Repeticones con Bandera
Raúl Martínez, 1966
© Essex Collection
of Art from Latin America
Historical Context
New York and Paris
There is in art history a general consensus that after the fall of Paris at the beginning of World War 2, the nerve-centre of the avant-garde moved to New York. The reality is more complex, as recent scholarship is beginning to reveal.
By investigating transnational exchanges and encounters, Meeting Margins will explore how the movement of individuals, ideas, and artworks generated fruitful interchanges and established nuclei of intense and unquestionably avant-garde artistic production across Europe and Latin America between 1950 and 1978.
The decision made by many artists from Latin America to continue favouring Paris over New York was partly based upon a long-standing tradition of transatlantic intellectual exchange. Via internationalist movements, such as schools of geometric abstraction, this tradition remained active on Latin American and European soil during and after WW2.
Later, repressive regimes such as those that seized power in Brazil in the 1960s and Argentina in the 1970s, forced artists into exile, some to other countries within Latin America and some to Europe, where the culturally vibrant and increasingly politicized milieus of 1960s London and Paris proved attractive and sympathetic.
Repressive governments also provoked collaboration between artists remaining in Latin America, with relatively stable institutions becoming urgent foci for exhibitions and meetings, allowing new allegiances to be formed, and for debates to be conducted concerning the particularity of a Latin American avant-garde and its restricted possibilities for action.
Transnational exchanges were also supported by the movement of artworks. Large scale international exhibitions played an important but potentially contraversial role in bringing artists and writers into close contact and collaboration.
The most prominent among these, the Bienal Internacional in São Paulo, founded 1951, was at first considered an exemplary modernist achievement, but later become an international focus for boycott, protest and intervention under Brazil's military regime.
In addition to exhibitons, the circulation of ideas by post, from journals to conceptual artworks, particularly mail-art, supported transatlantic and intra-Latin American networks and became vital tools for sustaining these connections under constrained circumstances.
