A Review of Essays on 20^th Century Latin American Art

Essays on 20th Century Latin American Art by Francine Birbragher-Rozencwaig (New York and London: Routledge, 2022, 195 pages, 16 b/w illustrations)

Citing renowned Cuban critic Gerardo Mosquera’s maxim that “Latin American art has traditionally been undervalued and marginalized from the centers…” (p. xi), Birbragher-Rozencwaig seeks to add a comprehensive text to the growing body of textbooks for use in classrooms in the English-speaking world. She covers a great deal of ground while nonetheless striving to differentiate her book from other well-known texts on the subject. Unlike Jacqueline Barnitz’s widely-read Twentieth-Century Art of Latin America (2001), for example, Birbragher-Rozencwaig includes analyses of Caribbean and Central American artists. And unlike Edward Sullivan’s edited Latin American Art in the Twentieth Century (1996), divided by nations, Birbragher-Rozencwaig oscillates between chapters adhering to a broader encyclopedic approach and chapters dedicated to specific nations or regions. A small number of images are included, unfortunately only in black-and-white. An “Artworks Cited” section at the end tries to compensate, giving websites where the reader can view images not reproduced in the book (although this tool is only really useful if the book is being read in digital, not paperback, format).

The book is divided into six chapters and a conclusion, split between three theme-based chapters on Modernism, Abstraction and Cold War politics and art, and three later chapters that focus specifically on Cuba, Central America and the Caribbean. The final and most compelling chapter is dedicated to the theme of Carnival as popular art. Chapter One presents an overview of modern Latin American art. Beginning with Symbolism, Birbragher-Rozencwaig adopts the argument put forward by art historian Jacqueline Barnitz that this movement “paved the way for future innovations” (p. 1). The author then moves through a brief look at various modernist trends in the earlier part of the century, including the social realism spawned by Mexican muralism, Cuba’s vanguardia artists, the impact of Surrealism, and Brazilian Antropofagia, that seem roughly grouped around the theme of figuration.

Chapter Two addresses Abstraction as a separate category from Modernism. While this extends the current scholarly trend to counteract the previous focus on social realism and the “marvelous real” (Alejo Carpentier), Birbragher-Rozencwaig inexplicably treats abstraction as a purely South American and Cuban phenomenon, rather than as a hemisphere-wide engagement bound up in intense debates over the relationship between aesthetic experimentation and socio-political agendas. In both chapters, Birbragher-Rozencwaig argues that European avant-garde movements “significantly impacted Latin American and Caribbean artists” (p. 35), but does little to tease out how this was a matter of sophisticated cultural interchange rather than Latin America being merely on the receiving end.

Chapter Three treats the pivotal years of the Cold War, examining the innovative conceptual strategies artists developed in the face of right-wing military dictatorships that sprang up in many countries. (Astoundingly, Birbragher-Rozencwaig makes no mention of the United States’ central role in perpetrating this rightward turn, attributing the rise of plethora of dictatorships solely to anti-communism among Latin America’s ruling elite.) The author adopts museum curator Mari Carmen Ramírez’s thesis in arguing for the distinct character of Latin American conceptualism, emphasizing “artists’ use of the written word to make art, their interest in mass media [and] mass consumption, and their role in making the public an active participant in the aesthetic process” (p. 59). 

Chapter Four highlights postrevolutionary Cuba, moving from the revolutionary generation of artists through the 1980s generation that marked a radical rupture with the increasingly rigidified state control of the arts. Birbragher-Rozencwaig makes helpful note of both the celebration of Afro-Cuban cultures and the role of the Havana biennials in opening the country to international dialogue. However, the complete absence of any mention of the hegemonic role of the United States in Cuba’s 20th-century history dramatically skews comprehension of that island nation’s trajectory, leaving the (predominantly U.S.) reader with little critical information on key issues governing the Western Hemisphere’s complex modernity. The chapter finishes with the 1990s generation of artists, substantially focused on issues of civil rights and freedom of expression under an increasingly repressive Cuban state.

Chapter Five offers a welcome if brief look at contemporary art of Central America, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico. The book’s final chapter, its most successful, treats the phenomenon of Carnival. Adapted from the author’s dissertation, it argues for this widely-practiced festival as a syncretic blend of European, African and indigenous American religions and popular traditions. Well-researched, Chapter Six convincingly meshes its detailed analysis of carnival aesthetics with a nuanced historical analysis, underscoring how this cultural form created spaces of popular resistance and negotiation within hegemonic structures.

With the exception of Chapter Six, Essays on 20^th Century Latin American Art is less geared toward college-level courses on Latin American art than toward high school classrooms or survey courses that might include a section on art within a broader overview of the region. In part, the book’s tendency to bland generalizations (e.g. “Art is a reflection of society and shapes it in many exciting and challenging ways,” p. 149) is an effect of trying to cover an enormous amount of material in a limited number of pages while using non-specialist language aimed at a general audience. Nevertheless, the reader cannot help but feel that more rigorous attention to argument, choice of images, bibliography and carefully crafted language would have animated the book considerably. It is baffling, for instance, that Birbragher-Rozencwaig spends a half-page on Siqueiros’s América Tropical, a comparatively minor work, while never mentioning his most complex, powerful and influential mural, Portrait of the Bourgeoisie (p. 10). At other points, the author throws in defensive sentences that seem aimed at some unknown critical specter. Her odd assertion, for instance, that “there was no ‘Surrealist movement’ in the Americas” (p. 22) begs the question of why artists and writers throughout the Americas consistently took up the banner of Surrealism, or how Birbragher-Rozencwaig would characterize the clear internationalist character of Surrealism “shaped as much by artists from the Americas as by artists from Europe” (Craven & Baackmann). Movements from the African-Caribbean Négritude, to the international group of artists and writers gathered around the New York-based surrealist journal VVV, to the self-described “surrealist fraternity” (Aldo Pellegrini) centered around the Argentine journal Qué, all laid claim to Surrealism.

 Overall, the book relies heavily on short narrative accounts of individual artists to connect its disparate sections. The book abounds with paragraphs that begin “Another artist who…,” imbuing the text with a slight laundry-list whiff. Odd morsels of information are sometimes included (e.g. Wifredo Lam’s full name, p. 22) that take up word-count space without adding any appreciable intellectual value. At other points, the author’s attempts to summarize complex political and aesthetic contexts into condensed statements result in awkward, even misleading assertions (e.g. contrary the author’s claim on page 7, Siqueiros, although a member of the Mexican Communist Party, was not a Stalinist when he led the writing of the Manifiesto de Obreros Técnicos, Pintores y Escultores in 1923, as Stalin had yet to take power in the Soviet Union or control the Comintern. And as Mexicanist scholar Leonard Folgarait has pointed out, Siqueiros’s politics were never straightforwardly Stalinist, and his artistic production even less so). The result is a book that seems torn between offering a broad overview on the one hand, and on the other hand detailed information and narrative that remain only loosely integrated with any critical historical analysis.

This loose approach is, unfortunately, also evident in Birbragher-Rozencwaig’s endnote citations. Excepting the chapter on Carnival, endnotes consistently rely on texts that themselves are broad overviews, such as Barnitz’s or John Chasteen’s Born in Blood and Fire, doing little to point the reader toward routes for deeper scholarly investigation. Birbragher-Rozencwaig repeatedly cites such low-level sources as the Khan Academy, an online resource aimed primarily at high-school students (note 4, p. 76,) or, embarrassingly, the New York Museum of Modern Art exhibition labels and website object descriptions (e.g. note 29, p. 56; note 25, p. 76). Top-grade scholars with deep expertise in the subjects to hand are often minimized or neglected altogether. Absent, for instance, is any mention of Nelly Richard on Chilean Conceptualism (especially the role of women), or Andrea Giunta on Argentine art in general and León Ferrari in particular (despite Birbragher-Rozencwaig lavishing a whole page on Ferrari, at one point citing a MoMA “gallery label” (note 18, p. 75) as her source). Just to name two of the many proponents of serious scholarship from across Latin America who have produced a plethora of foundational analyses in Spanish, Portuguese and English.

 Of deeper concern, the book would have benefited from a more critical approach to major conceptual issues concerning the framing of “Latin America” and its cultural production that have continually galvanized artists, critics and historians. Scholars have long noted the difficulty of pinning down any secure definition of “Latin America” in a region so marked by disparate cultures, languages, geographies, economies and social formations. Added to this is the problem of grappling with what Brazilian critic Frederico Morais has called Latin America’s “identity neurosis”—the long-term sense of inauthenticity and backwardness, harking back to the colonial period, “which is always linked to the debate about Latin America.” Equally, a stable definition of “Latin American art” has also proved elusive. Thus, for example, a 1966 symposium tackled the question head on: “Is There a Latin American Art?” Answers have varied, with many questioning whether the category is even relevant. It “does and does not exist as a distinct expression,” hedged Peruvian critic Juan Acha in 1975. “There is no such thing as Latin American Art,” declared art critic José Gómez Sicre in 1990. Rather, there is “art made by Latin Americans, which begins in the nineteenth century. Before this we have pre-Columbian and colonial art.” And in recent years, Mosquera has jettisoned the classification altogether, arguing that it habitually positions artists from the region as either provincial imitators or as exotic “others” vis-à-vis the international art world.

Yet the categories of “Latin America” and its “art” have proved tenacious, largely because they provide fertile ground for defining shared parameters of cultural practice distinct from those of Europe and the United States. Critics from José Enrique Rodó and Alejo Carpentier to Juan Acha and Roberto Schwarz have argued that the region’s conflicted historical trajectory in relation to Europe and the United States has given Latin Americans unique and powerful insights into the wider failure of modernity and an ability to allegorize it aesthetically. Others such as Rita Eder have argued for “Latin America” as a platform for constructing critical frameworks generated from the region rather than relying on those from Paris or New York, while Marta Traba notably revised her earlier opposition to the category toward seeing it as the basis for developing a “culture of resistance” against U.S. imperialism. 

Birbragher-Rozencwaig’s approach, while briefly acknowledging these ongoing debates, tends to present “Latin America” as a given, rather than using it as a platform for staging productive questions regarding modernity. This is unfortunate. What we need are accounts that explore, as scholars Alejandro Anreus and Megan Sullivan recently noted, “the fact that Latin American art can neither be collapsed with, nor fully separated from other histories of modernism or from global histories of the twentieth century in general.”  Instead of a text that provides the English-speaking reader with tools for critiquing conventional histories that still overwhelmingly position “Latin America” and its art as peripheral (and therefore the United States and Europe as the site of the universal), Essays on 20^th Century Latin American Art leaves the reader comfortably ensconced in that view.