IV
OF CHANGE
THE EARLY 1950s SAW A BLOSSOMING OF ARTISTS THAT COULD NOT HAVE been imagined in the previous period. Till then, the elements of modern plastic language had been provided by a mere handful, exceptional in their intuition, working in isolation. Suddenly the stage that had been held by a few solo performers was crowded with a vast chorus. Whereas Reveron had been an outsider in Venezuela, and Torres-Garcia had single-handedly led the way to modernism in Uruguay, the scene was now occupied by some 400 artists of relatively equivalent quality. Economic and political factors as well as ones of a cultural nature contributed to this explosion of activity. A number of inter-American exhibitions stimulated contact among artists from different countries and an appreciation of one another's work. The inauguration of the Sao Paulo Biennials in 1951 was the capstone of a series of events that had been initiated with the opening in 1947 of the Assis Chateaubriand Art Museum in Sao Paulo. This was followed in 1948 by the establishment of the Modern Art Museum of that same city and in 1949 by the founding of the Modern Art Museum of Rio de Janeiro. The Biennial constituted the first significant forum at which the work of Latin American artists could be contrasted and compared on an international scale. The energy with which Brazilian artists shook off the outmoded avant-garde notions of the 1920s, evolving toward tachiste Abstract Expressionism or Neoconcretism furthered, moreover, the modernizing trend set in motion by the Madi group in Argentina in the 1940s. Little by little artists of various countries took up the challenge of modernism. The manifesto of "The Dissidents," a Venezuelan group headed by Alejandro Otero, dates from 1950. A year later the Venezuelan architect Carlos Raul Villanueva called upon a number of artists to decorate the new University City of Caracas. This was the first monumental ensemble of art and architecture conceived in Latin America. (Brasilia, planned by the architects Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer, was proclaimed capital of Brazil in 1960 by President Kubitschek.) Villanueva enlisted the services of artists of international renown,
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DECADES
ALEJANDRO OBREGON. CATTLE
DROWNING IN THE MAGDALENA
RIVER, 1955. OIL ON CANVAS, 158,6 X 126.1 CM. MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS,
HOUSTON, TEXAS, U.S.A. PHOTOGRAPH FURNISHED BY THE MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS.