Musée Galliera, La Maison de l’Amérique latine, and l’Académie Internationale

des Beaux-Arts, Exposition d’art Américain-latin (1924), Paris: Musée

Galliera. Photo: courtesy of The Frick Collection, New York with permission of
the Musée Galliera archives, Paris.
 JCS 3 (2+3) pp. 212–236 Intellect Limited 2014

Journal of curatorial studies

Volume 3 Numbers 2 & 3
© 2014 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/jcs.3.2-3.212_1

MICHELE GREET
George Mason University

Occupying Paris: The First Survey

Exhibition of Latin American Art

Abstract Keywords
The first survey of Latin American art ever to be held anywhere in the world took Latin American
place in Paris at the Musée Galliera in 1924. Rather than showcasing a particular exhibitions
stylistic tendency, organizers conceived of Latin American heritage as the unifying Latin American
factor behind the show, giving rise to an exhibition format that would persist for identity
the rest of the twentieth century. The stylistic eclecticism of the exhibition compelled survey exhibitions
critics and audiences to ponder the existence of a Latin American aesthetic and to Musée Galliera
attempt to pin down characteristic traits common to the region. This article exam- art criticism
ines the content, reviews and ramifications of this foundational exhibition of Latin Latin American
American art. aesthetics

In the years between World War I and World War II, Paris was a desti-
nation of choice for artists from all over the world. During this period
more than 300 Latin American artists travelled to Paris and contributed to
nearly every major modernist trend between the wars, including cubism,
surrealism, constructivism and the more figural modes associated with the
School of Paris. This presence did not automatically result in a cohesive
Latin American artistic community. While the notion of Latin America
as a geo-political construct had existed since the days of Simón Bolívar a
century earlier, art schools and the governments that founded them were
decidedly nationalist, and artists were expected to exalt that national iden-
tity. As more artists, intellectuals and diplomats – who often had strong
cultural connections or leanings themselves – converged on Paris, tran-
snational liaisons assumed greater importance. These liaisons led to the

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Michele Greet

1. These delegates formation of two important cultural centres: the Académie Internationale
included Diana Dampt,
Alipio Dutra, Manoel des Beaux-Arts and the Maison de l’Amérique latine. As their inaugural
Madruga (Brazil); endeavour, these organizations hosted a small exhibition of modern Latin
Horacio Butler, Juan
Manuel Gavazzo
American art in 1923 followed the next year by an extensive survey of
(Argentina); Angel Latin American art from the pre-Columbian to modern era, the first such
Zárraga, George exhibition to be held anywhere in the world. Prior to 1924 exhibitions of
de Zayas (Mexico);
Hernández Giro (Cuba); Latin American art had focused on individual artists or national trends. It
Luis Alberto Sangroniz was only after this exhibition in Paris that the survey show, with repre-
(Chile); Carlos Otero
(Venezuela); and Pierre sentative examples of artwork from each country, became an accepted
Montalvo de Matheu (El format for the display of Latin American art. The conception of such an
Salvador).
exhibition, framed by geo-political identity, rather than by movement or
style, forced audiences and critics to contemplate what characteristics
should unite and distinguish Latin American from European art and if a
Latin American aesthetic identity could or should even exist. This article
will examine the content, reviews and ramifications of this foundational
exhibition of Latin American art.
In December 1922, Argentine economist Alejandro de Olazabal and
Brazilian intellectual Pedro Luis Osorio presented a proposal to the French
government for the formation of an Académie Internationale des Beaux-
Arts to be housed in a building donated by Olazabal at 9 Rue de Presbourg,
which would include a music conservatory, as well as classes in painting,
sculpture, architecture, printmaking and the philosophy of art. The school
would focus on training artists from Latin America and would be run in
conjunction with a newly formed Maison de l’Amérique latine. Whereas
the academy’s mission was education, the Maison would serve as a cultural
centre and showcase for Latin American art, music and literature with the
objective of ‘attracting [Latin] American artists to Paris for the great benefit
of their culture’ (‘Manifestations artistiques’ 1923: 95). The assumption here
was that Paris would serve as an archetype of cultural advancement for
Latin American cities. In February 1923 Olazabal and Osorio convened a
meeting to discuss these proposals and plan their implementation.
Plans proceeded quickly for both the Academy and the Maison. Over the
summer of 1923 directional committees for the L’Académie Internationale
des Beaux-Arts were appointed and convened to define the school’s mission.
Members of the committee on painting included such noteworthy French
artists as Maurice Denis, Roger de La Fresnaye, Albert Gleizes, Paul Albert
Laurens, Jacques Mathey, Lucien Simon, and André Dunoyer de Segonzac.
Latin American artists living in Paris were also chosen as delegates for
select Latin American countries (‘A l’Académie Internationale des Beaux-
Arts’ 1923: 94).1 Antoine Bourdelle, who had a strong connection with the
numerous Latin American art students he taught at the Académie de la
Grande Chaumière, hosted the first meeting of the sculpture section at his
home, which included delegates from Argentina (Pablo Curatella Manes),
Brazil (Victor Brecheret), Colombia (Marco Tobón Mejía), and Uruguay
(José Luis Zorilla de San Martin and Pablo Mañé). And it was also decided
that committees should be formed in each large city of Latin America with
the mission to facilitate transatlantic exchange:

1. Making known the resources and facilities that the International Academy
of Fine Arts has to offer the artists and students of Latin America

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2. Choosing works to be shown in the large exhibitions that the Academy 2. The concert featured
Brazilian pianist Souza
will organize in Paris Lima and Fructuoso
3. Preparing and organizing exhibitions of French art in Latin America Vianna, Argentine
composer Carlos
(‘A l’Académie Internationale des Beaux-Arts’ 1923: 94) Pedrell, and Mexican
violoncellist Ruben
As their mission statement indicates, Olazabel and Osorio envisioned a Montriel. I have not
been able to determine
widespread transatlantic exchange of art, education and resources. where this concert and
That same summer the Maison de l’Amérique latine was also launched – exhibition were held.
although it did not yet have a permanent address – with a musical concert 3. Artists in the exhibition
and an exhibition of Latin American art.2 This exhibition, while not nearly included Alfredo
Bernier, Juan Manuel
as extensive as the official exhibition that would take place the following Gavazzo Buchardo,
year, marked the first time that works by contemporary Latin American José A. Merediz, Tito
artists living in Paris were assembled for display as a unified group.3 These Saubidet and Manuel
Villarubia-Nory
artists, who almost all exhibited regularly in the Paris salons, represented (Argentina); Tarsila
eleven countries, including Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, do Amaral, Victor
Brecheret, Duara, Alipio
Cuba, Ecuador, Peru, El Salvador, Venezuela and, oddly, Spain (with the Dutra, Gaston Infante,
work of Servando del Pilar). This inaugural exhibition at the Maison de Manoël Madruga, Anita
Malfatti, Vicente do
l’Amérique latine was a relatively small and rapidly assembled endeavour Rego Monteiro and
that attracted little critical attention. It was, however, a prelude to the Domingos Viegas
much more extensive exhibition that would take place the following year. Toledo-Piza (Brazil); Luis
Alberto de Sangroniz
Raymond Cogniat, who was just starting to write a regular column on (Chile); Marco Tobón
Latin American art for the recently launched Revue de l’Amérique latine, Mejía (Colombia);
Max Jiménez (Costa
wrote the only known review of the show. His review introduced the issue Rica); Juan Emilio
that would come to define debates over Latin American art over the next Hernández Giro (Cuba);
Manuel Rendón
decades: the existence or lack of a Latin American aesthetic. For Cogniat, Seminario (Ecuador);
such an aesthetic was nascent, but underdeveloped, and still dominated José Felix (Peru); Pierre
Montalvo de Matheu
by European ideas and influences: (El Salvador); Manuel
Cabré and Carlos Otero
What remains is for us to hope that these exhibitions will now recur (Venezuela); Servando
del Pilar (Spain); and
often to permit us to follow the evolutionary efforts of the artist Manuel Reinoso and
who, though very influenced by our formulas, maintains a certain Arriaran (unidentified).
See Magellan (1923: 288)
independence that may perhaps allow their character to emerge. and Cogniat (1923: 365).
(1923: 365)
4. The press release
detailed the process
While he did not delineate exactly what he was seeking, Cogniat suggested for submitting work:
in this passage that Latin American artists should differentiate themselves artists had to send
a list of works by 15
from their European peers by foregrounding their innate character. January, works had to
On 1 January 1924 the office of the Direction des Beaux-Arts et des be received between 5
and 8 March, and each
Musées of the city of Paris announced that it would make the Musée work had to be labelled
Galliera available to the Maison de l’Amérique latine and the Académie with the address of the
exhibitor.
Internationale des Beaux-Arts from 14 March until 15 April for a much
larger official exhibition of Latin American art that would showcase the
full range of what the continent had to offer and ‘make Latin American
art known in France in its most original manifestations […] without differ-
entiating by tendency or school’ (Ville de Paris Direction des Beaux-Arts
et des Musées and Musée Galliera 1924).4 By renouncing ‘tendency or
school’ as an organizational mechanism, the organizers set the param-
eters for a new category of art exhibition, one determined by geo-political
rather than aesthetic identity. This decision paralleled that of the French
Salon des indépendants whose hanging committee decided that same

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year to abandon its tradition of presenting works by tendency (or alpha-

betically which it had done for the past two years) and instead organized
the galleries according to national identity. This shift towards a national
or regional presentation of art emerged in response to the increasing
presence of foreigners in Paris between the wars, and fears that this pres-
ence would dilute ‘French art’ (Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris
2000: 31). Thus while the exhibition provided a unique opportunity for
Latin American artists to exhibit in Paris, it also served to segregate and
classify their work as ‘other’.
The press release served as a call for participation, inviting Latin
American artists living in Paris as well as collectors of Latin American art
of all periods to submit works for inclusion. The exhibition did not have
an official curator. Rather, a selection committee made up of an eclectic
range of French artists, including cubist Albert Gleizes, the academic
painter and teacher at the Académie Julian Paul Albert Laurens, fashion
designer and illustrator George Lepape, and art deco illustrator and print-
maker Pierre Brissaud, assessed the paintings submitted. They, in coor-
dination with Bourdelle and Charles Despiau who were in charge of the
sculpture section, defined the scope of the show (‘L’Exposition d’Art
Américain-Latin’ 1924: 189–90). In the years between the world wars
there was a move to professionalize museum staff and separate education
departments from curatorial departments, but many museums continued
to organize exhibitions on an ad hoc basis. Given the range of style and
quality of the final exhibition, it appears that most if not all submissions
were accepted. Organizers also planned an extensive concert and lecture
series to accompany the exhibition throughout its month-long run.
Conceived as a grand affair aimed as showing off the very best of Latin
America’s artistic talent, the exhibition strove to present a vision of the
region as sophisticated and culturally relevant.
Pedro Osorio, who had assumed a leadership role in organizing
and publicizing the show, appealed directly to the cultural elite of Paris,
inviting all the diplomatic corps from Latin America, as well as elite
foreigners associated with the art, political and lettered world of Parisian
society to an elegant reception and concert at the Hôtel de Ville on 15
February to promote the exhibition. At the reception he made an impas-
sioned speech about his hopes for the project and reasons for creating
these cultural institutions:

There are nearly one hundred million men there [in Latin America]
who inherited at birth a culture thousands of years old […]. It is
up to our race, whose path has not destroyed our faith and whose
misery has not shrunken our heart, to legitimate our historical fate,
by creating for the world the liberating solutions of tomorrow. There
are nearly one hundred million men there whose similar ethnicity,
religion, historical tradition, customs, and democratic ideals will
intensify in a world of common aspirations […]. However, we are
still just numbers, dispersed by the four winds to follow our indi-
vidual dreams […]. Why can these people, despite the efforts they
make daily in this regard, not build ‘the central organs of a nervous
system’ of continental life that has been so powerfully drafted? It

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cannot be a question of choosing the capital of one of the coun- 5. The idea of pan-
Americanism – the
tries in Latin America to be the capital of the ‘Continent-Nation’. belief in shared
We will never allow any form of continental union that confers to cultural, economic
and historical bonds
one of us the international pre-eminence that this privilege would between South
in fact imply. Some propose to build a new capital located in a neu- American nations
tral zone […]. What we need is not a capital, it is a Latin American – originated with
the South American
‘brain’, that proclaims and that exerts in the world our supreme con- statesman and
tinental will to take an active and personal part in the historical task revolutionary Simón
Bolívar (1783–1830).
of humanity’s future […]. Where to found the institution that will Upon his death,
embody all these aspirations? Paris is at the head of the bridge that French intellectual
Saint-Simonian Michel
reaches everywhere. Paris is for Latin Americans the uncontested Chevalier identified the
ancestor of our democracies […]. So that is why we have crossed peoples of the region
the Atlantic Ocean to come, to your country, to found our Latin as a ‘Latin race’, which
led to the coining of
American foyer. the term ‘Latin America’
(‘La Maison de L’Amérique latine’ 1924: 380) under Napoleon III
(see Mignolo 2005 and
Lynch 2006).
In his speech Osorio made explicit this notion of a cultural community of
Latin Americans in Paris. He even proposed Paris as the cultural capital
of Latin America, a capital that could not be established on the continent
because it would privilege one country over the rest. While this concept of
a unified Latin American culture stems from a long history of ideological
pan-Americanism,5 Osorio’s explicit proposition of Paris as the quasi-cap-
ital of this region set up a unique transnational alliance between France
and the individual nations of South and Central America. France would
not exert any political authority over Latin America, but rather would
serve as a neutral ground as well as a cultural archetype for the formation
and promotion of the arts of Latin America.
Osorio added an additional justification for his selection of Paris as
the Latin American capital of the arts, asserting: ‘It is necessary, however,
that we soon be able to say Latin American as we have always said North
American’ (‘La Maison de L’Amérique latine’ 1924: 381). By focusing on
Latin America exclusively in this endeavour, the southern region could
distinguish itself from the United States whose increasing cultural and
political hegemony was a growing source of strife. The occupation of
Cuba by the United States in 1898 followed by the invasions of Panama in
1903 and Nicaragua in 1912 had caused Latin Americans to regard their
northern neighbour as an imperialist threat rather than as a model to
emulate. By the 1920s, US companies dominated much of the oil industry
in Latin America, leading to increased anti-American sentiment and a
continued emphasis on self-definition. Having experienced the power
of the United States to enforce its will on the divided republics to its
south, Latin American intellectuals began to focus on creating a cohesive
pan-Latin American identity, emphasizing common race and culture as
a means of unifying the bond between individual nations and differen-
tiating themselves from Anglo-Saxon-based societies. By choosing Paris
as a base of operations, Osorio aligned Latin America’s Mediterranean
heritage – its Latin-based language and culture – with Old World society
as a means of rejecting North American imperialism. This was the first
cohesive proposal of its kind to present Latin American art as a means of
conveying this culture to the world.

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Michele Greet

Program of events held in conjunction with the Exposition d’art Américain-Latin (1924),
4 April. Photo: courtesy of the author with permission of the Musée Galliera archives, Paris.

218
 Occupying Paris

The Exposition Art Américain-Latin opened with great fanfare on 6. On 21 March, the
program featured
15 March 1924 at the Musée Galliera on 10 avenue Pierre 1er de Serbie. a lecture on Latin
Among the distinguished guests at the opening were the ambassadors of American literature,
followed by Cuban
Chile, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, and Luis de Martins de Souza- dance, poetry, and
Dantas, the ambassador of Brazil, as well as the Princesse d’Orléans- music. On 4 April, there
Bragance, the daughter of the former emperor of Brazil (Simoni 1924: 5). occurred ‘Causerie sur
l’art Américain Latin
Over 260 works of contemporary art by 42 Latin American artists residing par M. Louis Hourticq,
in Paris, whole art collections owned by important Parisian and Latin Professeur à l’Ecole des
Beaux-Arts’, followed by
American collectors, as well as a retrospective section of pre-Columbian a musical programme.
and folk art filled the galleries and garnered significant attention in the On 11 April, a lecture on
Latin American poetry
press. Weekly cultural programs brought in new visitors throughout the was accompanied by
month-long event, including presentations on Latin American literature, a musical programme.
poetry readings, musical performances, and a lecture on Latin American The musical concert
of 15 April showcased
art by Ecole des Beaux-Arts professor M. Louis Hourticq.6 Given the Inca music followed
expansive geographic, chronological and stylistic scope of the exhibition, by a concert by Gabriel
Fauré (including a
the show simultaneously dazzled audiences and left them perplexed. translation into French
The retrospective section, drawn primarily from private collections, of Inca lyrics). These
programs are all in
included Mr Raoul D’Harcourt’s tapestries and funerary vases from the the Musée Galliera
Peruvian coast; Cuban cigars owned by a Mr Alvarez; Ecuadorian artist archives.
Camilo Egas’s tapestries; ponchos, indigenous garments and musical
instruments of Ecuador and Colombia from the Ecuadorian Consulate;
Mr Timolean Flores’s feathered and ornamental objects from the Andes;
and Mr and Mrs Chapsal’s collection of paintings of Mexico by the nine-
teenth-century French artist Edouard Pingret. The submissions were thus
heavily weighted to favour the indigenous traditions. This juxtaposition of
indigenous artifacts with the contemporary art in adjacent galleries tended
to construe the past as a pure original force and the present as tainted by
European influence, as remarks about the exhibition by Henri Clouzot,
the Musée Galliera’s conservator, indicate:

Evidently, the vicinity [of the pre-Columbian art to the contempo-

rary art] is not without danger. When we see the purity of style, the
perfection of technique and materials of the ceramics and textiles
from the Peruvian coast before the arrival of the Spanish, and which
are now just a memory, when we admire the sense of decoration
and colour, which in rare cases persist among indigenous tribes and
can still today withstand comparison with the best European crea-
tions, we realize that the conquest did not always have fortuitous
results for native art.
(1924: 447)

With this assessment of pre-Columbian art as highly innovative and

therefore worthy of comparison with the European tradition, critics were
hard pressed to find a means to evaluate positively the contributions of
contemporary Latin American artists.
Although Clouzot was the conservator of the Musée Galliera’s collec-
tion, the selection committee most likely determined the organization
and display of objects in the exhibition, since no mention is made in the
catalogue of an official curator and Clouzet’s review of the show takes
the tone of an outside observer. The contemporary art section included

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Michele Greet

Left: Emilio Pettoruti, L’instutitrice (1918), oil on board. Photo: courtesy of Fundación Pettoruti. Right:
Gino Severini, Woman with Green Plant (1917), oil on canvas, private collection, New York. Photo:
© 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

paintings, sculpture, architectural designs and decorative arts in various

media submitted by Latin American artists from fourteen different coun-
tries, with the greatest concentration from Argentina, Brazil and Cuba.
Indeed, national distribution was far from equal. There were seventeen
artists from Argentina, seventeen from Cuba (including many from the
retrospective section), thirteen from Brazil, seven from Chile, seven
from Uruguay, and three from Venezuela. Ecuador, Mexico and Peru
each featured two artists, while there was only one artist from Bolivia,
Colombia, Costa Rica, Honduras and El Salvador. Each artist submitted
from one to eight works for inclusion, and paintings represented by far
the largest category. Executed in a broad range of styles, the paintings
presented an eclectic vision of Latin American art. On one end of the
spectrum were the cubist works by Emilio Pettoruti and Alejandro Xul
Solar and on the other the impressionist landscapes of Manuel Cabré and
the Cézannesque compositions by Manuel Ortiz de Zarate. Only a small
handful of paintings depicted explicitly Latin American subject matter
such as those by Camilo Egas and Pedro Figari, whereas a much greater
number portrayed the French, Spanish or Italian countryside, generic still
lifes, portraits or genre scenes. It is difficult to determine by titles alone
exactly what the subject of the paintings were since many were listed
simply as ‘landscape’, ‘still life’ or ‘portrait’. But of those that were more
explicit, many more referenced place names in Europe than in Latin
America, and critical reviews of the show came to the same consensus.
Unfortunately, there are no installation photographs of the exhibition in

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the Musée Galliera’s archives and no photographs by individual artists

have surfaced.
One of Pettoruti’s submissions, L’instutitrice (‘The Governess’) (1918),
was a cubist rendition of a woman inscribed in an oval on a rectan-
gular canvas. While the composition bears a close resemblance to Gino
Severini’s Woman with a Green Plant (1916), and suggests knowledge of
the artist’s work from his time in Italy, Pettoruti’s rendition differs in its
crisp delineation of forms and uniform blocks of solid colour. Sharp angular
forms dominate the composition and disrupt the illusionary distinction
between figure and ground. Pettoruti also added checkerboards, dots or
wavy lines to some of the shapes to create dynamic patterns, which simul-
taneously suggest flooring, clothing or hair. A door to the left of the figure
indicates spatial recession because of its relative size, but also appears to
be directly next to the figure, further collapsing the pictorial space. The
picture thus plays with perceptions of solid and void in typical cubist
fashion. Whereas Pettoruti employs similar pictorial tactics to Severini, he
distributes form and colour more evenly and highlights clarity of design.
Pettoruti therefore extrapolates on Severini’s model bringing it more in
line with the new penchant for purist forms after the war. There is nothing
here that suggests Pettoruti is invoking his Argentine heritage; rather he is
engaging and enhancing Severini’s approach to cubism.
Since cubist pictures appeared regularly in the French salons, Pettoruti’s
painting would not have been particularly surprising for the French audi-
ence. Cogniat criticized it on its merits as a cubist composition, stating,
‘Mr Pettoruti submitted two curious cubist paintings in which values are
well rendered and coloured volumes well organized, but that remain a
bit cold like all paintings of this type’ (Cogniat 1924: 436). Others ques-
tioned the relevance of cubism in an exhibition of Latin American art,
however. The critic for the Journal des Debats asked: ‘Does an Argentine
cubist like Mr Pettoruti think he justifies himself by calling on the example
of his ancestors?’ (P.V. 1924: 4). The assumption here is that Pettoruti’s
cubism somehow recalled the blocky forms of pre-Columbian art and that
in invoking this art Pettoruti is claiming cubism as a legitimate expres-
sion of ‘Latin American’ culture. The critic then goes on to call for more
local or folkloric art, since in his eyes cubism was a dubious expression
of this culture. This desire on the part of French critics to identify ‘Latin
Americanness’ in works of art whose format and content indicate no such
connection reveals the dilemma posed by the exhibition’s imposition of a
geo-political construct on aesthetic production.
The Mexican critic José de Frías, took a different stance. Writing for
the Mexican journal Revista de Revistas, he called Pettoruti a ‘vanguard
artist’ and likened Pettoruti’s approach to that of the dadaists, expres-
sionists, cubists and futurists, proclaiming his art personal and sincere
(Frías 1924: 36). French critics pronounced the artist derivative, failing to
examine the nuances of his contribution to European movements. Latin
American critics, on the contrary, felt the need to assert his originality.
These divergent interpretations of the artist reveal an important divide
among critics in their assessment of artists who, in the context of this exhi-
bition, suddenly represented a regional identity. It was the premise of the
show, envisioned under the umbrella of Latin American identity, which

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Michele Greet

Alejandro Xul Solar, Surrealist Composition (1923), watercolour on paper. Photo: courtesy of
Fundación Pan Klub-Museo Xul Solar.

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 Occupying Paris

set up this dichotomy between centre and periphery and compelled critics 7. I have not been able
to locate any work by
to judge artists by a new set of criteria. Xul Solar of this period
The other artist deemed a cubist in the exhibition was Argentine with the title Femme
au serpent. Since
Alejandro Xul Solar, but his identification with cubism was tangential at paintings are often
best. Rather, his modernist explorations resulted from a fascination with renamed, it is therefore
the work of Paul Klee and Vassily Kandinsky, which he developed during possible that this may
even have been the
his 1921–23 residency in Munich. Of the three watercolours by Xul Solar piece in the exhibition.
that appeared in the show none can be identified decisively. One enti- Moreover, since Xul
Solar never associated
tled Woman with a Serpent, most likely resembled closely paintings such with surrealism, the
as Surrealist Composition (1923).7 In Surrealist Composition, which depicts current title of this
piece seems odd.
a person in profile facing a snake, Xul Solar arranges shapes, painted
in translucent washes of scintillating colour, so that they change hue at 8. The legend of the
the intersection between forms. The figure’s tongue intersects with the feathered serpent
refers to the
snake’s creating parity between the two; and the shape of the snake’s Mesoamerican deity
forked tongue echoes the strands of hair on the figure’s head, suggesting known as Quetzalcoatl
worshipped in various
that the two figures are in the midst of some sort of mystical transfor- forms by different
mation. A recurring motif in Xul Solar’s paintings, the snake may signify ethnic groups since
around the first
various religious traditions such as the Judeo-Christian creation myth century BC.
or the Toltec legend of the feathered serpent,8 since Xul Solar sought to
reveal universal truths by drawing parallels between religious, linguistic
and artistic traditions. As one of the most progressive and experimental
artists in the exhibition, Xul Solar seems to have been overlooked or
misunderstood completely by critics, with one dismissing him as a ‘rather
false’ cubist (Cogniat 1924: 436), and the other essentially equating his
work with that of Pettoruti (Sawyer 1924: 4). It seems that avant-garde
explorations had little place in this survey of Latin American art.
Work by artists who frequently contributed to the French salons
dominated the exhibition and may have influenced display practice as
well. Latin American artists seemed to exhibit in almost equal numbers
at the traditional salons and at the independent and autumn salons. By
counting those artists listed in the Revue de l’Amérique latine between
1923 and 1932 and those who self-reported participation in secondary
sources, I have identified 64 Latin American artists who participated in
the Société des artistes français and 35 who participated in the Société
Nationale des Beaux-Arts salons in the 1920s and 1930s, but there were
most likely many more. As with the national salons, at least sixty Latin
American artists exhibited at the Salon d’Automne between the wars
(Greet 2013).
In the many reviews of the Exposition Art Américain-Latin, the names
Manuel Ortiz de Zarate, Domingos Toledo Piza, Manuel Rendón
Seminario, Marcial Plaza Ferrand, and Manuel Cabré appeared over and
over, with the highest praise often heaped on Ortiz de Zarate. Phil Sawyer
called his work ‘bold and rugged in form and interpretation’ (1924: 4);
Frías proclaimed him ‘one of the most serious pictorial talents in Latin
America’ (1924: 36); and many others listed his work as among the best
in the show. Since Ortiz de Zarate rarely dated his paintings and very
little scholarly work has been done on his oeuvre, it is difficult to pinpoint
which paintings he submitted to the exhibition. It seems likely, however,
that a painting such as Still Life with Guitar, executed in a summary style,
was among his submissions. This painting demonstrates de Zarate’s shift

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Michele Greet

Manuel Ortiz de Zarate, Still Life with Guitar (c. 1920), oil on canvas, 73 × 116 cm., Inv. AM 2989P.
Photo: Bertrand Prevost, Musee National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France,
© CNAC/MNAM/Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.

9. Candombe is a away from cubism to explore the essential geometries of Cézanne in the
traditional Afro-
Uruguayan dance, 1920s. This type of painting would have appeared modernist in its brush-
while pericón is a folk work, but remained accessible to a general audience unaccustomed to the
dance from the Río de
la Plata region.
experimental forms of the avant-garde. It also aligns with the tendency
known as the call to order after the war. Since the aim of the exhibition
was to extol Latin American art to French audiences, showcasing those
artists whose work was on the cutting edge of innovation was probably
deliberately avoided. This tactic led critics to lament that the exhibition
did not reveal any singular talent, and that many of the paintings were
banal and sentimental (Cogniat 1924: 436). The display of objects at the
Musée Galliera may also have paralleled the custom of hanging paintings
close together and stacked at least two high at the salons as a means to
make the show accessible to French audiences.
Two artists whose work seemed to fulfil French critics’ desire for
‘native’ subject matter were Uruguayan Pedro Figari and Ecuadorian
Camilo Egas. Figari, while not in Paris at the time, had seven paintings
in the exhibition, which were most likely painted in the early 1920s,
submitted by the Franco-Uruguayan poet and writer Jules Supervielle. All
of Figari’s paintings were scenes of Uruguay and included two Candombe
paintings, Pericón, Toucans, Fiesta in the Village, The Visit and Assassination
of Quiroga.9 Executed in Figari’s characteristically loose brushwork,
Assassination of Quiroga depicts a chaotic scene. Riders on horses wielding

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Pedro Figari, Assassination of Quiroga (c.1924). Photo: courtesy of Fernando Saavedra Faget.

swords and guns surround a stagecoach from which they have dragged
and executed the federalist leader Juan Facundo Quiroga. Quiroga was an
Argentine caudillo who, after leading several attacks in the Cisplatine war,
was appointed governor of Buenos Aires in 1834. He was executed the
following year on a return trip from Salta where he had been attempting
to mediate a dispute between governors. His assassination led to a crisis in
the confederation, the establishment of the Rosas government, and calls
for a return to civility in Argentine political life. In choosing to depict an
historical event that took place nearly a century earlier, Figari romanticized
the wild unruly ways of the formative days of the Argentine state. In his
painting, Figari depicts Quiroga’s body as merely a black smudge in the
lower right-hand corner of the canvas. A group of assassins crowd around
his head to confirm whether or not he is really dead. Men on horseback
whirl around the space, and the two horses pulling the coach rear up on
their hind legs, heightening the drama of the scene. The undulating forms
of the trees and clouds in the clear blue sky echo the movement of the
scene unfolding below. This type of imagery, with its reference to a real
historical event, would have reinforced the French vision of the Argentine
pampas as a wild uncivilized place.
Whereas Figari appropriated the loose brushwork of the impression-
ists, unlike these artists he did not paint scenes of modern leisure observed
from life. Whether painted in Paris, Uruguay or Argentina, Figari’s scenes

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were nostalgic imaginings of disappearing customs. Yet by co-opting

impressionist brushwork, he lends an air of authenticity to these scenes
through association with the nineteenth-century penchant for capturing
modern life. These paintings seem to represent fleeting moments, captured
quickly by an artist who observed the scene. Impressionism, while still a
prominent technique in the Parisian salons half a century after its incep-
tion, was no longer disruptive nor cutting edge. Figari was not simply a
late impressionist, however; he redeployed impressionist technique as a
means of representing the fuzzy edges of memory, a past reconstructed
according to the desires of the present, that took into account the tastes
and expectations of a Parisian audience.
In combination, Figari’s paintings prompted critics to assert that his
work ‘separates itself right away from the rest of the group’ (Cogniat
1924: 436). Many commented on the local emphasis of his subject matter,
calling his compositions ‘very animated scenes of Uruguay’ (Clouzot 1924:
447), ‘full of local colour’ (‘Le Monde des Arts’ 1924: 3) or ‘quaint pictures
of Uruguayan life’ (Sawyer 1924: 4). None comment on Figari’s technique,
rather it was his focus on the local that drew attention to his submissions.
Critics found in them an exotic world of Afro-Uruguayan life, folk dances,
celebrations and violent political upheaval, an image of Latin America
that confirmed rather than challenged that which existed in the European
imagination.
The catalogue lists Camilo Egas’s submissions as a self-portrait and
two still lifes, but it appears that he added several drawings of indigenous
Ecuadorians after the catalogue went to press. According to the Chicago
Tribune review, Egas submitted ‘some very fine works in red chalk of
heads of Indians’ (Sawyer 1924: 4). Of the known works by Egas, it is
likely that the drawing in the exhibition was (or was very similar to) Rostro
Indígena (‘Head of an Indian’) (1922). The drawing is extremely natu-
ralistic in its proportions and shading and appears to have been drawn
from life. It depicts the face of a young indigenous woman with downcast
eyes, looking off to the left. She does not engage the viewer, but rather
subverts her gaze, allowing the artist to capture her form without actively
acknowledging his presence. Egas has rendered the figure without any of
the characteristic clothing or ornaments that would have identified her
as Native American and instead focused on creating a realistic portrait
of an individual, perhaps made as a preparatory drawing for the series
of murals he would execute for the Jijón y Camaaño library in Quito in
1922. If this were one of the works in the exhibition, it is perplexing that
two reviewers identified Egas’s drawings as ‘indigenous types’, however,
one calling them ‘curious’ and another ‘savory’ (Clouzot 1924: 447 and
Cogniat 1924: 436).
It is also possible that the work in the exhibition was more like Rostro
Indígena made in Paris in 1924. In Paris Egas would no longer have been
able to work from an indigenous model and therefore had to draw from
memory. The transformation in his rendering of the indigenous female over
this two-year period indicates more than just a lack of a model, however. In
the 1924 drawing Egas has distorted and exaggerated the figure’s lips and
jaw-line. She now also wears beads and a headdress, marking her indig-
enous status. She has become a caricature or a parody of Indianness rather

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Camilo Egas, Rostro Indígena (1922), drawing in red chalk, Célia Zaldumbide Collection (left); Rostro
Indígena (1924), drawing (right). Photos: courtesy of Nicolas Svistoonoff.

than a unique individual. Since we do not know exactly which drawings

were in the 1924 exhibition, it is impossible to determine which came first,
the reviews that referred to the images as ‘types’ or the images that inspired
the characterization. In either case, it was in Paris that Egas shifted his
approach to the indigenous subject moving from academic and naturalistic
to exaggerated and almost comedic. As I have discussed elsewhere, this
shift was perhaps a response to the distorted expectations of the Parisian
audience, who did not want reality, but rather stereotypes of the exotic and
native. By employing the technique of caricature these images satirize the
‘primitive’ qualities of Native Americans, thereby calling attention to the
constructed nature of this trope (Greet 2009: 44–45).
Works such as those by Figari and Egas were the exceptions not the
rule, however, and caused critics such as Cogniat to decry Latin American
artists’ lack of originality:

Several times in this review we have remarked on the lack of per-

sonality of many American artists. We have noticed, however, that
the nations which have a distinctive folklore, characteristic origins,
and a climate, vegetation and countryside, often very different from
that which we are familiar with in Europe, that those who have such
a past and such examples before their eyes, cannot possibly totally
lack originality and it would probably take very little to awaken in
them more instinctive tastes, more spontaneous and less encum-
bered by foreign influences.
(1924: 433–34)

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Michele Greet

Left: Pablo Curatella Manes, La femme au gros manteau (1921), plaster. Photo: courtesy of Museo
Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires. Right: Victor Brecheret, Rhythm (c.1924), bronze, NBE
Collection. Photo: © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/AUTVIS, Sao Paulo.

For Cogniat, originality does not refer to an artist’s unique vision, but
rather to that artist’s willingness to represent ‘native’ characteristics in his
or her work. The less a work of art resembles European models, the more
‘original’ he considers it. Moreover, the condescending tone of Cogniat’s
remarks and suggestion that artists need merely tap into their instinc-
tive (as opposed to cultivated or learned) response to their environment,
relegates Latin American artists to the role of unschooled children in need
of informed guidance from a discerning critic.
The sculpture section was even more devoid of specific references to
Latin American identity. The only piece that referenced this heritage was
Marco Tobón Mejía’s El perfil des Andes (‘Profile of the Andes’) (c.1910s).
For the most part the works submitted by the twelve sculptors living and
working in Paris were portrait busts or allegorical scenes. One of which, a
bronze head by Argentine Alberto Lagos, was even acquired by the French
government (‘Les Beaux Arts: Expositions d’art américain latin’ 1924: 3).
Several sculptures received critical acclaim in the press including works by

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Brazilian Victor Brecheret, Argentine Pablo Curatella Manes, and Costa

Rican Max Jiménez despite their ‘European’ subjects and techniques.
Brecheret submitted two sculptures: Sentinel (c.1920) and Rhythm (c.1924).
Rhythm is a small-scale bronze sculpture of a female nude crouching on
one knee. As suggested by the title, Brecheret has not tried to capture a
likeness of his model, but rather the essence of her movement. Reduced
to simple geometric shapes, the woman’s body forms a C-curve out of her
back that has been elongated and distorted to create a rhythmic pattern.
Her bent knee fits perfectly under the curve of her arm and a straight line
delineates her profile. Her breasts have been reduced to small mounds so
as not to interfere with the linear rhythm of the bends and curves of the
body. The sculpture is a study in form and energy guided by the shape of
the female body. Reviewers commended Brecheret’s ‘progressive talent’
and Friás even referred to his work as the salvation of Latin American
sculpture (Sawyer 1924: 4; Frías 1924: 35). Cogniat, despite his call for
nativist themes, lavished praise on Brecheret’s submissions, asserting that
his sculptures ‘were conceived in the most interesting decorative spirit.
The lines are simple and beautiful, supple and harmonious, the ensemble
lacks neither strength nor balance and has a well-established architectural
character that is unfortunately too rare in sculpture’ (Cogniat 1924: 435).
Pablo Curatella Manes submitted four sculptures, including a work in
bronze called La femme au gros manteau (‘Woman in a Heavy Overcoat’)
(1921). While not orthodox cubism, the sculpture reveals Curatella
Manes’s engagement with the movement and aptitude with reducing
and simplifying forms to derive essential geometries. As compared to
Brecheret’s Rhythm, La femme au gros manteau is all angles and planes.
Curatella Manes has almost completely eliminated curvilinear forms, yet
the sculpture shares an interest in overall linear patterning and rhythm.
Neither sculpture represents a recognizable individual; rather the female
form has become a motif upon which to perform geometric simplifica-
tions, a technique with which reviewers were familiar. Cogniat calls
the piece ‘a good example of simplification of volumes’ (1924: 435), the
reviewer for L’Oeuvre commented on Curatella Manes’s architectural
approach to human anatomy (Simoni 1924: 5), and Sawyer praised his
‘love of blocking out his figures in big angular forms’ (1924: 4).
Of the most disputed sculptures were Max Jiménez’s submissions.
Cogniat decried that Jiménez’s sculptures ‘were not of first rank; without a
doubt we find harmonious lines in the granite, but in the silver plate works
by the same artist we find an accumulation of unformed volumes, with a
weak silhouette, that do not succeed in creating an ensemble’ (1924: 435).
But Frías retorted that people laughed at Jiménez’s sculpture (he is refer-
ring specifically to his sculpture Intersection (c.1923) here) because they
did not understand it. According to Frías the piece represented a couple
embracing and was marked by strength, simplicity and synthesis, which
for Frías, made it among one of the most avant-garde works in the show
(1924: 35). Frías even chose to reproduce the work alongside his review,
in which he only discussed non-traditional works. In fact, one of Frías’s
chief complaints about the exhibition was that the organizers ‘were not
excessively keen on Latin Americans who were working with advanced

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tendencies’, which for Frías was an unfortunate representation of the true

vanguard potential of Latin American art (1924: 36).
Jiménez’s sculpture Intersection was one of the most abstract works in
the show. Whereas both Brecheret and Curatella Manes simplified their
forms, Jiménez pared his figures down until they straddled the boundary
between abstraction and representation. His granite sculpture, which
measured nearly a metre high, melds two figures together to form an
intertwined unit. An undulating biomorphic form, which seems to have
a life of its own, stands in for female hair. While it is nearly impossible to
cull any further description from the photograph reproduced with Frías’s
article, the only known reproduction of the sculpture, the confusion that it
provoked reveals a bit about its reception and the audience at the Musée
Galliera exhibition. Although artists such as Constantin Brancusi had been
experimenting with extreme simplification in sculpture in the years during
and after World War I, in the context of an exhibition of Latin American
art, Jiménez’s vanguard experiments with sculptural form seemed out of
place to reviewers seeking an aesthetic derived from regional identity.
In an attempt to make sense of its inclusion Sawyer compares it to pre-
Columbian art, a tactic that would soon become commonplace in inter-
pretations of modern Latin American artistic production:

Here is something of the primitiveness of the Astecs [sic] and the

hidden meaning of his civilization. Coming from a country where
the government has changed often, one is not surprised at a certain
revolutionary tendency which may be interpreted in different fash-
ions, but certainly is an attempt to have a perfectly free expression
in Art which promises to evolve into something very personal and
interesting.
(1924: 4)

Sawyer at least recognized the experimental quality of the sculpture,

but attributed it to Jiménez’s exposure to political upheaval and the
resultant desire for freedom. By explaining the sculpture’s formal quali-
ties in regionalist terms, Sawyer attempts to make them coincide with his
limited knowledge of Latin American culture. Critics frequently could not
reconcile styles bordering on abstraction with expectations of tropical,
primitive or politically radical content, and therefore dismissed artists
such as Jiménez.
Reviewers found a bit more of what they were seeking in the deco-
rative arts sections of the exhibition. Uruguayan artist Carlos Alberto
Castellanos submitted two decorative panels, two landscapes of tropical
America, and a set design for a new ballet Amancay. One of the decora-
tive panels was Les Espagnols surpris par las Indiens (‘Spanish Surprised
by Indians’) (c.1920), a lush landscape swirling with colour and rhythm.
Trees burgeoning with foliage in vibrant shades of red, orange, gold and
blue surround two small figures on horseback – conquistadors in full
armour – upon whom branches swoop down from above like claws.
At first glance the scene seems to be simply a decorative rendition of
a dense tropical forest, but upon closer examination birds and figures
start to appear. The conquistadors are not alone, but rather scantily clad

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 Occupying Paris

Carlos Alberto Castellanos, Les Espagnols surpris par las Indiens (c.1920), oil on canvas. Photo:
courtesy of Musée Municipal de la Coutellerie, Thiers.

Native Americans with their bows drawn surround them on all sides.
The density of the forest and its hidden dangers exacerbate the feeling
of exposure that early explorers must have felt. Castellanos employed
the symbolist tropes of untamed nature and non-natural colour to create
an appealing yet fear-inducing fantasy of discovery and conquest. While
Castellanos renders the Spanish vulnerable through his formal choices,
his presentation of extreme circumstances makes the resulting conquest
out as a courageous fight. Even the decorative background of undulating
clouds and light suggests enlightenment and new beginnings. Thus
Castellanos’s image allowed the viewer to indulge in a tropical fantasy
complete with vicious natives, without contemplating the brutality of
the conquest.
Other contributions to the decorative arts section were Argentine
artist Alfredo Guido’s submission of set and costume designs based
on Peruvian colonial dress for the opera La Cruz del Sud by Uruguayan

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Michele Greet

composer Alfonso Broqua, and a dining-room set by Brazilian designer

José de Andrada. While reproductions of these designs are no longer
extant, critics’ responses reveal yet again the extent to which the param-
eters of the exhibition dictated interpretation of the works. Whereas Jean-
Gabriel Lemoine commented that Andrada’s designs were not particularly
Brazilian, he praised the style and lyricism of Guido’s work (Lemoine 1924:
117). Henri Clouzot made a similar observation, praising Guido’s taste for
the picturesque, yet searching for a means to understand Andrada:

José de Andrada, who is Brazilian, is the only representative of the

applied arts with a dining-room table in coral and black wood, of an
excellent model. I would not say that he was inspired by indigenous
art, nor the colonial art of Quito. His handsome piece of furniture is
defined by its ‘mastery’. That is to say that it is French and Parisian.
(1924: 447)

Ironically, it was the ‘mastery’ with which Andrada executed the table that
precluded its identification as Latin American, which in the minds of critics
should have made it crude and primitive. Revealing his extremely limited
knowledge of Latin American artistic tradition Clouzot makes a failed
attempt to link Andrada’s design with indigenous art or, rather oddly, the
art of colonial Quito, in an effort to match his imagined construct of Latin
America with the art at hand.
The exhibition garnered a great deal of attention in the press with
at least nine different newspapers printing reviews of the show. While
the comments were positive overall, the general consensus was that
the art on display was an ‘echo of French art’ (Sawyer 1924: 4) and
that a Latin American tradition was still in the process of formation. As
Cogniat proclaimed, ‘It is evident that the great majority of the inhabit-
ants of South America have Latin origins and without a doubt are in
need of several more years [of] polish, before these transplanted races
manage to find for themselves a formula or a means of expression of
their own’ (1924: 434). Since his review of the preliminary exhibition of
Latin American art in 1923, Cogniat had contemplated how this might
be done. He contends that pre-Columbian art should serve as a model
for this sought after originality and regional expression. Clouzot makes a
similar assessment:

To tell the truth, we have the impression, as we tour the exhibi-

tion hall, that this contact [between France and Latin America] has
been established for a long time. This is because this time the com-
mittee could only request works by artists and collectors living in
Paris. Another year, they will present to us works born for the Latin
American soil and will permit us to judge the characteristics and
tendencies of an autochthonous art. That which is presented to us at
the Galliera is a bit too much ‘de chez nous’ […]. Therefore we can-
not say that there is an Argentine art, a Brazilian art, a Uruguayan
art. It is all art of French influence.
(1924: 447)

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For Clouzot, the problem was not that artists needed more time to develop
an original voice, but rather that the organizers selected artists who had
too much European exposure. This was the grand conundrum for Latin
American artists: to prove their modernity and universality at home they
had to be conversant in European visual idioms, but in Europe evidence
of this knowledge and training was judged to somehow impede the possi-
bility of a unique or native perspective.
The Mexican critic, José Frías, began his review with the question
‘Can Spanish America have its own art?’ He then goes on to observe,
like his European counterparts, that what the show reveals, with only a
few exceptions, is ‘a sufficient ability, and a constant dedication by artists
to copy European art’. But Frías draws a different conclusion from the
European critics, asserting, ‘I prefer to highlight that which can be defined
as modern art and which can be later converted into “our art”’ (1924:
35). The fundamental difference here is that Frías believes that artists
should first learn modernist technique and then transform what they have
learned into something uniquely Latin American. For him the artists who
were more interesting, and whom he chose to review – Jiménez, Pettoruti,
Ortiz de Zarate, Rendón Seminario and Brecheret – were those who could
bring new impulses and revolutionary ideas to Latin American art.
The organization of the exhibition at the Musée Galliera around
the geo-political construct of Latin America compelled both artists and
critics to ponder the existence of a Latin American aesthetic. Critics on
both sides of the Atlantic tended to agree that such an aesthetic did not
yet exist, and found the future possibility of defining characteristics that
unified the art of the region a desirable goal. They differed, however, in
how that goal should be achieved. Whereas Latin American artists and
critics lauded European training as a path towards regional innovation,
European critics pushed for isolationism, a return to pre-Conquest roots,
and a rejection of European techniques. This, of course, was an impos-
sible goal that coincided more with European fantasies of an authentic,
unadulterated primitivism, than with the reality of a culture that stemmed
from several hundred years of Spanish colonial rule. Despite the implau-
sibility of European critics’ proposition, this notion of the primitive and
the authentic set the tone for future debates and exhibitions of Latin
American art and led artists, critics and exhibition organizers to begin to
respond, often in diametrically opposed ways, to what they thought Latin
American art, as a regional construct, should be.
After the show at the Musée Galliera, Parisian galleries took a signifi-
cantly greater interest in exhibiting and selling Latin American art of
all genres, with nearly fifty different galleries on both sides of the Seine
holding exhibitions that featured or included work by artists from the
region (Greet 2013). By 1930, Latin American artists began to conceive
of themselves as a cohesive group, not to the exclusion of their national
identity or European collaborations, but as an additional alliance within
the international artistic community in Paris. That year the Uruguayan
artist Joaquín Torres García organized the Première Exposition du Groupe
Latino-Américain at the Galerie Zak, which showcased the work of 21
artists who were experimenting with vanguard tendencies. This emphasis
on avant-garde experimentation, in an exhibition planned and organized

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by Latin American artists, countered the minimal presence of such work

at the Musée Galliera exhibition and asserted an autonomous vision of
what Latin American art could be.
Whereas the economic crisis and the accompanying xenophobia
following the stock market crash forced most Latin American artists
residing in Paris to return to their home countries by 1933, New York
emerged as a new locus of artistic activity in the 1930s. In 1939 the survey
format appeared in the United States in an exhibition of Latin American
art at the Riverside Museum held in conjunction with the New York
World’s Fair (Greet 2009: 133–35). The exhibition, entitled Latin American
Exhibition of Fine and Applied Art, showcased the art of nine Latin American
countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, the Dominican Republic,
Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico and Paraguay, and was accompanied by a
100-page illustrated catalogue. Although the paintings selected portrayed
a range of subject matter, most depicted local landscapes, tropical scenes
and native peoples, fulfilling the expectation expressed by critics of the
Musée Galliera exhibition that Latin American art should focus on typical
and picturesque renditions of regional identities. Following the model
established at the New York World’s Fair, major museums such as the
Museum of Modern Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Art,
and the Newark Museum in New Jersey among others began to envi-
sion Latin American art as a viable category for exhibition, with MoMA
holding its first survey of Latin American art in 1943.
Over the next several decades, interest in Latin American art waxed
and waned, but the survey format remained a prevalent organiza-
tional mechanism. In the latter half of the century this format started
to come under more intense scrutiny, however. In 1987, a controversial
exhibition, Art of the Fantastic: Latin America, 1920–1987, organized by
the Indianapolis Museum of Art in conjunction with the Pan American
Games, set in motion a major re-examination of the aesthetic category
‘Latin American Art’ (Day and Sturges 1987). The exhibition, which
espoused the idea that the unifying characteristic behind Latin American
art was its emphasis on the ‘fantastic’, generated extensive critical resist-
ance and resulted in the publication of a compilation of essays, Beyond
the Fantastic: Contemporary Art Criticism from Latin America (Mosquera
1996), which critiqued prevailing assumptions about Latin American art.
These essays questioned the validity of imposing an overriding aesthetic
construct, especially one so deeply rooted in cultural bias, on an exhibi-
tion organized according to a geo-political framework, an issue that first
came to light in 1924 at the Musée Galliera and confounded critiques
even then.
While two major exhibitions – Art d’Amérique latine, 1911–1968 organ-
ized by the Pompidou Center in Paris (1992) and Latin American Artists of
the Twentieth Century presented at MoMA (1993) – were held in conjunc-
tion with the 500-year anniversary of Columbus’s ‘discovery’ of America
just before Beyond the Fantastic was published, these events seem to have
marked the culmination of an era of grand geo-political surveys. With
the emphasis on globalism and multiculturalism in the 1980s and 1990s
and the accompanying critical theories emerging in academia, curators
began to adopt a more sophisticated and self-reflexive approach to organ-

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izing exhibitions. While the category ‘Latin American art’ has not been
abandoned, exhibitions today, such as Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde Art
in Latin America (2004), have discarded, for the most part, the notion of
aesthetic unity and characteristic regional traits (Ramírez and Olea 2004).
Instead, recent exhibitions present a revisionist approach that emphasizes
the diversity and specificity of artistic practice.

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latine’, L’Europe Nouvelle, 24 April, pp. 447–48.
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G.-L. Manuel et à la “Maison de l’Amérique latine”’, Revue de L’Amérique
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Ramírez, Mari Carmen and Olea, Héctor (2004), Inverted Utopias: Avant-
Garde Art in Latin America, New Haven and London: Yale University
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Suggested Citation
Greet, Michele (2014), ‘Occupying Paris: The First Survey Exhibition of
Latin American Art’, Journal of Curatorial Studies 3: 2+3, pp. 212–236,
doi: 10.1386/jcs.3.2-3.212_1

Contributor Details
Michele Greet is Associate Professor of twentieth-century Latin American
Art History at George Mason University. With the support of a National
Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (2012–13), she is writing the
book manuscript Transatlantic Encounters: Latin American Artists in Paris
between the Wars, 1918–1939. She has published Beyond National Identity:
Pictorial Indigenism as a Modernist Strategy in Andean Art, 1920–1960
(2009), along with numerous articles, exhibition reviews, exhibition cata-
logue essays, and book chapters on modern Latin American art.
Contact: Department of History and Art History, MS 3G1, George Mason
University, 4400 University Drive, Fairfax, VA, 22030, USA.
E-mail: mgreet@gmu.edu

Michele Greet has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format
it was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

236
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Studies in Comics
ISSN: 2040-3232 | Online ISSN: 2040-3240
2 issue per volume | Volume 4, 2013

Aims and Scope Editors

Studies in Comics aims to describe the nature of comics, to identify the medium Julia Round
as a distinct art form, and to address the medium’s formal properties. The Bournemouth University
emerging field of comics studies is a model for interdisciplinary research and this jround@bournemouth.ac.uk
journal welcomes all approaches and methodologies. Its specific goal, however, is
to expand the relationship between comics and theory, and to seek to articulate a Chris Murray
‘theory of comics’. University of Dundee
c.murray@dundee.ac.uk
Call for Papers
The journal includes a selection of world-class academic articles that explore
the formal properties of comics, advance their own theory of comics or respond
to an established theoretical model. We also welcome reviews of new comics,
scholarship, criticism and exhibitions, as well as unpublished creative work.

For submission guidelines please contact: studiesincomics@googlemail.com

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