlo, Cajamarca

(1959); Roberto Matta, Hermala II (1948); Alejandro Otero, Coloritmo 24 [Color-rhythm

24] (1957-58); Wifredo Lam, Lisamona (1950); Alejandro Obregón, El Velorio [The

Wake] (1956).

Barr and Gómez Sicre’s formalist method was buttressed by a particular kind of rhetoric: each spoke of modern art as a visual language with the potential to be spoken and understood in any culture. This metaphor of language holds a prominent position in

Barr’s What is Modern Painting?, a paperback booklet designed to introduce teenagers and adults to the MoMA’s collection. The text was first published in 1943, the same year that Gómez Sicre began living in New York. In the booklet’s “Introduction,” Barr notes that the art of painting “is like a language which you have to learn to read….But one thing is easy, there are no foreign languages in painting as there are in speech; there are only local dialects which can be understood internationally, for painting is a kind of visual Esperanto”79 Gómez Sicre utilized similar metaphors. In the Boletin de Artes

79 Alfred Barr, What is Modern Painting? (New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art, 1943), 3. 42 Visuales, Gómez Sicre states that the “plastic arts requires no translator or interpreter.”80

Elsewhere he speaks of Latin American art as a body of work made up of many different

“accents”; when asked by Mirta Blanco-Padrón, “Do you believe in the existence of Latin

American art per se?” he replies, “Yes, just as there exists Spanish spoken with a Latin

American ‘accent,’ and within each region, a regional accent, so too exists an art with our accent. I have been occupied with this problem for three decades, always going in search of ‘accents.’”81

Other commonalities between Barr and Gómez Sicre’s tastes concern the significant emphasis they placed on abstract art. In 1936, Barr created the exhibition

Cubism and Abstract Art; on the jacket of the exhibition catalogue appeared his chart of modern art, a flow chart that has subsequently become iconic because of its attractive and stream-lined design, but also because it so well-embodies the methodological approach that Barr popularized—namely, to classify artists within or outside of particular avant- garde movements, and to trace their artistic influences and evolution over time (Figure 8).

Barr’s chart runs from 1890 to 1935, presenting a cluster of European movements in the first two decades of the 20th century (Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, Orphism, Suprematism and others) bound by an intertwining set of red and black arrows indicating influences.

(Barr who considered republishing the book in the early 1940s, continued to tinker with the chart in the period he knew Gómez Sicre).82 At the bottom of the chart, labeled 1935,

80José Gómez Sicre, “Nota editorial,” Boletín de Artes Visuales 9 (January-June 1962): 3. 81” Mirta Blanco-Padrón, “José Gómez Sicre,” Vanidades Continental, vol. 16, no. 7 (March 30, 1976), 30- 35, 112. 82 Barr’s 1940s alterations to the chart appear in Alfred Barr, Defining Modern Art: Selected Writings of Alfred H. Barr, Jr., 1926-64, ed. Irving Sandler and Amy Newman (New York: Abrams, 1986). 43 Barr distills all these movements into two tendencies “Non-Geometrical Abstract Art” and “Geometrical Abstract Art.”83 Barr did not believe these were the only two paths for modern art, but the chart does point to the importance he placed on the development of abstraction as a mainline of modern art.

Likewise, from the 1950s onward, Gómez Sicre’s reputation as art critic was bound up with abstract art, and what seemed like polarizing attitudes for or against it. His opponents like the Mexican Muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros described him as an “agent of abstractionism,” who promoted abstract art over all other modes of art making, particularly what could be categorized as social realism.84 This common criticism, while not entirely unfounded, oversimplifies Gómez Sicre’s aesthetic tastes and the work of the artists he promoted. When Gómez Sicre exhibited and wrote about abstract art, he used methods of categorizations and groupings similar to Barr’s. This is particularly evident in his contribution to the fourth edition of the São Paulo Biennial (1957) (where, it turns out, Barr was serving as a juror). For at least three consecutive biennials (1953, 1955, and

1957), Gómez Sicre arranged for the Pan American Union to host its own art booth at the

83 Students of art history have long adopted similar dichotomies when speaking of abstraction: “hard- edged” vs. “lyrical,” or “geometric” vs. “abstract expressionist,” wherein one is described in terms of of reason, logic, and idealized or “pure” forms, such as the square, while the other is assumed to more emotive, and based on abstracting organic or naturally occurring forms. 84 Siquieros is quoted as calling Gómez Sicre an “agent of abstractionism” in María Luisa Mendoza, “¡Tamayo es un hipócrita!: Dice Siqueiros en una entrevista exclusiva para Hoy sobre la Bienal” Hoy (Mexico, D.F., Mexico) 21 June 1958 (ICAA Record ID: 768083) [Accessed 30 April 2012]. On at least one occasion, Gómez Sicre was directly asked by a journalist about this perception that he favored abstract art. He answered that “It is certain that I’ve been accused of this. It is false, and while it’s true that I have been a promoter of abstract art, I sometimes like the figurative much more than the abstract.” Mirta Blanco- Padrón, “José Gómez Sicre” Vanidades Continental (Miami, FL) vol. 16, Issue 7 (30 March 1976), 34. 44 fair.85 In an article for Américas magazine, Gómez Sicre notes that for the 4th biennial he organized the PAU section around a theme: “I decided to give unity to the group and show abstract art in five different stages, through the work of artists of importance in their respective countries.”86 He then, in the course of a single paragraph, briefly outlines the stages, through which painters progressively move away from realist subject matter.

He speaks of Carlos Mérida’s work as emblematic of the first stage, which he describes as a “free geometrical interpretation of reality”; Enrique Zañartu of Chile represents what he calls “a second step on the road towards abstraction with his prefiguration of the cosmos”; the third phase is represented by the Ecuadorian painter Manuel Rendón, whose canvases use patches and planes of color that “suggest emotional states or evoke some circumstance, something real, at a poetic distance.”; Edgar Negret represents the fourth stage, related to “an invention of forms that becomes a symbol of the machine age”; and he presents Alejandro Otero “who searches constantly for the most absolute art, the most unrelated to reality” as emblematic of the fifth stage. Only images of three works (by

Zañartu, Otero, and Mérida) are illustrated in the article (Figure 9). The layout of the article places the PAU entries in between images of two prize winners from the Biennial, a sculpture by Spanish artist Jorge de Orteiza and a painting by British artist Ben

85 He pitched the pavilion as “an opportunity for a showing …several Latin American artists who for various reasons had not appeared [in the Biennial] before. This project occurred to me when I saw the difficulties and internal conflicts that arose in some of our countries over the sending of works abroad.” José Gómez Sicre,“Today’s Art at São Paulo,” Américas, vol. 10, no. 1 (January 1958), 33. According to art historian Florencia Bazzano-Nelson, the first such exhibit focused on representing Colombian artists who had been overlooked during the Colombian military government and had not been selected for the biennial. See Florencia Bazzano-Nelson, “Theory in Context: Marta Traba’s Art-Critical Writings and Colombia, 1945-1959.” (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, July 2000, 379 -380. 86 José Gómez Sicre, “Today’s Art at São Paulo,” Américas, vol. 10, no. 1 (January 1958), 33. 45 Nicholson. All except Zañartu’s painting could be classified under Barr’s label

“Geometrical Abstract Art” since they are composed of sharp, straight lines and industrial-like curves. Perhaps Gómez Sicre’s five stages of abstract art are not as tidy and methodical as Barr’s diagram. Yet, the tendency to chart the flow of art history remains a predominant feature shared by both curators, with abstraction and its many permutations holding great importance.

Additionaly, both Barr and Gómez Sicre took great interest in what they commonly referred to as popular, folk, naïve, or primitive art. They saw this art as “pure” in the sense that self-taught artists had avoided exposure to academic traditions. In the

1930s, Barr promoted primitive art as a central component of modern art, a counterpart to

Dada and Surrealism, and to abstract art movements like Cubism. With input from curator Holger Cahill and Sidney Janis, a member of the MoMA Advisory Board, the museum mounted several exhibitions that focused on what Barr called “modern primitives”: highlights include Fantastic Art, Dada, and Surrealism, which incorporated works by children and the mentally insane; the first solo show of stone sculptures by

William Edmundson in 1937; Masters of Popular Painting: Modern Primitives of Europe and America in 1938; Contemporary Unknown American Painters, which featured the work of Grandma Moses and Morris Hirschfield in 1939; and They Taught Themselves:

American Primitive Painters of the Twentieth Century in 1942.87 Under Barr’s guidance

87 Barr used the phrase “modern primitives” in the MoMA’s first exhibition of its permanent collection, Painting and Sculpture from the Museum Collection [MoMA Exh. #127, May 6-April 30, 1941]. The phrase also appeared a year later in What is Modern Painting, 15. Works by Grandma Moses and Morris Hirschfield were presented in Contemporary Unknown American Painters [MoMA Exh. #90a, October 18, 46 the museum actively collected work by nonacademic artists; by 1941, the first MoMA exhibition dedicated to showing its own permanent collection included two galleries full of folk art.

It was precisely during the period when Barr and Gómez Sicre were collaborating on Cuban Painting of Today that Barr’s passion for self-taught art led to great upset: he was removed from the position of Director at the MoMA ostensibly because of his exhibition in 1943 of Joe Milone’s shoe shine stand, which Barr treated as a vernacular sculpture. Barr’s spouse and fellow art historian Margaret Scolari Barr also cites as a cause for his dismissal Barr’s exhibit of nude puppet-like works by Morris Hirschfield, the look of which deeply upset the museum’s President Stephen Clark.88 Scholars specialized in the history of vernacular art point to 1943 as a turning point in the status of the genre within the U.S., when collecting by MoMA all but stopped, and Barr’s belief in self-taught art as a component of modernism began fading from view.89

Despite these controversies, folk art continued to crop up in MoMA exhibitions.

Cuban Painting of Today notably included a portion on “popular painting” focusing on the paintings by artists Matamoros, Acevedo, and Rafael Moreno. And while Barr may have needed to play down his passion for such art, Gómez Sicre faced no such pressures.

He touted the importance of primitive art and the art of children in his 1946 article “Mi credo” [“My Creed”] for El Nacional, stating his belief that art’s “common origin across

1939-November 18, 1939]. See Museum of Modern Art, “Exhibition History List,” available online: http://www.moma.org/learn/resources/archives/archives_exhibition_history_list 88 Oral history interview with Margaret Scolari Barr concerning Alfred H. Barr, 1974 Feb. 22-May 13, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution 89 See Charles Russell, ed. Self-Taught Art: The Culture and Aesthetics of American Vernacular Art. (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), 9. 47 all races…[its] common, universal beginning can be found more than ever in the art of primitives and that of children.”90

While in Washington, Gómez Sicre collected and exhibited primitive art for the

OAS, most notably work by Haitian artists such as Antonio Joséph, Luce Tournier,

Lucien Price, and Georges Liautaud. In the 1960s, he heavily promoted the work of

Asilia Guillén from Nicaragua and the work of José Antonio Velazquez from Honduras in OAS exhibitions and in his writing; he also created documentaries that focused on their work.91

The historical conceptions of modernism shared by Barr and Gómez Sicre may seem paradoxical in how “modern” and “primitive” art worked in tandem. But what linked these two fields, in the minds of the curators, was that they were both defined in opposition to academic painting. Gómez Sicre, like Barr and others of their generation, conceived of modern art as historically related to European artists break from academicism in the late nineteenth century.92 He viewed the academy in the 19th and 20th

90 José Gómez Sicre, “Mi Credo,” El Nacional (Caracas, Venezuela), 5 Mayo 1946, 9. My thanks to Claire F. Fox for providing me with a copy of this article. 91 For Gómez Sicre’s writing on Haitian primitive arts, see folder 1, box 4, JGS Papers. Also see 20th Century Latin American Naïve Art, in folder “Latin American -General,” box “1964,” AMA Archives. Films include José AntonioValezquez: The World of a Primitive Painter and Arte actual de Centro América y Panamá panorama de la colección ESSO en la Feria Mundial de Nueva York y sus artistas. 92 This line of thinking is evident in the seminar paper Gómez Sicre wrote for art historian Meyer Schapiro, whose class he audited in the spring of 1944. In this paper, Gómez Sicre begins by arguing that “after the first impressionist exhibition, there exists perhaps no other date more decisive and crucial for contemporary art than those three years from 1904 to 1906 in France.” These years, according to Gómez Sicre, represented a period of artistic upheaval, defined by artists’ rebellion against Impressionism and plein-air techniques. After succinctly reviewing the contributions of Van Gogh, Cezanne, Gauguin, Seurat, Lautrec, Rousseau—a generation he referred to as “new heroes of the late nineteenth century”—he focused on the Fauves, including artists Andre Derain, Albert Marquet, Henri Matisse, Maurice de Vlaminck, and several others who first trained under Gustav Moreau. He argued that the Fauves, like their “heroic” predecessors, fought against the traditions of art through their participation in the 1905 Salon d’Automne (Salon of 48 century as increasingly retrograde. He later would write that academic art suffered from

“immobility, [surviving] in the same way as waxwork figures, in a bloodless repose, through representations which, though possibly perfect, were lifeless and sterile, without allowing for any negligence, for any inconformity or for any agony of the spirit.”93 He expected that artists, to be truly avant-garde or modern, needed to rebel against established techniques or the institutions that would not recognize their vision or talents.

They needed to be non-conformists. These were beliefs reinforced by experience: in

Cuba he had witnessed his friends struggle with the San Alejandro Academy of Art. In

1944, in the catalogue to accompany Cuban Painting of Today, he describes the artistic contributions of the Cuban academy in harsh terms:

[San Alejandro] has produced innumerable painters of varying degrees of proficiency but has yet to yield one inspired, creative artist. Contemporary Cuban painters owe little or nothing to their fellow countrymen who preceded them: progressive Cuban art was born as a direct result of the courageous struggles waged against inflexible academic conceptions and influence. The stunted tuition of San Alejandro reached only the fringe of Impressionism there, alas, to remain forever. The technique and spirit of Cézanne, Gauguin, and Van Gogh have been sadly ignored even up to the present time.94

Both Gómez Sicre and Barr articulated a history of modern art based on the European break from academicism. They situated the beginnings of modernism with the work of

Independents). José Gómez Sicre, “La Pintura en Francia (de 1904 a 1906),” 1, folder 29, box 2, JGS Papers. 93 This statement comes from his 1983 essay on Alejandro Obregón, an artist who he says had “no feeling for wax figures, [and] began to eat away, to dismember that pictorial world, to perforate it like a termite.” José Gómez Sicre, “Alejandro Obregón,” Alejandro Obregón: Recent Paintings (Washington, DC: Museum of Modern Art of Latin America, 1983), 16. In the 1950s, Barr also spoke of academic art as a kind of “waxworks.” See Patricia Hills, “‘Truth, Freedom, Perfection’: Alfred Barr’s What is Modern Painting? as Cold War Rhetoric,” in Pressing the Fight: Print, Propaganda, and the Cold War, ed. Greg Barnhisel and Catherine Turner (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010), 274, n50. 94 José Gómez Sicre, Cuban Painting of Today, 15. 49 the post-impressionists in France. And they each considered Picasso a hinge-figure in the history of modern painting, an artist who personified rebellion and non-conformity.95

Gómez Sicre applied his critiques of academicism and realism (two terms he tended to conflate) not only to sculpture, painting, and primitive art, but to film as well.

Both men considered film a vital component of the visual arts, and modernism in particular. Barr, who had written about film throughout the 1920s and 1930s, spoke of cinema as “the only great art form peculiar to the 20th century.”96 With film critic Iris

Berry, he had established the MoMA’s film department in 1929. The department was the first of its kind, and Gómez Sicre spent significant amounts of time there while he lived in New York (1944-1946). Throughout his career, Gómez Sicre also wrote extensively about film, especially the cinema of the silent era, a period that he said remained “the

95 By the 1940s, Barr had established himself as an expert on Picasso, particularly by mounting Picasso: Forty Years of His Art in 1939-1940; the exhibition included Picasso’s Les Demoiselles de Avignon, a work which Barr had helped the MoMA acquire several years before and which became the centerpiece in subsequent installations of the museum’s permanent collection. Barr continued to write extensively on Picasso. In 1946 he published Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art; he was awarded a doctoral degree for the publication in lieu of writing his dissertation. In the years of his closest contact with Barr, Gómez Sicre also gained an expertise on Picasso’s work. In June of 1942, he and Alejo Carpentier co-organized an exhibition of Picasso works on paper at the Lyceum & Lawn Tennis Club in Havana. While in New York, Gómez Sicre wrote a term paper for a graduate course led by Meyer Schapiro; the paper focused on the rivalry between Matisse and Picasso around 1905 and draws the conclusion that while Matisse and the Fauves stagnated, becoming overly routine or commercial, Picasso continued working in “a state of purity…between the art of yesterday and that of the future.” Later, in 1949, when Gómez Sicre traveled to Europe for the first time, he sought out Picasso directly, carrying in hand a letter of introduction from Barr. See José Gómez Sicre, “La Pintura en Francia (de 1904 a 1906),” 13, folder 29, box 2, JGS Papers. For mention of the Picasso exhibition at the Lyceum, see José Veigas, “Picasso’s First” Arte por Excelencias. no. 7 The Archivist. Available online: http://www.revistasexcelencias.com/Arte/English/a(277484)-Picasso-s-First.html [accessed 13 April 2012] 96 Alfred Barr’s statement comes from the 1932 pamphlet The Public as Artist, in which he announced his desire to build a film department at the MoMA. For analyses of Barr’s interest in film and excerpts of the pamphlet, see Thomas Y. Levin, “Iconology at the Movies: Panofsky’s Film Theory,” The Yale Journal of Criticism 9.1 (1996), 27-55; available online: http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic235132.files/LevinPanofsky.pdf [accessed 12 April 2012] 50 most pure that cinematography has bequeathed to universal culture.”97 In the 1940s, he spent many hours watching films and his writings indicate that many of his friendships, including those with Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel and Chilean writer María Luisa

Bombal, took shape around the film screenings at MoMA.98 Movie-going, autograph hunting, and gossiping about film stars were activities that continued to solidify many of his friendships with artists, writers, and actors throughout the rest of his career. For

Gómez Sicre, the boundaries between film, literature, drawing and painting were fluid— all part of an inter-connected world culture—and his arguments about modernism vs. academicism could be transposed from one medium to another.

“Why is Chaplin lost?” asks Gómez Sicre at the beginning of a short, untitled note he wrote circa 1940. He praises Chaplin’s comic agility and his heroic obliviousness: “Life brings punches to the blind, and he keeps on zigzagging,

…determined to take on new, insignificant exploits.” He also recalls his amusement upon seeing the fake beards worn by hotel bellboys in Chaplin’s films—“They are unusual beards, truly artistic….”—before lamenting that contemporary cinema “is afflicted by an awful realism, a sinful naturalism. It lacks grace, charm, playful humor, and expectancy of the unexpected. The public progressively demands verisimilitude, a balance of truths, and cinema is weighed down by dense academicism. Now, after the history of little

Charlie Chaplin, we are only left with Disney.”99 Chaplin’s silent comedies, Gómez Sicre

97 José Gómez Sicre, “Luis Buñuel, apasionado creador descreido,” 3, folder 8, box 2, JGS Papers 98 Ibid. For more on his relationship with María Luisa Bombal, see Gómez Sicre, untitled document, folder 6, box 1, JGS Papers. 99 Gómez Sicre, untitled document beginning with “¿Por qué Chaplin pierde?,” folder 1, box 3, JGS Papers. I extrapolate that the note was written circa 1940 because it appears on the back of paper with the 51 believed, represented a very serious act: a spurring on of human imagination and creativity. In the context of 1940s Havana—the period when Gómez Sicre and his artists- friends were frustrated with the San Alejandro Academy and when he likely wrote the note—Chaplin also represented a key anti-academic figure, a rogue modernist who set off on his own to direct and star in his own films. Not only that, Chaplin possessed a stubborn confidence; notorious for his unwillingness to compromise on his creative ideas, he continued creating silent-era style films about his little tramp character long after the advent of sound films.

Another reason Gómez Sicre was critical of realism and academic art had to do with the global politics of the 1940s. Over the course of World War II, Gómez Sicre increasingly tied realism and academic art to totalitarian regimes, specifically Nazism. In

1947, he published an article for the Venezuelan paper El Nacional about an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington showcasing Dutch paintings that had been confiscated by Nazi forces during the war. The article offered a means for the critic to vent about Adolf Hitler’s criteria for realist art. From Gómez Sicre’s point of view,

Hitler’s censorship of modern art stemmed from his experiences as a frustrated artist:

“Adolf Hitler was a poor academic painter, who received very little recognition for his decadent style. All his artistic frustration progressively turned into a hatred for new forms of art, which in time would trigger a persecuting fanaticism as soon as he was given access to political power.”100

Lotería Nacional letter head and likely comes from the period in the early 1940s when Gómez Sicre worked for Cuba’s national lottery. 100 José Gómez Sicre, “Un Botin de Hitler,” El Nacional (16 February 1947), folder 5, box 4, JGS Papers. 52 His arguments parallel those made by Alfred Barr throughout the 1940s. As art historian Patricia Hills has shown, Barr’s What is Modern Painting? was partly an evolving piece of wartime propaganda.101 Hills focuses on the concluding portion of booklet, subtitled “Truth, Freedom, Perfection,” where Barr describes the role of the artist as the embodiment of individual freedom. In the first edition, he aimed his critique at ongoing Nazi censorship in Europe, noting that “Hitler crushed freedom in art.” Hills points out that Barr updated later editions with sharp criticisms of Soviet tyranny, arguing that modern art embraced a sense of “freedom” that remained the bane of authoritarian regimes.

Finally, both Barr and Gómez Sicre became increasingly anti-communist in the post-war period, and both defended modern art as an instrument of the free world. During the McCarthy Era, as many conservative politicians in the U.S. accused modern artists of communist-leanings, Barr became a prominent champion of modern art as a form of free expression. In his 1952 article “Is Modern Art Communistic?,” he argued that many

Russian artists had long been persecuted and prevented from expressing themselves under the Soviet Union’s totalitarian regime. Gómez Sicre adopted a similar point of view, never skipping an opportunity to criticize art under the Soviet Union and its demands for artists to produce propagandistic art based in realism.

Within his art criticism Gómez Sicre added something else to the mix: an explicit endorsement of free market capitalism. In his editorials for the Boletin de Artes Visuales and in various other writings, he was vocal about the importance of private industry to

101 See Patricia Hills, “‘Truth, Freedom, Perfection’” 251-276. 53 supporting the arts of Latin America. Gómez Sicre’s views were partly shaped by his work at the OAS; given that fundraising was extremely difficult at the institution, Gómez

Sicre became reliant on corporate sponsorship for many of his exhibitions—especially from Esso (the Latin American branch of Standard Oil, now Exxon-Mobile).102 He pointed to corporate funding behind the major art initiatives in Latin America in the

1960s as part of an international trend: the Bienal Americana de Arte in Cordoba,

Argentina supported by Kaiser Industries; the São Paulo Biennial founded by the industrialist Francisco Matarizzo Sobrinho; the Instituto Di Tella in Buenos Aires funded by Torcuato di Tella.103 As early as 1962, he described “a new phase in the cultural activity in Latin America, a phase in which private capital has instrumental importance for culture, principally for the visual arts, for the freedom to create and admire them, maintaining the most enduring areas of spirit of our people.”104 He describes private capital as opening the gateway to artistic freedom, a means to get out of a “vicious circle: the unyielding academy-scholarship-abroad-national-salon-prize-professored hierarchy that has restrained the life of the Latin American visual artist for a long time.”105 In other editorials for the Boletín he complained bitterly about the importation taxes and government regulation limiting the exportation and importation of art in Latin America,

102 The budget for the Visual Arts Division, and later the Museum of Modern Art of Latin America, was always very tight and only covered basic operating costs. In building a collection, Gómez Sicre relied on the generosity of artists to donate their works to the OAS. He also relied on the support of Washington art philanthropists and art collectors, such as Barbara Gordon, who founded the Friends of the Museum, a non- profit organization that helped Gómez Sicre raise money for museum events and acquisitions. Barbara Gordon, interview with the author, 14 March 2008. 103 See José Gómez Sicre, “Nota editorial,” Boletín de Artes Visuales 9: 4. 104 Ibid. 105 Ibid., 1. 54 saying they constitute a “death sentence” and that “for art to progress, enliven itself, and obtain the oxygen it needs for maturation and for reproduction, it is absolutely indispensible that it circulates, that it visits, and that it, at the same time, receives visits.”106

His strongest endorsements of corporate capitalism arose while organizing the

Esso Salon of Young Artists in 1964-1965. This international competition attracted over

3,000 applications from artists under the age of forty in Latin America; Esso Salon competitions were held in each country, where national panels of judges (that always included Gómez Sicre) awarded prizes and honorable mentions in two categories— painting and sculpture. The four or so finalists from each country were then sent to

Washington, where grand prizes were awarded by a three-person jury composed of

Thomas Messer, Director of the Guggenheim, Gustave von Groschwitz, Director of the

Carnegie Institute’s Museum of Art, and Alfred Barr. 107 In the exhibition catalogue for the final round of the Esso Salon, Gómez Sicre explains the impetus behind the competition, stating, “Of singular importance was the fact that it was private industry— the capitalistic initiative of a free world—that was thus seeking to foster the things of the spirit by an undertaking of broad cultural repercussion. The financial support provided by the Standard Oil Company (New Jersey) is eloquent testimony of an understanding of the balance which should prevail between the practical and the aesthetic which too often

106 José Gómez Sicre, “Nota editorial,” Boletín de Artes Visuales 4 (October 1958-April 1959): 3. 107 The final exhibition traveled for 5 years across the U.S, and included exhibitions at the IBM Gallery in New York and at the San Antonio Hemisfair ’68, before going to the Lowe Art Museum, where they are part of the permanent collection. A list naming each panel of judges is available on inside back cover of the catalogue, Esso Salon of Contemporary Latin American Artists; A New, Permanent Collection (Coral Gables, Florida: Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami, 1970). 55 escapes the upper echelons of economic power.”108 He believed the competition would be an art historical watershed; in the Mexican brochure for the competition he proclaims,

“When the history of contemporary art in Latin America is written, the historians will have to distinguish two periods: pre-Esso and post-Esso.”109 Ironically, while Gómez

Sicre’s statements about a “Pre-Esso” and “Post-Esso” do not adequately apply to the history of Latin American art, they could be applied to Gómez Sicre’s own career. In the

“Pre-Esso” phase, Gómez Sicre’s power as cultural broker grew substantially.110 Shortly after the Esso Salon, his cultural cache immediately plummeted, primarily since the competition brought a spotlight onto Gómez Sicre’s right-leaning politics. The winners of the Esso Salon were fairly conservative picks for 1965: Rogelio Polesello and Herman

Guggiari represented two modes of abstraction (Figures 10 & 11). That same year, the

OAS faced international protest for forming a military troop to keep peace in the U.S. occupation of Santo Domingo. Gómez Sicre’s competition was compromised by its links to U.S. Imperialism. And his position on corporate patronage, his connection to Alfred

Barr, and the political nature of the organization for which he worked signaled that he was the member of the establishment.

108 José Gómez Sicre, “Introduction,” Esso Salon of Young Artists (Washington, DC: Pan American Union, 1965), 3. 109 José Gómez Sicre, “El Salón Esso,” Esso Mexicana, 1965, cited in Alejandro Anreus, “José Gómez Sicre: Cold War and Internationalism at the O.A.S.,” an unpublished paper in the possession of the author. 110The notion of Latin American curators as “cultural brokers” was first theorized by Mari Carmen Ramírez in her essay, “Brokering Identities: Art Curators and the Politics of Cultural Representation,” in Thinking About Exhibitions, ed. Reesa Greenberg, Bruce Ferguson, and Sandy Nairne. (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 21-38. 56 AN ALLY, THEN ADVERSARY: MARTA TRABA

Gómez Sicre and Alfred Barr’s relationship was defined by professional distance:

Barr served as a positive role model for the Cuban critic and as a figure to emulate, but the two men were never close friends. Compared to his dealings with Barr, Gómez

Sicre’s relationship with novelist and art critic Marta Traba was much more personal and complicated. The two formed a friendship in the 1960s, at a time when they were two of the most prominent art critics in Latin America. They were the rare individuals who traveled throughout Latin America when commercial travel was still in its infancy; they were outspoken figures who used every medium available to them to broadcast the message that contemporary art in Latin America was strong and of great importance—a message that caught the ears of artists, academics, businesses, newspaper journalists and radio broadcasters wherever they traveled. They were each known for being polemical, delivering arguments in speeches, interviews, and writings with intensity and wit. Despite their common goal to get Latin American art international recognition, the political and cultural climate of the Cold War radically transformed each of them and ended their friendship.

Traba and Gómez Sicre came from different backgrounds, which point to the roots of their different approaches to art. Compared to Gómez Sicre—who began as a self-taught scholar of art, with a talent for reading formal qualities, for pinpointing the strengths of a painting, for curating and for selling art—Traba’s training was more traditionally academic. Born and raised in Buenos Aires, Traba earned a degree in literature at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, where she also took courses on art history 57 and criticism taught by Jorge Romero Brest. In 1949, she began publishing her first art criticism in Romero Brest’s magazine Ver y Estimar. That same year she moved to Paris, where she continued studying art history at the Sorbonne. Soon after arriving in Paris she met the Colombian journalist Alberto Zalamea, whom she married in 1950. They lived together in Paris for the next four years, before relocating to Bogota, Colombia in 1954.

Working as an art history professor at the Universidad de los Andes and a freelance writer, she quickly rose to national prominence for hosting numerous television specials on the history of art and for producing the arts magazine Prisma. In 1963, Traba became the Director of the Museo de Arte Moderna de Bogota (MAMBO). Still, she remained an educator all her life, someone who associated with university students and faculty. By the

1970s, Traba had become one of the most highly visible cultural theorists in Latin

American art—a position solidified when she published Dos décadas vulnerables en las artes plásticas latinoamericanos, 1950-1970 [Two Vulnerable Decades in Latin

American Art, 1950-1970] in 1973—the text that articulates the aesthetic beliefs for which she remains best-known.

It is uncertain exactly when or under what circumstances Gómez Sicre and Traba first met. There is a slight chance they were introduced to one another in Paris in 1950, during Gómez Sicre’s first trip to Europe; however, it is more likely that they met in

Colombia, when he visited in 1955 on official OAS business.111 In November 1958,

Traba published an interview with Gómez Sicre in El Tiempo newspaper—the earliest

111 Florencia Bazzano-Nelson, Theory in Context, 453. 58 known evidence of their professional connections.112 Their collaborations continued over the next few years. In 1959, Traba wrote a brief history of Colombian art, published by the OAS in its Art in Latin America Today series. They also collaborated together as judges for various art competitions, including the 1962 Bienal de Arte Americana in

Cordoba, Argentina and the Primer Salon Intercol de Artistas Jovenes organized by

MAMBO in 1964; that same year, Traba served as judge for the Esso Salon in Colombia.

Traba and Gómez Sicre were drawn together because of their shared vision for

Latin American art, but they eventually parted ways because of their radically different opinions about the Cuban Revolution. Initially, both were in strong favor of Fidel Castro and his revolution; artist Fernando de Szyzlo recalls Gómez Sicre´s excitement in 1959:

While I was there in Washington—everyone celebrated and was in strong support of [the Cuban Revolution]…, especially Pepe. Pepe brought out champagne he had saved for ten years to celebrate the fall of Batista. And, when Batista fell in December of ‘59, hundreds of people came to Pepe’s house to celebrate…. because Pepe was very politically active, in support of Fidel and the war in the Sierra Maestra….113

But this changed by December 1961, when Castro announced that Cuba would become a

Communist state. According to de Szyzlo, before the revolution,

all of the people on the left were at peace with Gómez Sicre. He was a very political person and very leftist. But Fidel’s decision was so strong that it became grave, so fatal for Pepe, because afterwards he became ‘anti-Fidel’ with such force that he did damage to himself: he closed the door, he became intolerant. That is to say, those who had something to do with Cuba were bad and those who attacked the regime were good. I don’t know how I survived our friendship....114

112 Marta Traba, “Crítica de arte. José Gómez Sicre habla sobre el arte americano,” El Tiempo [Bogota] 2 November 1958: 11. Available online http://www.eltiempo.com/seccion_archivo/index.php 113 Fernando de Szyzlo, interview with the author, 26 April 2009 114 Ibid. 59 While Gómez Sicre drifted right, Traba became associated with the New Left.115

She sympathized with the aims of the Revolution and the student movements of the

1960s; through her book Dos décadas vulnerables she became famous for theorizing the role of “resistance” in the aesthetics of Latin American art—a philosophy that resonates with her support of student-led protests in the late 1960s and 1970s.116 Though there is little record of their political falling out, tensions between Traba and Gómez Sicre likely began in 1966 when she went to Havana to receive the Casa de las Americas prize for her novel Las ceremonias del verano (1966); Szyszlo notes that Gómez Sicre shunned him for at least a year when the artist decided to visit Cuba for similar reasons.117 And yet, the two maintained some professional relations. In the late 1970s, Traba received a fellowship to write a history of Latin American art using the OAS collection—a decision that the institution could not have made without Gómez Sicre’s tacit approval. Her

115 The “New Left” refers to an ideological position that emerged in Latin America, Europe, and the U.S. in the 1960s tied to student activism and grass-roots political organizing, and often regarded as culminating in international student protests of 1968. Those who identified with the New Left tended to distinguish themselves from traditional Marxists’ focus on class struggle and labor issues–as well as distancing themselves from Soviet authoritarianism—to address issues of civil rights and free speech and to protest wars brought by Cold War conflict, particularly the Korean War and the Vietnam War. The term “New Left” was first popularized by C. Wright Mills in his essay “Letter to the New Left” (1960), and increasingly became associated with the writings of sociologist and activist Herbert Marcuse—nicknamed “The Father of the New Left.” In Latin America in the 1960s, members of the New Left took a confrontational position against imperialism and military dictatorships, protesting state-sanctioned torture and human rights abuses. Most members of the New Left identified with the Revolutionary aims of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara until the 1970 Padilla Affair, which marked a turning point when the Cuban government imprisoned and censured intellectuals and writers. In the last decade, journalists have revived the term to describe populist- and socialist-inspired leaders in Latin America like Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, Evo Morales of Bolivia, Cristina Fernandez Kirchner of Argentina. For a historical analysis of the New Left in Latin America, see Van Gosse, Where the Boys Are: Cuba, Cold War America and the Making of a New Left (New York: Verso, 1993). 116 Juan Gustavo Cobo Borda notes that she gave shelter to students wounded in violent skirmishes of the 1960s and 1970s. See. Belasario Bentancur’s “Foreward,” in Marta Traba, Art of Latin America, 1900-1980 (Washington, D.C: Inter-American Development Bank; Distributed by John Hopkins University Press, 1994), viii. 117 Fernando de Szyzlo, interview with the author, 26 April 2009 60 decision had practical considerations: it provided a means to live with her second husband, the writer Angel Rama who had received a teaching position at University of

Maryland. In 1981, Gómez Sicre supported a campaign that denied Rama tenure and the visa required to stay in the U.S. on account of his purported communist leanings.

Afterward, Traba and Gómez Sicre’s relationship turned fiercely antagonistic.

At the center of Gómez Sicre and Traba’s relationship was a paradox: while their interpretation of Latin American art took on different political valences, their aesthetic tastes remained largely in sync. In the early 1960s, they championed many of the same artists in their writing and their exhibitions: José Luis Cuevas, Fernando de Szyszlo,

Armando Morales, as well as the Colombian artists Fernando Botero, Alejandro Obregón,

Edgar Negret, and Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar. It is important to note from the outset that neither Traba nor Gómez Sicre felt comfortable with the avant-garde art trends that came to define the 1960s and 1970s, particularly pop art, minimalism, conceptual art, happenings and performance. They were advocates of what has become known as “high modernism,” with a particular passion for drawing, painting, and sculpture.118

Both believed that drawing was of particular importance in Latin America.

Gómez Sicre regularly commented on the importance of the technique for artistic expression. “Drawing has always fascinated me. I consider it the most serious of all exercises. The artist who cannot draw, cannot make anything; it is the beginning and end

118 For a discussion of high modernism and its political implications, see James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 87-102. 61 of all the plastic arts,” he told an interviewer in 1976.119 He was speaking about his interest in José Luis Cuevas’s work in particular. In that same interview he shares a story where after Cuevas is asked, “When are you going to paint?” the artist replies, “First I paint as a way of sketching for my drawings. I make my sketches with paint, but as easy as it is, I then transfer it to drawing, which is a method equally as difficult.”120 Gómez

Sicre appreciated Cuevas’ dedication to the medium of drawing, his resistance to treating it as a minor art or a preparatory stage. Even before he met Cuevas in 1953, Gómez Sicre expressed his predilection for the medium of drawing. His book Spanish Drawing XV to

XIX Century (1949) deserves mention; the book was published in the early years of his career at the OAS—a time when Gómez Sicre wrote articles on the history of European art and travel guides about U.S. art institutions, all intended for Latin American audiences. In this book he speaks of drawing as an “intellectual” art form—one that underlines the structure for painting—and that he delighted in those instances when artists subverted that expectation.121 Overall, he considered it a medium defined by its directness, its ability to express the immediate thoughts and feelings of the artist. Curator and scholar Mari Carmen Ramírez points out that drawing has long been conceptualized in this way, referring “on one hand to the most authentic imprint of the artist’s self and,

119 Mirta Blanco-Padrón, “José Gómez Sicre,” Vanidades Continental, vol. 16, no. 7 (March 30, 1976), 32. 120 Ibid. 121 Specifically, he calls drawings “profound intellectual executions” and relates this intellectualism to the Spanish temperament. José Gómez Sicre, Spanish Drawing XV to XIX Century (Washington, DC: Pan American Union, 1949). 62 on the other, to the unmediated projection of his/her intellect.”122 These aspects she calls the “autographic,” and the “diagrammatic,” and she notes that what distinguishes Latin

American drawing from its North American and European counterparts is the added

“axiomatic” element artists and critics in South America placed on the medium in the post-war period.123 Drawing came to represent not only an exploration of form, but a

“signifying practice” of the Boom generation, in some cases an act of defiance, but also an artist’s act of communion with the people, place, and times in which she or he lived.

Ramírez’s interpretation of the South American drawing follows a line of thought first popularized by Marta Traba, who theorized drawing to a much greater degree than

Gómez Sicre ever would. 124 For Traba, drawing had socio-political implications in Latin

America: to pursue it was to reject the market and international trends coming out of the

U.S. and Europe. In Dos décadas vulnerables she states her case:

Drawing represents an explicit rejection to producing painting, sculpture, objects, “happenings,” environments, proposals, reconstructions, to giving clues, and to accepting juggling acts. This means, then, a rejection of “impact” as a system, of “spectacle” as a result, and of the subsequent gratification on the part of the vanguardist society that hires the circus….

Drawing has been positioning itself as testimonial, and from such a position it becomes aggressive and nonconformist. By drawing, the new artists seem to have stopped cheating and playing with legitimate conventions. Nevertheless, it does not seem correct to speak of “draftsmen” or “printmakers,” but of new artists who draw and make prints, or of recognized artists who take up drawing and printmaking again, because the great number of people who have done so because

122 Mari Carmen Ramírez, “Un-Drawing Boundaries: A Curatorial Proposal,” in Mari Carmen Ramírez and Edith A. Gibson, Re-Aligning Vision: Alternative Currents in South American Drawing (Austin: Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery, University of Texas at Austin, 1997), 20. 123 Ibid., 22. 124 Gibson notes that “no single individual was more instrumental in recognizing, conceptualizing, and defining the Boom in South American drawing than Colombia-based critic Marta Traba.” Edith Gibson, “Re-Aligning Vision: Alternative Currents in South American Drawing” in Re-Aligning Vision, 47. 63 they feel comfortable in black and white, in the velocity of direct annotation of the image, in the capacity to connote it sharply on the margin; they feel good in the contempt that drawing implies for the ostentatious exploration of new materials; it feels good by returning to human sizes after the apocalyptic sizes of North American op-artists, signalists, and minimalists.125

Traba describes a renaissance in drawing in Latin America, identifying it as one of three currents causing a “state of alarm in the plastic arts” (the other two currents are the value of eroticism and the nationalization of Pop art).126 She describes drawing as a deliberate and collective act, preempting any accusations that drawing be seen as a solitary process or simply a trend in Latin America caused by economic limitations. For Traba, drawing is a medium for rebellion and critique, for conscientious rejection of the status quo, an act of regional resistance.

Traba saw José Luis Cuevas as a key artist in this regard, touting his drawings as the embodiment of her ideals. In her 1965 study, Los Cuatro Monstruos Cardinales, she identified Cuevas as one of the leading international artists concerned with neo- figuration, placing him in the ranks of Jean Dubuffet, William de Kooning, and Francis

Bacon. Gómez Sicre too hinted at drawing’s capacity for rebellion and critique, especially in his writings about Cuevas, who he saw as the modern-day torchbearer of a

Spanish tradition established by Francisco de Goya. He wrote that Cuevas’ early portraits of asylum patients “…reached the limits of hallucination that can be compared only to

125 Marta Traba, “A la busqueda del signo perdido” in Dos décadas vulnerable en las artes plásticas lationamericanas, 1950-1970 (Mexico City: Siglo Vientiuno Editores, 1973). Excerpts reprinted and translated by Albert G. Bork in Re-Aligning Vision, 225-226. 126 Ibid., 225. 64 that exhibited by Goya’s black period.”127 For the Cuban critic, Cuevas shared with the

Spanish master a tendency to use macabre and grotesque images of monsters, the mentally insane, and the marginalized as metaphors for the horrors of everyday life.

For both Gómez Sicre and Traba, the anxious subject matter of Cuevas’s work placed him in dialogue with neo-figurative artists in Europe, Latin America, and the United

States. They each read his work as an expression of existential angst felt globally in the postwar period.128

Both Gómez Sicre and Traba’s interest in Cuevas’s art also stemmed from the fact that they saw him working in resistance to Mexican Muralism. Early in his career,

Cuevas published “The Cactus Curtain,”—an article which criticized the conventions put in place by the Mexican School. This article, as well as his statements in subsequent interviews and newspaper columns helped make him a spokesman for his generation.129

Scholar Claire F. Fox has pointed out that Gómez Sicre and Traba supported artists like

Cuevas whose aesthetic represented “a golden mean between what they characterized as the antiseptic, mannerist abstraction favored in the United States, and the dogmatic social realism associated with the Soviet Union.”130 In Cuevas’s case, the macabre nature of his drawings seemed rooted to a particular Mexican identity associated with melancholia and

127 José Gómez Sicre, A Backward Glance at Cuevas (Washington: Museum of Modern Art of Latin American, 1978), n.p. 128 Seldon Rodman also framed Cuevas in a similar way in his book The Insiders: The Rejection and Rediscovery of Man in the Art of Our Time (Baton Rouge, LA: Lousiana State University Press, 1960). I discuss Cuevas, the notion of “Insiders,” and the perceived ties between existential writing and neo- figurative visual art in my M.A. thesis. See Michael Wellen, “Renewed Legacy: Revising José Clemente Orozco’s Place in Mexican Art History and His Relevance for José Luis Cuevas” (University of Texas at Austin, 2005). 129 I examine the “Cactus Curtain” and Cuevas’ perspective on the Mexican Muralists in depth in my M.A. thesis. See previous note. 130 Claire F. Fox, “Hemispheric Routes of ‘El Nuevo Arte Nuestro,’” 230. 65 popularized by the writings of Octavio Paz’s The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950). Fox argues that not only was Cuevas’s aesthetic important, but also that he acted as as public figure in his country, independently speaking out against the influences of Mexican

Muralism.

Likewise, both critics were aligned in a fight against Indigenism, an artistic and literary movement that emerged in the Andean region in the 1920s, which they viewed as a parallel to Mexican Muralism and as politically dogmatic. In Dos décadas vulnerables,

Traba describes Indigenism as a style of art that emerged primarily in “closed nations,” those places curtained off from European immigrations and its cultural influences. Art historian Michele Greet indicates that the dichotomies that Traba drew between “open” and “closed” nations, between “international” and “nationalistic” art trends, remained largely unquestioned until recently, and as a result, Indigenism has been subsequently left out of the history of modernism.131 Gómez Sicre never spoke of “open” and “closed” societies, but he subscribed to a similar belief system concerning the national and international: he viewed social realism and modern art as opposing forces, interwoven with the distinctions between nationalism and internationalism. Social Realism “interests me as a historic phenomenon,” Gómez Sicre told a Caracas newspaper in 1964, “but presently it does not interest anyone in Latin America. Rather what is very important to many of our young artists is what is happening now in the United States with abstract-

131 See Michele Greet, Beyond National Identity: Pictorial Indigenism as a Modernist Strategy in Andean Art, 1920-1960 (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2009). 66 expressionism. Inclusively, its influence in Europe is decisive.”132 These statements represent one of Gómez Sicre’s many attempts to redirect attention away from the influence of social realism in Latin America—an influence that he saw originating with the Mexican Muralists and carried on through Indignenism. He explains in the same interview that “many erroneous concepts exist in the United States about Latin American visual art…. [Most notably], the belief that painting from Latin America is Mexico and nothing else. It is evidently an error of information and, in all fairness, should be mended.” According to Gómez Sicre, Traba was even more adamant about the follies of

Mexican Muralism:

We were allied from the beginning, in opposition to reactionary and stale Indigenism, in opposition to the dogmas of Mexican Muralism—although in this case, Marta was more extremist than me, since she detested the work of Orozco, Rivera, and Siqueiros, and more than anything the work of their followers in South America, like [Oswaldo] Guayasamín. Together we defended abstraction, informalist and geometric alike, and we were united by a passion for drawing.133

In 1960, Traba famously launched a debate about the work of Ecuadorian painter

Oswaldo Guayasamín, attacking his art as entirely derivative of Mexican Muralism—a debate that Greet states “sealed the fate of Indigenism in the 1960s.”134 Greet argues that

Indigenism was not as unified nor as narrow an art movement as Traba and Gómez Sicre cast it. She points to the case of Fernando de Szyszlo, an artist who Gómez Sicre and

Traba favored over Guayasamín as representative of modernism in Andean regions, and

132 “Jovenes Artistas de Nuestro Hemisfero Expondrán en la Unión Panamericana,” El Nacional. Caracas, Venezuela 15 July 1964. folder “Latin American -General,” box “1964-1965,” AMA Archives. 133 Anreus, “Ultimas entrevistas con José Gómez Sicre,” reprinted in Appendix C. 134Greet, Beyond National Identity, 193. Traba published a string of articles after visiting Ecuador in 1960, where Guayasamín’s work was already well-established. Her attacks appeared in El Diario de Ecuador and in her book La pintura nueva en Latinoamerica [New Painting in Latin America] (1961). See Greet, Beyond National Identity, 193-196. 67 she argues that the work of Szyszlo and Guayasamín shared more common ground than either Traba or Gómez Sicre acknowledged. In the 1950s, both artists created Pre-

Colombian inspired works that employed rich colors and highly abstracted forms, and both added marble dust to their paints to create highly textured surfaces.135

Two works from the OAS permanent collection highlight the stark differences that Gómez Sicre and Traba viewed between the artists’ work.136 Szyszlo’s painting

Cajamarca (1959), which the museum acquired in 1960, takes its title from the town where Spanish Conquistador Francisco Pizarro captured, tortured, and killed the Incan

Emperor Atahualpa in 1534 (Figure 12). If this abstract painting references this historical event, it does so obliquely, relying on the violence of painterly gestures and the creation of a solemn mood. The canvas is bathed in a deep purples, blues and ocher that seem to form swirls and mist. Over this muted ground appear bright red and orange slender shapes, which seem to cut or burst across the surface of the work. Guayasamín’s drawing

Madre y niño [Mother and Child] (1955), a work that Gómez Sicre donated to the OAS in

1955, is an image of total contrast, exhibiting differences in subject-matter and style, as well as medium and scale (Figure 13). Gómez Sicre probably appreciated the stark composition of Madre y niño, where the human figure is attenuated in a manner not unlike the pen-and-ink drawings by José Luis Cuevas. But the social message of

Guayasamín’s drawing is explicit: it presents a family facing starvation. A mother, with

135 Ibid., 191. 136 Beginning in 1957, Gómez Sicre had a policy to acquire one work from every exhibition for the OAS permanent collection. This one may have been an unwanted gift given to the critic after the Pan American Union held a solo exhibition of Guayasamín’s work—a show that Michel Greet indicates that Gómez Sicre may have organized because of diplomatic pressures. Greet, Beyond National Identity, 189. 68 an outreached hand, and her child turn their half-moon shaped head towards the sky in a gesture of grief. The child is emaciated. His/her ribs are clearly visible. The mother suffers from the need to nurse her baby. Her breasts are small, overwhelmed by the broadness of her shoulders and arms, suggesting she cannot easily feed her young.

Guayasamín’s drawing exhibits the strong influence of Picasso’s Guernica (1937), which includes a depiction of a mother mourning the loss of her baby (not pictured). As Picasso does in Guernica, Guayasamín depicts the hands with thick, coarse fingers, using simplified lines to indicate fingernails and joints. Both compositions show the mothers’ faces upturned to express their agony. Both works rely entirely on a black and white palette. Picasso’s Guernica draws from contemporary political events, as does many of

Guayasamín’s own works. Madre y niño come from a long period of work the artist called the “Age of Rage” (1953-1993), in which his paintings and drawings drew inspiration from tragedies of the twentieth-century. Whereas Madre y niño is a generalized image of suffering brought by poverty, other works in the series refer to more specific political events like U.S. bombing of Hiroshima and the Vietnam War. In contrast to Guayasamín, Szyszlo never directly addressed contemporary issues of race and politics in his work.137 This was part of the reason Traba and Gómez Sicre preferred him. In their view, the artist tapped into his homeland and its Pre-Columbian heritage in a

137 Michele Greet has shown that most indigenist art and literary movements shared a particular political stance critiquing North American and European imperialism. Working in Washington, DC likely meant that Gómez Sicre would not feel comfortable showing Latin American art that could be read as anti- American. 69 poetic way thereby representing a distinctly Latin American contribution to modern art.138

Both critics were also wary of Pop art. In the Boletín de Artes Visuales, Gómez

Sicre writes about it as a regional art movement without any relevance to Latin America:

“Pop” is a movement that originates—and this is one of its tenets—in the rejection or critique of industrial civilization, where man lives overwhelmed by the constant onslaught of advertising. Within the United States, where [Pop art] was born, its making is, in fact, unique to a region, almost a single city: New York….However, an artist in the rural region of our America, separated from the living conditions that gave rise to this artistic expression, is conducting a “mannerism,” is simply copying something whose meaning cannot be understood because it is not a part his/her own life, but a movement conditioned by another cultural situation from another geographic region, distant and unlike their own…. For someone from our provinces to start doing “Pop” is like the Indians of Matto Grosso…deciding to hunt alligators while dressed in a tailcoat, having seen this piece of clothing in an illustrated magazine.139

These statements by Gómez Sicre were fundamental for Traba, who cites his editorial at length in the conclusion of Dos décadas vulernables and calls them “prophetic.”140 He criticized Pop art for being a regional art movement, misunderstood as an international

138 For more on Traba and Gómez Sicre’s statements comparing de Szyszlo and Guayasamín, see Greet, Beyond National Identity, 189-196. 139 José Gómez Sicre “Al Lector,” Boletín de Artes Visuales 13 (January-December 1965): 2-3. Available online: http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000497067 [Accessed 14 October 2012]. Gómez Sicre’s statements are intriguing because they seemingly contradict the ways Gómez Sicre has been historically cast as a cultural imperialist, who championed U.S. art movements like Abstract Expressionism as models for Latin Americans. Rarely did Gómez Sicre make comments that could be read as a critique of U.S. culture or U.S. art trends, but in this same editorial he mentions “the hegemony of neon lights,” a hint of Gómez Sicre’s dislike for the abundant commercialism he found living in the United States—a topic he only commented on more forcefully towards the end of his life. See Appendix C. 140 Marta Traba, Dos décadas vulnerables en las artes plásticas latinoamericanas, 1950-1970 (Buenos Aires: Siglo Vienteuno Editores, 2005), 214. All subsequent citations refer to this edition. 70 one. His discomfort also had to do with his belief that Pop artists valued the conceptual over the craftsmanship of the art object—an opinion that Traba also shared.141

While Traba saw many valid points in Gómez Sicre’s perspective, she became more accepting of Pop art towards the end of the 1960s as she witnessed an emergence of artists in Colombia, such as Santiago Cárdenas, Sonia Gutierrez, Ana Mercedes Hoyos, and Clemencia Lucena, who approached Pop art (she says) “with a blend of humor and formal discretion that saved them from the pitfall of mimeticism.”142 She writes of the

“nationalization of Pop art” with enthusiasm, as a feature of Latin America’s challenging contribution to the history of art. “‘Pop’ is not a working system, but a repertoire of signs of New York, hence the only possibility for transference is to ridicule those signs or employ them in an attack.” 143 To support her argument she cites the work of Brazilian artist Givlan Samico, saying that he uses graphic designs from commercial posters and lettering to create images that comment on Brazilian life. She also discusses the work of

Ana Letizia Quadros, who adapts a Pop-inspired style to address the issues of a consumer society in Brazil.144

Dos décadas vulnerables is the text where Traba posited some of her most influential aesthetic ideas—many of which I have cited, including her notions of “open” and “closed” regions of Latin America, the importance of “regional resistance” to foreign influence, the socio-political meanings she ascribed to drawing and to Pop art in Latin

141 Gomez Sicre speaks of Pop artists’ lack of craftsmanship in an interview, “Jovenes Artistas de Nuestro Hemisfero Expondrán en la Unión Panamericana,” El Nacional. Caracas, Venezuela 15 July 1964. See folder “Latin American –General,” box “1964-1965,”AMA Archives. 142 Traba, Dos décadas vulnerables, 216. 143 Ibid., 219. 144 Ibid. 71 America. Ultimately, the book was a means for Traba to define and defend the originality of Latin American art of the 1950s and 1960s. She took to heart the critiques proposed by various artists and theorists in the 1960s about the so-called “death of painting” and struggled with the idea that painting had been entirely exhausted, and could no longer be used to produce meaningful art.145 Like Gómez Sicre and Alfred Barr, Traba spoke of modern art in terms of language—a set of signs used to communicate messages universally. In Dos décadas vulnerables she argues that Latin American artists are “in search of a lost sign,” reclaiming painting, drawing, and sculpture as viable art forms in

Latin America—and in doing so, she reinforced those tastes she shared with Gómez

Sicre.

Traba and Gómez Sicre promoted many of the same artists, yet their historical legacies are radically different. Why? The most obvious answer concerns their radically different political positions. But we should also acknowledge the differences created by their discursive roles: Traba was primarily a writer and her legacy hinges on the left- leaning cultural theory she produced in the 1970s; Gómez Sicre was a curator, not a theorist, and his strongest achievements took place in the gallery, in shaping the OAS art collection, and in building an extensive archive of Latin American art. In the 1980s and

1990s, scholars of Latin American culture and art continued to find relevancy in Traba’s

145 Debates about the “death of painting” or the “end of art” arose in the U.S. and Europe in response to artist growing preferences for minimalism and monochromatic painting, pop art, conceptual art, land art, and performance. Its roots are found in essays like Clement Greenberg’s “The Crisis of the Easel Picture” (1948) included in Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961; reprinted 1989), 154-157. For a history of this debate see, Yves-Alain Bois, “Painting: The Task of Mourning” in Painting as Model (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 229-244, originally published in Endgame: Reference and Simulation in Recent Painting and Sculpture (Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art and MIT Press, 1986). Also see Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). 72 writing, particularly her critiques of U.S. cultural imperialism, the dangers of copycatting, and her arguments that Latin American artists had the power to culturally resist these influences, and in turn be models of originality for the rest of the world. But these were arguments that, time has shown, need not be dependent on Traba’s aesthetic tastes to be compelling. In fact, scholars of Marta Traba’s art criticism have pointed to the disjunction between Traba’s theoretical writing and the art she believed best represented her ideas. Mari Carmen Ramírez notes that the coterie of artists Traba insisted were emblematic of artistic resistance no longer represent those ideals today, stating that the group (including Fernando Botero, Fernando de Szyszlo, Alejandro Obregón, Eduardo

Ramírez Villamizar and José Luis Cuevas) that was once “so controversial… [are] totally inoffensive today.”146 The power of Dos décadas vulnerables rests in Traba’s intellectual agility and graceful rhetoric about the social role of art. Traba did all in her power to remain at the forefront of intellectual conversations taking place worldwide, and adapted her arguments—not her aesthetic tastes—to fit with the times. Gómez Sicre, by contrast, dropped out of those conversations in the 1970s; he remained committed to showing and selling the art he liked, even if his aesthetic tastes no longer fit with the times. As a result he and the OAS art gallery increasingly became alienated from the figures shaping the art world.

146 Mari Carmen Ramírez, “Sobre la pertinencia actual de una crítica comprometida,” in Traba, Dos décadas vulnerables, 37. 73

A DISTANT RIVAL: JORGE ROMERO BREST

Comparing Gómez Sicre to Jorge Romero Brest reveals just how conservative the

Cuban critic’s tastes seemed in the 1960s and 1970s. Romero Brest was Argentina’s most prominent art critic in the post-war period. He taught art history classes at the

Universidad de Buenos Aires and founded Ver y Estimar magazine (1948-1955) where he published extensively on art and theory. In assembling that publication, he mentored a young generation of art critics, the most notable of which were Marta Traba and Damián

Bayón. From 1955 to 1963 he served as Director of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, he then headed up the Centro de Artes Visuales del Instituto Torcuarto de Tella (ITDT)— an institution he made into Buenos Aires’ most recognized site for experimental art and performance.

Romero Brest and Gómez Sicre had very little contact with one another. “There seems to have been a profound antipathy between them,” writes Andrea Giunta, who in her study of Argentinean art of the 1960s points out that they could not reconcile their aesthetic differences.147 Theirs was not only a disagreement in aesthetic tastes, but a power struggle over whose aesthetic tastes would hold more sway as they competed for a similar position within the cultural field: to be leaders that shaped perceptions of Latin

American (specifically Argentinean) art inside and outside of the region.

147Andrea Giunta, Avant-Garde, Internationalism, and Politics: Argentine Art in the Sixties, trans. Peter Kahn (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 354, 84n. 74 Before further addressing their differences, it is worth noting the very few qualities they shared. They were both confrontational figures; each earned a law degree before dedicating themselves entirely to careers in the arts, and perhaps because of this, they each approached the task of the art critic with a particular knack for oral and written argument. Both were modernists, seeking recognition and “progress” for the visual arts in

Latin America; throughout their careers, they led institutions and art competitions in the hopes of sustaining what each saw as avant-garde art in Latin America.

Both were also critics who, early in their careers, staked great value on abstract art. However, their approaches to abstraction reveal some of the underlying differences in their idea of “modern art.” I have already indicated that Gómez Sicre’s sense of modernism was largely shaped through his experiences in New York and his apprenticeship with Alfred Barr; they each saw abstract art as a branch in the historical evolution of art, defending it as a “universal” language—a language as relevant and intelligible in Latin America as in Europe and the United States. I have tried to show that, to Gómez Sicre, abstract art, neo-figurative drawing, folk art, sculpture, and film all played a part in his aesthetic taste. At mid-century, Romero Brest took a more pronounced view of the importance of abstraction. He had seen the rise of concrete art in

Argentina in the 1940s though artists like Raúl Lozza, Tomás Maldonado, and the artists of the Madí group. He returned from trips to Europe (1948-1949) and to New York

(1950-1951), believing that abstraction, non-objective art, and concrete art together formed the most radical modes of contemporary art making, and he predicted that they would only continue to grow in importance. In the pages of Ver y Estimar, as well as his 75 books such as ¿Qué es el arte abstracto? [What is Abstract Art?] (1951) and La pintura europea (1900-1950) [European Painting (1900-1950)] (1952), he posited abstract art as the form through which painting, sculpture, architecture, and design stood in direct relation to one another. He wrote adamantly about the integration of the arts, which represented a long-desired goal of the avant-garde: the merger of art and everyday life.148

And through Ver y Estimar he sought to foster support for these values, establishing a network of contributors first in Europe and then throughout the urban centers of Latin

America. Gómez Sicre sought to create separate networks of his own—networks that were Pan-American in scope and that disavowed the importance of European centers, particularly Paris (More on this topic in the following chapter).

While Gómez Sicre and Romero Brest initially shared a belief that abstract art would play a transformative role in Latin America, their perspectives were never fully aligned. They diverged more dramatically during the 1960s, as Romero Brest radically reformulated his aesthetic tastes, becoming a strong advocate for the importance of pop art, happenings, kinetic art, conceptual art and installation art in Argentina. In 1960,

Romero Brest traveled again to Paris and New York—trips that he described as a form of

“cataract surgery” that allowed him to see contemporary art, particularly assemblages and informalist painting, with new vision.149 In New York, the Argentinean critic encountered

Rauschenberg’s combines and Oldenburg’s deflated hamburger sculpture, works that

148 These aspects of Romero Brest’s philosophy are discussed in Andrea Giunta, “Rewriting Modernism: Jorge Romero Brest and the Legitimation of Argentine Art,” in Listen, Here, Now! Argentine Art of the 1960s: Writings of the Avant-Garde, ed. Inés Katzenstein (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2004), 80- 81. 149 See Jorge Romero Brest, “What is Informal Painting?” in Katzenstein, Listen, Here, Now!, 93-98. 76 prompted a sense of “astonishment.”150 For Romero Brest, the trip was a strong indication that the nature of art was profoundly changing, and that the criteria he had clung to during the 1950s, particularly his expectations about the promise of concrete art, were not matching up with reality. While the shift in Romero Brest’s aesthetic preferences began as early as 1960, Andrea Giunta cites 1964 as the year that his transformation took full shape as a result of that year’s ITDT competition, for which

Romero Brest, Clement Greenberg, and Pierre Restany served as judges. The jury distributed two prizes, an international prize and national prize; the international prize went to U.S. artist Kenneth Noland, who Greenberg and Romero Brest both favored.

However, for the national prize, Romero Brest and Restany teamed up against Greenberg, awarding the prize to Argentinean artist Marta Minujín, who presented a group of sculptures made of mattresses. Both Minujín’s piece and the submission by artist Emilio

Renart, in which the artist created a gigantic vagina on the floor and walls of the ITDT, attracted media attention and public ridicule. All three jurists considered these pieces in relation to U.S. “pop” art and its European counterparts—what Restany termed “Nouveau réalisme” [New Realism]. While in Buenos Aires, Greenberg was particularly vocal about his dislike of pop art: “It is minor art, a fashion, and it is horrible to say this about any kind of artistic expression. The proof is the ease with which it achieved success, without struggle or resistance.”151 Greenberg even criticized the works at the ITDT saying “there is no originality, it resembles New York twenty years ago. At that time, art

150 Giunta highlights the importance of the term “asombro” (astonishment) for Romero Brest’s theoretical approach to the art of the 1960s. See Giunta, Avant-Garde, Internationalism, and Politics, 172-173. 151 Greenberg’s statements appear in “El premio Di Tella a la plástica nacional,” La Nación, 3 October 1964, 6; cited in Giunta, Avant-Garde, Internationalism, and Politics, 214. 77 in New York was provincial in relation to Paris.”152 This competition was the first instance (of what would become a regular occurrence) where Romero Brest felt the pressure to justify to fellow critics and to the wider public why such experimental art as

Minujín’s was significant. He employed a number of explanations, switching from one to another, “like a juggler performing his craft,” as Giunta puts it. 153 He turned to theories of phenomenology, particularly the writings of Merleau-Ponty, believing that appreciating these works required privileging “experience” over formal concerns.154 Just as Romero Brest’s position on Pop art put him at odds with Greenberg, so too did it put him at odds with Gómez Sicre, who like Greenberg distrusted the movement.

Over the course of the 1960s, the gulf between Romero Brest’s and Gomez

Sicre’s aesthetic preferences grew and grew. Unlike Gómez Sicre’s feud with Traba, the critic’s rivalry with Romero Brest was tied to the cultural politics of Argentina. In the

1960s, contemporary art in Argentina gained global prominence, receiving more attention in exhibitions and publications than any other Latin American country at the time. Some of Europe’s most notable art critics, such as Andre Malraux, Pierre Restany, and Sir

Herbert Read were drawn to Buenos Aires; so too were New York critics like Clement

Greenberg, Lawrence Alloway, and Jacqueline Barnitz. Gómez Sicre and Romero Brest were stalwart supporters of very different artists in Argentina. And by the mid to late

152 Ibid. 153 Giunta writes that “by the mid-1960s, like a juggler performing his craft, Romero Brest conveniently switched from one explanatory principle to another…” Giunta, Avant-Garde, Internationalism, and Politics, 179. 154 Romero continued to theorize the relation of art and phenomenology throughout the 1960s; by 1967, he eliminated the Di Tella prizes, replacing them with an annual exhibition he called “Experiencias Visuales” [Visual Experiences] in 1967, and simply “Experiencias” [Experiences] in 1968 and 1969—all of which focused on installations, conceptual, and process-based art. 78 1960s, Romero Brest monopolized Buenos Aires’ art scene in a way that left little room for Gómez Sicre to exert influence.

* * *

In this chapter, I have worked to situate Gómez Sicre’s aesthetic tastes in relation to three art critics promoting modern art in the Americas, highlighting various points of overlap and points of friction in their views. Unlike the other critics, Gómez Sicre’s aesthetic tastes were coupled with a particular set of Pan-American ambitions. In the next chapter, I describe some of the activities through which Gómez Sicre put his aesthetic tastes into practice and consider some of the historical and ideological conditions that shaped his work in the U.S. and in Latin America.

79 Chapter Two: Intellectuals, Networks, and Centers

José Gómez Sicre’s aesthetic tastes and knowledge of Latin American art trends earned him respect from fellow curators and art critics like Alfred Barr and Marta Traba during the 1940s, 1950s, and the early 1960s. And, yet he remains absent from intellectual and cultural histories of the period, largely because of his ambiguous relationship to the discourse surrounding the role of the intellectual. During the Cold

War, the word “intellectual” was a potent and highly-politicized term loaded with conflicting expectations and historical meanings. In his study Keywords, cultural theorist

Raymond Williams notes that “intellectual” began as a pejorative, only gaining positive connotations in the last century.155 In the United States, the negative associations of the term came to the fore during the McCarthy Era as right-wing conservatives led a variety of campaigns vilifying their political rivals as “intellectuals”—exploiting the vagaries of the term to attack leftists, homosexuals, and Jews. 156 At the same time, many writers and

155 Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 169-171. 156The McCarthy-era witch-hunts to expel communists from government positions quickly became tied to campaigns designed to remove homosexuals, who the government and the news media identified as “moral perverts”—a label conflating homosexuals with pedophiles and other sexual deviants. The persecution of gays and lesbians in the Federal Government during the Cold War—a phenomenon historian David K. Johnson has termed “The Lavender Scare”—also had repercussions in the art world. For further information about the “Lavender Scare” in Washington, see John D’Emilio, “Homosexual Menace: the Politics of Sexuality in Cold War America” in Making Trouble: Essays on Gay History, Politics, and the University (New York, NY: Routledge, 1992); William Parker, “Homosexuals and Employment,” Essays on Homosexuality. Essay no. 4, (San Francisco and Washington, DC: The Corinthian Foundation et al, 1970); and David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004). For a case study of the effects of the Lavender Scare on the New York art scene, see Gavin Butt, Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World, 1948-1963 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). The anti-Semitic undertones of anti-communism most clearly manifested in the 1949 race riots in Peekskill, New York. See Howard Fast, Peekskill USA: Inside the Infamous 1949 Riots (New York: Civil Rights Congress, 1951). For another discussion of McCarthyism and anti-Semitism, see Aviva Weingarten, Jewish Organization’s 80 scholars defended the leftist intellectual, writing texts in the 1950s and 1960s that grappled with the term, trying to justify the importance of the intellectual and progressive thinking in the face of what they perceived as growing political conservatism and outright anti-intellectualism.157

Adding fuel to the fiery debate was the fact that, at best, “intellectual” remains a contested identity, not a label that can be fixed with any certainty. Art critic Harold

Rosenberg summed up the problem in 1965, stating that there is a “tendency of the intellectual to slip out of every category, leaving its shell for the observer….The intellectual cannot be stabilized as a type, a style of behavior, or a member of a social category. By nature, his condition is ambiguous and subject to change: one does not possess mental freedom and detachment, one participates in them.”158 The term

“intellectual” is a catch-all that cannot be identified with a particular institution or profession (lawyer, doctor, university professor, etc.). Nor, as historian Richard

Hofstadter wryly points out, is the word necessarily related to intelligence: “We know, for instance, that all academic men are not intellectuals; we often lament this fact. We know that there is something about intellect, as opposed to professionally trained

Response to Communism and to Senator McCarthy, trans. Ora Cummings (Portland, OR: Vallentine Mitchell, 2008). 157 For an extensive history of anti-intellectualism, see Richard Hofstadter, Anti Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Vintage Books, 1963). Hofstatdter points out the term “egg heads” and other pejorative names were used by politicians during the McCarthy Era. Other key texts on the intellectual at the time include Jacques Barzun, The House of Intellect (New York: Harper, 1959); Lewis A. Coser, Men of Ideas: A Sociologist’s View (New York: Free Press, 1965); Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957), H. Stuart Hughes, “Is the Intellectual Obsolete?” Commentary [New York] October 1956; John Gross, Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters: A Study of the Idiosyncratic and Humane in Modern Literature. (New York: Collier, 1969). 158 Harold Rosenberg, “The Intellectual and his Future,” in Discovering the Present: Three Decades in Art, Culture, and Politics (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 190-194. Orig. published in The New Yorker in 1965. 81 intelligence, which does not adhere to whole vocations but only to persons.”159 How, then, do we identify the intellectual? Some see “intellectual” as a designation for a small and exclusive group, usually a subset of the ruling elite who possess valuable knowledge and offer advice; occasionally, scholars of Cold War history still utilize the term

“mandarin,” a word for a caste of Chinese scholar-officials, to describe such an intellectual.160 Others potentially see the intellectual everywhere; Marxist writer Antonio

Gramsci famously coined the term “organic intellectual” to describe the potential for the masses to identify and cultivate intellectuals at all levels of society. For Gramsci, organic intellectuals were rooted in working class culture, able to identify and combat flows of hegemonic power from above.161 Yet, even some liberals who self-identified as

“intellectuals” in the 1950s and 1960s tended to express their ambivalence about the label. For example, Rosenberg writes, “The independent intellectual feels no anxiety about the possible vanishing of his breed; there are moods in which he wishes that it would vanish, since he thinks intellectuals are fakes and invalids anyway—including himself and the marvelous minds that have produced humanity’s art and ideas. As Kafka

159 Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, 26. 160 See Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2004). Tyrsh Travis, Professor of Women and Gender Studies, also utilizes the word in her conference paper, “The Other Mandarins: Book Man and Cold War Democracy,” presented during the panel “Literary Intellectuals and the Cultural Cold War” at the Cold War Cultures Conference; University of Texas at Austin, 2010. 161 Excerpts from Antonio Gramsci´s Prison Notebooks, where he describes the “organic intellectual,” are included in The Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916-1935, ed. David Forgacs (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 300-323. The secondary literature on Gramsci’s terms “organic intellectual” and “hegemony” are extensive. One of the texts I found most helpful is T. J. Jackson Lears, “The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and Possibilities,” The American Historical Review 90, no. 3 (Jun.,1985): 567-593. 82 noted: in his fight against the world, the intellectual backs the world.”162 Rosenberg highlights the conflictive nature of the intellectual, an identity in which feelings of self- assuredness and education coexist with feelings of self-doubt and belligerence.

In his book ¿Qué es un intelectual? [What is an Intellectual?] (1998), Argentinean artist and theoretician Tomás Maldonado writes a history of the changing roles of intellectual during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the West. Recognizing the variety of forms that intellectuals take, he offers provisional classifications: “the scientific intellectual,” “the collective intellectual,” “the man of letters,” “the multi-tasker,” and others. He describes one type from the early Cold War period, the intellectual as “guiding beacon,” as follows:

The figure of the intellectual reemerges with a predominantly laudatory function in the contexts of leftist political and social movements, a figure that acquires the highest point of popularity in the period immediately following the war until approximately the mid-1970s. It is the intellectual that takes a position, or invites others to do so, over the most diverse questions of public life….It is the intellectual who is the signer of manifestos and sometimes the leader of protests. In sum: it is the intellectual as the guiding beacon of light, as privileged bearer of the ‘sun of the future’163

Maldonado’s characterization sums up what many writers, artists, and students in Latin

America, Europe, and the United States in the 1960s believed defined the intellectual. In particular, being an intellectual typically meant being sympathetic to the Cuban

Revolution and the aims of the New Left.164 His definition is also tied to a notion of the

162 Rosenberg, “The Intellectual and his Future,” 194. 163 Tomás Maldonado, ¿Que es un intelectual?: aventuras y desventuras de un rol (Barcelona: Paidos, 1998), 17. 164 Many Latin American writers identified with this meaning of intellectual, see Claudia Gilman, El Fusil y la pluma: Debates y dilemmas del escritor revolucionario en América Latina. Colección Metmorfosis 83 avant-garde in the sense that the intellectual has a privileged view of the future. Under those criteria, Gómez Sicre could never be mistaken for an intellectual. Not only was he staunchly anti-communist, but his publication record placed him far afield of those journals and little magazines generally regarded as avant-garde by their reading publics.165 His writing was not as theoretical as writing by other critics, such as Jorge

Romero Brest; although Gómez Sicre himself an avid reader, he rarely cited the ideas of other writers, philosophers, or art critics in circulation at the time.166 His articles appeared mostly in OAS publications—particularly Américas magazine in 1950s and the Boletín de Artes Visuales in the 1950s-1970s.

The publication of Gómez Sicre’s articles in these two magazines is important: it situates him within a non-academic context. Américas was not an arts publication, but a magazine published for general audiences, particularly for readers in the United States.167

(Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno, 2003). Also see Silvia Sigman, Intelectuales y poder en la década sesenta (Buenos Aires: Puntosur, 1991). 165My usage of the term “publics” is based on literary scholar Michael Warner’s writing on the subject. He defines a public as an association among strangers based in reading (whether it be reading a literary text or a visual text) that calls itself into being merely through the attention of its readers who identify that they and strangers are simultaneously being addressed. Warner maintains that “publics” are a phenomenon different from a “community,” “nation,” or “audience” for they form with or without a state and exist temporally without requiring the face-to-face dialogue. See Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2005). 166 One rare exception is he mentions Andre Malraux’s “Imaginary Museum,” but this can be explained by the popularity of Malraux’s writing in the early post-war period. The interchangeable phrases “Museum without Walls” and “Imaginary Musuem” gained currency in the United States after Malraux revised and republished his Psychology of Art (1949-1950) series into single-volume edition known as Andre Malraux, The Voices of Silence (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1953). Malraux likely appealed to Gómez Sicre because the French art critic held a prominent position within the French government directing the arts—a position tied to politics and art, not so unlike working at the OAS. 167 According to Christopher Shell, who worked for Américas for over twenty five years and served as Managing Editor, the publication was conceived as a means to teach U.S. audiences about their Latin American neighbors. He said that at one time the magazine had thirty-three staff members and 160,000 subscribers. In 2007 the staff was down to three people with some 40,000 subscribers. Christopher Shell, interview with the author, 25 April 2007. Information charting Américas’ circulation can also be found in 84 Unlike arts magazines produced in Latin America such as Romero Brest’s Ver y Estimar or Traba’s Prisma, the aims of Américas were unabashedly propagandistic: it was intended to promote the activities of the OAS and highlight different aspects of Pan

American cooperation between North and South America. Américas more closely parallels magazines such as Mundo Nuevo and Cuadernos, which were pivotal in disseminating the literature of the Latin American “Boom” of the 1960s, but which were funded partially by the CIA, a fact that elicited controversy in the late 1960s.168 In contrast, Américas was explicitly a government-issued magazine—an aspect reinforced by the total absence of advertisements in the publication (this also qualified it to circulate through the U.S. postal system for free). Perhaps closer equivalents are to be found in the

Cuban government’s Casa de las Americas magazine or, for that matter, the Americas

Society’s Review—two other literary magazines that became prominent vehicles for Latin

American writers in the 1960s to disseminate their work.169 An important distinction

the Annual Report of the Secretary General. January 1 1963-June 30, 1964 (Washington, DC: Pan American Union, 1964), 124. 168 The CIA did not fund the magazines directly. Both magazines were funded through the Congress of Cultural Freedom, which received funding from the CIA. For more on the Congress of Cultral Freedom, see Francis Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: New Press, 2000); Peter Coleman. The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe (New York: Free Press, 1989); and Giles Scott-Smith, The Politics of Apolitical Culture: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Political Economy of American Hegemony 1945-1955. (New York: Routledge, 2001). Studies focused on Mundo Nuevo include María Eugenia Mudrovcic, Mundo Nuevo: Cultura y Guerra Fría en la década del 60 (Rosario, Argentina: Beatriz Viterbo, 1997); Russell Cobb, “Promoting Literature in the Most Dangerous Area in the World: The Cold War, the Boom, and Mundo Nuevo” in Barnhisel et al, Pressing the Fight, 231-250; and Russell Cobb, “The Politics of Literary Prestige: Promoting the Latin American ‘Boom’ in the Pages of Mundo Nuevo.” A Contra corriente: A Journal on Social History and Literature in Latin America 5, no. 3 (Spring 2008), 75-94, available online at http://www.ncsu.edu/acontracorriente/spring_08/Cobb.pdf [Accessed 25 October 2012] 169 See Nadia Lie, Transición y transacción: La revista cubana Casa de las Américas (1960-1976) (Gaithersburg, MD: Hispamérica Leuven University Press, 1996) and Judith Weiss, Casa de las Américas: An Intellectual Review in the Cuban Revolution (Chapel Hill, NC: Estudios de Hispanófila, 1977). 85 between these magazines and Américas is that these, as well as Mundo Nuevo and

Cuadernos, were primarily tailored to Latin American intellectuals, while the editors of

Américas directed the magazine towards an unspecified audience. Judging from the letters to the editor, it seems the magazine reached many different readers, including teachers, students, business travelers, arm-chair adventurers, scientists, doctors, artists, home-makers, and prison inmates.170

Américas often reported on Gómez Sicre’s art exhibitions, however the curator had little if any editorial control. Instead his articles were interspersed with articles on politics, economics, literature, and human interest stories. Gómez Sicre’s articles waffle between informative texts and fluff pieces. He contributed several types of articles: some summarize his reactions to exhibitions he saw in Latin America, the U.S. and Europe; he also reported on each of the São Paulo Biennials in the 1950s and 1960s. These reports were painted in very broad strokes. In them, he names award winners and identifies weaker entries (especially artists from the Soviet Union), but he gives readers very little to go on about the individual pieces and the contexts from which they emerged.171 His longest and most intimate pieces consist of profiles of artists, actresses, and film makers.172 Surprisingly, his strongest arguments are found embedded within travelogues

170 The Norfolk Colony Stamp Club, composed of about thirty-three penitentiary inmates had their letter to the editor published in Américas, vol. 11, no. 1 (January 1959), 44. 171 See José Gómez Sicre, “Europe on the Easel,” Américas, vol. 3, no. 12 (December 1951), 23-27, 35. He writes about his visit to East Berlin as follows, “As the visitor enters the Soviet zone, he finds creative freedom losing itself in a realistic-academic kind of art used in all the propaganda. Since modern art is also proscribed b the dictatorship of the proletariat, artists with new ideas living in the Russian zone must either give them up or seek refuge in other zones.” Ibid., 26. 172 His profiles of Rufino Tamayo, Roberto Burle-Marx, Amelia Peláez, and Alexander Calder, which originally appeared in Américas magazine, are reprinted in José Gómez Sicre, Four Artists of the Americas (Washington, DC: Pan American Union, 1957). He also wrote articles about cinematographer Gabriel 86 of Europe. In these articles he downplays the importance of European art centers, especially Paris, in the period after World War II. And these articles suggest that there is no longer a single art center.

His writing for the Boletín de Artes Visuales—for which he served as editor-in- chief—had a different character. There he directed himself to a Spanish-speaking audience, particularly art collectors and OAS institutional partners across Latin America.

His editorials more candidly focus on the issues facing the field of Latin American art, and usually cite a recent event or the death of a key artist to make a larger point about the current state of the arts.173 In many of his pieces he discusses the economic conditions affecting Latin American artists and the reception of their art. He also argues for deregulation and financial support to open up avenues for exhibiting Latin American art internationally. His editorials were followed by extensive country-by-country lists of past and upcoming exhibitions, competitions, and news related to Latin American art, giving an impression that Gómez Sicre and his staff were tapped in to every event that had to do with Latin American art.

Perhaps Gómez Sicre did not fit within the mode of intellectual Maldonado describes as “guiding beacon,” but that does not mean Gómez Sicre can be discounted from the role of intellectual altogether. In The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the

Figueroa and actress Dolores de Rio. See José Gómez Sicre, “Depth of Focus,” Américas, vol. 2, no. 5 (May 1950): 24-28 and José Gómez Sicre, “Dolores del Rio,” Américas, vol. 19 no. 11 (November 1967), 8-17. 173 He discusses Carlos Mérida in José Gómez Sicre, “Nota editorial,” Boletín de Artes Visuales 8 (July- December 1961): 3-4. An homage to Emilio Pettoruti appears in José Gómez Sicre, “Nota editorial,” Boletín de Artes Visuales 10 (July-December 1962): 3-5. Another dedicated to Giorgio Morandi appears in José Gómez Sicre, “Nota editorial,” Boletín de Artes Visuales 12 (January-December 1964): 2-6. 87 Literary Field, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argues that the way the intellectual weaves together art and politics conforms to a specific logic: the intellectual builds influence and

“cultural capital” within the cultural field, earning recognition for his or her artistic and literary accomplishments; she or he then leverages that “cultural capital” to intervene into the political sphere, while maintaining the appearance of autonomy. Gómez Sicre constantly negotiated between the cultural and political spheres, and he justified his interventions into both spheres by maintaining that his aesthetic tastes were objective.174

Nonetheless, he wielding incredible cultural and political influence and generated audiences through exhibitions and in print. Ultimately, debates around the intellectual provide the historical context in which to see the logic behind Gómez Sicre’s cultural posturing; they also expose the gulf between his Pan American rhetoric and the political realities he faced in Washington.

BUILDING A PAN-AMERICAN NETWORK

Throughout his career, Gómez Sicre made various statements about the importance of Pan-American cultural exchanges. Perhaps his most compelling statements on the subject appear in his 1959 editorial for the Boletín de Artes Visuales. There he proclaims: “The young artist in America knows that new international centers of art are

174 Bourdieu writes “Far from there existing, as is customarily believed, an antimony between the search for autonomy (which characterizes the art, science or literature we call ‘pure’) and the search for political efficacy, it is by increasing their autonomy (and thereby, among other things, their freedom to criticize the prevailing powers) that intellectuals can increase the effectiveness of a political action whose ends and means have their origin in the specific logic of the fields of cultural production.” Pierre Bourdieu, Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 340. 88 being born on this continent and they are already prerequisite points of reception, from

New York to Buenos Aires, from Rio de Janeiro to Lima, from Mexico City to São

Paulo, from Caracas to Washington.”175 This sentence (perhaps the one most often cited by scholars) is significant for the way it so clearly draws the cultural map Gómez Sicre envisioned extending across the hemisphere.176 Gómez Sicre’s comment is part of a larger editorial, in which he takes aim at the cultural hegemony that Paris has held over artists from Latin America. In his editorial, he suggests that this situation is changing, as

“Paris has left behind being ‘the center’ to convert into ‘one center’ more.”177 He describes the feeling of inadequacy that many artists felt “for not having been born in

Paris, raised under the shadows of Chartres or passing through the galleries of the

Louvre.”178 And he encourages his U.S. and Latin American readers to join their efforts

175 José Gómez Sicre, “Nota editorial,” Boletín de Artes Visuales 5: 2. This translation comes from Andrea Giunta, Avant-Garde, Internationalism, and Politics, 189. 176 Notice that Havana is conspicuously absent from the cities he enumerates. His statement came at a pivotal time when the Cuban Revolution was bringing new attention to the cultural politics of Latin America; but it was still early enough that Gómez Sicre’s attitudes towards Havana were still in formation, he could avoid mentioning it altogether. In the 1960s the situation would change, and Gómez Sicre would have to face the fact that his dream of Pan-American network could not square with the reality of revolutionary Cuba playing a major cultural role in Latin America. 177 Ibid. Harold Rosenberg was one of the first to note a paradigm shift taking place in art world at mid- century, in which Paris would no longer serve as the foremost center for avant-garde art. See Harold Rosenberg, “The Fall of Paris” in The Tradition of the New (New York: Horizon Press, 1959): 209-220. Art historians often describe New York as the international center that dominated the arts in the post-war period. The history of this transfer of power is examined in Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). As New York galleries and institutions became more accepting of Latin American in the 1960s, they framed the growing presence of Latin American art as further proof of New York’s status as art center. This is most clearly the case with Magnet: New York—A Selection of Paintings by Latin American Artists Living in New York (New York: Galeria Bonino and The Inter- American Foundation for the Arts, 1964) and The Emergent Decade: Latin American Painters and Paintings in the 1960’s, with text by Thomas Messer (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1966). Also see Florencio García Cisneros, Latin-American Painters in New York (Miami, Rema Press, 1964). By contrast, Gómez Sicre argued for the emergence of a plurality of art centers across the Americas, rather than a single center in New York, Washington, or elsewhere. 178 José Gómez Sicre, “Nota editorial,” Boletín de Artes Visuales 5: 2. 89 in establishing cultural autonomy: “Our job,” he writes, “today more than ever, is to create our own value-scale for the art of this continent and to develop our own support system, and centers for the evaluation of art.” Further, he urges artists from Latin

America to take stock of their own cultural heritages, not to undervalue them. “If we can appreciate the grand Victory [of Samothrace] that presides, fluttering, over the stairs of the Louvre and we can mentally reconstruct the Middle Ages through the spires of

Chartres [cathedral],… we also can feel the emotion of the anonymous sculptor of

Coatlicue, of the pre-hispanic architects that made Machu Picchu, of the extraordinary tile artists of Uxmal. If we cross the Atlantic, certainly we will enrich ourselves by the amplifying our experiences and lifeways, but we should not underestimate ourselves if we cannot make the tour of Europe that before was considered indispensible.”179

In this editorial, we see Gómez Sicre criticizing the Old World Europe while heroicizing the Americas and its diverse ancient heritage. These were arguments that he employed throughout the first three decades he worked at the OAS. This approach is evident in his first feature article for Américas magazine, entitled “Art Critic on a

Holiday,” published in January 1950 (Figure 14). In it, he reflects on his first trip to

Europe, which he took in December 1949. He offers his perceptions of public life in each of the major cities he visited—London, Paris, Florence, Venice, and Rome. He also discusses and illustrates his interactions with some of Europe’s most famous modernists:

Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Henry Moore. Within a magazine dedicated to coverage of North and South America, a travel account of Europe may seem an anomaly.

179 Ibid. 90 But underlying Gómez Sicre’s observations rests his strategic attempt to reconfigure the art historical canon by reducing the looming presence of Europe—especially France—as a source of artistic influence, and to relocate the cultural center to the Americas.

Through Gómez Sicre’s narrative of his trip runs a thread of biting critiques of

European art museums and the contemporary artistic culture of the cities he visited. He disapproved of several museums for ignoring their country’s contemporary artists. In particular, he criticized the Tate in London for ignoring Henry Moore’s work. Likewise, he disapproved of Paris’s Museum of Modern Art for its curator’s “excessively tolerant criterion [which] gives places of equal rank to insignificant painters and the great figures of the School of Paris: Matisse, Picasso, Braque, and so on.”180 Upon visiting Aix-en-

Provence, Gómez Sicre expressed surprise to find that the work of Paul Cezanne received so little attention in the artist’s former home town: “though he was the greatest figure of nineteenth-century art, the local museum had only one insignificant drawing of his.”181

Seeking to find the house where Cezanne kept his studio, Gómez Sicre discovered that the residence was now private property closed to visitors. Such disappointment led

Gómez Sicre “to think it is not necessary to leave the United States to see the best of

French nineteenth- and twentieth-century art.”182

Writing about the cultural climate of Paris, Gómez Sicre acknowledged that the city held historical importance for art, but he found post-war Paris intellectually aimless.

“France undeniably carved out a world-wide cultural empire for herself in the last two

180José Gómez Sicre, “Art Critic on a Holiday,” Américas, vol. 2, no. 1 (January 1950), 14. 181 Ibid., 15. 182 Ibid., 14. 91 hundred years…,” wrote the art critic, “But today’s boulevardiers, facing the dilemma of having no great theses to defend, turn to Jean-Paul Sartre as the only thing that can hold their attention.”183 According to Gómez Sicre, the city’s young artists were floundering in existential crises, unable to overcome their reverence for the works of older avant-garde artists such as Kandinsky and Mondrian; further, they were unable to create original works “bearing the true native seal of Paris.”184

Gómez Sicre also attempts to defuse the major role Paris plays in the history of art, reminding his readers that France’s past masters had to escape the intellectually claustrophobic city to achieve greatness. Speaking of Southern France, he writes that

“this was the same environment that helped Cezanne to discover ‘the cone, the cylinder, and the sphere’ in nature—for Paris was never the artist’s best advisor. Corot had to shut himself up in Fontainebleau to achieve his suave landscapes... Gauguin chose exile in

Tahiti, and Van Gogh did his best work in Provence.”185

After critiquing England and France, Gómez Sicre turns his attention to Italy, which he describes as beautiful, but frozen in time. He explains that Florence and Venice each appeared to him “an inhabited museum.”186 In his article, he describes the art of the

Italian Renaissance as steeped in realism. This is most evident in a photograph of a contemporary Venetian woman seated with a child, which Gómez Sicre included with the article (Figure 15). The caption beside the photograph reads: “This Venetian girl and

183 Ibid., 13. 184 Ibid., 14. 185 Ibid., 14. 186 Ibid., 43. 92 baby [show] a striking resemblance to a “Madonna and Child” by Giovanni Bellini, proving the deep realism of Italian Renaissance.” The photograph is largely Gómez

Sicre’s own artificial construction; in a later issue of Américas he explains that the woman and child are not related, but he asked the true mother of the child if she would permit the boy to be photographed with another woman.187

At the core of “Art Critic on a Holiday” exists another seemingly contradictory construction: Gómez Sicre was generally critical of Europe for its lack of artistic contemporaneity, and yet, in this article, we also see Gómez Sicre eagerly seeking out the living legends of European modern art. Photographs on the article’s first page highlight these encounters. The topmost image places the curator and Matisse in close proximity as they are casually seated atop a drafting desk in Dominican Chapel of Venice. In the second image, a white stone sculpture acts as an intermediary between curator and Henry

Moore, as both men place their hands upon the arms of Moore’s sculpted figures. For the other two portraits—one of Marino Marini (1901-1980) alone with his sculptures and one of Picasso outside his ceramics studio—Gómez Sicre acted as photographer.

Several photographs showing Picasso and Gómez Sicre together were taken during his visit to Picasso’s ceramics factory in Vallauris. Gómez Sicre enjoyed telling friends that during his encounter with Picasso, the artist had taken such a liking to Gómez

Sicre’s Cuban guayabera shirt that he asked to wear it.188 This anecdote about Picasso

187 “Letters to the Editor,” Américas, Vol 2, no. 6 (June 1950), 48. 188Presumably, Picasso appears with no shirt in Américas because the photograph was taken while the artist and curator were trading shirts. Author’s interview with Diana Beruff. 15 March 2008. Gómez Sicre later wrote down the story and his first impressions of Picasso, but to my knowledge never published it. See “Picasso,” folder 2, box 20, JGS Papers. 93 and the guayabera extends a central theme of “Art Critic on a Holiday”: throughout much of the article, Gómez Sicre attempted to stake the identities of Europe’s major living artists in terms of their apparent Latin Americaness. Gómez Sicre described Picasso as looking and speaking “like a man of the Caribbean.”189 And he quoted Picasso as saying,

“…the police kept me under observation [in Madrid] because they thought I was one of the exiled Cuban revolutionaries with whom I had been associating.”190 Gómez Sicre, similarly, emphasized Henry Moore’s connections to Latin America: he described

Moore’s interest in Pre-Columbian culture, stressing that the ancient art of the Americas represented a “starting point in the development of his … ideas [about art].”191

Many of Gómez Sicre’s statements in “Art Critic on a Holiday” serve to situate the U.S. and Latin America in relation to existing art historical discourse about European modernism. He envisions North and South American nations working together at the forefront of cultural and artistic growth, at a time when many still assumed Latin

America to be underdeveloped. He concludes “Art Critic on a Holiday” by insisting that

European imperial and creative powers had been overtaken by the Americas. In particular, he claimed that today’s Romans were now learning from the modern empire of the United States.192

In 1950, Gómez Sicre spoke of the “modern empire of the United States” with a tone of admiration. Throughout the Cold War, he would continue to describe an

189Gómez Sicre, “Art Critic on a Holiday,” 15. 190 Ibid. 191 Ibid., 12. 192 Ibid., 44. 94 international cultural field in which the U.S. played a cultural, economic, and political role model for the rest of the world. He believed that cultural progress could only be an international, cooperative effort—a Pan American project. However, despite the triumphal tone of articles such as “Art Critic on a Holiday,” Gómez Sicre faced major challenges at home and abroad.

A CULTURAL SPACE AT HOME

When Gómez Sicre relocated to Washington in 1946 to take a position as art specialist at the Pan American Union, he was entering a city known for its conservative, if not poor, treatment of the arts—a situation that only worsened in the early 1950s.

“Washington was considered a cultural wasteland by the New York art pundits,” writes

Leslie Judd Ahlander, a long-time art critic for the Washington Post, who also served on the acquisitions committee for the OAS art collection.193 Despite the existence of several museums, including the Smithsonian, the Corcoran, and the National Gallery of Art, there was a general lack of visibility for modern art in Washington, a situation brought on by the absence of art collectors and galleries, of coverage in the press, and of institutional

193Leslie Judd Ahlander, The Washington Color School Revisited: The Sixties, Sept 9-Oct 4, 1980, an exhibition pamphlet for Fendrick Gallery, folder “Exhibition Catalogs undated, 1957-1986,” box 1, Leslie Judd Ahlander Papers (hereafter referred to as LJA Papers), Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution (hereafter abbreviated as AAA). Ahlander had long-standing connections to Gómez Sicre. In 1941, Ahlander helped create the Pan American Union’s visual art program and directed it until Gómez Sicre succeeded her in December1945. Her connection to Gómez Sicre and the OAS continued long after she left to join the Washington Post; she served officially on the Visual Art Division (and later Museum of Modern Art of Latin American Art) acquisitions committee, and unofficially as a PR person, consistently writing reviews of Gómez Sicre’s exhibitions during her thirteen years with the Post. I refer to Leslie Judd consistently using Ahlander as her last name since her archives at the Smithsonian are identified that way. However her maiden name was Leslie Judd Switzer. While working with the Washington Post, she mainly used her married name “Leslie Judd Portner,” and in 1959, she married Bjorn O. Ahlander. 95 support.194 Artist José Ignacio Bermúdez, who moved from Cuba to Washington in 1953 to work at the OAS, noted that “in New York and Paris there are so many distractions and you spend too much time talking. But here in Washington there is nothing to distract you.

The competition is tremendous and on the other side, the lack of reaction from viewers makes you work hard so that you develop. Washington is a good place to hide in order to work.”195

In the 1950s, Washington became the ground-zero for a battle waged by U.S. politicians against modern art. Inspired by the attention Senator Joséph McCarthy received for his mission to identify and rout out communists in government, politicians began attacking modern art, describing it as a means of subversion by foreigners. In

1952, Congressman George Dondero of Michigan proclaimed:

The art of the isms, the weapon of the Russian Revolution, is the art which has been transplanted to America, and today, having infiltrated and saturated many of our art centers, threatens to overawe, override and overpower the fine art of our tradition and inheritance. So-called modern or contemporary art in our own beloved country contains all the isms of depravity, decadence, and destruction….All these isms are of foreign origin, and truly should have no place in American art….All are instruments and weapons of destruction.196

According to art critic William Hauptman, Congressman Dondero had no trouble resorting to name-calling in his speeches:

194 Gómez Sicre spent a great deal of time in Washington trying to convince his co-workers, their friends, as well as visitors of neighboring embassies to purchase Latin American works and begin art collections of their own. Diana Beruff, whose husband worked for the OAS, began collecting art because of her contact with Gómez Sicre. Diana Beruff, interview with the author, 15 March 2008. 195 Leslie Judd Ahlander, “An Artist Speaks: José Bermudez,” Washington Post, 29 July 1962, G7. 196 George Dondero, “Communist Conspiracy in Art Threatens American Museums,” Congressional Record, 82nd Congress, 2nd Session (March 17, 1952), 2423-7; cited in Richard Hofstadter, Anti- Intellectualism in American Life, 14-15. 96 He described [modern artists] as ‘human termites,’ ‘germ-carrying vermin’ and ‘international art thugs.’ [Dondero] also concluded that modern artists who advocated freedom to experiment in a nontraditional style were charlatans because 1) they really could not draw; 2) they were insane; 3) they were in a plot to make the bourgeoisie nervous; and 4) they were committed to degrade their art for the purpose of Communist propaganda.197

Dondero’s comments were symptomatic of a broader body of distrust about the U.S. government financing exhibitions of modern art. For instance, between 1946 and 1948,

Dondero represented one of several right-wing politicians and journalists drumming up discontent about “Advancing American Art,” an exhibition organized by the U.S.

Department of State and sent to Europe and Latin America to highlight U.S. contributions to modern art. Newspapers and magazines lambasted the works in the show. Even

President Truman famously joined in on the attack with his off-hand remark: “…if that’s art, I’m a Hottentot.”198 Most of all, those critical of the exhibition found fault with its inclusion of artists Arthur Dove, John Marin, Ben Shahn and several others who, according to Hauptman, “seemed to reflect communist-leanings.”199

197 William Hauptman, “The Suppression of Art in the McCarthy Decade” Artforum, vol. 12, no. 2 (October 1973), 48-52. 198 Ibid., 49. Truman’s comment was indicative of his and the country’s disdain of modern art as well as the racism inherent to those views. In choosing a body to contrast himself against, Truman chose a “Hottentot” a perjorative term for the Khoikhoi peoples of Southern Africa. Truman’s statement is a particularly resonant example of the ways discrimination and invective language about racial difference shaped U.S. politics and culture that gave rise to the Civil Rights Movements of the 1950s and 1960s. 199 Ibid. This exhibition, which was one of several terminated for its inclusion of left-wing artists, and its surrounding controversy has become one of the most often studied case studies about the troublesome relationship between U.S. art and politics during the Cold War. See Taylor D. Littleton and Maltby Sykes, Advancing American Art: Painting, Politics, and Cultural Confrontation at Mid-Century (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1989); Michael L. Krenn, Fall-out Shelters for the Human Spirit: American Art and the Cold War (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); David Caute, The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy during the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Louis Menand, “The Unpopular Front: American Art and the Cold War,” The New Yorker, 17 October 2005, http://www.newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/articles/051017crat_atlarge.

97 The best-known refutation of Dondero came from Alfred Barr, who published the article “Is Modern Art Communist?” in the New York Times magazine in 1952. Barr insisted on setting the record straight about modern art from Europe, explaining that, in the Soviet Union, modern artists were victims of Communist censorship and forced into exile, rather than the agents of propaganda. In February 1955, Barr planned to visit

Washington to lecture on the topic further. “The lecture is not actually on art and communism,” he wrote to Leslie Judd Ahlander, “but a much broader review of the impact upon art of political intolerance or, in the case of the Nazis and Communists, of despotism. I intend, at the same time, to discuss some of the attitudes and actions of

American legislators and government officials towards modern art. Needless to say, these have not been so overt as in totalitarian countries, but they have at times been quite disturbing and I believe quite contrary to the best American traditions.”200

Many of Gómez Sicre’s views about art and politics coincided with Barr’s, as I discussed in the previous chapter. In Washington, he had to fight the battle on at least two fronts, combating general ignorance about modern art and about Latin America. He took his job of educating the public seriously, creating cycles of exhibitions, publications, and lectures on the importance of modern art.201 And there is evidence that he faced serious pressures during the McCarthy Era for his efforts. Though he rarely spoke about the scrutiny he faced during the witch-hunts of the 1950s, he once commented in an interview that he witnessed some of the left-leaning co-workers at the OAS being

200 Barr to Leslie Judd Portner, 1 February 1955, folder “Correspondence undated, 1954-1980,” box 1, LJA papers, AAA. 201 One of the earliest defenses of Latin American art appears in a letter to the Washington Post. See José Gómez Sicre, “Letter to Editor of the Washington Post” 20 January 1946, folder 1, box 5, JGS Papers. 98 hounded and expelled; “I was on the verge of losing my post,” he states, “but through my brother, who was a military man, [Cuba’s] Auténtico party protected me.”202

An interrogation of Gómez Sicre by U.S. Customs officials more fully shows the political pressures he faced during the period. The interrogation occurred in Miami on

May 5, 1952 as Gómez Sicre was returning to the United States after a trip to Puerto

Rico, Haiti, and Cuba.203 The interrogator quickly moved from gathering basic biographical information to questions that were more pointed and accusatory:

Q: Mr. Gómez, have you ever been the author of any publications? A: Yes; I have been the author, first, of a book on the Cuban painter Carreño, published in 1943, in Havana. The second one is a book called, in English, “Cuban Painting of Today.” It was published in early 1944 and was brought personally by me to the Museum of Foreign Art in New York [italics mine], which was the distributor of the book. I have some other publications. I have another publication called “Spanish Drawings from the 15th to the 18th or 19th Century” published by [name redacted by FOIA] press, New York, in 1949 or 1950, I do not remember….

Q: Mr. Gómez, have any of your publications a political significance? A: Not at all. My publications are all based on art. For about ten years I have been only writing on that subject.

Q: Did you ever write an article for a newspaper known as El Nacional, a Caracas, Venezuela, newspaper? A: Yes, I did. …

202 Anreus, “Ultimas Conversaciones con José Gómez Sicre,” reprinted in Appendix C. 203 In a letter to the Commissioner of Immigration and Naturalization, Gómez Sicre explains that he and his wife, Lucila Ballarin, initially were held at the airport “with the slightest explanation, for more than four hours,” only to be told that, because of some discrepancies in his visa, he should report to the Immigration Office in Miami the next morning. They arrived when the office opened at 9 a.m., but he explains, they “were kept there, without any explanation, until 4 p.m., when I was asked to record answers to questions made to me by Mr. Kiser, but not related to the visa problem but many different political topics.” Gómez Sicre to Commissioner of Immigration and Naturalization, 31 July 1952, document received through FOIA request. See Appendix A, for this letter and a full transcription of the interrogation. 99 Q: Were you aware, Mr. Gómez, that the newspaper El Nacional published at Caracas featured columnists who were left of center in their political beliefs and opinions, and that the newspaper’s policy in political matters coincides with that of the Communist Party?

A: Well I never thought that. I thought that was a popular paper, and was invited to contribute to that paper by an independent writer, Venezuelan writer called Juan Liscarna (phonetic), and who came to see me in the Pan American Union and proposed to me to contribute art articles to that publication. I never thought there were any political implications in that.

Q: Mr. Gómez, what is your attitude towards the Communist ideology? A: I am against it, absolutely against it, because I believe in the integrity of a family and in the concept of nations as it is conceived by the democratic mind.

Q: Have you ever publicly or privately made any statements which could be interpreted by a reasonable person as being in support of communism? A: I would never, I did never, do it.

Q: Do you know any of your acquaintances who are sympathetic to the cause of communism? A: I told you, I live in a quite isolated way, and I have no chance to talk very much about politics, only about the politics of my own country.

Q: What is your present attitude toward the conflict in Korea? A: I am completely on the part of the United States.

Q: Do I understand that to mean you are in accord with the position of the United States? A: Of the United States, absolutely.

Q: Have you ever made any statement which could be construed as supporting the aid which the Soviet Union is apparently giving to the North Koreans and the Chinese Reds? A: I never have.

Q: You never have? A: no.

Q: Have you ever made the statement that in your opinion the United States was actually the invader in the Korean situation? A: I never have said that. 100

Q: Do you believe that the Soviet Government is the savior of Asia? A: I never believed such thing.

Q: Have you ever to your knowledge made any statement admiring Stalin? A: No. I do not admire dictators.

Q: You have no recollection of having made any statement admiring Stalin? A: Not at all, and as I told you, I never write about politics.

Early in the interrogation, the U.S. Customs official transcribes the Museum of Modern

Art as the “Museum of Foreign Art”—it is a telling mistake, a symptom of the U.S. government’s conflation of modern art with foreignness during the McCarthy era. To reassure his interrogators, Gómez Sicre repeatedly indicated that he was anti-communist and that he writes only about art, not politics. Gómez Sicre insisted on his autonomy from politics as a cultural producer. Bourdieu describes such autonomy as a condition defining the intellectual: “To be entitled to the name of intellectual, a cultural producer must fulfill two conditions: on the one hand, he must belong to an autonomous intellectual world (a field), that is, independent from religious, political, and economic powers (and so on), and must respect its specific laws; on the other hand, he must invest the competence and authority he has acquired in the intellectual field in a political action, which is in any case carried out outside the intellectual field proper.”204 In Gómez Sicre’s case, his institutional affiliation always called into question his claims of autonomy. So did his behavior. While he spoke of his own objectivity and apoliticism, his actions indicated something different: he acted not as a disinterested party, but as a galvanizing

204 Pierre Bourdieu, “Fourth Lecture. Universal Corporatism: The Role of Intellectuals in the Modern World.” Poetics Today 12, no. 4, National Literatures/Social Spaces (Winter 1991): 656. Available through JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1772708 101 figure who personally involved himself in the lives of the artists whose work he preferred.

Within the tense anti-intellectual atmosphere of Washington, the critic took bold actions by creating a cultural space at his home, in the form of tertulias. “Tertulia,” a

Spanish word which finds its closest English parallel with salon, refers to an informal, usually private and late-night gathering of friends who meet to discuss art, literature, and poetry of common interest. Gómez Sicre was host to a constant stream of short-term and long-term guests at his house.205 Some artists, including Félix Ángel, Cundo Bermúdez,

José Luis Cuevas, and Carlos Poveda, lived for years in spare rooms of Gómez Sicre’s home in Adams Morgan. Many others, including Fernando Botero, Enrique Grau,

Guillermo Trujillo, David Mansur, Armando Morales, Alejandro Otero, Alejandro

Obregón, and Elmar Rojas would stay with him for a few days or a few weeks whenever they visited Washington.206 And, along with the set of regulars around his home, Gómez

Sicre frequently invited different guests over to join the group for dinner. Gómez Sicre’s dining room, a lively and eccentric setting for discourse, was decorated with Cuevas’s drawings of the mentally insane, and had cages containing various parakeets and exotic animals. Whereas the parrots at the Pan American Union building bred a certain exoticism for a so-called “gringo” audience, at Gómez-Sicre’s home rare birds became

205 Gómez Sicre first hosted gatherings in his apartment in Georgetown, and later in his townhouse in Adams Morgan. 206 These visitors became a sort of extended family for Gómez Sicre and they became well-acquainted with Gómez Sicre’s relatives, especially after the Cuban Revolution, when he brought many of his family members to Washington; his mother Guillermina Sicre lived with him from approximately 1960 until her death in 1974, and his sisters, Elisa and Guillermina, and his uncle, the sculptor Juan José Sicre, each lived down the street. 102 part of a comforting, even amusing, ambience for his Latin American visitors.207 After dinner and its drawn-out conversations about art and politics, guests might tour Gómez

Sicre’s home to see his personal collection of art and have cocktails in the living room or his upstairs library, where they would converse until early morning. In addition to the nightly tertulia, Gómez Sicre’s home also became a site for visiting artists to paint; and, in his bedroom, his assistants from the OAS edited documentary films about contemporary Latin American painters.208

Literature was a key topic of discussion at these gatherings. Szyszlo describes

Gómez Sicre as “a voracious reader,” saying he was grateful to the critic for introducing him to Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, a work now regarded as a modernist masterpiece.209 Likewise, José Luis Cuevas credits Gómez Sicre with introducing him to the writings of Franz Kafka; Cuevas subsequently created paintings and print series inspired by the copies of Metamorphosis (1916) and The Trial (published posthumously in 1925) given to him by Gómez Sicre.210 Both Cuevas and artist Carlos Poveda recall the critic separately introducing them to writer Jorge Luis Borges.211 Poveda recalls that

207 Some visitors, such as José Martinez Cañas, recall the constant coo of Gómez Sicre’s doves in the background at dinner. Others, like Diana Beruff, remember the screeches of his small squirrel monkeys. He also kept lots of parakeets, and according to his cousin Horatio (who lived with Gómez Sicre from 1973 until 1991), he smuggled many other rare and exotic creatures in from Latin America. From trips to Brazil, he brought back the monkeys and also a coatimundi, a raccoon-like creature. “My uncle brought it in his pocket,” Horatio Sicre explains, “Customs weren’t so strict as they are today.” Horatio Sicre, interview with the author, 3 March 2010. 208 Felix Angel, interview with the author, 23 February 2010 209 Fernando de Szyzlo, interview with the author, 26 April 2009. 210 See José Luis Cuevas, The Worlds of Kafka & Cuevas; an Unsettling Flight to the Fantasy World of Franz Kafka (Philadelphia: Falcon Press; distributed by G. Wittenborn, New York, 1959). For more on works by Cuevas dealing with Kafka, see my MA thesis, “Renewed Legacy.” 211 See José Luis Cuevas, ¨Mis Encuentros con Jorge Luis Borges,” in Gato Macho, 527-528, and Carlos Poveda, “Jorge Luis Borges En La Calle Maipu 900.” Variedades (Costa Rica) no. 4 (Abril 1966), 34, 103 he, Gómez Sicre, and Borges spoke about possible collaborations, in particular, making a short film either on Borges’ “El Aleph” or Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scribner,” which Borges had translated into Spanish—a translation that Gómez Sicre highly praised.212

Another shared point of reference for Gómez Sicre and his circle was movies— particularly silent films. “He had as many friends [that were] actors as [were] artists,” says his nephew Horacio Sicre, who mentions that Gómez Sicre was delighted when, in the 1960s and 70s, he was able to convince seasoned film stars, such as Joan Crawford,

Douglas Fairbanks, and José Ferrer to narrate the documentaries he produced for the

OAS.213 According to Horacio Sicre, he and his uncle went to the movies at least three times per week when they lived together in Washington. Gómez Sicre was also something of an autograph hound. “When he was a kid, he’d write the stars and ask for signed photos,” says Horacio Sicre.214 As an adult, he continued to write fan letters to celebrities—not only film stars and theater actors, but directors and prominent novelists.

available in the artist files for Carlos Poveda, Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin. These encounters with Borges reveal something about Gómez Sicre modus operandi: he continuously attempted to open a path toward an international celebrity. In the case of Borges, we see a very concrete interest in making some cross-cultural, specifically Pan American products by encouraging a Costa Rican artist and Argentine writer to collaborate on interpreting the work of a classic U.S. author, whether through film or illustration. Not only did Gómez Sicre and his circle meet celebrities, but—and perhaps this is most significant—they regularly documented, discussed, and/or wrote about these interactions. It may be that they focused on these interactions because of the sheer pleasure it brought them; in many cases, they were meeting artists, writers, actors, and directors, whose work they had long admired. But, these meetings also came with a certain boost to Gómez Sicre’s reputation, significantly adding to his cultural cache as international art critic. 212 In his article for Vanidades, Poveda mentions a proposed movie script for “El Aleph” (see previous note). However, in a later email correspondence, he recalled the meeting differently, saying the conversation focused on producing a film based on “Bartleby the Scribner.” Carlos Poveda, correspondence with the author, 16 April 2010 213 Horacio Sicre, interview with the author, 3 March 2010. 214 Ibid. 104 His archives contain a few of these letters from the 1970s—including one in which he asked for autographs from author Mario Vargas Llosa. In another, he pitched a movie idea to Italian film director Luchino Visconti, urging him to create an adaptation of novelist Margueritte Yourcenar’s Memoirs d’Hadrien (1951).215 He also bonded with his artist-friends on the subject; Colombian artist David Mansur recalls that while living in

New York on a Guggenheim fellowship in 1963 and 1964, he, Cuevas, and Gómez Sicre would customarily go on stake-outs to find Greta Garbo, “dedicating their entire evenings to waiting in strategic places where she might pass, only to see her.”216 Tracking down the notoriously reclusive film star became something of a fad in the 1960s; tabloids and entertainment magazines of the time featured stories with maps showing her favorite groceries and shops and the paths she usually took through the city.217

These are some of the cultural activities that characterized Gómez Sicre’s life and helped him form bonds with various cultural producers of Latin America. Many who gravitated to Gómez Sicre were first compelled by his charm and confidence. But that wasn’t the only reason many young artists lived and traveled with Gómez Sicre: many promoted by Gómez Sicre were confined by their financial state and the low-income of their families before receiving his benefaction. Not only were they dumbstruck that a

215 Gómez Sicre to Luchino Visconti, 6 May 1973, folder 2, box 5, JGS Papers. 216 Octavio Peláez Mendoza, “Esta es hoy Greta Garbo” (Bogota 1975), artist file for David Manzur, AMA Archives. According to Manzur, he alone met the actress a year later. After seeing her in Central Park, Manzur followed her for several blocks. At the corner of Madison and 57th St, she turned around, put her hand on his shoulder, and told him, “Isn’t that enough!? I couldn’t speak…and when I told Pepe, who was in his office in Washington, he told me, ‘I envy you and hate you because you managed to do what I never could. I hate you for robbing me of my Greta Garbo!’” David Manzur, correspondence with the author, 20 April 2010. 217 See Alan Levy, “Garbo Walks! Through midtown Manhattan with a Garbo-watcher” Show: The Magazine of the Arts (New York), vol. 3, no. 6 (June 1963), 60-61, 93-94. 105 recognized authority on art was taking interest in their work, but also that he offered them the chance to travel widely and study in the U.S. The benefits of his support and the activities he hosted also came at a significant cost. In many cases, Gómez Sicre could be overbearing and unreasonable. Carlos Poveda recalls “that when he believed in someone.…there was no curtailing his efforts to feel as if he was that person’s protector….”218 Gómez Sicre’s personal attachments were difficult enough to navigate around, but the lines between work and pleasure, office and home, were nearly non- existent. Even those who did not live with Gómez Sicre recall how exhausting working for him was. Szyszlo, who worked at the Visual Arts Division from 1958 to 1960, remarks, “I left because, in reality, I had sacrificed my art to work every day, without missing a day, and could only paint at night.”219 In these instances, we can see Gómez

Sicre converting his home into a kind of workshop. He kept the boundaries between work and home extremely permeable, a strategy through which he could develop an artistic community around the Visual Arts Division and modern art, literature, and film while still sheltering his activities from criticism by politicians or the wider DC public.

218 Poveda continues, “…Such was my case. He tried to oblige himself to me in every way, and because of him, I have been placed in good status within Latin American art, because the majority of exhibitions in which I participated in the 60s and 70s were organized by him. But there came a moment when Pepe wanted to decide which people I could meet….. In those days, I was twenty-seven years old, and to give you an idea of Gómez Sicre’s possessiveness, only he would answer the phone in the house, and when someone called me (especially if it was a woman!) only he decided with whom I could speak.” Carlos Poveda, correspondence with the author, 27 September 2007. 219 Fernando de Szyszlo, interview with the author, 26 April 2009. 106 A WORKSHOP ABROAD

At the same time that he was carving out a cultural space at home, Gómez Sicre tried to foster similar spaces in Latin America, best exemplified by what he and his colleagues named the Taller Libre de Arte (Free Art Workshop). In 1948—the year that the Pan American Union transformed into the Organization of American States—Gómez

Sicre was given a task: to create an exhibition to celebrate the inauguration of Romulo

Gallegos as Venezuela’s first democratically-elected President.220 He worked quickly to create the show; according to Venezuelan poet and writer Ida Gramcko, “the task of selection was arduous and intense….The exhibition was organized in ten days, not one more and not one less.”221 Gómez Sicre borrowed most works from the private collections of his friends and colleagues in Washington (such as diplomats Juan Liscano and Raul Nass), he pulled five works from his own personal collection, and nineteen were loaned by the MoMA. The resulting show, entitled “Exposicion Panamericana de

Pintura Moderna” [Pan-American Exhibition of Modern Painting] included works by 43 different artists from the North and South America. The exhibition opened in February during a week of public celebrations, parades, concerts, and cultural events marking the inauguration—TIME magazine described the festivities as “the biggest week in Caracas since [Simon] Bolivar threw out the Spaniards.”222

220 José Gómez Sicre, “Preliminar,” Exposición panamericana de pintura moderna (Washington, DC: H.K. Press, 1948), folder “1948,” box “Venezuela-Art,” AMA Archives. 221 Ida Gramcko, “La Exposición Panamericana de Pintura Moderna que mañana se abre en el Museo de Bellas Artes,” El Nacional [Caracas], 15 February1948, 8, cited in Milagros González, “Pintura contemporáneo para celebrar la democracia: Una ventana al mundo” unpublished paper, July 2008, Microsoft Word file in the possession of the author. 222 “Venezuela: Dress: Formal,” Time, 23 February 1948, available at www.time.com/time/archive. 107 While in Caracas to set up the exhibition, Gómez Sicre met regularly with artists to talk about their work and the city’s art scene. He found that many of the artists who graduated from the Escuela de Artes Plásticas [School of Visual Arts] were struggling to find places to produce and exhibit their work. Gómez Sicre listened, and then called for a meeting open to all the artists in the city. Together they hatched an ambitious project: to create a multipurpose space for the arts, that could serve as a studio, a meeting place, and a site for exhibitions.223 Gómez Sicre took the proposition directly to the National

Ministry of Education, which agreed to support the creation of the Taller Libre de Arte.

The workshop, which lasted from 1948-1952, consisted of two adjoining rooms on the third floor of the Miranda Building on Mercaderes St, used alternatively for life drawing classes and exhibitions. “All of us upon completing our studies felt disoriented, uncontrolled,” explains artist Alirio Oramas, “and here we have found an environment to continue painting, to resolve our artistic differences. Here we have models. Not only painters meet, but also writers, journalists, musicians, to discuss art. Here we read. We share our knowledge.”224

Oramas served as Director of the Taller Libre. He managed its day-to-day activities from 1948 to 1951. During his tenure, over thirty artists attended the Taller

Libre. They were all relatively young, generally between the ages of 16 and 25 years old.

223 Alirio Oramas is quoted discussing the origins of the Taller Libre in an untitled article, La Esfera, no. 7.855 (13 February 1949), folder “1949,” box “Venezuela-Art,” AMA Archives. 224 Ibid. 108 Many of them went on to become well-recognized artists, notably: Jacobo Borges, Carlos

Cruz-Diez, Mateo Manaure, Pascual Navarro, and Alejandro Otero.225

The Taller Libre was not an artistic workshop in the Renaissance sense: that is, it was not a place where a group of artists worked collectively under the name of a master.

It was not a school with designated teachers, or a place of stylistic unity—in fact, Gómez

Sicre and the artists who founded the workshop took pleasure in the belief that it was a space outside the academy.226 Many from the Taller complained that the curriculum at the

Academy of Fine Arts, Caracas ended with studies of Cezanne. They wanted to become conversant with modern techniques and they wanted to engage with contemporary artists, especially with those working outside of Venezuela.227

Gómez Sicre’s contribution in Caracas was primarily on the practical side: he helped Venezuelan artists procure funds and get government approval for their workshop.

He also connected the young artists of the Taller with his Cuban friends—the art patron

María Luisa Gómez Mena, who donated a space to the group, and writer Alejo

225 In the early 1950s, these last three moved to Paris and along with several others formed “Los Disidentes,” a pivot group in the history of Venezuelan art. For more on the group, see Ariel Jiménez, ed. Alfredo Boulton and His Contemporaries (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2008). 226 The format of the Taller Libre was loosely modeled on Cuba’s Escuela Libre de Artes Plásticas (Free School of Visual Arts), a studio founded by artist Eduardo Abela in 1938 as an alternative to the San Alejandro Academy. To his friend Dewitt Peters, Gómez Sicre extolled the virtues of Abela’s short-lived enterprise (the studio lasted only one year). And he encouraged Peters to adapt a similar model when, in 1944, Peters created the Centre d’Arte, a gallery and artist workshop in Port-au-Prince designed to exhibit and promote contemporary Haitian art. Central to this project was Gómez Sicre’s belief in the connection between modernism and primitive painting: he believed that they shared an anti-academicism. The primitive, by Gómez Sicre’s definition, worked with an “intuitive approach” and was unschooled, inherently untainted by formal art academies. In contrast, the modern artist had undergone academic training, but rejected the lessons that he or she viewed as dogmatic. My thanks go to art historian Gerard Alexis, whose research on the Centre d’Arte reveals the influence of Gómez Sicre and the Escuela Libre de Artes Plasticas. Alexis spoke about the Centre d’Arte in a lecture “Voodoo and Haitian Contemporary Art,” 10 March 2010, the University of Texas at Austin. 227 Lía Caraballo, Taller Libre de Arte, 1948/1952 (Caracas: Museo Jacobo Borges, 1997), 5. 109 Carpentier, who lived close to the workshop and would drop in when he was not working on his novel, The Kingdom of This World. Gómez Sicre also wrote some letters of advice to the young artists, which were published in his art column in El Nacional. In these letters, he urged the students to remain committedly avant-garde.228 “You form part of culture that opens new paths with your non-conformity,” he wrote. “…The worst that can happen to a generation that begins a fight, is to perceive that they have adapted to and are satisfied with their predecessors….Because of this, it appears to me socially noble that you feel unsatisfied with the previous state of visual art in your country…. Non- conformity implies revision, evaluation and even when values begin to root themselves in the historic future, it is necessary that, in the moment, you question them.”229

Gómez Sicre’s success creating the Taller Libre was partly a result of timing: there was an immense optimism in Venezuela surrounding Gallegos’ election. According to art critic Marta Traba, the artists of the Taller, like most Venezuelans, wanted to forget the past—especially the dictatorship of Juan Vicente Gómez, which lasted from 1908 to

1935—and instead wished to concentrate on the future. With Gallegos at the helm, it seemed like there was a cultural opening; the artists felt they could break free from academic traditions and create a new Venezuelan art. However, Traba argues that despite their own wishes, the artists of the Taller Libre were “more linked with the past than with

228 Drafts of Gómez Sicre’s two open letters to the Taller Libre appear in folder 23, box 1, JGS Papers. For a published version of the second letter, see José Gómez Sicre, “Notas de arte: carta abierta a los jóvenes del Taller Libre [de Arte] (II)” in Fuentes documentales y críticas de las artes plásticas venezolanas: siglos XIX y XX, ed. Roldán Esteva-Grillet (Caracas:Universidad Central de Venezuela, Concejo de Desarrollo Científico y Humanístico, 2001), 1059-1066. 229 Ibid. 110 the future.”230 She explains that they remained formally conservative; they painted landscapes, portraits, and still-life, all of which Traba calls, “modest ‘genre’ scenes that referred, without the least bit of subversive spirit, to the expectations of the petit bourgeoisie….”231 She points out that for artists Mateo Manaure, Pascual Navarro, and

Alejandro Otero—who together formed the art group Los Disidentes—their radical aesthetic came later, during their time in Europe.

Alirio Oramas denied this kind of criticism as late as 1985, when he claimed that

“We the artists of the Taller Libre combated decorative taste.”232 This statement comes from an essay where the artist foregrounds the role of workshop in artistic practice:

For the artist the workshop is a defined and sacred space….All the things that surround the contour of the site influence the artist…. The workshop is the hidden side of the artist. His or her playground. The spectator, when he or she sees the work, sees it finished, completed, but has no idea of the intimacy that existed between the work and the artist, and even less of the factors that could have influenced, determined, the creation of the work…. The workshop is something very important for discovering the unknown facets of an artist. In the history of Venezuelan painting there is a tremendous flaw, a terrible gap, and it is that no importance has been given to anything but the product made by its creator, to something called the “picture.”233

From these statements we see that Oramas and Traba present radically different points of view. Traba’s criticisms about the Taller are persuasive when considering the formal qualities of the work, which consisted largely of still-life and genre scenes. But to be fair

230 Marta Traba, “Venezuela, como se forma una plástica hegemónica,” Re-Vista: Del arte y la arquitectura en Colombia. [Bogota] vol. 1, no. 1, April-June, 1978: 5. 231 Ibid. 232 Alirio Oramas, Del Taller de Alirio Oramas Hoy (Caracas: Galeria de Arte Nacional, 1985), republished as “Yo he sido toda mi vida un investigador. No me considero un pintor convencional de cabellete,” in Alirio Oramas: Del misterio a las revelaciones. Exposición antológica, 1946-2005. (Caracas: Galeria de Arte Nacional, 2005), 16. 233 Ibid., 15. 111 to Oramas, Traba’s criticism is entirely based on judging the Taller’s output—the paintings themselves. Taking Oramas’ statements seriously, a key aspect to consider about the Taller Libre was the experience of the workshop.234 Ultimately, it was in the

Taller Libre where Venezuela’s young artists began to think of themselves differently.

Gómez Sicre’s Pan-American Exhibition of Modern Painting was a chance for many of them to see an earlier generation of modernists from across the Americas. There were works from the 1930s and early 1940s by pioneers like Joaquín Torres-García, Emilio

Pettoruti, Cândido Portinari, Amelia Peláez, José Clemente Orozco, and Diego Rivera, alongside more contemporary works by their Venezuelan colleagues, Alejandro Otero,

Héctor Poleo, and Armando Reverón. The exhibition confirmed to them that they were not alone. That, in fact, there was a history of modern art within Latin America.

Long after Gómez Sicre had left, the Taller Libre continued to create exhibitions in homage to Latin American modern artists, including a homage to Orozco, exhibitions of Armando Reverón’s work, and the first exhibition of Argentine concrete art in

Venezuela. Alirio Oramas said he organized the show of José Mimó Mena and Concrete artists in 1948, in reaction to “what was coming to Venezuela from Paris at that moment, specifically Alejandro Otero’s Cafeteras [series].”

234 Many of the articles published about the Taller during its heyday focus on the social atmosphere of the place. For instance, when a journalist from El Nacional asked some members of the group, “Why is the Taller important?” The artists stared him down: “Are you joking?” they said. Finally one artist answered, “Above all else, it serves as a place to get together…for young people with artistic vocations to exchange ideas, to discuss, to study….It means—and this is the most important—the first step towards creating a coordinated art movement.” See “Un Taller Libre Para los Pintores y Artistas Independientes Acordó Crear el Ministerio de Educación Puede ser el Comienzo de un Movimiento Plástico Coordinado,” folder, “1948,” box “Venezuelan Art,” AMA Archives. 112 It’s worth mentioning that what figures like Gómez Sicre and Oramas saw as Pan

American potential, Otero and Los Disidentes took in a different direction: for them, the

Taller provided an intellectual pathway to Europe, specifically Paris. According to

Mateo Manaure, the Taller Libre raised the visibility of the arts in Caracas, and enabled artists to get scholarships to travel abroad. He says “The workshop reinforced Los

Disidentes. It pioneered something that was brewing but could not be done in Venezuela, the more appropriate place was Paris.”235 Because of the tremendous influence of the

Los Disidentes, the Taller Libre has long since been understood as a stepping stone to

Europe. But we can read it as much more than that: the exhibition of José Mimo Mena, like Gómez Sicre’s Pan American exhibition, offer another indication of the Taller

Libre’s value; it was not simply a point of departure, but a chance for Venezuelan artists to see themselves as part of a Latin American modernist tradition. Oramas recalls that before he organized the concrete art exhibition, he and Mimo Mena both agreed that Paris was not the only origin point for abstraction. They spoke of Otero’s Cafetera series and

Mimo Mena said, “‘These people come from Paris and bring that? No buddy, I’ve got this.’” He then showed books and photographs of Madi works to Oramas, who became excited about putting together an exhibition at the Taller. “It was the first time in my life that I saw a manifesto,” recalled Oramas.236 Perhaps Oramas meant this literally: that this was the first time he saw a written manifesto. Or, perhaps, he meant it metaphorically:

235 Caraballo, Taller Libre de Arte, 1948/1952, 6. 236 Alirio Oramas and Ernesto J. Guevara, “Entrevista,” in Alirio Oramas: Del misterio a las relevaciones; Galeria de Arte Nacional; Exposición antológica, 1946-2005 (Caracas, Venezuela: Galeria de Arte Nacional, 2005), 55. 113 that concrete art aesthetically constituted its own manifesto, for it attested that abstract art was not merely a European import, but a phenomenon rooted in South America.

FROM NETWORK TO CENTER

Gómez Sicre had hopes of creating other artist workshops across Latin

America.237 However, the Taller Libre in Caracas was the only one he was able to successfully launch. With the rise of democracy in Venezuela, Gómez Sicre could effectively draw a parallel between the political liberty promised by Gallegos’s administration and the promise of creative liberty for Venezuelan artists. In effect, this was a reversal of the intellectual operation as outlined by Bourdieu: Gómez Sicre was channeling events taking place on the political field to generate a cultural outcome. The

Taller Libre played to the creative interests of the artists and the democratic beliefs of both the newly formed OAS and the Gallegos administration. But democracy in

Venezuela did not last: after nine months in office, the Gallegos administration was overtaken by a military coup. Another democratic election would not take place in the country until 1958. The Taller Libre persisted until 1952, but it no longer seemed a site of innovation, instead, it became a place of refuge.

The overthrow of the Gallegos government was the forerunner to a series of events in the 1950s and 1960s across Latin America that called into question the Pan

American ideals promoted by Gómez Sicre and the institution for which he worked. The

237 Ramon Osuna, interview with the author, 20 February 2009. 114 most notable of these include the OAS tacit approval of the U.S.-led overthrow of the

Guatemalan government in 1954, the adoption of the trade embargo against Cuba in

1962, and the OAS’s involvement in the U.S. occupation of Santo Domingo in 1965.

Adding to the general distrust of cultural activities of the OAS, a flurry of news reports appeared in the mid-1960s revealing that the U.S. government was engaging in cultural espionage, bankrolling organizations like the Congress for Cultural Freedom and funding literary magazines such as Encounter, Cuadernos, and Mundo Nuevo to promote right- wing interests.238

Throughout these events, Gómez Sicre’s rhetoric of a Pan-American network remained resolute, but his ideals seemed increasingly detached from reality. Andrea

Giunta notes that “the emphatic and insistent discourse that called for the definitive abolition of ‘centers,’ which Gómez Sicre reiterated in the pages of the OAS’s Bulletin of

Visual Arts, revealed, little by little, its fictional structure.”239 She outlines a set of paradigmatic shifts in the mid- to late 1960s that had serious repercussions for those working in the cultural field, two of which deserve special mention: changes in artistic practice and changes in the concept of the intellectual. The rise in pop art, happenings, installation, performance and conceptual art presented modernist art critics like Gómez

Sicre with a challenge. Giunta explains:

238The New York Times broke the story on April 26, 1966 in the article “Electronic Prying Grows: CIA Is Spying From 100 Miles Up; Satellites Probe Secrets of the Soviet Union ELECTRONIC AIDS TO PRYING GROW Two Nations Vie in Cosmic Survelillance Earthbound Gadgetry Developed Too” The New York Times, 26 April 1966, 1. Available through ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times (1851-2008), [ProQuest document ID: 03624331] . For an overview on the scholarly literature on this topic, refer to note 177. 239 Giunta, Avant-Garde, Internationalism, and Politics, 224. 115 It was not possible to consider pop art, the happenings, or mass-media art in terms of the modernist canon. It was not a question of evolution or of rupture in order to expand the base. Rather, it was a new situation in which art could no longer be thought of in terms of language or composition. From that movement forward, art would also be viewed as a system whose communicative matrixes did not depend upon surfaces, but rather on other materials that had invaded its territory: popular culture, new technologies, language sciences, and the means of communication.240

While critics like Jorge Romero Brest and Marta Traba actively took the steps to understand pop art, happenings, and mass-media art, Gómez Sicre never developed the critical framework necessary to appreciate these modes of art making. He remained committed to traditional forms of painting, sculpture, drawing, and printmaking. This was in large part a personal choice, but also one reinforced by the conservatism of the institution where he worked; for instance, as late as 1968 higher-ups at the OAS were fearful about nudity in art, canceling an exhibition of Puerto Rican artist Rafael

Villamil’s work because his collages, made from magazine clippings, included images of nude men and women.241

These changes in artistic practice in the 1960s coincided with major changes in the concept of the intellectual. Citing the influence of writers like Jean-Paul Sartre,

Raymond Williams, and Pierre Bourdieu, Giunta tracks a conceptual shift where artists were increasingly identified as (and understood themselves to be) intellectuals, politically engaged in shaping the social sphere. This transformation culminated in the global student movements of 1968—a period when artists and protestors became conceptually

240 Ibid., 256. 241 See “Exhibit With Nudes Canceled,” The Washington Post 5 July 1968, B3. Available online through ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The Washington Post (1877-1995). 116 aligned in their critique of government authority, the news media, and art institutions.242

Under these circumstances, Gómez Sicre’s insistent claims of “autonomy” or

“objectivity” no longer held the traction they once did. They only contributed to the growing distrust of institutions such as the OAS. In the 1950s and early 1960s, Gómez

Sicre worked to establish Washington as a key destination in his imagined art circuit.

Eventually, by the 1970s he had to reformulate his goals: he turned his attention to building a center for art instead of a network for artists, which culminated in his creation of the Museum of Modern Art of Latin America in 1976.

242 For further discussion of these transformations, see Giunta, Avant-Garde, Internationalism, and Politics, 244-290. 117 Conclusion: A Museum Personified

It seems ironic that José Gómez Sicre, despite his many statements about the universality of art and its ability to cross geographic and cultural boundaries, can be credited as the creator of one of the first regionally-specific art museums in the United

States. For years, the Museum of Modern Art of Latin America has stood as a sort of orphan art museum along the national mall, overshadowed by national monuments, the

Smithsonian Institution, and the nearby Corcoran Gallery of Art. But the museum represents the first step in a legacy that continues to shape the physical and intellectual landscape of Washington, DC: in 2004 the Smithsonian Institution completed the

National Museum of the American Indian, and plans are underway to create separate museums dedicated to African American, Latino, and Latin American culture and art.

The founding of the Museum of Modern Art of Latin America was defined by ideological contradictions and compromises. Even in its title, the museum’s Pan American underpinnings were downplayed: the Museum of Modern Art of Latin America separates out “Latin America” from the rest of the hemisphere.243

Certainly, by creating a museum dedicated to the exhibition of modern art, Gómez

Sicre had accomplished a long sought-after goal. After joining the Pan American Union in 1946, he had spent a decade making do with the space afforded to him. And between

1957 and 1976, he had successfully used the gallery in the basement of the OAS main building—in 1963, art critic Frank Getlein had even referred to the place as “an oasis in

243 Only within the last decade has the museum been renamed “Art Museum of the Americas” to appear more inclusive. 118 the desert” of the Washington, DC arts scene.244 For years, these exhibitions flourished and brought international attention to the OAS, despite the fact that the gallery and offices of the Visual Arts Division were literally subterranean.

In 1976, Gómez Sicre founded the Museum of Modern Art of Latin America.

However, despite a new museum building, his shows lacked the visibility once held in earlier times. “This museum is just like the Freer used to be: Nobody’s in it,” writes Jo

Ann Lewis in a 1980 article for The Washington Post. 245 As recently as June 2012 The

Washingon Post called the museum “the Miss Havisham of the Washington art scene” saying “It’s rich with assets but concealed from public view.”246 What accounts for this persistent invisibility? According to curator Félix Ángel, who worked at the Art Museum of the Americas from 1978 to 1989, the trouble stemmed from Gómez Sicre’s narrow vision: he only petitioned for the funds to renovate the OAS “Casa de las Americas” building into a museum building, but made no attempt to enlarge the staff under him and expand the museum into specialized departments (curatorial, educational, development, archival). In Ángel’s opinion, Gómez Sicre become complaisant in his position at the

OAS by the mid-1970s, using his intimate knowledge of OAS bureaucracy towards achieving more selfish ends—namely, avoiding retirement and maintaining his power as director of the museum, until he was forced to retire in the early 1980s.247

244 This statement by Frank Getlein, art critic of the Evening Star, was cited by Luis Lastra in “Summer without Smoke,” Art of the Americas Bulletin 1 (1966), 27-28. 245 Jo Ann Lewis, “Washington’s Lost Latin American Art” The Washington Post, 8 July 1980, B9. 246 Stephanie Merry, “Art Museum of the Americas opens ‘Constellations,’” The Washington Post, Friday 22 June 2012. Available online: http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/museums/art-museum-of- the-americas-opens-constellations/2012/06/21/gJQACMxBvV_story.html 247 Félix Ángel, interview with the author, 23 February 2010. 119 Even Gómez Sicre seemed to recognize that the resulting museum was a far cry from early dreams. Years after the museum was built, he lamented:

In retrospect, as I reflect on my own contribution, I realize that more could have been done. It is like wanting to develop an airplane factory and ending up with a bicycle shop. One always wants to have what one loves the most to be appreciated and unconditionally supported by everyone, in this particular case, especially by the political institutions that purport to serve that cause. Reality is at times disheartening.248

His wistful statements express both his desires for acceptance of Latin American culture and for its potential to circulate. It also suggests his disillusionment about his own ability to transport art; according to his metaphor, he had failed at creating cultural vehicles that, like airplanes, were self-propelled, could travel long distances, or fly in coordinated, military-like formations. Instead he had unexpectedly created a modest place for repairs and temporary upkeep, a bicycle shop, a place where the vehicle in question could travel only in small circuits, through immense physical and individual effort.

For artists, curators, and critics interested in Latin American art, the museum became completely synonymous with Gómez Sicre—a personification of his tastes, his politics, and his flaws. By the time the Museum of Modern Art of Latin America was founded, Gómez Sicre and the Visual Arts Division had lost their symbolic power, and had been discredited as pawns in an imperialist project. As Ángel points out, Gómez

Sicre made no effort to grow or reform the institution. It seems the critic was torn between his global ambitions and his desire to maintain all aspects of the museum within arm’s reach. He liked the idea of a museum personified by its director. Writing a

248 José Gómez Sicre, “Foreword,” Contemporary Latin American Artists; Exhibitions of the Organization of American States 1941-1964, ed., Annick Sanjurjo (Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 1997), v. 120 homage about Alfred Barr, Gómez Sicre expresses of the nostalgia for the museum’s early days—when it was defined entirely by Barr. Gómez Sicre expresses his relief that, although the museum grew to “unfathomable” stature, it did not become “the monster created by Dr. Frankenstein,” but remained true to the vision of its founder; he reminds his readers that “The Museum was the idea of a man, a man of singular modesty despite his exceptional intelligence and sensitivity, whose name is Alfred H. Barr.”249

There is no doubt that the Museum of Modern Art of Latin America was inextricably tied to its founder. But, his cultural work was not single-handed. Rather, it developed within a specific artistic community around the Visual Arts Division and through relationships (some collaborative, some divisive) with fellow critics in the U.S. and Latin America. Part II of this dissertation continues my endeavor to widen the view of the OAS’s involvement in exhibiting and promoting Latin American art, by focusing on the work of Rafael Squirru, poet and art critic who worked as Gómez Sicre’s supervisor at the OAS in the 1960s and presented a different Pan-American framework for the arts.

249 José Gómez Sicre, “Al lector,” Boletín de Artes Visuales 16: 10. It is worth noting that Gómez Sicre’s characterization of the OAS museum as airplane factory recalls the famous analogy made by Alfred Barr between the collection of the Museum of Modern Art and a torpedo moving through time—both analogies draw on industrial and militaristic metaphors to describe the museum’s role. See Kirk Varnadoe, “The Evolving Torpedo: Changing Ideas of the Collection of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art,” in The Museum of Modern Art at Mid-Century: Continuity and Change, ed. John Elderfield, Studies in Modern Art 5 (New York: Museum of Modern, 1995). 121 PART II: RAFAEL SQUIRRU AND THE DEPARTMENT OF CULTURAL AFFAIRS

Introduction: Phantom Museums and New Men

In 1956, the Argentine poet and art critic Rafael Squirru founded the Museum of

Modern Art of Buenos Aires (MAMBA).250 The institution, for its first four years, existed in name only, with no galleries or collection. It was a one-man operation, shaped entirely by Squirru. One never knew where a MAMBA exhibition would turn up or what artists it might include; Squirru organized some shows in galleries around town or improvised others in friends’ homes. Local news reports from the period suggest that some porteños took notice of Squirru’s exhibitions and applauded him for bringing attention to the city’s contemporary art.251 Still, Squirru wished that his institution—so impressively named a

“Museum of Modern Art”—had its own brick-and-mortar museum, one that would help legitimize his activities. Even his friends teased him about it: they referred to Squirru as the “Director of the Phantom Museum,” a title he was eager to refute.

By 1960, he had arranged a permanent gallery for the museum in the Teatro

General San Martín, the city’s newest theater for the performing arts. That same year

Squirru was named Argentina’s Director of Cultural Relations—a position he held for two years under the administration of President Arturo Frondizi while also continuing his

250 From 1956 to 1989, the Museo de Arte Moderna de Buenos Aires was abbreviated “MAM.” When the museum relocated to its present location in San Telmo in 1989, the institution began referring to itself as “MAMBA.” For consistency, I use the contemporary abbreviation, “MAMBA,” throughout this chapter. 251 “Porteño” is a Spanish term to refer to residents of Buenos Aires, meaning “living in or from the port city.” The MAMBA archives contains clippings from newspapers including the Buenos Aires Herald, Clarín, Los Diarios, Primera Plana,and La Razón, which highlight Squirru’s activities and travels on behalf of the museum dating in the late 1950s and 1960s. See the “actividades” folders (arranged by year), Biblioteca y Centro de Documentación, Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, Argentina (Hereafter “MAMBA Archives”). 122 work as head of MAMBA. The government position was an honorary one and came with no salary. But Squirru used it as a stepping stone, an opportunity to travel and to arrange more exhibitions of Argentine art abroad. In 1962, he was asked to serve as Director of

Cultural Affairs at the OAS, a position he held from 1963 to 1970.

Shortly after joining the OAS, Squirru published The Challenge of the New Man:

A Cultural Approach to the Latin American Scene (1964), a booklet that reproduces four speeches he delivered in his first year in Washington, DC. In these speeches, Squirru lays out his philosophy about art and its relationship to politics. At the time, the OAS was responsible for administering the Alliance for Progress, a program launched in 1961 by

President John F. Kennedy, who pledged that the U.S. would invest approximately twenty billion dollars of economic aid in Latin America within the decade. In The

Challenge of the New Man, Squirru insists that for policies like the Alliance to work, they must have a cultural component. He highlights the role Latin American intellectuals, artists, and poets must play in creating free and democratic societies in the midst of the

Cold War. “Latin America is underdeveloped economically and socially,” writes Squirru,

“but Latin America is not underdeveloped culturally. In fact, Latin American countries have a lot to offer in the realm of creative achievement. Some of the best artists, composers, writers, and intellectuals can be found in Latin America….These men are the new men.”252

This term “new man” repeatedly appears in Squirru’s writing and in his statements to the press from the 1950s and 1960s. In isolation, its meaning may seem

252 Squirru, The Challenge of the New Man, 15-16. 123 obscure; Squirru offered few specific explanations for it, instead employing poetic and tautological explanations, such as in his statement above that “the best artists, composers, writers, and intellectuals…are new men.” To understand his thoughts on the “new man” requires us to look at his statements in relation to their historical and geographic contexts.

(Hereafter I dispense with the quotation marks around new man, though I still consider it a historical phrase, and a problematic one at that.) Squirru used the phrase regularly, but at no point was the rhetoric of the new man exclusively his own. Rather it formed part of much broader discourse, attached to international debates about modernism at mid- century.253

In the next two chapters, I contextualize Squirru’s statements about the new man, highlighting how his use of the phrase differed between Argentina and the United States.

In Chapter Three, I examine the term’s relevance in Buenos Aires in the 1950s for

Squirru and for his colleagues. I argue that the new man played a key role in Squirru’s

253 We might consider the new man an offshoot of what art historian Michael Leja, in his study of Abstract Expressionism in New York in the 1940s and 1950s, calls “Modern Man discourse.” According to Leja, the violence of the twentieth century, especially World War I and II, raised fundamental questions across the Western Hemisphere about the nature of mankind; he coins the phrase “Modern Man discourse” to refer to the preponderance of material in the U.S. concerned with what it meant to be a “modern man,” material especially from popular culture that he argues exhibit a cohesive set of anxieties about the inner-self, particularly the mind’s primitive and unconscious components, and the human predilection for destruction. Leja notes that discussions of the “modern man” took a variety of forms and usages, but professionals from across various disciplines, whether they were art critics, anthropologists, journalists, philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, or theologists, all tended to speak of the “modern man” as an ideal and in heroic terms. They consistently cast the “modern man” as white, heterosexual, and male; and they described “modern men” as individuals aware of their own subjectivity, who kept the dark sides of their unconscious at bay, and in doing so, were defined by their “enlarged capacity for containing evil, destructive, and inexplicable behavior” (Leja 16). Essentially, Leja uses “Modern Man discourse” to ground the work of Abstract Expressionists in a particular time and place—positing their paintings as artifacts produced not in isolation from mass culture, but in dialogue with it. Not only did Abstract Expressionist painters, like Gottlieb, Pollock, Newman, Rothko, and Still, speak about subjectivity in relation to their work, they themselves were continually cast as “modern men,” able to vent their primal, violent, and masculine urges through the creative outlet of painting. See Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). 124 curatorial strategy as he founded the MAMBA; he used the phrase to describe contemporary Argentine artists, who he believed could restore Argentina’s international reputation after World War II and the overthrow of Juan Domingo Perón.

Next, in Chapter Four, I discuss Squirru’s arrival in Washington, DC and explain how his concept of the new man increasingly became tied to the politics of the Cold War and his conception of John F. Kennedy. Through his continued use of new man rhetoric, he sought to build publicity and what he called “mystique” around the Alliance for

Progress, and at the same time, he hoped to counter Ché Guevara’s socialist interpretation of the phrase. While Squirru spoke of the new man to address issues of art and democracy, Guevara was using the phrase to describe a generation of socialist revolutionaries inspired by the Cuban Revolution. I argue that Squirru and Guevara promoted competing embodiments of the new man: Squirru generated an image of

Kennedy as the embodiment of the new man, while Guevara framed Fidel Castro as one.

I focus on how Squirru and Guevara separately applied the concept to visual art, arguing that their philosophies relied on different imaginings of Pan Americanism and the potential for Latin American culture to create transnational alliances.

Throughout these two chapters I also underscore how Squirru’s concept of the new man dovetailed with his desire to create museums to showcase Latin American art. I see museum-making as a key thread running through Squirru’s work in Argentina and

Washington. Long after he was nicknamed “Director of the Phantom Museum,” Squirru found his ideals and objectives still haunted by museums; and through his efforts to build

125 museum institutions—what he called “the new house for the new man”—we see how he set his idea of culture against the models proposed by Perón and by Guevara.

126

Chapter Three: The New Man Movement in Buenos Aires

Four years before Rafael Squirru established the MAMBA in the Teatro San

Martin, his “Phantom Museum” took the form of a giant steam ship named the Yapeyú

(Figure 16). The ship, which carried in its cabins the first exhibition organized under the auspices of the MAMBA, left the port of Buenos Aires in late September 1956 for a six- month voyage around the world; it stopped at twenty three different cities including

Capetown, Durban, Havana, Honolulu, Jakarta, Los Angeles, Melbourne, Montevideo,

New Orleans, Osaka, Rio de Janeiro, Shanghai, and San Francisco, among others. Squirru did not accompany the exhibition. Instead he asked his friend, the artist and set designer

Cecilio Madanes, to oversee it on its journey; at each port of call, Madanes was supposed to have a banner unfurled along the side of the boat proclaiming it the first “Floating

Exhibition of Modern Art”; he also was supposed to invite locals to come aboard and see the show, which included works by fifty different Argentine painters.254 This exhibition has since become a symbolic origin point for the MAMBA, one that highlights the innovative methods Squirru employed to gain international recognition for contemporary

Argentine art.255 Launched exactly one year after the overthrow of Juan Domingo Perón, the floating exhibition was also emblematic of the intense optimism among porteños

254 Cecilio Madanes (1921-2000) is best known for founding the Teatro Caminito, where he staged street performances in the La Boca neighborhood of Buenos Aires. 255 The exhibition onboard the Yapeyú has been highlighted by Andrea Giunta, Avant-Garde, Internationalism, and Politics, 68-69. In an interview between Squirru and Giunta, Squirru mentions Cecilio Madanes’ role as co-organizer of the exhibition, and the sign that ran the length of the boat, see Avant-Garde, Internationalism, and Politics, 311, 34n. Curator and art historian Beverly Adams also discusses the exhibition in her dissertation, “Locating the International: Art of Brazil and Argentina in the 1950s and 1960s” (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, December 2000), 102-113. 127 involved with the arts, many of whom had been frustrated by eight years of Peronism; the boat’s launch, seen in the context of the post-Perón years, situates Squirru’s curatorial projects within a specific historical and political milieu—one which would affect his later work for the OAS.

Under Perón, the Argentine government generally maintained a conservative attitude towards literature and art. During his first two presidential terms (1946-1952,

1952-1955), Perón garnered wide support from the country’s urban and rural working class, while he maintained a tense, even adversarial relationship with the Argentine upper class and its intellectuals.256 Perón’s extensive propaganda campaigns infused official formulations of culture with imagery of the president and first lady, Eva Perón, and slogans glorifying Perón’s Justicialist party. Art historian Ana Pozzi Harris indicates that, in the early 1950s, there was an “overbearing presence of Peronist images in Buenos

Aires” which made it impossible to avoid pro-Perón propaganda in the course of one’s everyday life.257 Images of the Peróns appeared on posters, billboards, pamphlets, newspapers, magazines, as well as in school books. Likewise, Peronist mottos were anonymously spray-painted throughout the city. Pozzi Harris notes that porteños were

256 The literature on Perón is vast. For a primer on Perón’s political and social policies, see Luis Alberto Romero’s acclaimed book, A History of Argentina in the Twentieth Century, trans. James P. Brennan (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University, 2003). For a cultural perspectives on Peronism, see The New Cultural History of Peronism: Power and Identity in Mid-Twentieth-Century Argentina, ed. Matthew B. Karush and Oscar Chamosa (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010) and Maríano Ben Plotkin, Mañana es San Perón: A Cultural History of Perón’s Argentina (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002). Contemporary artist Daniel Santoro has created a large body of work in response to the Peronist propaganda that shaped his adolescence. See Daniel Santoro, Manual del niño peronista/ Textbook of the Peronist Child (Buenos Aires: La Marca, 2002) and Horacio González, Eduardo Lopez, Daniel Santoro, and Guido Indij, Perón Willing!: Classic Peronist Graphics (Buenos Aires: La Marca, 2006) 257Ana Pozzi Harris, “Marginal Disruptions: Concrete and Madí Art in Argentina, 1940-1955” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas, 2007), 152. 128 also bombarded by Perón’s frequent radio speeches, and by agit-prop cars that drove around the city playing slogans and speech excerpts.258

In this context, the intellectual elite struggled to carve out their own cultural niche distinct from the mass Peronist culture that surrounded them. Several scholars refer to the situation as “interior exile” to describe how artists and intellectuals created networks within the city where they could live and work in an insulated environment, hiding away from the dominant culture.259 The Perón regime repeatedly attempted to humiliate its opponents: for instance in 1946 the writer Jorge Luis Borges was fired from his post as cataloguer at the Miguel Cané municipal library for openly criticizing the government and he was “promoted” to Inspector of Poultry at a public marketplace—he declined the position.260

The coup d’état that ended the Perón presidency in September 1955 signaled positive changes for artists and intellectuals. Under the new provisional government set up by General Eduardo Lonardi, leader of the Revolución Libertatora that toppled the

Perón government, Borges’s reputation was restored as he was appointed the director of

258 For more on the propaganda and mass culture associated with Peronism, see Ana Pozzi Harris, 149-154. 259 Literary historian John King was the first to describe a “internal exile” that affected Victoria Ocampo and many of the Argentine writers contributing to Sur magazine in the 1950s who lived in fear of censorship and/or incarceration if they openly criticized the regime. See John King, Sur: A Study of the Argentine Literary Journal and Its Role in the Development of Culture, 1931-1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 131. Art historian Andrea Giunta expands on King’s concept of “internal exile,” (which is translated as “interior exile” in the English version of her book) noting its impact on those involved with the visual arts, such as art critic Jorge Romero Brest, founder of the magazine Ver y Estimar. According to Giunta, the magazine become “something close to a laboratory” for Romero Brest and his circle, a place where they promoted those aesthetic and cultural values that they believed were being marginalized under Perón. Giunta, Avant-Garde, Internationalism, and Politics, 170. 260 Francisca Folch, “Jorge Luis Borges muses on his desert island book selections” Cultural Compass Blog, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Tuesday, February 8, 2011. http://www.utexas.edu/opa/blogs/culturalcompass/2011/02/08/jorge-luis-borges-muses-on-his-desert- island-book-selections/ [Accessed 4 March 2011] 129 the Biblioteca Nacional. Likewise, art critic Jorge Romero Brest, another who had remained in “interior exile” under Perón, became director of the Museo Nacional de

Bellas Artes, perhaps the most prominent position for officially redefining the aesthetics associated with his country. According to Andrea Giunta, the post-Perón period represented “a time, for some sectors, of historical revenge,” as artists and critics like

Romero Brest attempted to instill cultural values they believed would delegitimize

Peronism and its legacy.261 She notes that it was a period also characterized by a sense of euphoria shared between intellectuals and government officials; for instance, Carlos

Adrogué, the new Minister of Education, gave an impression of this optimism when he proclaimed at the opening of the 1955 National Salon that “the Revolución Libertadora has brought us before a new Renaissance.”262

Squirru, like the majority of those involved in the city’s art scene, was critical of

Perón.263 Yet, whereas his contemporaries lived in “interior exile,” Squirru first developed his impressions of the leader while living abroad from 1946 to 1949, attending the University of Edinburgh in Scotland to earn a law degree. In post-war Britain, he likely encountered a general dislike for Peronism and sensed that Argentina’s

261 Giunta, Avant-Garde, Internationalism, and Politics, 26. She explains that artists and critics in the post- Peronist period tended to characterize cultural life under Perón by “dictatorship, tyranny, attacks against freedom, international isolation, demagogy, populism, the lack of aesthetic values…. What characterized the various discourses on the visual arts in the post-Peronist period was the degree of agreement prevailing over what the next program should be. The agenda was primarily focused on reestablishing conditions considered necessary for artistic production: absolute freedom for creators, openness to the international scene, modernization of languages….Novelty, youth, and internationalism would be the key words upon which institutional projects would be organized with increasing frequency. ” Ibid., 58-59. 262 “Inauguróse ayer el salón de Bellas Artes con la asistencia de Aramburu y Rojas,” El Mundo, December 6, 1956, 8; cited in Giunta, Avant-Garde, Internationalism, and Politics, 57. 263 In a letter to Argentine poet and journalist Miguel Grinberg, Squirru mentions his participation in an early student protest opposing Perón’s run for presidency. The letter is republished in its entirety in Eloisa Squirru, ¡Tan Rafael Squirru!, 158-162. 130 international reputation had become tarnished for providing a safe-haven for Nazi war criminals—a topic likely touched upon during his discussions with his fellow law students and professors about the Nuremburg trials.264 After he graduated from

Edinburgh in 1949, Squirru returned to Buenos Aires, but refused to practice law because he felt that under Perón the legal system was broken.265 Instead, he earned a living teaching English, and immersed himself in the arts.

Squirru and his friends believed that Perón’s exile in 1955 signaled, like Carlos

Adrogué stated, the start of “a new Renaissance.” They latched onto the term “new man,” which, like the word “Renaissance,” relates to rebirth. “The new man is an evangelical notion,” Squirru told me in July 2010, adding that he considers the term tied to the concept of rebirth: “When Nicodemus asks Christ how to save himself, he states that ‘you must be reborn.’ The second birth,” says Squirru, “is a spiritual rebirth.”266 A theological thread runs through much of Squirru’s art criticism. In Buenos Aires, he and

264 Among the important figures that Rafael Squirru met at Edinburgh, Eloisa Squirru mentions her father’s contact with “Judge Cooper, called ‘The hanging judge’ because of his determining role in the then recent Nuremburg trials.” ¡Tan Rafael Squirru!, 39. I have been unable to find any judge by that name in the scholarly literature on the Nuremburg trials. However, the anecdote does suggest that the trials were a central topic of discussion at the University of Edinburgh. For a discussion of British critical attitudes toward Perón, see Roger Grevil, “The Denigration of Peronism,” in The Land that England Lost: Argentina and Britain, a Special Relationship (ed. Alistair Hennessy and John King) (London and New York: I.B. Taurus, 1993), 93-106. There were also strong anti-Peronist currents in the U.S.; see Victoria Allison, “White Evil: Peronist Argentina in the United States Imagination Since 1955,” American Studies International 42, no. 1 (February 2004): 4-48. 265 According to Eloisa Squirru, he ultimately abandoned his law career in response to a comment by one of his professors at Edinburg: Squirru related to his daughter that, after proposing to write a comparative study of the Argentine and British constitutions for a class, the professor “looked at me very seriously and asked: ‘In your country, do they respect the constitution? I was a bit disconcerted. I responded, not always. ‘Then pick another topic.’…in this period, I took myself very seriously...[and when] I returned to Argentina, I felt that I could not practice a profession whose highest law was not respected.” Eloisa Squirru, ¡Tan Rafael Squirru!, 43. 266 Rafael Squirru, interview with the author, 1 July 2010. During our interview, he spoke about his Catholic upbringing, especially his education by Jesuits at the Saint Andrews Scot School in Buenos Aires, and acknowledged the influence of Christianity on his intellectual thought. 131 his colleagues took the new man concept from its theological origins, incorporating it into more secular discussions about the human spirit. He recalls that, in the late 1950s, he and his friends met regularly “to theorize and exchange ideas about the Hombre Nuevo, a

Pauline conception taken up successively throughout history, which, for us, went way beyond the political connotations that others later attributed to that dynamic vision and essentially humanist approach to the human condition….”267 The group functioned like a

European salon; its participants included the poet and philosopher Fernando Demaría, with whom Squirru founded las Ediciones del Hombre Nuevo, a press through which they published poetry; writers Federico González Frías and Manolo Belloni, whose treatise on the “Hombre Nuevo” was published by the MAMBA in 1959;268 artists Pérez Calis,

Federico Martino, Leopoldo Presas, and Kenneth Kemble, and the art dealer Natalio

Jorge Povarché.269

The “Hombre Nuevo” (which they abbreviated H.N.) seemed a flexible term for the group, taken up and used to different degrees by each member. Overall, the new man related to their shared ideals about remaking Argentine society: it was a way for the group to speak of a new consciousness they envisioned for their countrymen. All of them, in one way or another, wished to transform the art of Argentina, wiping the slate clean of

267 Rafael Squirru, Kenneth Kemble: Ensayo crítico biográfico. (Buenos Aires: Arte Gaglianone, 1987), 6. Available online at: http://www.paseosimaginarios.com/artistadelmes/Kemble/notas1.html [Accessed 28 July 2011] 268 Belloni’s book takes the form of a prose poem, divided into thirty-three cantos written in stream-of- consciousness around the metaphor of the “New Man.” Belloni, himself introduces it as “un poema, un ensayo, un monogdiálogo, un plan, ¿un caos?” (a poem, an essay, a monologue, a plan, a chaos?” Manolo Belloni. El Hombre Nuevo (Buenos Aires: Municipalidad de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires, Museo de Arte Moderno, 1959). A copy of this book is located in folder “Actividades 1959,” MAMBA Archives. 269 Squirru, Kenneth Kemble: Ensayo crítico biográfico, 32. 132 Peronist culture. They saw the new man as the figure leading the transformation; Belloni, for instance, writes that “The H.N. affirms and shapes: he looks at the country…like the sculptor looks at raw stone….”270 That Belloni compares the new man to a sculptor is telling: he, like his colleagues, equated the “new man” with the artist. In his description, the new man focuses his vision on his own country, on the national.

Squirru likewise wrote about the new man in terms of the nation. However, he believed the new man should revamp not only the nation, but also international perceptions of Argentina after Perón. In 1955, shortly after Perón’s departure from office,

Squirru published “El hombre nuevo – Solución política argentina,” in Demos magazine.271 It is the first work where Squirru employed the phrase. In it, he describes the new man as having both political independence and creative freedom. In terms of politics, Squirru sees the new man as someone who remains above local party politics and is aware of dangers of demagoguery (Squirru points to Perón as one such demagogue). He also describes the new man as profoundly connected to the people; he writes that the new man “feels all mankind is linked in a common destiny and looks to make a contribution, however modest it may be.”272 Both of these aspects—a resistance to party politics and a connection to the people’s “common destiny”—were vital to

Squirru’s use of the idea in the United States and also made the new man easily adaptable with Pan-Americanism.

270 Belloni. El Hombre Nuevo, 6. 271Demos was published by the Ateneo de la Juventud Democrática Argentina in the 1950s. The title is an abbreviation for “Democrats,” but it also can be translated as an imperative “Let’s Do It!” 272 Rafael Squirru, “El hombre nuevo- Solución política argentina,” Demos 1955, 10-23, cited in Eloisa Squirru, ¡Tan Rafael Squirru!, 263. 133 In Squirru’s formulation of the new man, the artist and intellectual—figures that were relegated to the margins under Perón—are presented as integral to society. Squirru believed his country should be taken seriously as an innovator, producing original art, and leading the latest international art movements.273 In Squirru’s early writing it is clear that he felt Argentina’s artists were not only alienated by their own national politics, but that they had few, if any, opportunities outside of Argentina. He often wrote that

Argentine art—and Latin American art in general—seemed unjustly surrounded by international derision and accusations of derivativeness.

His exhibition on the Yapeyú was laced with such concerns. Below I excerpt at length Squirru’s “A Word of Introduction,” from the pamphlet accompanying that exhibition, because it speaks to the artistic and international character Squirru attributed to Argentine painting and to the new man:

It is not easy to penetrate the soul of our everyday neighbor. Leaving aside the question of our power of penetration, the fact is that reality lies always hidden beneath forms deceitful in the measure of their obliviousness.

Many will consider the clothing of the better part of Argentine painters as derived from one European school or another: some will sneer at the obvious fact that the paternity of Picasso, or that of Klee or Mondrian may be detected, they will eagerly look for the folkloric touch, and feel disappointed at the almost total absence of ‘gauchos’ in broad hats or beautiful ‘señoritas’ or colourful indians.

273 Squirru did not explicitly tie his beliefs about Argentine modern art to a particular artistic style, but he did champion the work of his colleagues in the New Man group; he repeatedly wrote about artists, such as Kenneth Kemble, Antonio Berni, Alberto Greco, and Marta Minujín, who incorporated found objects and detritus in their paintings, assemblages, and sculptures—works he later referred to as “the art of things.” Rather than rally behind certain formal tendencies, Squirru tended to focus his discussions of art and the new man to emphasize Argentine originality and newness. See Rafael Squirru, “Pop Art or the Art of Things,” Américas, vol. 15, no. 7 (July 1963), 15-21. 134 Many travelers have reached our shores, only a few have glimpsed beyond our fancy dress, which we carry like all men, only perhaps a bit more self- consciously.

Friends have praised and enemies derided. We are touchy, we feel our nakedness, we are not innocent, we have tasted the apple.

Although recently born we are not terribly young and often we find our latin ancestors wonderfully naïve and we feel nostalgic for our youth that took place somewhere else, before we were born.

Wisdom is not precisely the treasure of the young, the new man is not the adolescent: it is he born to new life [italics mine].We Argentines feel a special vocation for that existence beyond forms; therefore observer look twice into our eyes before judging our elusive spirit, mysterious even to ourselves. 274

In these statements, Squirru weaves his concerns about the judgments cast on Argentine art with proclamations of its contemporariness, its modernity. He describes the artist/ new man as “new” but not “young”—a figure spiritually reborn, and wiser for it. He strikes religious-inspired tones, claiming Argentines “have tasted the apple”—a metaphor to suggest the artists of his country are both self-conscious and knowledgeable about the world. And, here, as with his later writings, Squirru uses the Catholic-inspired metaphor of the new man to speak of the spiritual power of modern art.

Beverly Adams and Andrea Giunta have read the Yapeyú exhibition—and the activities of the MAMBA in general—as strategies designed to place Argentina into the dominant discourse of modernism. Adams writes, “Underlying the Exposición flotante and the Museo de Arte Moderno’s later traveling exhibitions was the notion that the mere circulation of Argentinean art would transform it into ‘international’ art….The export of

274 Rafael Squirru, Primera Exposición Flotante de Cincuenta Pintores Argentinos (Buenos Aires: Museo del Arte Moderno, 1956). A copy is located in AR-Fundación Espigas. Exp. Colectiva 1956.09.28/1957.02.21, Fundación Espigas, Buenos Aires, Argentina. 135 art and artists would, in turn, put Argentina on the art world map.275” Giunta, likewise, describes the Yapeyú exhibition as a byproduct of Squirru’s international ambitions; she notes that “for Squirru, the internationalization of Argentine art was a mission in which he saw himself as a crusader committed to the conquest of a sacred territory.”276 I fully agree with these assessments. It is clear from Squirru’s own words that he believed in using art to “penetrate the soul” of those in Buenos Aires and other cultural metropolises.

And, that this transformation of the soul meant a transformation in perceptions of

Argentina from abroad.

While neither Adams nor Giunta address the new man concept, we can see that the term fits well within Squirru’s internationalist project. At bare minimum, it was a rhetorical tool in his intellectual crusade. But I believe the new man was much more than that: it was a central component to his curatorial strategy, the theoretical armature that gave rise to the floating exhibition and to many of the MAMBA projects that followed. In

1960, when the museum finally acquired its own permanent gallery, he wrote that “to speak of the Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires is not to speak of one more institution….It is a palace to lodge the new muse; it is the new house for the new man.”277 The statement is significant, for it reveals that in addition to Squirru’s ambition

275 Beverly Adams, “Locating the International,” 104. 276 Andrea Giunta, “‘Argentina in the World’: Internationalist Nationalism in the Art of the 1960s” in Images of Power: Iconography, Culture, and State in Latin America, ed., Jens Andermann and William Rowe (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005), 151. 277Squirru’s statements appear in Primera Exposición Internacional de Arte Moderna Argentina (Buenos Aires: Dirección General de Cultura; Museo del Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, 1961). A copy is located under “Ar-Fundacion Espigas-Kardex:Atlantida/1127,” Fundación Espigas, Buenos Aires, Argentina. 136 to internationalize art, there was the related, but distinct desire to create institutions, not merely to circulate art.

In light of the new man, we can see Squirru’s efforts to create the MAMBA as a phenomenon very specific to Buenos Aires and to the philosophy of his circle of friends in the post-Peronist era. By building a Museum of Modern Art, Squirru was encouraging a drastically different way of experiencing art than under Perón. Rather than support a mass culture that flooded the streets, he worked to centralize and institutionalize art into a specific site—whether it be a ship or a museum gallery. In characterizing the MAMBA as a “palace for the new man,” he suggests that the museum could be home to artists and to the public, a space that served a pedagogical function, intended to attract and shape the new man from within the confines of an institution.

I expect it was not only Squirru’s commitment to internationalism, but this desire to build and work with institutions that made him a good fit for the OAS. Squirru’s concept of the new man evolved in Washington, DC in relation to the Alliance for

Progress. However, his faith in museums and their transformative power continued. So too did his resistance to mass culture, which became his major point of contention with

Che Guevara and the Cuban state’s push for a people’s art—an art of the street— especially posters and film which could be circulated easily and viewed by mass audiences.

137 Chapter Four: Refiguring the New Man in Washington, DC

Tuesday evening. November 20, 1962. The staff at the OAS waited anxiously for the guest of honor to arrive. Inside the main building, crowds were gathering in the tropical patio—the news had leaked that Jacqueline Kennedy, was coming to preview the current exhibition, which showcased paintings from the first Bienial Americana de Arte

(commonly referred to as the “Kaiser Biennial” because it was sponsored by Kaiser

Industries of Argentina).278 Around seven o’clock, Secretary General José Mora, with his wife and the ambassadors of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay formed a receiving line near the building’s front entrance. Twenty-four hours earlier, during a brief meeting at the White House between President Kennedy and a group of Latin American writers and intellectuals, Rafael Squirru had encouraged the President and his family to visit the exhibition.279 Squirru had served on a panel of judges for the Kaiser Biennial and was eager for the Kennedys to see the latest art emerging from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and

Uruguay. The following night, at ten minutes after seven, Squirru found himself in the company of Mrs. Kennedy, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Marion Cannon Schlesinger, and he began guiding them through the exhibition.

278 For a history the Kaiser Biennials, see Cristina Rossi, Las biennales de Córdoba en los ’60: arte, modernización y guerra fría (Córdoba, Argentina: Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, 2005). 279 Squirru’s visit with President was arranged as the culminating part of a symposium on Inter-American Affairs held on Paradise Island in the Caribbean and sponsored by Huntington Hartford, who developed the island and created Show: Magazine of the Arts. The exhibition at the OAS, co-sponsored by Kaiser Industries and Show, was entitled “New Directions of Modern Art from South America.” 138 On November 22, The Washington Post reported on Mrs. Kennedy’s visit to the

OAS with a headline proclaiming, “The First Lady Turns Art Critic.”280 A photograph accompanying the article shows Squirru and the First Lady speaking in front of Raquel

Forner’s Those Who Saw the Moon (Figure 17). Douglas Chevalier, staff photographer for the newspaper, centered his camera on Kennedy, who appears enthusiastically engaged in conversation with Squirru. Squirru, partially cropped out of the picture, stands to her left. He casually leans back, his mouth is open and he seems to be responding to Kennedy’s comments. Kennedy and Squirru seem at ease.281 They direct their interest towards one another’s words, more than towards the artwork.

It seems more than coincidental that the group stands before a painting by Raquel

Forner, the grand prize winner of the Kaiser Biennial and an artist whose work Squirru heavily promoted during his tenure as MAMBA director. Three paintings by Forner were included in the OAS exhibition, all of which touch on themes of outer space. She entitled two of them Those Who Saw the Moon, and the other, Astronauts.282 In each, the artist used gestural brushwork and impasto to create varying shapes and textures, some of which loosely resemble lunar surfaces. Forner also depicted strange, spindly figures like the ones that appear in Those Who Saw the Moon; she occasionally called such figures

“astronauts.” With their large featureless heads, elongated necks, and slender shoulders,

280 Dorothy McCardle, “First Lady Turns Art Critic,” The Washington Post, Times Herald, Nov 22, 1964, D3. Available through ProQuest Historical Newspapers, The Washington Post. 281 Also visible in the photograph is Harold Lauth, a Washington representative of Kaiser Industries. 282 Forner began painting space-themed works in 1957, with a painting entitled Moon. She regularly reused titles, such as Moon, Those Who Saw the Moon, and Astronauts, and although her paintings could be grouped by their titles into separate series, to classify them seems unnecessary. Despite their subtle differences in style, they have much in common. 139 they look more like extraterrestrials than human explorers. In Chevalier’s photograph, we see almost the entire canvas, even though the painting is not oriented directly towards us.

The photographer’s focus seems not to be on the painting, but on certain correlations between the painting, Kennedy, and Squirru. The composition balances two of Forner’s painted figures with Kennedy and Squirru standing side by side viewing them. Even the photograph’s caption in The Washington Post notes that “Mrs. Kennedy’s silver and black cocktail suit matched the colors of the painting.”283

Chevalier’s photograph circulated widely via the Associated Press, appearing in newspapers across the country, included the New York Times, and it was later reprinted in

Américas magazine and the Boletín de Artes Visuales. Perhaps the image carried currency because of the particular way it drew together the celebrity of Mrs. Kennedy with Latin

America, modern art, and the space age. The painting’s reference to the moon seems particularly important in this case, and can be read as an oblique reference to the space race. In 1961, in response to the Soviet’s first successfully manned space flight, President

Kennedy announced that the U.S. would land on the moon before the end of the decade.284 Kennedy’s words transformed the moon from an intriguing celestial body into a Cold War objective, a benchmark for modern technology. The painting’s title suggests

283 Dorothy McCardle, “First Lady Turns Art Critic,” The Washington Post, Times Herald, 22 Nov 1964, D3, ProQuest Historical Newspapers, The Washington Post. 284 The space race is most commonly considered to have started in 1957 with the Russian’s launching of Sputnik I. By 1962, the Soviets had confirmed their lead over U.S. with first manned space flight. The U.S., under President Kennedy, promptly began investing in its space program. See John M. Logsden, John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon (New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010). 140 that Forner’s work was inspired by these current events.285 Forner had based earlier series on contemporary events; for instance, in the late 1930s, she created paintings inspired by the Spanish Civil War. Given Forner’s long interest in surrealism, we also could read

Those Who Saw the Moon and its theme of space travel more broadly as a metaphor for the act of painting, in which the artist works to explore her own psychological space

(rather than outer space).286 Confronted with the painting, we see gestural brushwork and abstracted, perhaps ominous looking figures, but there is no straightforward political message of any kind. Nor is there any clear visual indication of outer space, it is referenced only in the work’s title.

However, in the context of this photograph, outer space and space travel seem more literal, more propagandistic. With the appearance of Mrs. Kennedy—a stand-in for the President and his policies—the painting seems to indicate that travel to the moon, a

U.S. goal, has fired the imagination of Latin America’s artists and critics. Through the photograph, viewers could share their excitement about art and the space age.

285 Andrea Giunta has come to a similar conclusion about this work. She writes, “In the works Los que vieron la luna (Those Who Saw the Moon) and El astronaut (The Astronaut), the artist utilized a repertoire of shapes and forms that were appropriate to themes of the moment, feeding into the imaginary of the future and also part of the Cold War struggle, such as the space race….” Giunta, Avant-Garde, Internationalism, and Politics, 201. 286 Forner’s work concerning the Spanish Civil War was done in a surrealist style; she painted series of distorted figures and disconnected body parts, usually hands, feet, and heads, situated around classical columns and desert landscapes—absurd images that seemed to express desolation and the threat of violence under Franco. In the late 1950s, she became part of an international artistic movement commonly called “Nuevo Figuración” (Neo-figuration) in Argentina, a movement that focused on portraying the human figure. Artists like the Buenos Aires collective Otra Figuración usually spoke about their work in terms of artistic process; they twisted, distorted, and abstracted the human figure in the hopes of uncovering innovative visual forms. However, these were not just formal experiments, but a means for personal introspection; critics often read them as artistic expressions of angst about contemporary society. On the whole, the rise of neo-figurative movements in Europe, the United States, and Latin America ran parallel with existentialist writing, with artists using techniques adapted from abstract expressionism to express something about human condition. 141 The photograph also marks the launching point for Squirru’s career at the OAS.

To the Argentine government, the image documented Squirru’s ability to enter the

Kennedys’ circle. Soon after the photograph began to circulate, the Frondizi administration nominated Squirru for the position of the OAS Director of Cultural

Affairs.287

I also see this photograph as marking an early moment in Squirru’s intellectual transition from Argentina to the United States. In Buenos Aires, Squirru had used the new man as a symbol of an Argentine cultural renaissance after Perón; he related the new man with his efforts to build an institution for Argentine modern art—a site where he hoped to simultaneously alter national culture and raise the international visibility of Argentine art.

In Washington, he increasingly tied his new man concept to the Kennedys and the

Alliance for Progress, and in doing so, he reconfigured his new man into a Pan American figure, defined in opposition to communism. In this press photograph, Mrs. Kennedy becomes representative of Squirru’s new man philosophy just as it was beginning to transform; the photograph presents her as a cultured, democratic leader sensitive to the cultural happenings of the world. Images such as these, which drew connections between the Kennedys and Latin American art, played a major role in Squirru’s reformulated definition of the new man.288 In Chevalier’s photograph we can read Jacqueline Kennedy

287 Eloisa Squirru has read the image in a similar way, noting that “the illustration carried unexpected importance. And since the position of Director of Cultural Affairs remained open…the new [Minister of Foreign Affairs] Carlos [Manuel] Muñiz proposed my father’s name.” Eloisa Squirru, ¡Tan Rafael Squirru!, 126. 288 In September 1965, another press photo of a Kennedy appeared in Américas magazine: this one shows Robert Kennedy visiting an OAS exhibition of selected works from the second Kaiser Biennial. Kennedy stands alone before a geometric painting by Argentine painter Eduardo Mac Entyre. This painting is in a 142 as a “new woman,” the female counterpart to President Kennedy, who Squirru began referring to as a new man.

The phrase “the new man” also appears in the essay “Man and Socialism in Cuba”

(1965) by Che Guevara and represents a meeting point in a broader ideological conflict waged between Havana and Washington concerning the Alliance for Progress. Guevara was the first to publicly denounce the program, even before it was signed into action at an economic conference held in Punta del Este, Uruguay, in August 1961. At the conference, Guevara spoke of the Alliance of Progress charter as “an attempt to seek a solution within the framework of economic imperialism.”289 He claimed that the charter exhibited a “colonial mentality,” full of grandiloquent language but, ultimately, vague and misleading promises.290 Guevara explained that the Cuban delegation refused to sign the charter because they viewed the Alliance for Progress as a means for the U.S. monopolies to exploit Latin America.

Guevara represented a formidable opponent for Squirru not only because of his critiques of the Alliance for Progress and the OAS, but also because he offered an alternative to Pan Americanism. Guevara supported the 1966 Tricontinental Conference

style MacEntyre called “arte generativo,” in which he used a curved line as a module, systematically reproducing it into an intricate and hard-edged pattern. 289Ernesto Guevara, Our America and Theirs: Kennedy and the Alliance for Progress—The Debate at Punta del Este (New York: Ocean Press, 2005), 77. 290 Guevara presented statistics at the Conference that showed the difficulty for Latin American economic growth under the Alliance. He later restated these findings on Cuban television as follows: “We had done some calculations…and they showed that, if all the countries of Latin America had a growth rate of 2.5 percent and bad, based on it, tried to reach the standard of living the United States has now, it would take us 100 years to do so. And, if we tried to reach the standard of living the United States would have by then—because it would be growing, too, even though slowly—it would take us 500 years to do so. So, the ‘tremendous Alliance for Progress’ means that only several generations later will our descendents be able to consider themselves to be on a par with the United States.” Guevara, Our America and Theirs, 95. 143 and helped launch a solidarity movement to unite what was then commonly referred to as the “third world.” The Tricontinental movement relied on what Guevara perceived as a shared anti-imperialist stance and disadvantaged socio-economic status of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, as opposed to a Pan American movement that called for partnerships based on the geographic proximity of North and South America.

THE ALLIANCE FOR PROGRESS: ORIGINS, DEVELOPMENT, AND MYSTIQUE

Among the many factors that contributed to the creation of the Alliance for

Progress, the Cuban Revolution was perhaps the most pressing and culturally significant.291 Even before the 1959 Revolution, Fidel Castro had become a recognizable and galvanizing figure in the U.S.—someone who stimulated the public imagination in polarized ways. Historian Van Gosse has traced the rise of “Fidelismo” within 1950s youth culture in the U.S., indicating how many college students admired Castro as a revolutionary and intellectual, working to combat the tyrannical rule of Fulgencio

Batista.292 Writers and poets of the Beat generation celebrated Castro as a political hero with the power to create a new form of government, one that would be both anti-capitalist and democratic. And with news programs, such as the CBS News Special Event “Rebels

291 Historian Jeffery F. Taffet outlines the circumstances that led to the Alliance for Progress in Foreign Aid as Foreign Policy: The Alliance for Progress in Latin America. (New York, NY: Routledge, 2007). In addition to discussing the role of the Cuban Revolution, he cites as influence: (1) U.S.-Latin American aid policies initiated by the Eisenhower administration, (2) the importance of modernization theory for Kennedy and his cabinet, and (3) Kennedy’s perception that Asia, Africa, and Latin America were an important battleground in the Cold War. 292 For historian Van Gosse, Fidel Castro is a figure through which we can trace a major intellectual change in U.S. political thought: a redefining of liberalism and the emergence of the New Left (See note 122). 144 in the Sierra Maestra” (1957), U.S. journalists latched onto the romanticized image of

Castro, presenting him and his followers as vibrant and principled revolutionaries.293

In January 1959, LIFE magazine reported on Castro’s assumption of power with a cover-story filled with photos celebrating his arrival in Havana. One of those images, by photo-journalist Grey Villet captures Castro surrounded by a crowd reaching out to him

(Figure 18). He stands next to a car: his left hand rests on its white metal roof, and his right arm reaches across the roof towards his admirers. Dressed in army fatigues, he smiles with a characteristic cigar at the corner of his mouth. The photographer captured his shot from an intimate and unusual angle, as if seated on the shoulders of someone in the crowd. Castro seems close, almost within arms’ reach. We can see six outstretched arms that reach upward from the base of the photograph—three come together in the center, loosely forming a triangle, and two appear to converge on the left. All point to

Castro as the focal point, the new leader, presented here as the hub of Cuban society. I see this image as emblematic of the kind of new man that Guevara (and Castro himself) promoted—that is, the new man imagined as the revolutionary in touch with his people.

Similar kinds of representations of Castro and Guevara appeared in posters, photographs, and speeches that circulated throughout Cuba and internationally in the 1960s— representations that Squirru and the creators of the Alliance for Progress sought to contend against.

293 See Van Gosse, Where the Boys Are and Todd Teitchen, The Cubalogues: Beat Writers in Revolutionary Havana (University Press of Florida, 2010). 145 Despite the optimism about Castro in the U.S. among many young people and, initially, among many journalists, the prevalent attitude among policy-makers in

Washington was one of skepticism. After the Revolution, their doubts only increased: the

Eisenhower administration recognized the Castro government as an official governing body and offered aid to Cuba, but were surprised to find Castro a fierce critic of U.S. assistance. Daniel Braddock, the U.S. Chargé d´Affaires, reported from Havana in

February 1959 that “there has not been a single public speech by Castro since the triumph of the revolution in which he has not shown some feeling against the United States, the

American press or big business concerns in Cuba.”294 The Eisenhower administration was already sensitive to the growing anti-U.S. sentiment in Latin America—an issue that came to the fore when Vice President Richard Nixon’s 1958 goodwill trip to Latin

America was cut short by violent anti-U.S. demonstrations in Caracas and Lima.

Washington bristled at Castro’s speeches accusing the U.S. of imperialism. In a private memo, Eisenhower questioned whether Castro was a “madman.” And, Nixon, after meeting with Castro in Washington in April 1959, speculated that he was susceptible to

Soviet influence; he perceived Castro as having a naïve understanding of politics, but he was concerned that Castro might also have ulterior motives of becoming a dictator.

Increasingly, the administration worried that Castro and his government represented the wrong sort of role model for the rest of Latin America. They feared that the success of the

294 Daniel M. Braddock to Department of State, 18 Feb. 1959, Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States: Cuba, 1958-60 (Washington, DC, 1991), 402; cited in Louis A. Pérez, Jr, ¨Fear and Loathing of Fidel Castro: Sources of U.S. Policy towards Cuba,” Journal of Latin American Studies 34, no. 2 (May 2002): 230. Available through JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3875788 146 Cuban Revolution would incite further violent revolutions and anti-Americanism across the region.

The Kennedy administration took a similar attitude towards Castro and believed that under Eisenhower the U.S. had not paid sufficient attention to Latin America and to the problems caused by widespread poverty and government corruption in the region.

Kennedy proposed the Alliance for Progress as the solution to these problems of social and political unrest. He first announced the program in March 1961 in a White House address to the Diplomatic Corps of Latin America. His speech carried powerful Pan

American rhetoric, presenting North and South America as “firm and ancient friends,” who “share a common heritage, the quest for dignity and the freedom of man.”295 He pledged $500 million of U.S. aid to Latin America in the Alliance’s first year and vowed to provide the region up to twenty billion more over the next decade, provided that Latin

American nations enacted certain social and economic reforms. He described his Alliance for Progress as a “plan to transform the 1960s into a historic decade of democratic progress,” one inspired by Latin American-led initiatives, such as “Operation Pan

America” proposed by Brazilian President Kubitschek in 1958. The Kennedy administration and supporters of the Alliance latched onto the idea that the program could bring “peaceful” revolution to Latin America, as opposed to violent revolution, for which they pointed to Cuba as example.

295 John Fitzgerald Kennedy, “Address to the Diplomatic Corps of Latin American” March 13, 1961, available online through the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs. http://millercenter.org/scripps/archive/speeches/detail/5732 147 Kennedy’s proposal combined sweeping humanitarian efforts with defense goals: by strengthening Latin American economies and improving the living conditions for the region’s citizens, the U.S. hoped it also could secure the region from potential communist takeover. “We confront the same forces which have imperiled America throughout its history—the alien forces which once again seek to impose the despotisms of the Old

World on the people of the New,” stated Kennedy. He spoke of the Alliance as “an alliance of free governments” and he singled out Cuba’s revolutionary government as tyrannical, expressing his hope that “the people of Cuba…will soon rejoin the society of free men, uniting with us in common effort.”296 In retrospect, Kennedy’s statements concerning the Cuban people appear disconcerting; while publicly he spoke of diplomacy, friendship, and peace-making, privately he consented to the CIA’s plans for the clandestine overthrow of Cuba (plans initiated under the Eisenhower administration).

The Bay of Pigs invasion took place only a few weeks after Kennedy’s address.297

While covert operations against Castro failed, more overt diplomatic attempts to curtail Cuba’s influence, by way of the Alliance for Progress, gathered steam. Over the next few months, the U.S. State Department outlined the procedures for creating the

Alliance, and the OAS took a strong role in the efforts; first, by organizing a meeting of its Inter-American Economic and Social Council (IA-ECOSOC) in Punta del Este,

296 Ibid. 297 Che Guevara called attention to these correspondences at the Punta del Este Conference: “In that speech, which I have no doubt will be remembered, Kennedy also said that he hoped the peoples of Cuba and the Dominican Republic, for whom he felt great sympathy, could join the community of free nations. Within a month there was the Playa Girón [Bay of Pigs invasion], and a few days later President Trujillo was mysteriously assassinated….We merely take note of the bare fact, which has not been clarified in any way up to the present time.” Ernesto Guevara, Our America and Theirs, 29. 148 Uruguay in August 1961, where all of the member nations except Cuba signed the

Alliance for Progress charter. Through the IA-ECOSOC, the OAS also formed a Panel of

Experts of the Alliance for Progress, nicknamed the Nine Wise Men, to advise the implementation of Alliance-related projects.

The rifts between Cuba, the United States, and the OAS solidified in 1962. The

U.S., which had imposed partial embargos on trade with Cuba since 1960, dramatically expanded its embargo after the Cuban government nationalized U.S. corporate holdings on the island without compensation. The Cuban Missile Crisis of that same year only reinforced OAS and U.S. political collaboration. The OAS suspended Cuba’s membership from the organization and in 1964 the OAS began imposing its own punitive trade embargo against the country.

By 1963, most of the OAS branches dealing with political, legal, health and educational services had an influx of Alliance-related work. In addition to various advisory and administrative roles, the institution also was responsible for generating status reports and publishing press materials about the program, including the Alliance for Progress Weekly Newsletter.298 However, I suspect that with its emphasis on economic reform, health, science, and technology, the Alliance left undefined the space for cultural activities. Under the Alliance, the staff and the responsibilities of the OAS grew. But, the OAS Department of Cultural Affairs—which included the Music and

Visual Arts Divisions, Philosophy and Letters, and the Columbus Memorial Library—

298See Nathan Haverstock, “Remembering the Alliance for Progress,” Américas, vol. 61, no. 5 (September 2009), 50. 149 likely remained largely unchanged, operating in a holding pattern since their work seemed peripheral to the Alliance’s goals.

Squirru’s leadership became crucial in this context, namely because he framed cultural issues as wholly relevant to the Alliance’s aims. Contained within Squirru’s The

Challenge of the New Man is a strong argument for fitting cultural activities firmly in the sphere of “development,” a watchword for many U.S. economists and social scientists behind the Alliance for Progress, who subscribed to what has come to be known as

“modernization theory.” Historian Nils Gilman, in his comprehensive study of the rise and fall of modernization theory during the Cold War, describes the term “development,” especially “economic development,” as “a deliciously ambiguous concept” that world leaders and policy makers latched onto “as the answer to the problem of decolonization.”

He writes that

for American social scientists, underdevelopment invoked poverty, agriculture, morbidity, illiteracy—in short, backwardness, a term it was meant to replace. Policy makers identified development with economic growth—another ambiguous expression—with the additional implication that this economic growth would be distributed so that the masses as a whole would benefit. Depending on who was speaking (and who was listening), development could mean either increased income or increased welfare, or put another way, increased production or increased consumption. However it was defined, economic growth was something tangible and measurable, unlike ‘democracy’ or ‘sovereignty’ or ‘international respect.’”299

299 Gilman, Mandarins of the Future, 36. Gilman notes that the terms “modernization” and “development” both have long and complex semantic histories associated with European imperialism, but were taken up anew and uncritically by social scientists and political leaders in the United States. He writes, “Although ‘development’ was something that some colonial authorities had been advocating since the beginning of the century, American social scientists generally ignored these discourses, if their footnotes and acknowledgments are to be believed. Because postwar Americans saw themselves as radically different from the colonialists they were replacing, they saw little need to understand the colonial policies or theories of the British, French, or Dutch.” Mandarins of the Future, 34. 150 According to Gilman, modernization theorists evoked “development” as the process that would transform so-called “traditional” societies into “modern” ones; the phrase carried currency because of its open-ended meaning and because it seemed to promise quantifiable results.300

While “development” was generally associated with economic production and industrialization, Squirru applied the concept to culture. “The time has come when it must be acknowledged that art and thought are more than just a luxury,” he proclaims in

The Challenge of the New Man, “They are the abstract symbol of a community’s deepest longings, and those who ignore these voices are, by the same token, ignoring the vocation of…each and every one of our peoples.”301 The idea that culture was not “just a luxury,” but a basic human necessity was something Squirru reiterated throughout his tenure at the

OAS.

By casting culture as a basic human need, Squirru was making a well-calculated argument designed to overcome institutional pressures and generate support for his cultural policies. He alluded to the resistance that cultural projects met in the Frondizi government and within the OAS in an interview in 1981:

Each time that someone went to give an estimate of the budget, they would answer him or her, “No, we can’t give money for culture when the hospitals lack bed sheets.” Faced with this statement, which in principle seems very practical, I would answer that without culture, there would be no hospitals nor bed sheets because each and every one are the results of culture. Culture is nothing more and

300 Two of the most prominent subscribers to modernization theory in the Kennedy administration were Walt Whitman Rostow and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. For information, on Rostrow see Gilman, Mandarins of the Future. For more on the role of modernization theory within the Kennedy Administration, see Michael Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation Building” in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). 301 Squirru, The Challenge of the New Man, 61. 151 nothing less than the point of view of men and women, and through them, communities, regarding reality…. If one does not understand that all types of development, economic, political, and social, are intimately connected to cultural development—that it is nothing more than the same development from a different angle, that is, a spiritual angle—then he or she makes the mistake of believing that culture must be postponed until more basic and urgent needs are met. But man is a totality; he is not a being that eats first, thinks later, and only then concerns himself with his fellow man. For humans the problem is simultaneous. For that reason, it cannot be said, sheets and hospitals first, then philosophy and the arts.302

Here Squirru presents cultural and economic development as related components that both contribute to the “development” he sees as most important: spiritual development.303

By framing his cultural programs in this way, he presented the institution with a flattering image of itself, an international organization with the power to saves lives and enrich the spirit of others.

Certainly, there were also external pressures for Squirru to define development in a way that incorporated cultural affairs. Critics of the Alliance for Progress, including

Guevara, lambasted the program for its vague allusions to development. At the Punta del

Este Conference in 1961, Guevara urged Latin American delegates to veto the Alliance’s charter, criticizing it as a poorly-conceived U.S. policy. He pointed out its paternalist and imperialist framework, stating,

I get the impression they are thinking of making the latrine the fundamental thing. That would improve the social conditions of the poor Indian, of the poor black, of the poor person who lives in subhuman conditions, “Let’s make latrines for them and after we have made latrines for them, and after their education has taught them how to keep themselves clean, then they can enjoy the benefits of

302 “Squirru: Nada más lamentable que equivocarse de país” Correo de la Tarde, 30 Junio 1981, Año 24, No 2253. Envelop no. 300 (Squirru), MAMBA Archives. 303 In Squirru’s writing of the period, spiritual development and the mystical power of modern art appear as recurring themes. Partially, this stems from a Catholic perspective that runs through much of Squirru’s writing. But it also may be an attempt to curtail popular stereotypes characterizing the United States as grossly materialistic and accusations that such materialism shaped its policies towards Latin America. 152 production.”…Planning for the gentlemen experts is the planning of latrines. As for the rest, who knows how it will be done!304

In light of Guevara’s comments about the Alliance as “the planning of latrines,” we can see Squirru’s discussion of development—specifically, its importance culturally and spiritually—as a means of refutation. Both inside and outside of the OAS, he saw a need to promote a flexible understanding of development. In a sense, he was working to make the Alliance appear as a sincere, charitable, and spiritually-nourishing program, one that could capture the hearts and minds of world.

While framing culture as a basic need, Squirru also described it as one of Latin

America’s most plentiful resources. In The Challenge of the New Man, he writes that

“Latin America is underdeveloped economically and socially, but Latin America is not underdeveloped culturally. In fact, Latin American countries have a lot to offer in the realm of creative achievement. Some of the best artists, composers, writers, and intellectuals can be found in Latin America.”305 For Squirru, the success of the Alliance for Progress depended entirely on harnessing the support of intellectuals and cultural leaders across the Americas, those he refers to as new men. According to Squirru, these

“new men…are not difficult to recognize. They do not speak in terms of right and left.

They speak in terms of the old—which must go and the new, which has to be brought forth.”306 On one level, Squirru’s statements seem a straightforward continuation of the new man philosophy he espoused in Argentina; the new man continues to be an

304 Guevara, Our America and Theirs, 38-39 305 Squirru, The Challenge of the New Man, 16. 306 Ibid., 17-18. 153 intellectual who rises above party politics, who is committed to “the new” and the disposal of “the old,” a friend of freedom and enemy of tyranny. However, in The

Challenge of the New Man Squirru also defines his new man as staunchly anti- communist. He emphatically states that these new men “do not equate the United States and the totalitarian states in their concept of friendship. They realize that the United

States is a free community and that communist countries are not. And they see this distinction as a very important one.” He goes on to say that

the new men put their trust in democratic rule as the expression of the will of the majority of the people but they respect the rights of those who happen to think differently (and they accept the idea that democracy can be other than parliamentary in its form). The new man subscribes to the Christian idea of charity as the highest human attitude in our dealings with fellow men.307

For Squirru, the anti-communist stance of the new man was also bound up in Christian theology. By the time Squirru published The Challenge of the New Man in 1964, the phrase had come back into popular use by Catholic theologians, notably the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, who published his own book titled The New Man in 1962.308

Merton’s text describes Christ as the redeemed “new man” in contrast to Adam, a symbol of the “original man,” plagued by original sin.

307 Ibid., 18. 308 Thomas Merton, The New Man. (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1962). Squirru sent Merton a copy of The Challenge of the New Man and the two began an epistolary friendship. One of Merton’s letters to Squirru is published in Thomas Merton: A Life in Letters: The Essential Collection (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2008), 314-315. Excerpts from this same letter were published in Américas magazine in the 1960s. For more on Merton’s cultural relevance in the Kennedy Era and in Latin America, see the following two texts: James W. Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008); Malgorzata Poks, Thomas Merton and Latin America: Consonance of Voices (Saarbrücken,Germany: Lambert Academic Publishing, 2011). 154 In The Challenge of the New Man, Squirru critiques communism using a theologically-inspired framework. Namely, he draws a distinction between “free societies” (the United States) and “totalitarian societies” (Soviet Russia and Cuba), based on their capacities for spiritual redemption.309 Squirru argues that “free societies” are by no means perfect, but that their strength rests precisely in recognizing human imperfection and striving for moral progress, whereas totalitarian regimes demand perfection. He writes, “totalitarian societies… shut all doors to the freedom of the spirit….Allowing for imperfection allows for betterment. Perfect conceptions do not allow for imperfection, and therefore produce moral stagnation.”310 For Squirru, the new man’s purpose is redemptive: he seeks redemption for the self and for society.

Squirru also writes that a major danger of communism is that it functions as a false religion: “It is important to realize that the appeal of communism as an ideology…lies in the fact that it does purport to be a philosophy that will redeem mankind as a whole. The idea of redemption has a religious appeal. Many of these so- called atheists are in fact very mystical characters, who are trying to fill the vacuum in their souls….”311 He knew that for Latin America, the appeal of the Cuban Revolution would be especially difficult to combat as its leaders Fidel Castro and Che Guevara were

309 For Squirru, intellectual responsibility entails recognizing that human beings are flawed and selfish by nature. He insists that totalitarian societies believe only in the good nature of man: “Many are the happy ideologists who cannot be intellectually responsible in facing the truth about man,” he writes, “These ideologists are responsible for all the beautiful Utopias that inevitably lead mankind to a disastrous end. This is true whether they be Utopias springing from an extreme right-wing position like Nazism, or whether they be Utopias springing from an extreme left-wing position like communism.”Squirru, The Challenge of the New Man, 4-5. 310 Ibid, 7. 311 Ibid. 155 increasingly romanticized. In The Challenge of the New Man, Squirru tries to cut down

Castro’s charismatic reputation. “Communism,” he writes, “overruns any country that does not have its own mystique. Maybe Castro did not start as a communist, but having no mystique of his own to offer it was inevitable that he adopt the communist faith.”312

According to Squirru, democratic nations needed to develop their own mystique to counter that of communism. “Without a mystique of its own, the Alliance [for

Progress] is too remote, too cut and dried to spark the Latin imagination.”313 He was not alone in this belief about mystique—what we might define as an aura of mystery and reverence surrounding a person or object. The word was in wide usage at the time; most famously in Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, which was published in 1963, the same year that Squirru delivered the speeches included in The Challenge of the New

Man.314 Friedan approach towards “mystique” was entirely the opposite of Squirru’s: instead of building it up, she aimed to identify what she called “the problem that has no name” in order to tear it down. Both Friedan and Squirru saw “mystique” as a powerful vehicle for covering over the material conditions that frame ones’ existence. Friedan showed the feminine “mystique” to be a myth manufactured by a powerful confluence of forces, agents, and disciplines; her book examines how male-dominated fields psychology, advertising, and religious leadership constructed narrow and largely false images of femininity that society reinforced as true. By extension, Squirru and other politicians in support of the Alliance for Progress were hoping to channel a similar

312 Squirru, The Challenge of the New Man, 14. 313 Ibid., 11. 314 For a recent study of the Feminine Mystique, see Stephanie Coontz, A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and the American Woman at the Dawn of the 1960s (New York: Basic Books, 2011). 156 confluence of forces to build support for their policy. The Brazilian economist Roberto

Campos, then Minister of Planning and Economic Coordination at the Brazilian Embassy in Washington, was perhaps the first to speak of the need for a “political mystique” surrounding the Alliance for Progress. The idea was also cited by Campos’s colleague,

Lincoln Gordon, the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, who had served as U.S. ambassador in Brazil.315 Squirru believed mystique had to be anchored in the cultural realm, its creation and development the responsibility of Latin America’s artists, writers, and poets.

In Buenos Aires, Squirru’s friends depicted him as an intellectual knight with a crusader’s zeal for internationalizing Argentine art; in 1954, Leopoldo Presas painted a portrait entitled el Hombre Nuevo, which shows Squirru in a silvery suit of armor (Figure

19). On his chest appears a blue shield (or, perhaps, a book) with the initials H.N.—for

Hombre Nuevo—the cause under which he leads his intellectual crusade. In Washington, he identified with another world of knighthood, in which Kennedy’s Alliance for

Progress represented a combined political, cultural, and spiritual crusade. Squirru’s arrival at the OAS coincided with a time when many fondly referred to Kennedy’s White

House as “Camelot.” 316 In criticizing communism as a false religion that offered no

315 Historian Jeffrey Taffet mentions the term “mystique” appearing in State Department documents associated with the Alliance for Progress. Taffet, Foreign Aid as Foreign Policy, 52. For an early analysis of Roberto Campos and Lincoln Gordon’s use of the term “mystique,” see Herbert K. May, Problems and Prospects of the Alliance for Progress: A Critical Examination. (New York, NY: Frederick A. Praeger, 1968), 71-79. 316 Comparisons between Washington and Camelot solidified after Kennedy’s assassination as a result of Jackie Onassis Kennedy’s statements in the December 6, 1963 issue of LIFE magazine. In the “Epilogue” of this memorial issue, she mentions that one of her husband’s favorite lyrics came from the Alan Jay Lerner’s 1960 musical Camelot. According to LIFE, she repeatedly used the comparison, stating “There’ll 157 means of redemption, Squirru was essentially casting the ideological battle between democracy and communism as a modern-day crusade in which the new man played the part of the good Christian soldier and communists represented “infidels.” In this scenario, mystique represents a sort of secularized version of religious faith; one of the goals of the new man was to build mystique to gain adherents to the Alliance, to persuade people that it was more than a U.S. government aid program, but rather that it was something deserving of their reverence, something they could believe in.

CASTRO AND KENNEDY AS NEW MEN

While traveling through Africa in 1965, Che Guevara wrote a letter to his friend

Carlos Quijano, the editor of the Uruguayan weekly publication Marcha. Quijano published the letter—which was later titled “Man and Socialism in Cuba”—immediately after receiving it in March 1965, and again in November that same year. This letter, in which Guevara describes the goals of the Cuban Revolution and the progress the country is making to meet them, became his best-known piece of writing; it is where he outlined several of his key beliefs about building a revolutionary society. He discusses the value of work, especially voluntary manual labor, as well as the roles of education and the culture in a socialist society. The essay is also where he first explained his notion of the new man. It is worth noting that similar ideas had floated around since the beginning of the Cuban Revolution; Castro and his supporters often spoke in terms of renovation, the need to form a new Cuba, new social institutions, and, ultimately, a new classless society. be great Presidents again…but there’ll never be another Camelot.” Theodore H. White, “An Epilogue,” LIFE, vol. 55, no. 23 (6 December 1963), 160. Available through Google books. [Accessed March 2011] 158 We can find such rhetoric sprinkled throughout Cuban periodicals and bulletins, evident even in the title of propaganda magazines, such as Cuba Nueva, published by the

Comisión de Doctrina y Propaganda, part of the Consejo Revolucionario de Cuba.

Guevara’s 1965 writing on the new man is not, then, the origin point of the idea, but a place where an ongoing concept became codified.

Guevara begins his essay by recounting the history of the Cuban Revolution, in which he identifies the guerilla rebels of the Sierra Maestra as the quintessential new men. He calls them the country’s “vanguard” and the “motor force” that mobilized Cuban society. 317 And he claims that “in the attitude of our fighters could be glimpsed the man and woman of the future.”318 He makes special mention of Fidel Castro as a guerrilla fighter and a political leader deeply in touch with the people of the country and their needs. According to Guevara, Castro has a

special way of fusing himself with the people [that] can be appreciated only by seeing him in action. At the great public mass meetings one can observe something like the dialogue of two tuning forks whose vibrations interact, producing new sounds. Fidel and the mass begin to vibrate together in a dialogue of growing intensity until they reach the climax in an abrupt conclusion crowned by our cry of struggle and victory.319

As in the LIFE magazine photograph, here Castro is framed as a man of his people.

Guevara speaks of a union between leader and crowd, using a metaphor of tuning forks that together reach a musical crescendo—in Guevara’s turn of phrase there is also a not- so-subtle allusion to sexual climax. He writes this, perhaps, not only to celebrate Castro’s

317 Ernesto Guevara, “Man and Socialism in Cuba” The Che Reader (New York: Ocean Press, 2005), 212- 230. All citations refer to the version available online at: http://www.marxists.org/achrive/guevara/1965/03/man-socialism.htm. [Accessed September 2010] 318 Ibid. 319 Ibid. 159 leadership, but to verify Castro’s legitimacy, by showing him as a person who knows the aspirations of the country and who brings his people immense gratification. But it is also clear that he sees Castro as a model new man for future generations. He spends a great part of his essay discussing the importance that youth play in building a socialist society.

Guevara says that in socialist Cuba “we can see the new man and the new woman being born—the image is not yet completely finished—it never will be, since the process goes forward hand in hand with the development of new economic forms.”320

For Guevara, the new man had a connection to Christian rhetoric, but unlike

Squirru, who was a devout Catholic, Guevara’s statements represent a secular—and possibly tongue-in-cheek—reworking of the Christian “new man.”321 This tone is most evident when he writes that “The fault of many of our artists and intellectuals lies in their original sin: they are not true revolutionaries. We can try to graft the elm tree so that it will bear pears, but at the same time we must plant pear trees. New generations will come that will be free of original sin.”322 For Guevara, the new men and new women are revolutionaries, especially those of future generations, who will completely cast off the

“sins” of capitalism to create a communist society. He writes, “…To build communism it is necessary, simultaneous with the new material foundations, to build the new man and woman.” Here, the new man serves as a key element in Guevara’s larger argument about the role of the individual in a socialist or a communist society. He explains early in

“Socialism and Man in Cuba,” that the purpose of his writing is to refute “a common

320 Ibid. 321 Guevara was raised Catholic in the city of Rosario and in Alta Gracia, a colonial town founded by the Jesuits. However, by the time he joined the Cuban Revolution, he was no longer a practicing Catholic. 322 Guevara, “Socialism and Man in Cuba,” n.p. (See note 319). 160 argument from the mouths of capitalist spokespeople…[that socialism] is characterized by the abolition of the individual for the sake of the state.”323 In evoking the new man,

Guevara calls for a new conception of the individual, one who understands his or her role in society quite differently from the capitalist viewpoint. Guevara notes that individual is defined by “quality of incompleteness, of being an unfinished product,” and that self- improvement and a sense of completeness comes only through socialist society, where the individual recognized his or her obligation to help fellow members of society and works collectively to improve one’s self and society. He describes “the education of the new man” as a central pillar in the “construction of socialism”—an education forged not only through formal schooling, but also by culture and art.

“Socialism and Man in Cuba” is one of the only places where Guevara writes about art and the role it should play in a revolutionary society. He claims there is a need for a new art within Cuban society, one that is politically committed. However, he makes no speculations about what forms that art should take, nor does he identify contemporary examples of this new art. Instead, he critiques past art movements. He disapproves of

Soviet-style socialist realism that attempts to depict utopian society. His tone is apologetic, regretting the narrow-mindedness and exaggerated dogmatism the Soviet

Union took towards art—“Socialism is young and has its mistakes,” he writes, and in his opinion, the government’s insistence on socialist realist art was one of those mistakes.324

He is equally critical of contemporary art movements in democratic countries, criticizing

323 Ibid. 324 Guevara, “Socialism and Man in Cuba,” n.p. 161 the tendency for artists to speak in terms of “artistic freedom.” He argues that “we cannot counterpose ‘freedom’ to socialist realism, because the former does not yet exist and will not exist until the complete development of the new society.”325 For Guevara the revolutionary art, like the new men and new women, was a prediction for the future; an art not fully formed, but in the process of emerging.

Political posters represent the earliest and best-known form of revolutionary art to emerge in Cuba.326 The medium itself seemed to embody socialist ideals: posters were affordable and accessible to the masses; they also were anonymously designed and circulated, the seeming result of collective effort, rather than of an individual artist.327

Cuban writer and critic Edmundo Desnoes noted in 1969 that “we rarely feel the presence of such-and-such artist in our graphic work for it is always done to illustrate an idea…,” and goes on to say that

in the houses, on the walls and windows, the new posters and billboards have replaced the painting of a flamingo, the North American calendar, magazines and advertisements for consumer goods, and have introduced a new vision, a new preoccupation, without appealing to or exploiting sensationalism, sex or the illusion of aristocratic life.328

325 Ibid. 326 Guevara even took political posters with him to Africa to distribute in Algeria and later in the Congo. Richard Frick, ed. The Tricontinental Solidarity Poster (Bern, Switzerland: Comedia-Verlag, 2003), 72. 327 In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin argued for the revolutionary potential of mass media—especially film—as art forms that are egalitarian, available and affordable to the masses. He also warned that emancipatory aspects of media could easily be shut down by fascist leaders who used mass reproduction to forward propaganda. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1968), 217-252. 328 Desnoes’ statements come from an informal seminar about art that first appeared in the July 1969 issue of Cuba Internacional. Excerpts of this article appear in Dugald Stermer’s essay, “Bread and the Rose,” in Dugard Stermer, The Art of Revolution. Castro’s Cuba: 1959-1970, with an introductory essay by Susan Sontag (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1970), xxxii-xxxiv. 162 Cuban graphic artists were commissioned to produce posters by several different government-sponsored agencies, including the Organization of Solidarity with Asia,

Africa, and Latin America (OSPAAL), the Commission for Revolutionary Action (COR), the Cuban Communist Party, the Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC), Casa de las Americas, and the Institute of Books (ICL). Each produced posters highlighting the institution’s programming and publicizing new books, film screenings, and other cultural events. As

Desnoes indicates these posters were conceived of not only as functional, but instructive.

They transformed the look of homes, streets, and towns.

Poster art in Cuba also represented a definitive break with academic and vanguard traditions of painting and sculpting. Cuban poster artist Raúl Martínez commented that in the 1960s he and many of his colleagues gave up painting entirely: “It happens that no one has taken an interest in seeing what they can learn from Amelia Peláez, Portocarro,

Maríano, or some of the other Cuban artists. No graphic artist has thought of extracting something original and positive by looking around and seeing what is being and has been painted.”329 According to Martínez, poster artists refused to draw any influence from

Cuban art movements before 1959 (many of whom Gómez Sicre had favored in the

1940s).

Posters worked in conjunction with other mass-produced media, notably photography, cinema, magazines, and literature, to broadcast propagandistic images of revolutionary triumph. On a 1969 trip to Cuba, John Corry, a correspondent for Harper’s noted that photographs of Fidel and Guevara were visible across the country; he reported

329 Ibid. 163 that “along with posters, the Cuban graphic arts being more or less spectacular, photographs of revolutionary leaders make up most of the interior and exterior decorations, and it is far easier to get a Communist to pose than to make a statement.”330

According to Corry, many images presented early scenes from the revolution, especially those depicting Castro as a guerilla fighter: “Indeed, when Fidel and his little band were trudging through the mountains and harassing Batista there must have been a great many photographers around because there are now a great many photographs of Fidel trudging through the mountains.”331 After Guevara’s “Socialism and Man in Cuba” was published, images of guerilla fighter were frequently conflated with label of new man: in Cuba the new man was not simply spoken about, but visualized.

In the United States, artists for pulp magazines created visual counterpoints to the

Cuban new man as heroic guerilla fighter. Two examples can be found on the covers of a pulp magazine entitled New Man, published from 1963 to 1971 by Reese and Emtee

Companies (Figure 20).332 In each of these, artist Norman Saunders depicts communist guerillas as villainous sexual predators. A cover from November 1964 shows a tropical jungle scene where three bearded men in green army fatigues torture their female captives. In the center is a caricature of Castro; he is identifiable not only for his long beard and his smoldering cigar, with which he threatens to burn his victim’s flesh, but

330 John Corry, “Castro’s Cuba: Drums, Guns, and the New Man” Harper’s (April 1969), 39. 331 Ibid. 332 More information about these magazines and their creators is available on the Men’s Adventures Magazine Blog http://www.menspulpmags.com/2010/05/mens-pulp-magazines-take-on- fidel.html?zx=78a8a4fb40b9f175 [Accessed 24 October 2012] 164 also for the two wristwatches on his left arm—Castro has appeared in several press photos wearing multiple watches on one arm.

In the 1960s, Castro was cast as enemy and depicted on the cover of many different men’s magazines, including Man’s Story, Men Today, True Adventures, and

Whisper. However, in Saunders’ images there is a dialectic connection between the new man and Castro that goes beyond their arbitrary juxtaposition. We may take the magazine’s title of New Man as an appeal to the aspirations of the male reader who wants to be identified as a modern, well-informed man. But the potential reader can also imagine himself in relation to the figure of Castro, who serves as foil. The enemy guerillas are sexually out of control, in contrast to the honorable and morally upright hero—not depicted on cover perhaps so the reader more easily can project himself as protagonist in the story. Castro and the communists here are set up as the counterpoint to the new man—in a sense, they are the evil new men. They are presented as dehumanized and unfathomably cruel; they are one among a set of historical super-villains, including

Nazis, Fascists, and Soviets (Notice that the November 1964 cover also advertises a testimony about Hitler’s underground “bunker of lust”). 333 In their construction of the enemy, these magazines play on Cold War fears about violent enemies in hiding. In retrospect, these magazines are campy, at once humorous and crude; they also were savvy in perpetuating negative characterizations about Castro and the communist threat to Latin America and the United States—and they show one use of new man, as it

333 Adam Parfrey notes that “in men’s magazines, the Cuban issue always seemed a hot topic. Fidel Castro replaced Nazi and Jap with his own variety of sadistic torture of very white women, peppered with suggestive Spanish commentary.”Adam Parfrey, ed. It’s A Man’s World: Men’s Adventure Magazines. The Postwar Pulps. (Los Angeles, CA: Feral House, 2003), 215. 165 appeared in American popular culture. Squirru’s conception of the new man has no direct connection to these pulp magazines—if anything, his work stands in complete contrast to them. Still, they set an important backdrop, because they indicate that definitions of the new man were circulating in the U.S. on varying levels in the early 1960s.

In contrast to these images of Castro, Squirru associated President John F.

Kennedy with embodying the new man. In particular, the assassination of the president in

November 1963 served as the catalyst that fundamentally realigned Squirru’s new man philosophy. He immediately began to frame Kennedy as a martyr. A special memorial issue of Américas magazine begins with a poem by Squirru dedicated to the late president. One stanza reads,

A friend, more golden than his life, was killed by the hand of darkness. In his crucifixion more naked more man more friend more one of us.334

In naming Kennedy’s death a crucifixion, Squirru identifies the late president as the

Christ-like epitome of the new man—a connection bolstered by Kennedy’s Catholic affiliation.335 The following month, Squirru wrote a front page essay for Américas, highlighting the President’s mythical status. For Squirru, the myth of Kennedy remained inseparable from the actual man. He writes that “although I met President Kennedy only

334 Squirru, “Death Has Taken Away A Friend” Américas, vol. 15, no.12 (December 1963), inside cover. 335 Kennedy’s Roman Catholicism became a polemical issue during his bid for the presidency. However, his Catholicism potentially boosted his popularity in Latin America. See Thomas Carty, A Catholic in the White House? Religion, Politics, and John F. Kennedy’s Presidential Campaign (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 166 twice, I was very much impressed by the mythical quality that surrounded his person like an aura not easily grasped by the physiological eye. Mr. Kennedy moved in a world of dream because he himself was partly dream.”336 According to Squirru, the mythic status of Kennedy was not simply manufactured by others, but emanated from the president himself—it was a vital component of his identity. Squirru describes the myth of Kennedy as “[a] man who would bring peace to the world, who would launch a program of help to foreign countries that would give them the opportunity to achieve their destiny in dignity and freedom.” He goes on to say, “Perhaps, it is true, as many critics say, that none of these high goals was actually accomplished, but it would be more true to say that a much higher accomplishment was reached: these goals fired the imagination of those to whom he promised this redemption.”337

In addition to presenting Kennedy as redeemer, Squirru also describes the myth surrounding Kennedy as offering intellectual sustenance—an argument that echoes his earlier statements about importance of cultural development. He writes,

After all—and at the risk of being considered a cynic or a skeptic—the truth is that what can be done for man to better his lot is always rather little. What really counts is not so much, therefore, what can be achieved in a material sense as what can be reached in terms of hope and imagination. The human being is frail and needs this daily bread even more than that of flour and crumb.338

336 Squirru, “A Deeper Reality,” Américas, vol. 16, no. 1 (January 1964), 1. 337 Ibid. 338 Ibid. 167 Certainly Squirru took the Kennedy myth as a source of poetic inspiration. So did his friends from the New Man group in Argentina, such as Fernando Demaría, who wrote in

Américas that Kennedy “belonged to poetry and to poetry he shall return.”339

We can read much of Squirru’s poetry, art writing, and curatorial work in the mid-

60s as attempts to build mystique around John F. Kennedy in the wake of the president’s death. There are a few cases, in which Squirru rallied behind Latin American artists whose work seemed to bolster Kennedy’s mythic status, that deserve special mention.

One concerns the Esso Salon of Young Latin American Artists (1964-1965). In that competition, the grand prize in sculpture was awarded to the Paraguayan artist Hermann

Guggiari (b. 1924) for his abstract sculpture, “Kennedy.” The work consists of a smooth iron beam arching upward and across the length of a rectangular base (Figure 11). On the top of the base, a pattern of painted dots appears to increase in density where base and beam meet. The sculpture and base together are approximately seven feet high. At the top of the beam, a split runs down the center, forming a serrated gap several inches long.

Both of the two top points are jagged; one is longer than the other, which appears as if it was torn off.

The judges of the Esso Salon touted it as evidence of the diversity and maturity of

Latin American artistic production. One of the recurring tropes within the art historical literature on Latin America—especially in this early period—is an argument that the art of the region not be labeled “derivative” of U.S. and European art trends, that it be judged on its own merits and understood for having its own unique geographic and historical

339 Fernando Demaría, “Letters,” Américas, vol. 16, no. 1 (January 1964). 168 contexts.340 Many supporting the Esso Salon felt the need to proffer this argument.

Gómez Sicre, in his “Introduction” to the catalogue asserts that Latin America possesses

“a vigorous art of its own,” he describes the plight of artists in Latin America as one similar to that of “a prophet without honor in his own time.”341 For an article in Art in

America, Thomas Messer describes the Esso Salon as a “remarkable breakthrough” and one of several venues where artists from Latin America have “proved themselves on the international plane.”342 Messer believed that the strength of the works meant that artists no longer need to be circumscribed by “the imaginary Latin American banner,” that they would be appreciated as individually as artists international in their scope. He concludes his article by saying that with the “Latin American” label dissolved, the critics’

“emphasis will return to a point where…it has always belonged—on the individual artist and particular works.” This statement seems rather ironic given that Messer does not name a single artist or work in the Salon exhibition.

Guggiari’s sculpture, in its material form and its title, played to the Pan American dreams of the critics, to their optimism about U.S.-Latin American cultural relations. The austere sculpture was fabricated from sheet metal and positioned on a concrete base— industrial materials that seem a testament that artists even in small countries like

Paraguay had access to the latest industrial techniques and were contributing to

340 Squirru argued against reading Latin American art as “derivative” in The Challenge of the New Man and in his article “Spectrum of Styles in Latin America,” Art in America, vol. 52, no. 1 (February 1964), 81-86. 341 Gómez Sicre’s “Introduction” is reproduced in Annick Sanjurjo, Contemporary Latin American Artists: Exhibitions at the Organization of American States, 1965-1985, 10-11. 342 Thomas M. Messer, “Latin America: Esso Salon of Young Artists,” Art in America, vol. 53, no. 5 (October-November 1965), 121. 169 international style. Its hard, abstract design lent itself to readings of Latin American modernization and “development.” The title potentially anthropomorphizes the work.

Can we read this as a highly-abstracted portrait of the late President Kennedy? The sculpture’s metal arch, which was once perfectly smooth, now appears split. The jagged tear at the top of the sculpture seems to allude to Kennedy’s violent death. At the very least, the title bestows a geometric shape with a narrative. This work also seems to indicate that Kennedy’s reach into Latin America was profound, that through the Alliance for Progress, artists in Paraguay were fascinated by the U.S. President—that he was a Pan

American figure—and suggests that Latin Americans mourned his death.343

Guggiari’s sculpture formed part of a set of tributes to Kennedy that the OAS hosted. In early May 1965, while the exhibition of the Esso Salon finalists was still up, there was a performance of the “Duo Tragico,” an orchestral piece written by Puerto

Rican composer Hector Campos Parsi in memory of John F. Kennedy.344 Squirru’s involvement with the Esso Salon and the musical tribute to Kennedy remains undocumented, but as Director of Cultural Affairs he surely had a hand in arranging them. At the very least, they suggest that Squirru’s thinking was not set in isolation, but that his attitude towards Kennedy and the new man was shared by others at the OAS and in Latin America.

343 In the late 1960s, Guggiari turned his attention to creating metal sculptures in which Christ appears as a figure emerging from a metal sheet—the figure seems to float, leaving behind a trail of sharp metal fringes. In the sculpture for the Esso Salon, we see the artist casting Kennedy as a martyr of a different sort—one that resonates with Squirru’s particular version of the new man. 344 The performance was conducted by Guillermo Espinosa, Chief of the OAS Music Division, as part of the Third Inter-American Music Festival, organized as an extended celebration for Pan American Day. Press releases announcing the performance are available in The Alfred Barr, Jr. Papers, [AAA: 2193;804], The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. 170 In 1967, the connection between Kennedy and the new man reemerged in the form of a public monument to Kennedy entitled Homenaje del Hombre Nuevo a Kennedy by Argentine artist Lincoln Presno. Squirru served as keynote speaker at an unveiling ceremony for the monument in May of that year; he had been in dialogue with his friend

Presno (a participant in the Buenos Aires-based new man group) about the monument since 1964, when the artist began sending him sketches for it. In one of them, the simple geometric forms of Presno’s monument appear both futuristic and monumental, especially given the detail of two cars whizzing along the curved road (Figure 21). We see a tall, rectangular structure with a triangular wedge running horizontally through the center. Beneath the shade created by wedge, stand five figures—their tiny, schematic appearance indicating the proposed monumental scale of the structure. An unreadable scrawl appears above their heads, presumably it is an inscription for future visitors to read. Like Guggiari’s Kennedy sculpture, Presno’s monument commemorates the

President using the formal language of geometric abstraction. If a solid, smooth, impenetrable block represents the ideals of freedom and democracy, then there is a missing piece here that has been laid down, representing the president. That vital missing piece makes the block open and vulnerable.

Contemporary photographs of Presno’s monument, which stands a few miles outside the rural town of Quemú Quemú, show the austere sculpture isolated in the

Argentine pampas (Figure 22). The finished work stands approximately 40 meters tall. Its design varied only slightly from the earlier sketch: no longer does the horizontal element rest on a base, instead it appears to float in a spiritual manner between the legs of the 171 vertical structure. Without the base, the sculpture seems more delicate and less stable.

The inscription has been moved to the inside of one of the sculpture’s legs; it reads “The righteousness of our cause must always underlie our strength,” a quotation that comes from a speech that Kennedy was scheduled to deliver the day he was assassinated.

I see the Monument to Kennedy in Quemú Quemú as the site of a forgotten Cold

War ideological battle between Squirru and Guevara: a conflict about the meaning of the new man, and the role of culture in building transnational alliances—Pan American or

Tricontinental. The monument itself is the most concrete result of Squirru’s brand of new man philosophy—a philosophy shared (at least partially) by Latin American artists like

Presno and poets like Fernando Demaría (whose grandparents had helped found the town of Quemú Quemú), but whose adherents were diminishing as Guevara’s new man gained momentum.

Squirru’s speech at the unveiling ceremony further confirms the monument as a site where many of his ideas about development, the new man, and Kennedy converged.

There, in front of his friends, officials from the Argentine government, and several townspeople of Quemú Quemú, he spoke about the monument in terms of spiritual development; he expected that some who saw Presno’s monument might think, “It’s not a bad monument; on the contrary, it’s beautiful, but at the same time, this money could have been spent on hospitals, or on schools, or on more urgent needs.” His answer to

172 these concerns is: “Yes, we need hospitals for bodies that decay, but these monuments and [artistic] gestures are hospitals for our souls….”345

Perhaps, more explicitly there than any of his published writings, Squirru describes the Americas as a war zone:

The American reality is a revolutionary reality. And Kennedy understood this and that is why we identify ourselves with his message. We are not people that have been born into peace, we were born into war. For this reason, the message at the foot of the monument is a warrior’s message….346

Squirru repeatedly speaks of “revolution” and describes Kennedy as a “revolutionary torch” who has lit the way for people across the world. He concludes by saying that

We are at a crossroads and you would have to be blind not to see it. Other revolutions export their flags and many try to import them. They constitute a challenge that we cannot underestimate, because it is a challenge that is incendiary and real. We are the ones that have to know whether we could respond to this challenge to end these importations, or if we have the ability to launch our own revolution, that is the challenge that Kennedy presented to us. Nothing more.347

The “other revolutions” of which Squirru speaks pertains partly to Cuba (whose communist government he identifies as an “enemy” earlier in the speech) and its support of national liberation struggles in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Since 1959 critics of the Castro government had written about the danger of Cuba “exporting” its revolution to other countries.348 In January 1966, the issue reached a new pitch after the first

345 Rafael Squirru, untitled speech at Quemú Quemú. Reprinted in Appendix B. 346 Ibid. 347 Ibid. 348 The phrase mingles Cold War fears about the spread of Communism—especially George Kennan’s domino theory—with journalistic wisecrack. For instance, Time magazine began one report in 1960 with the statement, “Revolution is fast becoming Cuba’s principal export” August 22, 1960. Available online: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,869815,00.html [accessed August 2011]. Fidel Castro personally disliked the notion, stating, “To the accusation that Cuba wants to export its revolution, we 173 Tricontinental Conference was organized in Havana; the conference brought together delegates from 82 countries from across Latin America, Africa and Asia to discuss how to join forces in the struggles against colonialism, apartheid, racism and imperialism.

Guevara, in his “Message to the Tricontinental” spoke of the need to “create two, three, many Vietnams,” because Vietnam symbolized the militant guerilla who could bog down

U.S. imperialism.349 He urges his listeners to embrace war and envisions an armed socialist revolt taking place across Asia, Africa, and Latin America—underdeveloped continents that have been “fundamental field of imperialist exploitation.”

Squirru’s comment that “other revolutions export their flags” seems a direct reference to Guevara’s Tricontinental speech—a speech that was published in the inaugural issue of Tricontinental magazine in April 1967, and circulated widely in the month before the unveiling of Presno’s Monument to Kennedy. Guevara speaks of the interchangeablity of national flags in the socialist revolution: “To die under the flag of

Vietnam, of Venezuela, of Guatemala, of Laos, of Guinea, of Colombia, of Bolivia, of

Brazil—to name only a few scenes of today’s armed struggle—would be equally glorious and desirable for an American, an Asian, an African, even a European.”350 His hope is for a transnational alliance, one in which the revolutionary causes of each country and continent are connected. This was a radically different imagining of geo-politics from

reply: Revolutions are not exported, they are made by the people….” See Fidel Castro, “On the Export of Revolution,” undated. Available online: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/castro-revolution.asp [accessed August 2011] 349 Ernesto Guevara, “Message to the Tricontinental,” first published in English by the Executive Secretariat of the Organization of the Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (OSPAAAL), Havana, April 16, 1967, available online at http://www.marxists.org/archive/guevara/1967/04/16.htm [Accessed 24 October 2012] 350 Ibid. 174 that of Pan-Americanism: whereas Pan-Americanism basically presumed that the geographic proximity of North and South America meant the continent was destined for harmonious collaboration, Guevara saw North-South power relations as exploitative, and misleading. Essentially, the Tricontinental was an East-West alliance rather than a North-

South one; it was an association that thought of itself as “international,” but it was not strongly tied to geography; instead the supporters of Tricontinental saw affinities based on social and economic status, on shared histories of colonial oppression and violence.

At the foot of the Monument to Kennedy, Squirru urged his countrymen to follow in the footsteps of President Kennedy, to accept democratic revolutions as the only viable type worthy for “export.” As Director of the MAMBA in the 1950s, he spoke of the

“export quality” of Argentina’s art.351 And, more often than not Squirru’s work in

Washington was concerned with the “export of culture,” which he saw as the antidote to the spread of communism. In Quemú Quemú, he said that the Americas were engaged in

“a war against ignorance, against misery, and above all against stupidity.”352 He saw modern art as the tool to cultivate the Americas, to eliminate ignorance and bring spiritual strength to the people.

351 Squirru and Gómez Sicre both spoke of Argentine art as “exportable.” Claire Fox mentions Gómez Sicre’s use of the term in 1958; see Fox, “The Pan American Union Visual Arts Section and the Hemispheric Circulation of Latin American Art during the Cold War,” 97. Beverly Adams also discusses Squirru’s idea of “export quality” in her dissertation; Adams, “Locating the International,” 102-112. The Grupo del Sur exhibition, held in the MAMBA in September 1960, is one place where both Squirru and Gómez Sicre’s belief in “exportability” of art are layered together; Gómez Sicre in the exhibition catalogue writes that the artists in the group show “technical discipline and that strictness of opinion that I, when I glance at a work of art, I name it ‘exportable.’” Grupo del Sur (Buenos Aires, Argentina: Peuser Galeria de Arte, Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, 1960), 2. Copy located in “Actividades, 1960-B” folder, MAMBA Archives. 352 Squirru, untitled speech at Quemú Quemú. Reprinted in Appendix B. 175 We can see the Monument to Kennedy as prime illustration of how Squirru’s cultural projects at the OAS became infused with an evolving concept of the new man.

No matter how remote Quemú Quemú might seem, the monument—its size, its geometric design, and sturdy construction—suggests that for Squirru, Kennedy’s ideals and the mythic figure of the new man would continue to be contemporary, durable and everlasting.

176 Conclusion: The Phantom Museum and the Street

The phantom museum is an idea that by its very nature never dies. It is an impulse, a political stance, never easily visible. Throughout his career, Squirru constantly struggled with the street. He engaged in public art projects, and yet always with the idea of making a centralized art museum, a place separated from the street and its politics, a refuge or alternately a turret from which to wage his own ideological battles. One of his plans as Director of Cultural Affairs was to create a museum in New York City. He was in touch with the multimillionaire Huntington Hartford, who had founded the Gallery of

Modern Art in Columbus Circle; after Hartford’s museum folded in the mid-1960s,

Squirru and Hartford worked up plans to convert the building into a museum dedicated to

Latin American art. They petitioned the OAS to acquire the building. Ultimately, however, their proposal was rejected—a situation that Squirru cites as one of primary reasons he left the OAS in 1970.353 With these plans unrealized, we could say that

Squirru again became director of a “phantom museum.” Inside the phantom museum also roams the forgotten ghost of Squirru’s new man.

Today the lasting image of the new man, the one inscribed in the heart of Buenos

Aires, is largely based on Guevara’s concept. Gone are Squirru’s associations with

Kennedy and modern art. But, so too are most of the associations with Fidel Castro.

Instead, Guevara himself has become the visual embodiment of the new man. Since

Guevara’s assassination in 1967, his image has become an icon representing the guerilla revolutionary and a Christ-like martyr. Shortly after Guevara’s death, art critic John

353 Eloisa Squirru, ¡Tan Rafael Squirru!, 209-211. 177 Berger compared the documentary images of Che’s body that circulated in the press with

Andrea Mantegna’s The Lamentation over the Dead Christ.354 Interestingly, present day invocations of the new man almost always tie together Guevara and Christ.355

The idea of the new man continues to haunt the streets of Buenos Aires. In July

2010, I noticed stenciled graffiti with the words “Agrupación Hombre Nuevo” along the

Avenida de Mayo, the city’s main axis (Figure 23), where a litany of political graffiti and flyers can be found along on the street. Unauthorized and ephemeral political statements compete and change week-to-week as the older messages fade, get washed away, or covered over by new posts. Agrupación Hombre Nuevo—a Christian-based human rights organization in Latin America—defines itself by connecting the new man to Guevara and

Christ. Its graffiti is meant to appeal to general passerby, but especially to young people interested in tagging. The organization’s homepage includes two images (Figure 24).

One is a watercolor showing Christ with his arm around Guevara’s shoulder—their bond is depicted as one between brothers; their beards and mustaches give them an almost family resemblance. There is an amateurish and child-like optimism to the painting, perhaps a suggestion that the two men are enjoying each other’s company in heaven. The second image on the homepage alters an iconic black and red stencil image of Guevara

354 See John Berger, “The legendary Che Guevara is Dead,” New Society [London], vol. 10 (26 October 1967), 596-597. Also see Berger, “Che Guevara: The Moral Factor,” in The Moment of Cubism and Other Essays (New York: Pantheon, 1969). 355 For a further discussion of the interrelations between Catholicism and images of Guevara, see David Kunzle, “Chesucristo: Fusions, Myths, and Realities” Latin American Perspectives 35, no. 2, Reassessing the History of Latin American Communism (March 2008): 97-115. Available through JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27648090 [Accessed 16 October 2012]

178 (based on a famous photograph by Alberto Korda) into a visual composite of Christ and

Guevara.

The Agrupación Hombre Nuevo graffiti and Lincoln Presno’s Monument to

Kennedy are perhaps the most tangible artifacts tied to ideological battles concerning the new man that took place in the 1950s and 1960s. I see them as meaningful stand-ins for

Squirru’s and Guevara’s different visions. The graffiti is a mass produced and populist art form; it appears without permission and runs throughout heart of a Latin American capitol. Meanwhile the Monument to Kennedy, which embodies Squirru’s dreams for the new man and which once resonated with U.S. rhetoric for a Pan American alliance, remains forgotten in the pampas, a gateway to nowhere.

179 AMÉRICAS AND LINGERING DREAMS: CONCLUSIONS

For over fifty years, the OAS spread its philosophy of Pan Americanism through its magazine Américas. Initiated in 1948 by the Secretary General Alberto Lleras

Camargo, Américas was ostensibly created to replace the Pan American Union’s monthly bulletin; its immediate goal was to highlight and explain the OAS’s activities to the general public in a well-illustrated and easily readable format. Each issue contained short articles about Latin American current events, history, music, and visual art, as well as book reviews, events listings, essay contests, and “Know Your Neighbor” quizzes—the entire issue kept to a concise forty-eight pages, compared to the hundred or so pages of the text-heavy Bulletin of the Pan American Union. The renovated magazine also carried with it loftier intentions: namely, to promote international good will by increasing understanding between North and South Americans. This commitment to Pan American dialogue is made clear through the fact that the magazine, unlike the earlier bulletin, was printed in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and also for a short time, French, the four most prevalent languages in the Western Hemisphere. Today the magazine is still printed six times a year in English and Spanish editions.

José Gómez Sicre and Rafael Squirru—two key figures in DC shaping the relationships between Pan-Americanism and the arts—worked independently from one another, leaving almost no record of their interactions despite the fact that they both worked at the OAS from 1963 to 1970. But Américas was one of the vehicles they had in common: in the 1950s and early 1960s the magazine was a crucial agent for translating

180 and transmitting their writings to U.S. audiences at a time before U.S. museums and collectors had other resources for learning about Latin American art.

Their inclusion in Américas magazine was not without its challenges. On the pages of the magazine, their views of Latin American culture had to compete with diametrically different representations of the region’s culture. Their visions of Latin

America as the site for modern art were constantly interrupted by images of the region’s poverty, and its rural and indigenous lifeways.

The history of the magazine’s art coverage could be grouped into two periods: the first decade (March 1949—December 1959), in which Kathleen Walker served as Editor- in-Chief. Gómez Sicre contributions came mainly during this first period. With Rafael

Squirru’s arrival to the OAS in 1963, the magazine entered a cultural phase, which lasted until about 1968. During this second period, the magazine was headed by Dr. Guillermo de Zéndegui and formed part of the Department of Cultural Affairs. Zéndegui and several other editors highlighted a new commitment to discussing the arts.356 After 1968 the magazine did not cover art on a regular basis, focusing instead on social and environmental issues.357

During the first decade, Walker put into place the discursive framework that would stay the magazine throughout the Cold War period. Under her editorship, the

356 During a period of editorial transitions from January 1960 to August 1962, the magazine had no head editor but was jointly edited by George C. Compton, George Meek, and Flora Phelps. De Zéndegui originally oversaw Américas as Editorial Division Chief for the Department of Public Information. He became Editor-in-Chief in 1962. 357 In 1982 the magazine was officially reintegrated back into the Department of Public Information, severing its link to the Department of Cultural Affairs. See General Secretariat, “Executive Order no. 98- 2,” available online: http://www.oas.org/legal/english/gensec/EX-OR-98-2.htm 181 magazine tried to promote positive images of Latin America by focusing on culture, education, and work- and family-life. In the first years especially, Walker brought a light and good-humored tone to the magazine, which presented Pan-Americanism as part and parcel of a healthy curiosity about the world. Many articles in the magazine are filled with humorous wordplay; the title of one article, “Montevideo…Minnesota That Is” (Sept

1949), suggests some of the magazine’s warmth and use of surprise; the article describes how a small town in the U.S. renamed itself after the capital of Uruguay, and the article details the public sculptures and yearly celebrations of Uruguayan history in that town. A reoccurring theme in many articles was that, despite geographic distance, North and

South America shared cultural and commercial interests.

Even as U.S.-Latin American relations tensed in the 1950s, the magazine maintained its good-humored tone. Maybe the editors believed that the first step in improving U.S.-Latin American relations was to stay upbeat in its coverage. There is indication that some readers found the magazine an effective palliative. For instance, one letter to the editor from Elizabeth Pinkerton of Allison Park, Pennsylvania states that

“After hearing and reading about the shabby treatment accorded to Vice-President Nixon

[in South America] I had resolved to give up your magazine. But your cover was so striking, and as I held the magazine, it opened to the article on Brasília and my resolution was forgotten.”358 This letter hints at a central objective of the magazine: rather than try

358 Elizabeth Pinkerton, “Letters,” Américas, vol. 10, no. 10 (November 1958), 43. The letter is in regard to the article by Assistant Editor of the magazine Betty Wilson, “Brazília, Brazil—Carving a Capital Out of the Wilderness,” Américas, vol. 10, no. 8 (August 1958), 2-8. 182 to solve global conflicts, it encouraged one to forget about them, and instead stimulated day-dreaming and fantasies of travel.

Walker and her fellow editors avoided directly addressing topics of international conflict, violence, and social unrest. The polarizing issues of the early Cold War are conspicuously absent, especially those topics that generated immense fears in the U.S., such as the threat of international communism and of nuclear holocaust. In fact, the word

“communism” barely appears within the magazine’s pages—and when it does, it is buried within dense texts reviewing OAS policies. Likewise, any mention of atomic power is always kept in positive terms as a renewable source of energy, a medium for

“progress,” and even the inspiration for artistic ideas.359 Even the political conflicts in which the OAS was heavily invested make only an indirect appearance in the magazine.

The controversy surrounding Guatemala in 1954, for example, which came to a head at the OAS’s Tenth Inter-American Conference in Caracas, receives only a single oblique mention.360 Likewise, Cuba received no coverage in 1959 and very little thereafter—even when the OAS was debating whether to suspend the country’s membership to the organization in 1962.

359 The August 1957 issue of Américas is dedicated to discussions of the atom. The cover shows a photograph of radioactive phosphorous and announces two articles within: “Putting the Atom to Work,” and “Edgar Negret’s Magic Machines,” in which the sculptures of the Colombian artist are described as creative “atomic machines.” See Raúl Nass, “Edgar Negret’s ‘Magic Machines,’” Américas, vol. 9, no. 8 (August 1957), 14-19. 360 A review of the Conference by Secretary General Alberto Lleras in Américas makes no mention of the debates between U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and Guatemalan Foreign Minister Guillermo Toriello, which were the focus of most news coverage. Alberto Lleras, “Tenth Conference Report,” Américas, Vol 6. No. 5 (May 1954), 3-5, 41-43. These debates take a prominent place in histories of the Guatemalan coup, most notably Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala. (New York: Doubleday, 1982. Reprint, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005) and Piero Gliejeses, Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944- 1954 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). 183 Eventually some readers complained. In 1960, a reader from Worcester,

Massachusetts wrote a letter to the editors stating,

I am very much disappointed in your magazine. You have constantly ducked all controversial matters….You have forgotten about Cuba, the Dominican Dictatorship, Venezuela, Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, and other trouble spots that might be of interest. You delight in light stuff, simple stories and the like….I won’t buy your magazine until you face facts, tell the truth and tell the story behind the story.361

The editors responded, writing that since Américas served as the official publication of the OAS, which included Cuba, the Dominican Republic and the U.S. as members, the magazine could not “editorialize on political questions between members….”362

Consistently, across all editorial periods, one of the primary goals of the magazine’s staff was to make North American readers care about Latin America, especially by fantasizing about traveling there. As one U.S. reader put it in 1954, “Your magazine is a regular magic carpet taking many on their first trip to a wonderful continent and I hope fills them with the ambition to see it in person.”363 Letters by other

U.S. readers resonate with the same romance of the “magic carpet” metaphor. For instance, one reader from California submitted a “Letter to the Editor” praising Scott

Seegers’ article, “The Other Side of the Mountain” (Sept 1949) six years after it was published in Américas, explaining that he began planning a trip to Villavicencio,

Colombia, because of it; he writes that

the article…so fired my imagination that I determined I would one day see those vast plains that Mr. Seegers so aptly described….I have read Mr.Seegers’ stories

361 Philip D. Sullivan, “Some Like it Hot,” Américas, vol. 12, no. 9 (September 1960), 44. 362 Ibid. 363 E.P. McKean-Smith, “Letters to the Editor,” Américas, vol. 6, no. 3 (March 1954), 48. 184 many times in Américas and I’d like to tell you how much I enjoy them. From my armchair in San Francisco I have made quite a few journeys through Latin America with him.364

There are similar letters indicating that the magazine inspired readers to make actual visits abroad. In 1960, an Episcopal minister, Rev. W. Shelby Walthall and his family decided to motor down the Pan American highway from their home in Oakland,

Maryland to Santiago, Chile. He writes, that “It is through Américas magazine that we have come to know our Latin American neighbors and have come to the point where we would really like to see how they live and work. We feel such a trip as we are planning will be of great help to our sons not only in their school work now but in the days when they become older and can understand more of the adult world.”365 These few excerpts suggest that the editors were successful at interesting readers in Latin America— especially through travel stories; they also indicate that Pan Americanism was not something simply imposed by editors onto their readers, but that Pan American desires also germinated from the readers themselves. The metaphor of the magazine as a “real magic carpet” also captures something deeper about Américas’ editorial-readership relation: both sides were spellbound by Latin America, they saw it as a fantastic destination, almost out of a storybook or fable, where important life lessons could be learned—lessons that are helpful in, as Reverend Walthall it, “the adult world.” The readers were drawn to the magazine because of its ability to reflect what they themselves felt were the most alluring aspects of the region, its customs, and its culture. They also

364 John G. Kosack, “Letters to the Editors,” Américas, vol. 6, No 1 (January 1955), 43. 365 W. Shelby Walthall, “Letters,” Américas, vol. 12, no. 12, (December 1960), 43. 185 counted on the magazine as medium for exchange—using the letters section on the last page of the magazine as a place to trade news, information, and stories.366 In the 1950s and 1960s it was an unlikely place for U.S. audiences to learn about Latin American art and to exchange ideas and hopes about Pan American unity.

Américas is still produced and circulated by the OAS. On October 12, 2009, in conjunction with Columbus Day, the OAS celebrated the 60th anniversary of Américas with a display of twenty-eight of the magazines’ covers, arranged in cascading tiles, in the atrium of the Pan American Building (Figure 25). On the table were complimentary copies of the latest issue for visitors to take. This display represents one of the few instances when the magazine and its history has been celebrated within the OAS’s massive bureaucracy. The present-day editors—a staff of about five—remain modest about their work; according to managing editor Christopher Shell, they were not the ones who requested the small exhibition of magazine covers.367 All their energy is focused on completing the next issue. The display suggests a continuity in focus and tone throughout the magazine’s life. But the display is a selective construction: all of the covers on view show portraits of Latin American people, except one at center presenting flags. Absent are magazine covers that show modern and contemporary art, as well as many themes of industrial development, nature, and travel. The focus is instead on presenting Américas as the vehicle for people-to-people contact and Pan-American friendship. The display is not

366 Nearly any of the “Letters to the Editor” pages provide substantial evidence that a strain of hobbyists and collectors read the magazine. A single example, especially rich in such content, can be found in the March 1961 issue; the “Letters” section includes various letters seeking to trade license plates, matchbooks, flags, bells worn by animals, records of national marches, and information on UFOs. See Américas, vol. 13, no. 3(March 1961), 43-44. 367 Christopher Shell, interview with the author, 22 February 2010. 186 historically-oriented. It gives no sense of the magazine as a publication that evolved over time. Instead it serves as signpost for a recurring Pan-American dream of peace and international good will guiding U.S.-Latin American relations.

* * *

Long before the monument was visible, you might hear it. It produced a mysterious sound that would not fade on a windy day, not when the car windows were rolled tightly shut, nor when the vehicle stopped alongside the highway. The sound’s source came from an unnamed town somewhere along the U.S.-Mexican border. There, in the city center, stood a large bronze sculpture soaring out of a silvery reflecting pool.

The sculpture depicts two male figures, one kneeling while the second performs a ritual.

The kneeling figure wears a headdress in which gears and levers converge to form a face.

He is the personification of technology and engineering. He holds open a large sheet of paper on his lap, possibly a map or an architectural blue-print. He is the embodiment of modern America, and he is asking the standing figure, a Mayan priest, a symbol of ancient America, for a blessing. The priest solemnly gestures with his hands; he is wearing a feathered headdress and an elaborate skirt. A young boy, also wearing a headdress, clings to the priest’s legs, peering out at the ceremony taking place. The figures are enclosed within a niche—also part of the bronze sculpture—that is decorated with patterns and symbols inspired by South American weaving and hieroglyphics. At the center of the niche, directly behind the two figures, is a hole shaped like a human eye. It is the source of the sound: the hole is designed to resonate intermittently in the desert breeze. 187 The monument I just described was never erected. It exists only in the form of written proposals, preparatory drawings, and a maquette designed by the Polish-born artist Stanislav Szukalski (1893-1987), who first conceived of the monument he called

Promerica in 1933, believing it would be the crowning jewel of the Pan American

Highway system (Figure 26).368 Szukalski, who fled Poland during World War II and took up residence in Southern California, never gave up on the project. In 1956, he wrote a letter about the monument to Nelson Rockefeller, who he believed was in charge of the

Organization of American States, the institution overseeing the Pan-American Highway project. In his letter, he describes the monument as

…. a side issue of a larger project with which I now turn to your organization. There ought to be on the Highway, at the junction between the United States and Mexico, a town founded, ostensibly a University town, whose primary aim would be the facilitation and radiation of the Pan-American spirit of the cultural, economic interdependence and politico-historic filiality. At the Pan-American University all such specialists, whose acknowledged intellectual activity has been known to be for the advancement of a mutual understanding through learning, would teach and lecture. This would be the primary activity of the town throughout the year.

Annually there would be Pan-American Fairs, to which craftsman, artists and manufacturers would bring their folk Art [sic] and modern industry from the centers, as well as from the remotest settlements of every Country [sic]. Each Country [sic] of both of the Americas would have their visiting Public to the Fair with an eagerness to be known, and depart home with a greater mutual understanding. The annual Fairs would stimulate an All-American interest.

Somehow I feel that the town should be inter-American with its own jurisdiction, dependent on no specific Country, so as not to be regarded as an “Americanization” center (and by that term I mean “United States”), which should

368 My initial discussion of the Promerica monument, its symbolism, and reference to “modern American” and “ancient America,” are based on Szukalski’s own explanations of it in his letter to Nelson Rockefeller. See Stanislav Szukalski to Nelson Rockefeller, 13 March 1956, folder 3, box 4, RG 5, Series: Projects, NAR, RAC. 188 be avoided under all circumstances. The most civilized Nation automatically will have the lead. It can afford impartiality and an altruistic generosity.369

Szukalski’s description of a Pan-American city and its central monument continues for several pages, each sentence running at the same fevered pitch. Perhaps Szukalski’s plan for a Pan-American city seems eccentric, maybe even preposterous.370 His letter likely went no further then the desk of Francis Jamieson, Rockefeller’s chief public relations aid, who declined interest in the Szukalski’s project and explained that Rockefeller “is in no way connected with this organization and so cannot be of help to you.”371

However, Szukalski’s monument should not be dismissed as merely the musings of a crank. His imagined monument was part of a Pan-American dream that was taking shape at mid-century. But, if monuments are meant to memorialize the events and people of historic note, what exactly was Szukalski’s monument attempting to historicize? To be sure, the sculptor wished to celebrate the creation of the Pan-American Highway. But his monument also projects a future world where the United States and Latin America are more closely aligned in their politics, their modernity, and spiritual values. It imagines a

369 Ibid. 370Szukalski’s work was rediscovered in the 1980s by comic book artists and enthusiasts living in Southern California. He was lionized as a genius in 1981 by artist Robert Crumb, who ran a feature on Szukalski in the first issue of Weirdo: The Magazine for Modern Misfits, a magazine celebrating those who lived “on the frayed fringe of culture.” In 2000, Szukalski’s life and work received more thorough study in the exhibition and catalogue, Eva Kirsch, Donat Kirsch, and George Di Carpio, Struggle: The Art of Szukalski (San Francisco, CA: Last Gasp, 2000). 371 Francis Jamieson to Szukalski, April 19, 1956, folder 3, box 4, RG 5, series Projects, NAR, RAC. Despite Jamieson’s firmness on the matter, Rockefeller did have power with the Organization of American States. When the organization was forming in 1948, he offered recommendations to the Secretary General Alberto Lleras about who should head the institutions’ various departments. Later, working behind the scenes in the late 1960s, he encouraged the Ecuadorian politician Galo Plaza Lasso to run for office of Secretary General, campaigning and helping him secure the position. 189 day when the citizens of North and South America need a monument to help recall their past differences and the traditions they traded with one another.

That day has not come. There is no Pan-American city for Szukalski’s monument to stand in. The Pan-American Highway was never completed. Time has only made

Szukalski’s monument seem more alien; its rather crude racial depiction of modern

America as Anglo—nearly Aryan in appearance—and ancient America as indigenous hint at the kind of stereotypes that plague the history of U.S.-Latin American relations.

Consider a radically different view of Pan-Americanism offered by Peruvian artist

Fernando Bryce (b. 1965). Since 1997, Bryce has made free-hand drawings of historical documents and images he finds in archives—a process the artist calls “mimetic analysis” since drawing requires Bryce to painstakingly study each historical document he chooses to reproduce. Styling himself as a kind Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), Bryce has embarked on his own “Arcades Project,” creating a visual archive of obscure and discarded historical materials.372 He has even applied his copying technique to

Benjamin’s personal archives, ID cards, and photographs. His early series, Atlas Perú

(2000-2001), charted the historical representations of his home country throughout the twentieth century, pulling together 494 drawn documents relating to Peruvian culture and politics: truncated news articles, flow charts, portraits of diplomats, ethnographic studies, photographs, and advertisements, all of which through Bryce’s painstaking process transform mundane and mass-produced material into singular works of art.

372 The Arcades Project refers to German literary critic Walter Benjamin’s unfinished collection of writings about Paris during the nineteenth century. The book, written between 1927 and 1940, is generally considered Benjamin’s magnum opus; it was edited and published posthumously and provides a dense archive of transcriptions and thoughts about daily life in the city. 190 Over the past ten years, Bryce has performed his mimetic analysis on documents covering representations of Latin America more broadly. A portion of these works address representations of war and revolution in the Spanish-speaking world. These include the following series: Guatemala 54 (2002), a series of 4 drawings; The Spanish

Revolution (2003), a series of 21 drawings; The Spanish War (2003), a series of 127 drawings; Revolución (2004), a series of 219 drawings. He also has hunted down and copied images of Latin America as a tourist paradise and exotic wonderland—a quest that began around 2002 when Bryce found a small pamphlet, entitled “South of the Border,” created by the U.S. Defense Department. In an interview with curator Helena Tatay, the artist recalls that the pamphlet was the first in an ongoing exploration of imagery produced by a wave of 1950s Pan-Americanism:

It [the pamphlet] spoke about Latin America using terms of fantasy and unwittingly comic phrases, as if it were an exotic, idyllic, picturesque entity. All this business of ‘south of the border’, the idea of a pan-American union that is a kind of democratic idyll which contrasts with real politics, with real history [emphasis mine] and also because there is a whole string of clichés about Latin America: the proud, vigorous Mexican Indian, the brooding natives of Peru, the fantastic, cosmopolitan Buenos Aires, and yet we are all Americans, or whatever. I submitted the document to mimetic analysis and a fine series was the result and I decided to continue in that vein: looking for documents from the fifties, the golden era of North American hegemony on the continent of America.373

Along with his South of the Border series (2002), Bryce also created drawings based on tourism pamphlets about Costa Rica, Cuba, and Mexico.

His Américas series (2005) represents a continuation of his interest in the Pan

American fantasies that circulated at mid-century. The series includes 44 drawings, all

373 Fernando Bryce and Helena Tatay, “Conversation,” Fernando Bryce. ed. Helena Tatay, trans. Peter Bush and Elena González (Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tapies, 2005), 377. 191 based on English editions of the OAS magazine from 1949 to 1963. The drawings were included in the exhibition Poetics of the Handmade at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2008, and at Cosmopolitan Routes: Houston Collects Latin American Art at the

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston in 2010. Eighteen of them reproduce the magazines’ front covers. The covers address several recurring themes. Industrial and economic development are represented through images of oil rigs in Venezuela, an article about an economic conference in Buenos Aires, and scenes of car manufacturing in Brazil. Health and modern medicine are represented by covers depicting a hospital scene, as well as an image of a white-coated doctor surrounded by children in rural Paraguay. Other drawings present portraits of Peruvian and Amazonian Indians, representing contemporary indigenous life. Bryce also draws from pages describing OAS literacy campaigns, good will tours by politicians, and exhibitions of modern art from Latin America.

Through mimetic analysis, Bryce engages in an act of serious research—one that can also be disarmingly droll. “What I am interested in is reshaping all those representations of real events understood as constructions, through the media…,” he tells

Helena Tatay. “In the source,” he continues, “they are all condemned to be prisoners of their time, of the circumstances in which they were constructed.”374 By taking representations out of their original context, Bryce creates a certain distance or detachment between the image and its original usage. Bryce’s craftsmanship is alluring, as is the graphic design of the original source material. But the information conveyed in

374 Ibid, 374. 192 the drawings are discomforting, particularly in the stark contrasts between the historic attitudes about Pan-Americanism and our contemporary sense of political correctness.

Consider the drawing based on the cover of the magazine’s January 1953 issue

(Figure 27). On the left half of the image, we read cover lines describing stories on electric power (“Kilowatts for Prosperity: New Power to Mexico’s Homes and

Factories”) and transportation (“The South American Way: Motoring from Caracas to

Buenos Aires”) indicating the OAS’s desires to modernize Latin America. Bryce uses dark humor to underscore the colonial implications of such modernization. For example, the unsettling caption accompanying the image of the bearded man on the right reads,

“Indian from Pisac, Peru. You can now motor through his country on the Pan American

Highway.” On the same highway that Szukalski imagined a monument honoring the native history of the Americas, Bryce’s drawing highlights a world where the living indigenous populations are passed by quickly, serving merely as one more element in a picturesque drive through Latin America.

Bryce’s handmade reproductions play with the idea of generating “aura”—what

Walter Benjamin famously described as the constant feeling of distance we sense in front of an original work of art.375 For Benjamin, the “aura” refers to our tendency to fetishize objects, remaining in a state of reverence about the object’s authenticity and ritual use.

Mass reproduction, he argues, can free us from our worship of the original work of art,

375 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1968), 217-252. 193 and by extension, we become cognizant of art’s historical use as propaganda. In Bryce’s work, however, there is an interesting reversal: by transforming the mass produced document into a one-of-a-kind drawing, he builds a kind of “auratic” distance where there previously hadn’t been one. The distance Bryce intends to generate is a critical distance.

But Bryce’s own editorial powers are key to his drawing series, like Américas. He has the power to select one image over another, he changes the medium of a multi-page publication into a singular drawing, and he occasionally makes subtle changes to the images to bring out messages he sees embedded in them. Comparing Bryce’s work to the source, we see that he rearranges the article “The Spinning World” for greater comic effect by making a caption that reads, “Although it may take centuries for statesmen to achieve One World, globe makers do it in a minute,” appear as though it was the opening sentence (Figures 28 and 29). In another case, he crops an image of artist Constancía

Caulderón and Joan Crawford, pairing it with the article’s title “Art Safari” (Figures 30 and 31). Another alteration by Bryce involves taking the titles of two separate articles,

“The Role of Business” and “The Role of Unions,” and placing them into one composite image (Figures 32-34). The artist’s alterations, his cropping and condensing of details, may all seem quite innocuous. There is at least one case, however, where Bryce’s change seems loaded. In his drawing of a man and woman on horseback, an image based on the back cover of the November 1949 issue, the artist captures the sitters with an economy of lines, conveying their postures and their decorative clothing (Figures 35 & 36). But Bryce adds his own label to this image: “Gaucho and girl.” The actual caption in the magazine is more specific: “Chilean hueso (cowboy) and friend.” The difference may seem 194 insignificant. But it is an unnecessary change, clueing us to the possibility that Bryce, through his rearrangements and edits, is perhaps making Américas appear more prone to stereotyping than it actually was. Even when he shows absolute fidelity to his source materials, Bryce irrevocably changes things as he traces out a history. He is doing the work of the historian: bringing certain aspects into focus, while necessarily occluding others, always using materials from the past to make meaning in the present.

Szukalski and Bryce present radically different standpoints on Pan Americanism.

While Szukalski’s monument hums with utopian imaginings about Pan Americanism working towards the good of the future, Bryce looks back at Pan Americanism with a critical eye. Any sense of hope rests on the idea that, by critically examining the past, we might learn from our mistakes.

As Bryce’s work continues to grow in popularity, drawing series like Américas take with them the threads of Pan Americanism into the twenty-first century, giving viewers the opportunity to criticize as well as to relish in the myths that were so popular in the 1950s. They reopen a space—albeit a self-conscious one—for Pan American dreaming.

In the last few years, I have seen a resurgence of Pan-American modes of thinking in the contemporary art world—but they do not seem as conscientious as Bryces’s. In the introduction to this dissertation, I discussed the Blanton’s “America/Américas” exhibition, which integrates U.S. and Latin American art in the belief that a continental view of the Americas can better illustrate each region’s contributions to the history of art.

This is a permanent exhibition rooted in a Pan-American vision. Other museums have 195 adopted a similar position, most notably the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (MFA). In

2010 the MFA opened its Art of the Americas Wing, a four story wing designed by

Foster + Partners architects and dedicated to presenting pre-Columbian, colonial, and contemporary art from North, Central, and South America. Videos of the opening celebrations show an event that seems taken directly from a 1950s Pan American guidebook, juxtaposing scenes of sincerity and kitsch: we see gospel singers performing the U.S. National Anthem, and brass band street performers, their drums labeling them

“Hot Tamales”; speeches and news reports citing the integration as the makings of a new era. Critic Holland Cotter praises the galleries for providing a new vision of the history of art by placing U.S. and Latin American art “as equals at a hemispheric table.”376 He acknowledges that the definitions of “America” have long been polarized, but concludes with the hope that “maybe this is where art itself comes to the rescue. So much about the new Americas Wing is so startling, stimulating and beautiful that you just want to lay down your arms.”377 This hope that art can overcome all borders, as well as academic misgivings, is eerily familiar Pan American rhetoric.378 At museums and in scholarship,

376 Holland Cotter, “Seating All the Americas at the Same Table” The New York Times, 19 November 2010, C23. 377 Ibid. 378 We can see indications of this Pan American trend at other museums and universities. The Newark Museum’s Constructive Spirit: Abstract Art in South and North America, 1920s-50s, curated by Mary Kate O’Hare in 2010, likewise presented works from across the Americas based on their formal similarities. That same year, Adam Kleinman of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and founder of Lentspace curated “Avenue of the Americas,” an open-air exhibition that brought four artists from Latin America Julieta Aranda, Carlos Motta with David Sanin Paz, Judi Werthein, and Carla Zaccagnini to produce site-specific works at the corner of Canal St. and Sixth Ave about Pan Americanism. Even the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s major new initiative—Documents of 20th Century Latin American and Latino Art digital archive and book project—could be considered something of a Pan-American endeavor. While its goal is to make key documents of 20th century art available for free globally through the internet, the scope of collecting (so far) focuses on materials from repositories in the Latin America and the United States. At universities, 196 the terminology has changed—“Pan American” has largely been replaced with seemingly more neutral mentions of “the Americas” or the “Hemispheric”—but the impulse remains in place to read the U.S. and Latin America as a unit, linked through geographic proximity, history, and shared political and cultural ambitions.

In this dissertation, I have examined the activities and the arts writing of José

Gómez Sicre and Rafael Squirru, two historical figures who have received only limited scholarly attention previously. I explored the different ways their curatorial strategies and their desires to build museums of Latin American art connected their personal agendas with corresponding national and international politics. Few scholars have wished to engage in this topic, perhaps because the politics of their Pan-American dreaming seemed too transparent. Some may prefer to forget these figures and their activities, filing them away as closed chapters of the Cold War era. But to avoid or ignore their work and their

Pan-American dreaming is to potentially deny those aspects of the past that still shape the field today. Pan-American dreams are not simply of a bygone era, but they are still lingering with us today and they are constantly being remade.

programs of international affairs have long offered courses on “Inter-American Affairs,” now repackaged as specializations in “Latin American and Hemispheric Studies.” George Washington University’s School of International Affairs offers graduate degrees in the subject, and University of California offers undergraduates minors. The framework is migrating to other areas in the humanities, particularly the fields of Comparative Literature, American Studies, and Art History. The University of New Mexico offers graduate degrees in Art of the Americas; Stanford University’s Division of Literature, Cultures, and Languages offers courses in “Hemispheric Studies.” And scholarly books, such as Robert S. Levine and Caroline F. Levander, eds. Hemispheric American Studies (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008) and Justin Read, Modern Poetics and Hemispheric American Cultural Studies (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

197

Illustrations

Figure 1. Asilia Guillén, Héroes y artistas vienen a la Unión Panamericana para ser consagrados [Heroes and Artists Come to the Pan American Union to be Consecrated], 1962. Art Museum of the Americas, Washington, DC

198

Figure 2. José Balmes, No, 1965. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

199

Figure 3. “Courtyard of the Pan American Building, Washington, DC,” 1942. Photograph by John Collier. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA-OWI Collection (LC-DIG-fsac-1a34529)

200

Figure 4. “Washington, DC Under the auspices of the Bureau of University Travel and the National Capital School Visitors' Council, over 200 high school students chosen for their intellectual alertness visited Washington for a week. Students and parrot in the patio of the Pan-American Union.” Photograph by Marjory Collins. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection (LC-USW3-010019-E).

201

Figure 5. Partial View of the Gallery for the Permanent Collection of Contemporary Latin American Art of the Pan American Union. Photographer unknown. Reprinted from the Boletín de Artes Visuales 6. January-December 1960.Washington, DC: Pan American Union, frontispiece.

202

Figure 6. Partial View of the Gallery for the Permanent Collection of Contemporary Latin American Art of the Pan American Union. Photographer unknown. Reprinted from La Union Panamericana en el servicio del arte. Washington, DC: Pan American Union, 1961.

Figure 7. Partial View of the Gallery for the Permanent Collection of Contemporary Latin American Art of the Pan American Union. Photographer unknown. Reprinted from Permanent Collection of Contemporary Art of Latin America. Washington, DC: Pan American Union, 1960.

203

Figure 8. Alfred Barr, Cubism and Abstract Art (book jacket). New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1936.

204

Figure 9. “Today’s Art at São Paulo” by José Gómez Sicre. Reprinted from Américas, vol. 10, no. 1 (January 1958), 32-33.

205

Figure 10. Rogelio Polesello, Faz A [Phase A], undated. Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida.

206

Figure 11. Hermann Guggiari, Kennedy, 1964. Image reprinted from the inside back cover of Américas, vol. 17, no. 6 (June 1965). Lowe Museum Art Gallery, University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida.

207

Figure 12. Fernando de Szyszlo, Cajamarca, 1959. Art Museum of the Americas, Organization of American States, Washington, DC

208

Figure 13. Oswaldo Guayasamín, Madre y niño [Mother and Child], 1955. Art Museum of the Americas, Organization of American States, Washington, DC

209

Figure 14. “Art Critic on a Holiday” by Jóse Gómez Sicre. Reprinted from Américas, vol. 2, no. 1. (January 1950), 11.

210

Figure 15. Detail of “Art Critic on a Holiday,” by José Gómez Sicre. Reprinted from Américas, vol. 2, no. 1 (January 1950), 14.

211

Figure 16. The Yapeyú ship, date unknown, photographer unknown. Courtesy of Kees Heemskerk, www.shipspotting.com.

212

Figure 17. Jacqueline Kennedy and Rafael Squirru at the Pan American Union. Photograph by David Chevalier. Reprinted from Américas, vol. 15 no. 2 (February 1963), 16.

213

Figure 18. Fidel Castro in Matanzas, 1959. Photograph by Grey Villet. First printed in “Liberator’s Triumphal March Through an Ecstatic Island,” LIFE Magazine, vol. 46, no. 3(January 19, 1959), 29.

214

Figure 19. Leopoldo Presas, El Hombre Nuevo, 1954. Reprinted from Homenaje a Rafael Squirru. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Galería Zurbaran, 2005.

215

Figure 20. Norman Saunders, New Man, November 1964 (left); Norman Saunders, New Man, September 1965 (right). Original paintings in the Collection of Richard Oberg.

216

Figure 21. Lincoln Presno, Sketch of the Monument to John F. Kennedy, 1964.

217

Figure 22. Lincoln Presno, Monument to John F. Kennedy, c. 2010. Photographer unknown. Photograph courtesy of http://QuemúQuemú.gob.ar

218

Figure 23. Stencilled Graffiti along Avenida de Mayo, Buenos Aires, July 2010. Photograph by author.

219

Figure 24. Screenshot of Agrupacion Hombre Nuevo homepage: http://www.elhombrenuevo.galeon.com/index.html [accessed August 2011].

220

Figure 25. Display for Américas’ 60th Anniversary in OAS’s main building, October 12, 2008. Photograph by Juan Manuel Herrera.

221

Figure 26. Stanislav Szukalski, Maquette for Promerica, 1933.

222

Figure 27. Fernando Bryce, Américas, 2005. Private Collection, Houston.

223

Figure 28. Fernando Bryce, Américas, 2005. Private Collection, Houston.

224

Figure 29. “This Spinning World.” Reprinted from Américas, vol. 4, no. 1 (January 1952), 21.

225

Figure 30. Fernando Bryce, Américas, 2005. Private Collection, Houston.

226

Figure 31. “Art Safari” by José Gómez Sicre. Reprinted from Américas, vol. 16, no.11 (November 1964), 16-17

227

Figure 32. Fernando Bryce, Américas, 2005. Private Collection, Houston.

228

Figure 33. “The Role of Unions.” Reprinted from Américas, vol. 13, no. 10 (October 1961), 26-27.

229

Figure 34. “The Role of Business.” Reprinted from Américas, vol. 13, no. 10 (October 1961), 36-37.

230

Figure 35. Fernando Bryce, Américas, 2005. Private Collection, Houston.

231

Figure 36. “Chilean hueso (cowboy) and friend.” Reprinted from Américas, vol. 1, no. 3 (November 1949), back cover.

232

Appendix A. Documents concerning José Gómez Sicre recovered from a Freedom of Information Act Request

Note: My FOIA request regarding José Gómez Sicre, filed on March 10, 2009 [NRC2009012339], returned 222 pages of documents from the U.S Citizen and Immigration Services; pages 213-229 appear here and pertain to a 1952 interrogation of Gómez Sicre by officials of the United States Immigration Service.

233

234 235 236 237 238 239 240 241 242 243 244 245 246 247 248

249

250

Appendix B. Rafael Squirru’s Speech in Quemú Quemú, Argentina, 1966.

251 252 253

254

255

Appendix C. Alejandro Anreus’s Last Interviews with José Gómez Sicre

Note: The following interviews by Alejandro Anreus provide valuable insights into José Gómez Sicre’s life and work. Because the published article is difficult to find, I have included a copy here to aid fellow researchers. Originally published as Alejandro Anreus, “Ultimas conversaciones con José Gómez Sicre,” ArteFacto: Revista de arte y cultura en blanco y negro [Nicaragua] no. 18 (Summer 2000), n.p. Reprinted with the permission of the author.

256 257 258 259 260 261 262 263 264 265 266 267 268 269 270 271 272 273 274 275 276 277 278

279

280 Bibliography

ARCHIVES:

Art Museum of the Americas, Organization of American States, Washington, DC Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX. Biblioteca y centro de documentación, Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, Argentina Columbus Memorial Library, Organization of American States, Washington, DC Fundación Espigas, Buenos Aires, Argentina Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX. Library and Archives, Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA. Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York, NY National Archives, College Park, MD Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Washington, DC The Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York, NY.

TEXTS:

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