Date: 30-05-1989
Owning Institution: Hayward Gallery
Publication:         The Independent 1987 - 1999  
Subject:     20th Century  19th Century    

The Hayward Gallery's over-ambitious 'Art in Latin America' show.

'ART IN Latin America' goes in search of a coherent tradition in Latin American art but ends by sug-gesting that there is probably no such thing. Virtually everything in it seems the product of cross- fertilisation: foreign styles tailored to fit local circumstance, local artists struggling to assimilate foreign ways of seeing, working in Toltec or Mayan references perhaps, or injecting traces of voodoo.

Limiting itself, modestly, to what its subtitle designates 'The Modern Era, 1820-1980', the exhibition's ostensible subject is the emergence of the new from the old: from Aztec to high-tec in three tight-packed floors of breezeblock South Bank architecture. Biting off more than they can chew, the curators admit that they can't aspire to conclusiveness: this is 'a temporary museum of Latin American art, which offers a nec-essarily selective and partial, rather than comprehensive view.' Which is a diplomatic way of admitting that this is a skimmer's guide rather than an encyclopedia, a Latin primer, a whistlestop tour through the art of half a continent.
 
First stop is the early nineteenth century, the Age of Revolutions. Virtually every Latin American country had one, and liberators and assorted martyrs to freedom take their places in the roll of honour that is 'Inde-pendence and its Heroes.' They are painted in an odd hybrid of styles, ranging from the quaintly naive to the would-be full-blown neoclassical. The walls of the display have been painted in the red, white and green of the Mexican national flag, complementing the flag-waving mood of the paintings themselves.
 
Jose Gil de Castro paints The Martyr Olaya as a stiff tailor's dummy, resplendent in a natty white suit against a stage- prop landscape of cardboard boulders, pop-up volcano and two-dimensional clouds, the red banner that flies overhead proclaiming 'Gloria ala PATRIA'. The effect is of a pub sign consecrated to the sacred flame of liberty. Elsewhere, the heroic formulae first established by post-Revolutionary French artists - and transmitted via colonial Latin America's sundry Royal Academies of Art - get put through their paces. Simon Bolivar, who had a schooner (Lord Byron's) as well as a country named after him, is recorded for posterity as a Latin American Buonaparte: his right hand, tucked Napoleonically into a gilded lapel, is the main giveaway.
 
While independence, in political terms, was all the rage in Latin America, cultural self-determination re-mained harder to achieve. The styles and techniques of European art, thanks to the Spanish and Portuguese invaders, were deeply ingrained. At the entrance to the exhibition you are greeted by an arrogant archangel as painted by a member of the Circle of the Master of Calamarca, Lake Titicaca School, in the latter stages of the seventeenth century. Dressed to the nines in ballooning, madly intricate lacework, even the wings that sprout from his elegant back look like heavenly status symbols. Every inch the Spanish aristocrat, this par-ticular archangel shoulders a musket: believe in God, heathen, or else. The most conspicuous anachronism in a show given over to 'The Modern Era', he has presumably been stationed here to make a point - a sym-bol, perhaps, of the way in which European art adapted to Latin American circumstances, and vice- versa.
 
'Academies and History Painting' documents the ways in which academy- trained Latin American artists fell back on the cliches of salon painting. Felix Parra enters neoclassical realms of historicising fantasy with his Episodes of the Conquest, in which hapless Mexican Indians are put to the sword by dastardly ar-mour-clad Spanish conquistadors; Parra and his audience did little to improve the lot of the indigenous Mexican races, but paintings like his were considered useful propaganda at a time when Mexico preferred to stress its pre- Hispanic origins. Juan Manuel Blanes paints Paraguay: Image of Your Desolate Country as Bouguereau at his most socially conscientious might have done. A peasant girl on a battlefield gazes down at the head of a corpse shrouded in the Paraguayan national flag. Her petticoat is showing and her blouse has fallen open, revealing an expanse of dusky bosom: an image of desolation contrived with an eye to the market.
 
Latin America continued, too, to suggest marketing possibilities to European artists, who turned up there in considerable numbers throughout the nineteenth century in search of previously unpainted land-scapes, of quaint local customs and dress (or undress). The Age of Revolutions was also the age of the Voyage Pittoresque, of equatorial rainforest transformed into Arcadian vista or tribespeople portrayed as Noble Savages disporting on riverbank or under palm tree. Compiling his Voyage Pittoresque et Historique au Bresil, Jean- Baptiste Debret homed in on the Bororenas tribe preparing for war and drew a trio of girls in a Native Village in Cantagalo as a Three Graces with dark- skinned novelty value. Most of the work in this overlong section of the show is the stuff of which art historical footnotes are made.
 
At least it is punctuated by reminders of the sort of art preferred by the rising Mexican middle classes. Here, among a cornucopia of talented-amateur depictions of mouthwatering fruit, street scenes and the like, Jose Agustin Arrieta's radiant portrait of a negro fruit-seller stands out, suggesting the sophistications of Spanish Baroque transplanted to the Mexican interior.
 
So does the magnificent, matronly bulk of an anonymously painted Girl from Puebla, with Roses. Stiff and frontal as an icon, she frowns out of the canvas and seems to throttle her garland as much as cherish it. Numerous anonymous ex-votos are also included - small, roughly executed panels sending thanks heaven-wards, mostly for sicknesses miraculously cured - which do some justice at least to the continuing influence of Catholicism on Latin American art.
 
Accelerating towards the twentieth century, via the Penny Press outbursts of Jose Guadalupe Posada - sensational scenes, executions a speciality, fresh off the wood-block for sale on street corners or topical satires that throng with grinning skeletons - this show implies that there's little point in drawing a strict line between high and low art in Latin America.
 
'Modernism and the Search for Roots' sets the scene for a series of uneasy domestications of the dominant tendencies in mainstream modern art. Funny things happen to the European 'isms' on Latin American soil. Late Impressionism is radically reinterpreted in the work of Armando Reveron, a recluse whose increasingly etherised canvases hinting at figure or landscape propose a curious, sun-bleached ver-sion of nineteenth century naturalism. Xul Solar, operating under the conjoint influence of Malevich and Klee, sets aerolites drifting and stick figures cavorting on abstract grounds, but his forms are unmistakably pre-Columbian in inspiration.
 
The latter stages of this show are phrased increasingly in terms of the quest for a 'Latin American iden-tity', but Latin American art seems characterised precisely by its lack of a dominant tradition, by a sense of uncertainty in its practitioners of what, or how, they are to paint (one of the pleasures of this show is that you never know what to expect next). The exceptions were the Mexican muralists, but the section given over to their work disappoints for the same reasons that the Hayward's 1987 Diego Rivera retrospective did: their best art is immovably fixed to Mexican walls, so you have to make do with slide shows and a series of fairly unconvincing preparatory sketches.
 
Surrealism went down big in Latin America, and vice-versa; Andre Breton described Mexico as 'the Surrealist place par excellence'. Curator Dawn Ades, an expert on Surrealism, has turned one of the show's rooms into a memorial of sorts to the International Surrealist Exhibition held in Mexico City in 1940. This proves, among other things, that Latin Americans could paint Tanguy-like melted landscapes or Miro- esque biomorphs with the best of them. But it is dominated by the extraordinary pictures of Frida Kahlo, whose odd, bitter transformations of the ex-voto format - she paints herself, for instance, in a wheelchair, next to the domineering portrait of the doctor who has presumably failed to save her from it - suggest that her art is at least as close to earlier Latin American forms as modish modernist ones.
 
Latin American art can't easily be assimilated into standard histories of modernism, and when it can it looks painfully dated. A host of Latin American artists in the 1950s and 1960s turned to geometric abstrac-tion, playing stale variations on an international theme. Their Op Art gimmickry, presented as 'A Radical Leap', looks more like a pratfall.
 
'Art in Latin America' concludes, as perhaps it should, in a tangle - a quickfire survey of what curators often like to call 'New Tendencies' but which in this case has been labelled 'History and Identity'. Fernando Botero paints an assembly of obese, waxy personages who are The Presidential Family and includes himself by their side at his easel, paying joky homage to Las Meninas. His chubby dictator plus entourage look like modern voodoo dolls, ripe for pin-sticking. Antonio Berni depicts shanty town poverty using the materials at hand, marrying the long tradition of social protest in Latin American art with the tactics of arte povera. The World as Promised to Juanito Laguna is a sorry place, cobbled together from egg boxes, bits of car, corrugated cardboard and chicken wire and peopled by scrawny collage waifs. 'Independence and its Heroes' have been left far behind.