Pintura 9 [Painting 9], Helio Oiticica, 1959 — All Images: Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros
Some gallery shows aren’t just a pleasure, they’re a public service. That would describe “The Geometry of Hope”, the survey of Latin American abstraction that I previewed last week at the indispensable Grey Art Gallery at New York University. Latin American Modernism is the chapter of 20th century art history that’s still finding its way into the books. The establishment six years ago of the International Center for the Arts of the Americas at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston was a big step in correcting the historical picture. The NYU show, which is drawn from the collection of Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, is another, an excellent introduction to the major names and to some entirely fascinating work.
Doble transparencia [Double Transparency], Jesus Rafael Soto, 1956
For most Americans, Latin American art is still defined by the Mexican muralists and Frida Kahlo, lots of monumental toiling peasants, personal drama, monkeys, fruit and mono-brows. Even people reasonably well versed in art history don’t always know that South America had a multitude of thriving art centers in the 20th century. Rio, Sao Paolo and Buenos Aires were full of men and women making tough minded and original abstraction while fanning the air with their manifestos.
Physichromie No 21, Carlos Cruz-Diez, 1960
The show now at NYU was organized by Gabriel Perez-Barreiro, curator of Latin American Art at the Blanton Museum at the University of Texas at Austin, where it first appeared earlier this year in a somewhat larger version. The Blanton version, which I did not see, was organized chronologically, which would have pointed up how often the Latin Americans were not merely aware of work by artists in Europe and the U.S. but ahead of it. In hard edged geometric abstraction, kinetic art and work that predicts the Op Art of the 60s, the Latins were sometimes experimenting in materials, procedures — and more than that, in understandings — first. American museums can leave you with the impression that after the death in New York of Mondrian, hard-edged geometric abstraction moved across the Atlantic only when Ellsworth Kelly came home from Paris. Guess again.
Ocho cuadrados [Eight Squares], Gego, 1961
Let’s be clear. Many of the Latin artists, like the Venezuelan Jesus Rafael Soto and the Uruguayan Joaquin Torres-Garcia, had spent parts of their career in Europe and the U.S., and their work can show the plain influence of everyone from Malevich and Mondrian to Yves Klein and Jean Tinguely. (And also sometimes of lesser figures like Victor Vasarely. Remember him?) But there was no trace in their work of anything folkloric. Or for that matter, with the exception of Torres-Garcia, even of anything representational. They frequently worked in a restricted pallette of black, white, grey and beige, the better to focus on their investigations of pure form. And when they used color it was typically to construct or to emphasize form, or to look into the power of adjacent pigments.
Dibujo sin papel 76/4 [Drawing without Paper 76/4], Gego, 1976
The NYU version of this show is organized by geography, to show how artists in each of the major cities responded to (or squabbled over) shared concerns. Over the past year we’ve seen some major exhibitions devoted to artists who turn up at the Grey Gallery. There’s one still traveling dedicated to the Brazilian artist Helio Oiticica — it’s presently at Tate Modern in London. There was another for the endlessly inventive Gego, the self-chosen name of Gertrude Goldschmidt, a German-Jewish emigre to Venezuela. And also a MoMA show devoted to Armando Reveron, a less interesting figure in my book but also another neglected Latin.
I noticed a few months ago that a Gego has also popped up in the galleries of MoMA’s permanent collection, which also contains three Sotos, though don’t expect to always see them on the walls. Now that I think of it, for years there’s been a good Soto sculpture on an office building plaza just across the street from MoMA, as though it were waiting to be summoned inside. Which, in a way, it is.
UPDATE: And Asleep-at-the-Wheel Critic Alert. On my way to MoMA this afternoon I ambled past the “Soto” sculpture, as I do several times a week. But this time I checked the name plaque at its base, something I hadn’t done for years. Uh oh. It’s not a Soto. It’s by the Texas-born granite sculptor Jesus Bautista Moroles. Soto is still an interesting case for further study. And that Moroles is still a great piece.
Concreto 61 [Concrete 61], Judith Lauand, 1957