Latin American art, an introduction

Why is it important to study Latin American art today?

The study of Latin America and Latin American art is more relevant today than ever. In the United States, the burgeoning population of Latinos—people of Latin American descent—and consequently the rise of Spanish (and Spanglish) speakers, Latino musical genres, literature, and visual arts, require that we better understand the cultural origins of these diverse communities. Even beyond our borders, Latin American countries continue to exert influence over political and economic policies, while their artistic traditions are everyday made more and more accessible at cultural institutions like art museums, which regularly exhibit the work of Latin American artists. In many ways, Latin American and Latino culture is an inescapable reality, thus it is up to us, for the benefits of appreciation and integration, to tackle the difficult question of what it means to be from Latin America.

For many of us Latin America is not an entirely foreign concept, in fact our knowledge of it is most likely defined by a particular country, food, music, or artist, and sadly, it is also sometimes clouded by cultural stereotypes. What many of us often overlook, is the diversity of what it means to be Latin American and Latino. Interestingly, Latin America is not as different from the United States as we tend to think, since we both share in the history of conquest and imperialism, albeit from different perspectives. Thus the study of Latin American art should not necessarily be thought of as a narrative that is entirely separate from that of the United States, but rather as one that is shared.

What do we mean by Latin America?

Latin America broadly refers to the countries in the Americas (including the Caribbean) whose national language is derived from Latin. These include countries where the languages of Spanish, Portuguese, and French are spoken. Latin America is therefore a historical term rooted in the colonial era, when these languages were introduced to the area by their respective European colonizers. The term itself, however, was not coined until the nineteenth century, when Argentinean jurist Carlos Calvo and French engineer Michel Chevalier, in reference to the Napoleonic invasion of Mexico in 1862, used the term “Latin” to denote difference from the “Anglo-Saxon” people of North America. It gained currency during the twentieth century when Mesoamerican, Central American, Caribbean, and South American countries sought to culturally distance themselves from North America, and more specifically from the United States.

Today, Latin America is considered by many scholars to be an imprecise and highly problematic term, since it prescribes a collective entity to a conglomerate of countries that remain vastly different. In the case of countries that share the same language their cultural bond is much stronger, since despite their potentially different pre-conquest origins, they continue to share collective colonial histories and contemporary postcolonial predicaments. Spanish-speaking countries are therefore known as Spanish America or Hispanoamérica, while those that were colonized by the Iberian countries of Spain and Portugal, fall under the broader category of Iberoamérica, thus including Brazil. In addition to these Latin-derived languages, indigenous tongues like Quechua, spoken by more than 8 million people in South America, are still preserved today. When discussing countries such as the French-speaking Haiti and Spanish-speaking Mexico, the similarities become much harder to articulate.

That said, the collective experiences of the conquest, slavery, and imperialism—and even today, those of underdevelopment, environmental degradation, poverty, and inequality—prove to be an undeniable unifying force, and as the artworks of these countries demonstrate, the idea of both a collective and local experience exists among the selected countries. For the purposes of clarity, the term Latin America is used loosely, whether referring to the pre- or post-conquest era. At the same time however, this term will be challenged in order to demonstrate both the limitations and benefits of thinking of Latin American art as a shared artistic tradition.

It is anachronistic to discuss a Latin American artistic tradition before independence, and as a result pre-Columbian and colonial art are discussed according to specific regions. However, it is best to approach the art of the 19th and 20th centuries as a whole, in large part due to the emergence of Latin Americanism and Pan-Americanism (a twentieth-century movement that rallied all American countries around a shared political, economic, and social agenda). Contemporary artists working in a globalized art world and often times outside of their country of origin give new meaning to what it means to not necessarily be a Latin American artist, but rather a global one.

Geography

While the countries of Latin America can be categorized by language, they can also be organized by region. Before 1492 C.E., the regions of Mesoamerica, the Isthmus (or Intermediate) Area, the Caribbean, and the Andes shared certain cultural traits, such as the same calendars, languages, and sports, as well as comparable artistic and architectural traditions. After colonization, however, the borders shifted somewhat with the creation of the viceroyalties of New Spain, Peru, New Granada, La Plata, and Brazil. After independence (and still today), the countries stretching from Mexico to Honduras form part of the region of Mesoamerica (also known as Middle America since the Greek word “meso” means “middle”). Parts of Honduras and El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama, which lie to the south of Middle America, make up Central America, while all the countries to the south of Panama form part of South America. The Caribbean is sometimes considered part of Central America or at times entirely excluded. The United States also factors into this discussion of Latin American art—through the work of Latino, Chicano, and Nuyorican artists.

Lastly, it is important to note that when discussing specific Latin American countries, the geographical scope in question will correspond to the current, rather than former borders. While these linguistic and geographical parameters lend clarity to the study of Latin American art, they often obscure cultural differences that are not border specific. The coastal cultures of Colombia and Venezuela for instance, are closer to those of the Caribbean than to their mainland counterparts. This is reflected not only in the similar climate, diet, and customs of these particular areas, but also in their artistic production. The islands of the Caribbean, however, are also a geographical region (delineated by the Caribbean Sea), thus the distinction between regions depends on how and where you draw the borders—reminding us of the flexibility and variety of labels that can be employed to describe the same region.

A similar distinction occurs in South America, where cultures vary greatly not necessarily across countries, but rather according to geographical landmarks, the two most prominent of which are the Andes Mountains and the Amazon Rainforest. Stretching from Chile to Venezuela, the Andes traverse the western portion of South America. At impressive heights and in snow-covered peaks, the Andean cultures of South America share irrigation techniques, textile traditions, and native languages, such as Quechua, the former language of the Incas that is today spoken by millions, that continue to this day. The Amazon, the world’s largest tropical rainforest, is contained mostly in Brazil, although it stretches into the bordering countries of Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana. Just these two landmarks, without mentioning the Pacific and Atlantic coastal cultures of South America, reveal the geographical, and thus cultural diversity of the area. Latin America is a useful, but by no means perfect term to describe a vast expanse of land that is historically, culturally, and geographically diverse.

From networks of exchange to a global trade network

From as early as the pre-Columbian era, there existed networks of exchange among the early civilizations of Latin America, through trade networks that stretched from Mesoamerica to South America. Limited by technology and transportation, forms of indigenous contact were mainly restricted to the American continent. With the arrival of European conquistadores (Spanish for “conquerors”), the panorama changed entirely. Starting in the sixteenth century, and now exposed to Africa, through the Atlantic Slave Trade, and Asia, through the trade network of the Manila Galleon, Latin America entered into an era of global contact that continues to this day.

With the nineteenth-century struggles for independence, collaborations across countries increased, not to mention alliances were formed, that although unsuccessful, nevertheless tried to articulate the idea of a collective Latin American entity. During the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, namely as a result of socio-political transformations, migration, exile, and diaspora (the dispersion of people from their homeland), travel became a trademark of modern art, further contributing to the internationalism of Latin American art. As a result of these networks of exchange, which began before colonization and continue to this day, Latin American art is difficult to categorize. It is in fact hybrid and pluralistic, the product of multi-cultural conditions

“Non-Western” art?

It is critical to also consider the negative impact of the artificial insertion of Latin American art into Western and non-Western narratives. While the term “Western art” refers largely to Europe and North America, whose artistic tradition looks back to the Classicism of the ancient Greeks and Romans, the term “non-Western art” includes everything else. This distinction has plagued Latin American art, since—except for pre-Columbian art—it mostly fits in the category of Western art history. This categorization however, is debatable, with some scholars positing that Latin American art is a non-Western artistic tradition that owes more to its pre-Columbian roots, than to its European influences. Often, when Latin American art is discussed in a Western context, it is usually presented as derivative of European or North American art, or simply treated as the “other,” meaning different from the artistic mainstream.

This notion can be countered by exposing the many ways that artists adopted, rather than imitated, these outside influences, and by demonstrating the manner through which these forms of exchange were reciprocal—rather than unilateral—as is usually discussed. A case in point can be seen in the work of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo (right), who are usually included in textbooks on either Western or Modern art, but whose presence is marginalized in comparison to their European and North American counterparts.

A survey of non-Western art would surely include indigenous Latin American art, but it might not include any artworks from the sixteenth century (conquest) onwards. As a result—and depending on the context in which you study Latin American art—one can end up with an entirely different and fragmented view of its artistic tradition. This is even made more complicated when considering the artistic selections in the pre-Columbian and Colonial sections versus those in the Modern sections, as evidenced by the number of ritual objects (considered artworks as a result of their aesthetic qualities and craftsmanship). Only from the broader perspective of Latin American art can individual artistic traditions be better appreciated. The plurality of meaning and the inability to neatly title or categorize Latin American art is precisely what makes this area of study so unique, and therefore interesting. A living and constantly evolving field of study, Latin American art will continue to surprise you with its multifaceted and multilayered history.

Mexican Muralism: Los Tres Grandes—David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego Rivera, and José Clemente Orozco

Siqueiros and Mexican History

At the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City visitors enter the rectory (the main administration building), beneath an imposing three-dimensional arm emerging from a mural. Several hands, one with a pencil, charge towards a book, which lists critical dates in Mexico’s history: 1520 (the Conquest by Spain); 1810 (Independence from Spain); 1857 (the Liberal Constitution which established individual rights); and 1910 (the start of the Revolution against the regime of Porfirio Díaz). David Alfaro Siqueiros left the final date blank in Dates in Mexican History or the Right for Culture (1952-56), inspiring viewers to create Mexico’s next great historic moment.

The Revolution

From 1910 to 1920 civil war ravaged the nation as citizens revolted against dictator Porfirio Díaz. At the heart of the Revolution was the belief—itself revolutionary—that the land should be in the hands of laborers, the very people who worked it. This demand for agrarian reform signaled a new age in Mexican society: issues concerning the popular masses—universal public education and health care, expanded civil liberties—were at the forefront of government policy.

Mexican Muralism

At the end of the Revolution the government commissioned artists to create art that could educate the mostly illiterate masses about Mexican history. Celebrating the Mexican people’s potential to craft the nation’s history was a key theme in Mexican muralism, a movement led by Siqueiros, Diego Rivera, and José Clemente Orozco—known as Los tres grandes. Between the 1920s and 1950s, they cultivated a style that defined Mexican identity following the Revolution.

The muralists developed an iconography featuring atypical, non-European heroes from the nation’s illustrious past, present, and future—Aztec warriors battling the Spanish, humble peasants fighting in the Revolution, common laborers of Mexico City, and the mixed-race people who will forge the next great epoch, like in Siqueiros’ UNAM mural. Los tres grandes crafted epic murals on the walls of highly visible, public buildings using techniques like fresco, encaustic, mosaic, and sculpture-painting.

One of the earliest government commissions for a post-Revolution mural was for the National Preparatory School, a high school in Mexico City affiliated with UNAM. During the 1920s Los tres grandes and other artists completed works throughout the school’s expansive exteriors and interiors.

Destruction of the old order

Orozco painted nearly two dozen murals at the school including Destruction of the Old Order, 1926. It depicts two figures in peasant attire who watch nineteenth-century neoclassical structures fracture into a Cubist-like pile, signaling the demise of the past. Just as Siqueiros’ UNAM murals anticipate an unrealized historic event, the “new order” implied in Orozco’s work is the world these men will encounter once they turn to face the viewer. These anonymous men are unlikely heroes given their modest attire, yet they represent a new age where the Revolution has liberated the masses from centuries of repression.

Murals for the Palace of Fine Arts

In 1934 the government inaugurated the Palace of Fine Arts Mexico City, which soon became the nation’s most important cultural institution. The Palace’s Museum, Mexico’s first art museum, opened the same year with works by two of Los tres grandes: Rivera’s Man, Controller of the Universe, 1934, a recreation of Man at the Crossroads (painted at Rockefeller Center and destroyed the year before), and Orozco’s Catharsis, 1934.

The title of Orozco’s painting dates to 1942, when an art historian speculated that the fire at the top of the composition symbolized catharsis, and thus “the only possibility of saving and purifying civilization” as it succumbed to the excesses of moral depravity. The laughing central figure jerks the viewer into an immoral world, where the malevolent aspects of modern life—senseless warfare, destructive technology, and prostitution—run rampant.

In Torment and Apotheosis of Cuauhtémoc, 1950-51, another mural at the Museum of the Palace of Fine Arts, Siqueiros explores the violent period of the Conquest. In this mural Spanish soldiers torture the Mexican tribal leader for information on the location of the treasure they seek. The Mexican motherland, symbolized by the blood-stained female figure, stretches her arms protectively over his still figure. Siqueiros’ penchant for sinewy limbs, showcased in the UNAM murals and exemplified here in the bodies of Cuauhtémoc and his praying companion, underscore the tension in this encounter.

The Mexican Revolution was a watershed moment in the twentieth century because it marked a true break from the past, ushering in a more egalitarian age. With its grand scale, innovative iconography, and socially relevant message, Mexican muralism remains a notable compliment to the Revolution. The way the muralists reoriented history, recovered lost stories, and drafted new narratives continues to stir audiences and inspire artists, like the Chicano muralists that emerged in the U.S. Southwest. The fact that their in-situ masterpieces can still be seen publicly in Mexico and beyond is a testament to their relevance, popularity, and the power of their didactic message.

The History of Mexico: Diego Rivera’s Murals at the National Palace

How is history told?

Typically, we think of history as a series of events narrated in chronological order. But what does history look like as a series of images? Mexican artist Diego Rivera responded to this question when he painted The History of Mexico, as a series of murals that span three large walls within a grand stairwell of the National Palace in Mexico City. In Rivera’s words, the mural represents “the entire history of Mexico from the Conquest through the Mexican Revolution . . . down to the ugly present.”^[1]

In an overwhelming and crowded composition, Rivera represents pivotal scenes from the history of the modern nation-state, including scenes from the Spanish Conquest, the fight for independence from Spain, the Mexican-American war, the Mexican Revolution, and an imagined future Mexico in which a workers’ revolution has triumphed. Although this mural cycle spans hundreds of years of Mexican history, Rivera concentrated on themes that highlight a Marxist interpretation of history as driven by class conflict as well as the struggle of the Mexican people against foreign invaders and the resilience of Indigenous cultures.

A new national identity

In the immediate years following the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920), the newly formed government sought to establish a national identity that eschewed Eurocentrism (an emphasis on European culture) and instead heralded the Amerindian. The result was that Indigenous culture was elevated in the national discourse. After hundreds of years of colonial rule and the Eurocentric dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, the new Mexican state integrated its national identity with the concept of indigenismo, an ideology that lauded Mexico’s past Indigenous history and cultural heritage (rather than acknowledging the ongoing struggles of contemporary Indigenous people and incorporating them into the new state governance).

José Vasconcelos, the new government’s Minister of Public Education, conceived of a collaboration between the government and artists. The result were state-sponsored murals such as those at the National Palace in Mexico City.

Why murals?

Rivera and other artists believed easel painting to be “aristocratic,” since for centuries this kind of art had been the purview of the elite. Instead they favored mural painting since it could present subjects on a large scale to a wide public audience. This idea—of directly addressing the people in public buildings—suited the muralists’ Communist politics. In 1922, Rivera (and others) signed the Manifesto of the Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters, and Sculptors, arguing that artists must invest “their greatest efforts in the aim of materializing an art valuable to the people.”^[2]

Rivera had to design his composition around the pre-existing built environment of the National Palace. Rivera painted in the historical buon fresco technique, in which the artist paints directly upon wet plaster that has been applied to a wall resulting in the pigment being permanently fused to the lime plaster. Such murals were common in pre-conquest Mexico as well as in Europe.

In the case of The History of Mexico, this meant creating a three-part allegorical portrayal of Mexico that was informed by the specific history of the site. Today the National Palace is the seat of executive power in Mexico, but it was built atop the ruins of the Aztec emperor Moctezuma II’s residence after the Spanish Conquest of the capital of Tenochtitlan in 1521. The site then served as the residence of the conquistador Hernán Cortés and later the Viceroy of New Spain until the end of the Wars of Independence in 1821. This site is a potent symbol of the history of conflict between Indigenous Aztecs and Spanish invaders.

The North Wall

The Aztec World, the title of the mural on the North Wall, features Rivera’s first large-scale rendering of Mesoamerica before the Spanish invasion—here focused on the Aztecs (the Mexica). Rivera’s representation of the deity Quetzalcoatl (“feathered serpent”), seated in the center of the composition wearing a headdress of quetzal feathers—draws on imagery from colonial-era sources, in particular, an image of Quetzalcoatl from the Florentine Codex.

Against the backdrop of the Valley of Mexico (where Tenochtitlan and now Mexico City are located), Rivera renders a Mesoamerican pyramid and various aspects of Aztec life. He represents figures grinding maíz (corn) to make tortillas, playing music, creating paintings, sculpture, and leatherwork, and transporting goods for trade and imperial tribute.

Despite Rivera’s great admiration for pre-Conquest civilizations (he was a great collector of pre-Columbian art) he did not uncritically portray the Aztec world as utopian. In addition to rendering scenes of agriculture and cultural production, The Aztec World shows laborers building pyramids, a group resisting Aztec control, and scenes of the Aztecs waging the wars that created and maintained their empire. Here, Rivera demonstrates the Marxist position that class conflict is the prime driver of history—here, even before the arrival of the Spaniards.

The West Wall

On the West Wall and in the center of the stairway, visitors are confronted with a chaotic composition titled From the Conquest to 1930. The wall is divided at the top by corbels from which spring five arches.

Across the top, In the outermost sections, Rivera represents the two nineteenth-century invasions of Mexico—by France and the United States respectively. From left to right, the three central sections depict: the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, figures associated with Independence and the Mexican Revolution, and the Constitution of 1857 (during the presidency of Benito Juárez) and War of Reform. These historical events are somewhat distinguishable thanks to the arches that separate the scenes.

In the lower section of the mural, however, there is no such distinction between, for example, scenes of the Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire, the subsequent destruction of Mesoamerican painted books (now called codices), the arrival of Christian missionaries, the destruction of pre-Columbian temples, and construction of new colonial structures—emphasizing the interrelated nature of these events.

An eagle standing on a nopal cactus at the very center of the wall, mirrors the insignia at the center of the Mexican flag. These historical scenes have been compressed and flattened on the picture surface, resulting in a dense visual mosaic of intertwining figures and forms. The lack of deep space in the composition makes it difficult to distinguish between different scenes, and results in an allover composition without a central focus or a clear visual pathway. This cacophony of historical figures and flurried action overwhelms viewers as they walk up the stairs.

Given the breadth of the wall space, Rivera had to make critical decisions about which historical figures and narratives to include. Rivera’s formal choices—the flattening of the pictorial space, the nonlinear organization, and the monumental scale of the figures—create a non-hierarchical composition. These formal choices support Rivera’s decision to represent not just the historically well-known and recognizable figures, such as the independence fighter Miguel Hidalgo, revolutionary Emiliano Zapata (who holds a flag with the words tierra y libertad, or land and liberty), or the first Indigenous president Benito Juárez, but also anonymous workers, laborers, and soldiers. As Rivera later noted,

“Each personage in the mural was dialectically connected with his neighbors, in accordance with his role in history. Nothing was solitary; nothing was irrelevant.”^[3]

The artist’s portrayal of the interconnection of social struggle throughout Mexico’s history and the non-hierarchical representation of the historical figures reflects his Marxist perspective.

The South Wall

Rivera’s politics becomes more evident on the South Wall, titled Mexico Today and Tomorrow, which was painted years later in 1935. Mexico Today and Tomorrow depicts contemporary class conflict between industrial capitalism (using machinery and with a clear division of labor) and workers around the world.

The narrative begins in the lower right and progresses upward in a boustrophedonic pattern (here, a reverse S-curve), similar to the compositional layout of pre-Conquest Mesoamerican painted manuscripts (such as the Codex Nuttall). In the lower section Rivera depicts campesinos (peasant farmers) laboring, urban workers constructing buildings, and his wife Frida Kahlo with a number of school children who are being taught as part of an expansion of rural education after the Revolution.

Following the narrative up, Rivera represents—using a pictorial structure unique to this wall—negative social forces such as high-society figures, corrupt and reactionary clergy, and the invasion of foreign capital—here represented by contemporaneous capitalists such as John D. Rockefeller, Jr. who was attempting to secure access to Mexican oil at the time.

To the right, workers are being oppressed by police wearing gas masks, yet just above this scene a figure in blue emerges from a mass of uprising workers, their fists raised in the air against the backdrop of downtown Mexico City. The narrative culminates in a portrait of Karl Marx who is shown pointing wearied workers and campesinos towards a “vision of a future industrialized and socialized land of peace and plenty.”^[4] Unlike the non-linear composition of the West Wall, here Rivera expresses his vision for the future of Mexico, a winding path that leaves oppression and corruption behind.

An alternative history

So what type of history has Rivera told us and how did he tell it? Is he the sole narrator? The History of Mexico was painted in a governmental building as part of a campaign to promote Mexican national identity, and yet, the mural cycle is not necessarily didactic. Rivera could have created a much simpler representation of Mexican history, one that directed the viewer’s experience more explicitly. Instead, the viewer’s response to this visual avalanche of history is to play an active role in the interpretation of the narrative. The lack of illusionistic space and the flattening of forms creates a composition that allows the viewer to decide where to look and how to read it. Moreover, the experiential and sensorial act of moving up the stairs allows the viewer to perceive the murals from multiple angles and vantage points. There is no “right way” to read this mural because there is no clear beginning or end to the story. The viewer is invited to synthesize the narrative to construct their own history of Mexico.

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Diego Rivera, Detroit Industry Murals

by LINDA DOWNS

The impact of the Great Depression

When the Mexican artist Diego Rivera arrived in Detroit in 1932 to paint these walls, the city was a leading industrial center of the world. It was also the city that was hit the hardest by the Great Depression. Industrial production and the workforce were a third of what they had been before the 1929 Crash.

Rivera arrived days after an infamous Hunger March where thousands of unemployed workers walked from downtown Detroit to the gates of the Ford Motor Company River Rouge plant to demand employment. Armed Ford security guards met them, panicked, shot into the marchers and killed six people. This confrontation became known as the Battle of the Overpass. The workers were shut out of the Ford factories, but Rivera put them to work in the heart of the museum.

East wall

The space he was given to paint was aligned on an east/west/north/south axis. Rivera utilized this architectural orientation in a symbolic way. On the east wall, the direction of the sunrise, beginnings, new life, he represented a child in the bulb of a plant cradled by two plowshares and framed on either side by hefty nudes holding grain and fruit—symbolizing bountiful harvests. These panels introduce some of the world’s earliest technology in agriculture.

North and south walls

The manufacture of the 1932 Ford V-8 at the Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge plant is captured in the two major panels on the north and south walls.

On the north wall, the direction of darkness, and the interior of things—Rivera captured all the processes related to the assembly of the motor. The blast furnace glows orange and red at extreme temperatures to make molten steel that is poured into molds to make ingots that are then milled into sheets. All the major processes related to the manufacture of the motor of the car from mold-making in the upper left to the final assembly of the motor on the assembly line in the foreground are accurately rendered with engineering precision. The artist wove the processes together through the use of the serpentine conveyors and assembly lines. The composition is grounded by two rows of white milling machines that stand as sentinels in the center of the wall and march into the background to the blast furnace.

On the south wall, the wall of light, the exterior of things, Rivera painted the assembly of the body of the car on the south automotive panel. The parts stamped out at the stamping press on the right then are welded in the welding buck in the upper center. Surrounding this image are painting, upholstering and the final assembly where the chassis is joined to the body. At the end of the assembly line is a finished tiny red car.

The only machine that has been slightly altered is the stamping press because Rivera saw in it a resemblance physically and symbolically to the famous and feared ancient Aztec statue that was believed to have caused death and destruction when it was unearthed in Mexico City in the 18th century. It is now known as the representation of Coatlicue, the creation goddess. Coatlicue was both a creator and destroyer of life. She was fed human hearts in order to maintain the order of the universe. The Coatlicue/stamping press presides over the sacrifice of workers through repetitive and physically demanding factory jobs.

On the upper north and south panels Rivera painted gigantic red, black, yellow and white figures symbolic of the diverse workforce. Each has one of the raw materials that form the basis for the automobile industry—iron ore, coal/diamonds, sand and limestone. Rivera attributed the tensile strength of the raw materials with his conception of the character of each race. The red race he associated to iron ore; the black race to coal and diamonds; the yellow race with malleable sand; and the white race with the building material of limestone.

The west wall

The west wall, the direction of sunsets, endings, and last judgments, Rivera painted passenger planes and bombers. Here the constructive and destructive uses of technology are clearly presented. The panels below the planes depict a dove and a hawk to underscore the theme.

Controversy

The most controversial panel in 1932 was this small right hand panel on the north wall. Here a child is vaccinated in a medical laboratory surrounded by the animals that provided the serum. Rivera took this composition from Christian nativity scenes where the baby Jesus is attended to by Mary and Joseph and honored by three wise men. To Rivera, medical technology would be the new savior of mankind. He based the image of the child on the kidnapped Lindberg baby, Mary is based on the popular movie star of the time, Jean Harlow, and the doctor is a portrait of the museum director, William Valentiner. The three scientist/wise men he referred to as a Catholic, Protestant and a Jew—ecumenical wise/medical men.

A major controversy was sparked when the murals were publicly unveiled. Thousands of people signed petitions to either destroy or save them. The Catholic Church sparred with factory workers and college students and the press wrote articles for weeks. The museum held public speak-outs. The Detroit City Council considered a vote to whitewash them. In the end Edsel Ford publicly accepted them for the museum collection. The Detroit Industry murals remain today one of the most engaging, major modern works of the twentieth century.

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Frida Kahlo, introduction

by DR. MAYA JIMÉNEZ

Sixty, more than a third, of the easel paintings known by Frida Kahlo are self-portraits. This huge number demonstrates the importance of this genre to her artistic oeuvre. The Two Fridas, like Self-Portrait With Cropped Hair, captures the artist’s turmoil after her 1939 divorce from the artist Diego Rivera. At the same time, issues of identity surface in both works. The Two Fridas speaks to cultural ambivalence and refers to her ancestral heritage. Self-Portrait With Cropped Hair suggests Kahlo’s interest in gender and sexuality as fluid concepts.

Kahlo was famously known for her tumultuous marriage with Rivera, whom she wed in 1929 and remarried in 1941. The daughter of a German immigrant (of Hungarian descent) and a Mexican mother, Kahlo suffered from numerous medical setbacks including polio, which she contracted at the age of six, partial immobility—the result of a bus accident in 1925, and her several miscarriages. Kahlo began to paint largely in response to her accident and her limited mobility, taking on her own identity and her struggles as sources for her art. Despite the personal nature of her content, Kahlo’s painting is always informed by her sophisticated understanding of art history, of Mexican culture, its politics, and its patriarchy.

The Two Fridas

Exhibited in 1940 at the International Surrealist Exhibition, The Two Fridas depicts a large-scale, double portrait of Kahlo, rare for the artist, since most of her canvases were small, reminiscent of colonial retablos, small devotional paintings. To the right Kahlo appears dressed in traditional Tehuana attire, different from the nineteenth century wedding dress she wears at left and similar to the one worn by her mother in My Grandparents, My Parents, and I (Family Tree) (1936).

Whereas the white dress references the Euro-Mexican culture she was brought up in, in which women are “feminine” and fragile, the Tehuana dress evokes the opposite, a powerful figure within an indigenous culture described by some at the time as a matriarchy. This cultural contrast speaks to the larger issue of how adopting the distinctive costume of the indigenous people of Tehuantepec, known as the Tehuana, was considered not only “a gesture of nationalist cultural solidarity,” but also a reference to the gender stereotype of “la india bonita.”^[5] Against the backdrop of post-revolutionary Mexico, when debates about indigenismo (the ideology that upheld the Indian as an important marker of national identity) and mestizaje (the racial mixing that occurred as a result of the colonization of the Spanish-speaking Americas) were at stake, Kahlo’s work can be understood on both a national and personal level. While the Tehuana costume allowed for Kahlo to hide her misshapen body and right leg, a consequence of polio and the accident, it was also the attire most favored by Rivera, the man whose portrait the Tehuana Kahlo holds. Without Rivera, the Europeanized Kahlo not only bleeds to death, but her heart remains broken, both literally and metaphorically.

Self-Portrait With Cropped Hair

In opposition, the painting Self-Portrait With Cropped Hair boldly denounces the femininity of Two Fridas. In removing her iconic Tehuana dress, in favor of an oversized men’s suit, and in cutting off her braids in favor of a crew cut, Kahlo takes on the appearance of none other than Rivera himself. At the top of the canvas, Kahlo incorporates lyrics from a popular song, which read, “Look, if I loved you it was because of your hair. Now that you are without hair, I don’t love you anymore.” In weaving personal and popular references, Kahlo creates multilayered self-portraits that while rooted in reality, as she so adamantly argued, nevertheless provoke the surrealist imagination. This can be seen in the visual disjunctions she employs such as the floating braids in Self Portrait with Cropped Hair and the severed artery in Two Fridas. As Kahlo asserted to Surrealist writer André Breton, she was simply painting her own reality.

 

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Wifredo Lam, The Jungle

by DR. DORIS MARIA-REINA BRAVO

In The Godfather Part II Michael Corleone has the impeccable timing of visiting Cuba on the eve of the 1959 Revolution that would overthrow the corrupt government of Cuba’s leader at the time, Fulgencio Batista. Corleone’s stay in Havana—marked by business meetings with American corporations and trips to casino-resorts and cabaret shows—highlights the excesses that led to the dramatic fall of that regime during the film’s New Year’s Eve party. More than fifteen years earlier, when Wifredo Lam painted The Jungle (1943), Cuba had already spent more than four decades at the mercy of United States interests.

Wifredo Lam remains the most renowned painter from Cuba and The Jungle remains his best known work and an important painting in the history of Latin American art and the history of twentieth-century modernism more broadly. In the 1920s and 30s, Lam was in Madrid and Paris, but in 1941 as Europe was engulfed by war, he returned to his native country. Though he would leave Cuba again for Europe after the war, key elements within his artistic practice intersected during this period: Lam’s consciousness of Cuba’s socio-economic realities; his artistic formation in Europe under the influence of Surrealism; and his re-acquaintance with Afro-Caribbean culture. This remarkable collision resulted in the artist’s most notable work, The Jungle.

A game of perception

The Jungle, currently on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, has an undeniable presence within the gallery: the cluster of enigmatic faces, limbs, and sugarcane crowd a canvas that is nearly an 8 foot square. Lam’s bold painting is a game of perception. The artist haphazardly constructs the figures from a collection of distinct forms—crescent-shaped faces; prominent, rounded backsides; willowy arms and legs; and flat, cloddish hands and feet. When assembled these figures resemble a funhouse mirror reflection. The disproportion among the shapes generates an uneasy balance between the composition’s denser top and more open bottom—there are not enough feet and legs to support the upper half of the painting, which seems on the verge of toppling over. Another significant element within Lam’s game of perception is how he places the figures within an unorthodox landscape. Lam’s panorama excludes the typical elements of a horizon line, sky or wide view; instead this is a tight, directionless snapshot, with only the faintest sense of the ground.

One part of the flora in this scene—sugarcane—is alien to the jungle setting suggested by the painting’s title. Sugarcane does not grow in jungles but rather is cultivated in fields. In 1940s Cuba, sugarcane was big business, requiring the toil of thousands of laborers similar to the cotton industry in the American South before the Civil War. The reality of laboring Cubans was in sharp contrast to how foreigners perceived the island nation, namely as a playground. Lam’s painting remains an unusual Cuban landscape compared to the tourism posters that depicted the country as a destination for Americans seeking beachside resorts. While northern visitors enjoyed a permissive resort experience, U.S. corporations ran their businesses, including sugar production. Though Cuba gained independence from Spain at the end of nineteenth century, the United States maintained the right to intervene in Cuba’s affairs, which destabilized politics on the island for decades.

European Modernism and Santería

During the interwar period in Paris, Lam befriended the Surrealists, whose influence is evident in The Jungle. Surrealists aimed to release the unconscious mind—suppressed, they believed, by the rational—in order to achieve another reality. In art, the juxtaposition of irrational images reveal a “super-reality,” or “sur-reality.” In Lam’s work, an other-worldly atmosphere emerges from the constant shifting taking place among the figures; they are at once human, animal, organic, and mystical.

This metamorphosis among the figures is also related to Lam’s interest in Afro-Caribbean culture. When the artist resettled in Cuba in 1941, he began to integrate symbols from Santería, an Afro-Cuban religion that mixes African beliefs and customs with Catholicism, into his art. During Santería ceremonies the supernatural merges with the natural world through masks, animals, or initiates who become possessed by a god. These ceremonies are moments of metamorphosis where a being is at once itself and otherworldly.

No cha-cha-cha

Lam created a new narrative within the Cuban imagination: rooted in the island’s complex history, his work was an antidote to the picturesque frivolity that mired the nation in stereotype,

[…]I refused to paint cha-cha-cha. I wanted with all my heart to paint the drama of my country, but by thoroughly expressing the negro [sic] spirit […] In this way I could act as a Trojan horse that would spew forth hallucinating figures with the power to surprise, to disturb the dreams of the exploiters. I knew I was running the risk of not being understood either by the man in the street or by the others. But a true picture has the power to set the imagination to work, even if it takes time.^[6]The Jungle is both enigmatic and enchanting, and has inspired generations of viewers to liberate their imaginations.

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Geometric Abstraction in South America, an introduction

by DR. GILLIAN SNEED

During his decades spent living in Europe, Uruguayan artist and theorist Joaquín Torres-García experimented with several different artistic modes, including making representational paintings (depicting recognizable images) in a Neoclassical style or with bright colors and bold brushstrokes. While living in Paris, he would also come into contact with European geometric abstraction (abstract art based on geometric forms) and created a group with other artists he encountered there. He transitioned from making small toys and representational paintings to making geometric abstractions. He eventually returned to Uruguay and helped influence artists in Argentina, Brazil, and later, Venezuela to make art in this new modern style.

Geometric Abstraction rose to prominence in South America between the 1930s and the 1970s. Prior to this period, traditional representational art styles rooted in the traditions of academic painting were officially sanctioned and considered respectable in the region. This radical departure toward geometric abstraction was embraced by artists and state powers across Latin America as a way of culturally distancing themselves from the colonial past (c. 16th to early 19th century), while signifying their alignment with a new modern, economically independent future.

Joaquín Torres-García in Paris

Like many Latin American artists of his generation, who lived, worked, and studied in Paris between World War I and II, Torres-García came to Paris because it was seen as the artistic capital of the West. While living there in the 1920s and early 1930s, he met Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian, the Dutch founders of the art movement De Stijl (also known as Neoplasticism). Together, they formed the artistic group “Circle and Square,” which promoted geometric abstraction in opposition to Surrealism, an art movement based on dream-like imagery and the subconscious that was well known in France at the time. Torres-García was inspired by Mondrian, but was critical of De Stijl’s strict austerity. He wanted to propose a more “human” approach to geometric abstraction that would engage his interests in Latin American Pre-Columbian and European ancient and Classical art.

Torres-García’s Color Structure, made in Paris in 1930, demonstrates his interest in many of the same principles as the Neoplasticists, including the grid, a reduced palette of primary colors, and the use of the Golden Ratio. These qualities are also evident in Mondrian’s Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow (made the same year as Torres-Garcia’s Color Structure), a non-objective painting divided asymmetrically by thick black lines into squares of various sizes filled with flat planes of white and primary colors, the largest one, a bright red. Torres-García was inspired by De Stijl’s emphasis on the grid and Constructivism’s geometry, as well as what he believed to be the “universalism” of nonobjective art—in other words, he believed that geometric abstraction, which does not depict recognizable figurative imagery, could be visually understood across all cultures. In Torres-Garcia’s Color Structure, we also see a grid composed of different sized of rectangles in blue, yellow, white, and red, arranged vertically and horizontally.

Torres-García also adopted van Doesburg’s and Mondrian’s use of the Golden Ratio, an important concept to him, which he felt would help his art become integrated with natural and cosmic forces. But, unlike Mondrian, Torres-García emphasizes Color Structure’s imperfections: the grid is drawn freehand with wavy lines and the colors are muddy and include tonal variation and rough brushwork.

Constructive Universalism in Uruguay

When Torres-García returned home to Uruguay in 1934 (for financial reasons and the encouragement of friends), after more than forty years living abroad, he sought to bring geometric abstraction to Latin America as a way to reconcile this style with the region’s own cultural histories and artistic traditions. Dissatisfied with what he saw as a lack of emotion or humanity in Constructivism and De Stijl, he developed his own style called Universalismo Constructivo (Constructive Universalism), which sought to combine the “reason” of Constructivism’s and De Stijl’s geometry with the sources of abstract art found in the arts and crafts of ancient civilizations from around the world. He incorporated pictographs (simplified images or symbols) related to the cultures of various ancient civilizations (including Pre-Columbian cultures), into his images. He felt these pictographs communicated common ideas to people everywhere, making them “universal.”

As a cultural nomad who lived abroad in the U.S. and Europe for 43 years before returning to Uruguay, Torres-García was interested in the concept of “universalism” because he wanted to find visual elements that were shared by all cultures, underpinning his belief in the metaphysical wholeness of the universe. He also wanted to show how the geometric principles of pre-Columbian, Indigenous artistic styles actually anticipated later European geometric abstraction. His ideas paralleled psychologist Carl Jung, who believed that archetypal images could connect individuals to collective cultures and universal experiences. Torres-García was not relating to Jung directly, and for him, the metaphysical was much more important than the psychological. His search for the universal was not based on the psyche of the individual, but rather the universal collective.

We find an expression of these impulses in his painting Universal Art, a composition in earthy browns depicting many interconnected rectangular compartments filled with pictographs, including shapes, symbols, and recognizable images such as the sun, the moon, scales, fish, a heart, a house, boats, and people, that appear as if they are carved into wood or stone. Like his earlier works that borrow from Mondrian, Torres-García creates an asymmetrical grid based on the Golden Ratio with a reduced color palette, but his earth tones convey more warmth, and his rough, painterly strokes and shading appear more “crafty” and reveal a human touch.

Later, Torres-García founded an arts and crafts workshop called the Taller Torres-García to disseminate his artistic theories to a younger generation of Uruguayan artists, whose style came to be known as the School of the South. Following Torres-García’s innovations in the 1930s and 1940s, artists across Latin America—especially in Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela—began working in geometric abstraction, which would dominate the painting and sculpture in those countries until the 1960s and 1970s.

AACI and Madí in Argentina

In 1944, a group of Argentine and Uruguayan artists based in Buenos Aires published the first and only issue of a magazine about abstract art titled Arturo, with texts and reproductions of artworks by Torres-García, Mondrian, and the Russian abstract artist Wassily Kandinsky. The magazine was intended to promote Concrete Art (a term first used by Theo van Doesburg to describe nonobjective geometric abstraction) in Argentina.

Two Argentine Concrete Art groups emerged from the magazine: the Association of Concrete-Invention (AACI) and the Madí Group. These developments took place during the first term of the presidency of the Argentine populist Juan Domingo Perón, whose administration officially sanctioned naturalistic, figurative art styles, which these Concrete art movements fought against.

AACI

The AACI was founded in 1945 by Argentine artist Tomás Maldonado and poet Edgar Bayley. The catalogue for the group’s first exhibition included their manifesto—a written statement declaring the group’s intentions, motives, and views—titled the “Inventionist Manifesto.” It called for artists to “invent” their own images, rather than trying to copy what they see, and justified Concrete art through Marxist political theories. [1]

Embracing Mondrian’s and van Doesburg’s strict Concrete aesthetics while rejecting Torres-García’s emphasis on symbolism and a hand-made aesthetic, the AACI emphasized a rigorous, mathematical, even mechanical-looking approach to geometric abstraction with flat, planar colors. These principles are on display in Maldonado’s Development of a Triangle a composition on a white ground of intersecting straight and angular lines and a series of triangles, one yellow and another violet.^[7]

Madí Group

In 1946 the Madí Group was formed by artists Rhod Rothfuss, Carmelo Arden Quin, and Gyula Kosice. [1] Like the AAIC, Madí endorsed making nonobjective artworks with flat planes of bright color. But, unlike the AAIC, Madí art was more playful and experimented with three-dimensions and unusual materials such as Plexiglas and neon.

Madí artists often rejected the traditional rectangular picture frame in favor of an irregularly-shaped canvas, known as a marco recortado (cutout frame). The cutout frame was first conceived by Rothfuss in an essay he wrote for Arturo, in which he argued that irregularly-shaped canvases would allow artworks to function like other objects in the world, rather than as windows framing views of another world. One example of the cutout frame is Rothfuss’s Three Red Circles, a bright yellow geometrically-shaped composition with shapes delineated with thick black lines, a blue rectangle at the top and on the side, and three small red circles on the left.

Concrete and Neo-Concrete Art in Brazil

Max Bill

In 1951, Swiss Concrete artist and former Bauhaus student Max Bill won the grand prize for sculpture at the First São Paulo Biennial (a large international exhibition occurring every two years) in Brazil, for his metallic sculpture of flowing, intertwining ribbon-like forms, called Tripartite Unity. This sculpture would influence a young generation of Concrete artists in the country, including the Grupo Ruptura in São Paulo and the Grupo Frente in Rio de Janeiro. Concrete art captured the values of science and mathematical precision heralded in Brazil in the 1950s, a period of rapid industrial growth, modernization, and the development of a new capital in Brasília defined by architect Oscar Niemeyer’s futuristic International Style architecture.

The Grupo Ruptura

The Grupo Ruptura was formed in 1952 with an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo. The group’s name meant “rupture,” and it sought to break with traditional art styles, namely naturalistic painting, which was seen as elitist (though this break was not specifically tied to political radicalism). Their works were characterized by flat colors and a reduced palette, geometry, and industrialized media like enamels and mechanical techniques like spray painting that would not reveal the hand of the artist. Their works also incorporated Gestalt psychological theory (a perceptual theory about how the brain forms a whole image from many component parts) by training the viewer’s eye on outlines as contours of a solid shape, as in Judith Lauand’s Virtual Space, a painting of a pinwheel-like shape of white and purple lines in a field of black. Lauand was also the only woman in the Grupo Ruptura.

The Grupo Frente and Neo-Concrete art

The Grupo Frente was founded by artist and teacher Ivan Serpa in Rio de Janeiro in 1954. Many of the artists involved were his former students at the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro. They rejected the Grupo Ruptura’s strict adherence to purity, science, and math and promoted instead more creative intuition in geometric abstraction. This shift in the Grupo Frente’s brand of Concrete art eventually led to a new style altogether, known as Neo-Concrete art, pioneered by artists Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape, and later, Hélio Oiticica.

The principles of Neo-Concrete art were theorized by poet Ferreira Gullar in his “Neo-Concrete Manifesto” (1959), which called for more sensuality, freedom, and feeling in Concrete art. Like Torres-García who sought to infuse geometric abstraction with more emotion, the manifesto sought to distance the new movement from the dogmatic rationalism of European Concrete art styles like Neo-plasticism and Constructivism.

Gullar also developed the theory of what he termed the “non-object,” by which he meant an art object that would function as a mediator between the spectator and the physical experience of the object. This is exemplified by Lygia Clark’s Bicho (Critter), a metal sculpture made of moveable flaps intended to be manipulated and rearranged by the spectator-participant (or someone who observes and participates). As Clark’s Bicho suggests, Neo-Concrete art adapted Concrete art’s geometric shapes and transformed them into organic three-dimensional objects to be handled by spectators, or environments to be physically entered, which helped to break down boundaries between art and life in Brazilian art of the 1960s.

Optical and Kinetic Art in Venezuela

Two other forms of geometric abstraction, known as Optical (or Op, a style of abstract art based on patterns and optical illusions) and Kinetic art (objects that have moving parts), became popular in Venezuela in the 1950s and 1960s. These styles were dominated by three artists in the country: Carlos Cruz-Diez, Alejandro Otero, and Jesús Soto. Their works included small and large-scale abstract sculptures and public artworks made of bright colors and industrial materials that moved, or appeared to move.

[Video: https://youtu.be/7zW2y9tqJBo] Jesús Rafael Soto, Penetrable BBL Bleu, conceived 1999, given to LACMA in 2020 (Los Angeles County Museum of Art)

A famous example are Soto’s “penetrables,” tubes of colored plastic suspended from the ceiling in box-like shapes, into which participants could enter and play. While Brazilian Neo-Concretists sought to move away from the purely optical toward the experiential and sensual, the Venezuelans still embraced the visual, but also created participatory and sensually experiential environments and objects to be interacted with, like Soto’s penetrables.

The Op and Kinetic works by these artists received corporate and government support from the Venezuelan regime of Colonel Marcos Pérez Jiménez’s dictatorship of the 1950s, as well as later democratically elected administrations in the 1960s and 1970s, and resulted in the commissions of several large-scale public artworks. The state and corporate leaders believed such works helped position Venezuela on the world stage as a modern, forward thinking, and technologically advanced country. This was important to them as they were growing their oil industry for international export. These works were used by corporations and the state as propaganda promoting Venezuela as an international modern center of industry, revealing how state-patronage and nationalist interests intervened in the so-called “avant-garde” art in the country during the period.

Another important artist in the history of Venezuelan abstraction was Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt), a German emigrant, who developed her own approach to geometric abstraction, creating delicate sculptures and environments (sculptures that occupy entire gallery spaces) made of wire. Gego’s large Reticulárea (Reticular), created at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas in 1969, comprises a sprawling wire grid that filled the gallery’s floor, walls, and ceiling, into which spectators could enter and walk around.

Contributions and Legacy

Latin American geometric abstraction united international principles of modernist abstraction with local cultural traditions, and led to more participatory forms of art. It also served as an ideological tool for both Latin American artists and nation-states to signal a break with traditional art styles—associated with their colonial past—and to assert a new, modern, and often utopian industrialized future. Latin American geometric abstraction is probably most notable for the large number of women artists who were leaders in these movements and who achieved successful artistic careers in their lifetimes, something that was much less common with mid-twentieth century art movements in the U.S. and Europe.^[8]

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International Style architecture in Mexico and Brazil

by DR. MAYA JIMÉNEZ

In Latin America, the International Style of architecture flourished in the mid-twentieth century, replacing the classicism of the previous decades. Countries with booming economies and nation-building efforts embraced international abstraction as an alternative to indigenism. The International Style is a general term that refers to modern architecture often stripped of ornamentation to reveal the beauty of its structural form. Designs are often use reinforced concrete and brise soleil walls. As exemplified by the Swiss architect Le Corbusier, the International Style consisted of a functional style of architecture, through which purpose dictates form. Devoid of ornament, the exterior of many of these buildings feature geometric design, modular units, and clean lines. The style transformed Latin American cities, like Mexico City and Brasília, into modern metropoles.

The International Style in Mexico City

In Mexico, Juan O’Gorman designed housing projects to accommodate the rapid urbanization of Mexico City, as well as private residences, among them the house and studio of the artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. The large windows and the modular units of square panels of glass are typical characteristics of the International Style, not to mention highly functional in the context of artists’ studios.

An important feature of the house was the rooftop bridge, which connected the larger red house that belonged to Rivera with the smaller blue house that belonged to Kahlo (and refers to La Casa Azul, “The Blue House,” in which she grew up in Coyoacán). The horizontality of the bridge railings, which paralleled that of the window panes, was a typical feature of the International Style, as were the supporting pilotis (or piers) on the ground floor, which elevated the house and provided parking space, as exemplified in the Villa Savoye (1931) by Le Corbusier.

The population of Mexico City grew rapidly between 1940 to 1960,  increasing from 1.7 million to 5.4 million people. In order to accommodate this exploding population, housing developments, such as Satellite City, sprouted up throughout Mexico City. Designed by Mario Pani, who also designed the campus of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), this self-sufficient urban enclave catered primarily to the middle class.

At the entrance to the city, the German émigré artist Mathias Goeritz and the Mexican architect Luis Barragán created The Towers of Satellite City, a work that “would mark the origin point of Mexico City’s mid-century middle-class expansion to the north.”^[9]Their formulation of “Concrete-Invention” was rooted in their commitment to Marxist materialism and anti-idealist revolutionary and collective art.[/footnote] The monument consists of five wedge-shaped structures that rise more than 100 feet, and they demonstrate the artists’ abandonment of figuration. Varying in height, placement, and shape, they recreate an urban landscape through which their spatial relation with the viewer changes according to movement, an effect that is further dramatized by passing drivers. Goeritz further elaborated on the importance of abstraction in civic architecture in his “Emotional Nature” manifesto, in which he called for “a spiritual uplifting” in architecture.

Tropical modernism

Perhaps the greatest monuments of the International Style in Latin America can be seen in Brasília. The capital city of modern-day Brazil was created between 1956 and 1960 by the famed Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer. Niemeyer first met Le Corbusier in 1929, when the French architect traveled to Rio de Janeiro as part of his first trip to South America, which also included visits to Argentina and Uruguay.

Transforming the horizontals and verticals of Le Corbusier into sweeping curves and spires, Niemeyer articulated a unique and modern architectural vision for Brazil. This was partly due to the influence of his mentor, Lúcio Costa, who advocated for a synthesis of Modernism and Brasilidade (“Brazilian-ness”), a “tropical modernism,” that presented a view of an industrially modern, yet exotic country. Like the Mexican Muralists, Niemeyer was empowered by the government, who showered him with commissions for architectural projects in emerging cities like Pampulha and Brasília.

Pampulha

Pampulha was established as a resort community near a lake of the same name. Pampulha served as the vacation destination for residents of the surrounding city of Belo Horizonte and of Brasília. Among the many buildings designed by Niemeyer, the Church of Saint Francis of Assisi demonstrates his iconic use of curves, made possible through reinforced concrete. Niemeyer was building the curvilinear forms that characterized the Brazilian Baroque style from centuries earlier—particularly the work of Antonio Francisco Lisboa, who designed the Church of São Francisco de Assis in Ouro Prêto. The curves also echo the topography of Brazil, and Niemeyer dramatized his structure further by having the entire church plan consist of a single vaulted nave. This provides an intimate atmosphere for worship. It also prevents the interruption of form between wall and ceiling. Still, some residents of Pampulha resented the simplicity of Niemeyer’s design. Candido Portinari, on the other hand, who created murals based on the life of Saint Francis for both the interior and exterior of the church, benefitted from Niemeyer’s curved design, which provided an ideal surface for his murals.

Brasília

Literally built from scratch, Brasília was to showcase the modernity of a newly industrialized country, as encapsulated by its slogan “fifty years of progress in five.” The urban planning was entrusted to Lúcio Costa, while the development of government, religious, and domestic buildings was assigned to Niemeyer. Costa’s design, called the Pilot Plan, separated civic spaces from those meant for residential living. The civic spaces are arranged on an “x” axis, while blocks of housing units for 500,000 people were constructed on a “y” axis for the city.

At the civic center, known as the Plaza of the Three Powers, Niemeyer situated the legislative, executive, and judicial buildings in close proximity to one another. The National Congress, which houses the legislative branch, consisted of a one-story structure topped with two opposing half-circles, a dome, which marked the Senate, and a bowl, the Chamber of Deputies. While the horizontality of the National Congress contrasts with the curvature of the bowl and the dome, it also intersects with the verticality of the two administrative buildings, prominently placed behind it. A powerful play on shape and line, Niemeyer further dramatizes the layout by adding ramps onto which visitors can approach the dome and bowl not only at street level, but also from the rooftop.