Book

Barnitz, Jacqueline.

Twentieth-century art of Latin America / Jacqueline Barnitz.

1st ed.

Austin : University of Texas Press, 2001.

400 pages : illustrations (some color), maps ; 31 cm

"The twentieth-century art of Latin America is art in the western tradition, and its leading figures - Wifredo Lam, Roberto Matta, Diego Rivera, Joaquin Torres-Garcia, to name only a few - have achieved international stature. Yet much of the writing about this art has offered either a victimized view of an art tradition dominated by foreign models or a romanticized view of what Latin American art should be. This pathfinding book, by contrast, seeks not to "invent" Latin American art but to look at it from the points of view of its own artists and critics." "Drawing on some forty years of studying and teaching Latin American art, Jacqueline Barnitz surveys the major currents and artists of the twentieth century in Mexico, the Caribbean, and South America (including Brazil), with a short introduction to the nineteenth century. She progresses chronologically from modernismo and the break with nineteenth-century academic art to some of the trends of the 1980s, setting each movement within its historical and cultural contexts. She gives particular weight to the first half of the century, which has received little attention in English-language publications, and discusses contracts between Latin American artists and the United States or Europe where relevant. Most importantly, she presents the artists as active contributors to western art, not as passive receivers of information from abroad."--Jacket.

Art, Latin American -- 20th century.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 359-372) and index.

Also issued online.

Modernismo and the break with academic art, 1890-1934 -- The avant-garde of the 1920s : cosmopolitan or national identity? -- Social, ideological, and nativist art : the 1930s, 1940s, and after -- Surrealism, wartime, and New World imagery, 1928-1964 -- Torres-García's constructive universalism and the abstract legacy -- New museums, the São Paulo Biennial, and abstract art -- Functionalism, integration of the arts, and the postwar architectural boom -- Geometric, optical, and kinetic art from the 1950s through the 1970s -- Concrete and neoconcrete art and their offshoots in the Brazilian context -- Neofiguration, representational art, pop, and environments : the 1960s and 1970s -- Political art: graphic art, painting, and conceptualism as ideological tools -- Some trends of the 1980s.

Table of contents

Publisher description

99050871

9780292708587

0292708572 (hardcover : alk. paper)

0292708580 (paperback : alk. paper)

42980076

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0

1

95983

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709.80904 Barnitz