The works produced toward the end of the '40s by Fontana and by the Madi group (which was to persist until the late '50s) facilitated Argentina's incorporation into the international current of Geometric-Constructivist art. Max Bill, Andre Bloc, Vasarely, and Pevsner, whose time was divided between Paris and the United States, and Pietro Dorazio in Rome constituted a veritable international of nonfigurative art. In Latin America aggressively avant-garde positions, aimed at radical tranformation of local art, were taken only in connection with the project for the exterior decoration of the Central University of Venezuela, which the architect Carlos Raul Villanueva brought to completion in 1952, and by the Madi group. It paved the way for later experimentation with kinetic art and "breaking out of the frame." (All this, it should be noted, had previously been envisioned by the Russian Constructivists.) "Representational art belongs to the past" one reads in Madi texts. "The first objective is to take all paintings down off their walls and to dynamite all statues." All this led to a hypertrophy of the avantgarde in Buenos Aires. As a result, works such as Juan del Prete's 1932 string collages and Pettoruti's Portrait of Maria Rosa no longer had a bomblike effect at lifeless national salons, seeming rather to exemplify the only path art could now take. During the period that now concerns us—from 1920 to 1950—the third country to possess an organized avant-garde was Mexico. In this case it was composed of Surrealists. At first their most vigorous supporter was the critic Luis Cardoza y Aragon, who had frequented the French Surrealists during his 1930 stay in Paris. When Andre Breton came to Mexico in 1938, he greeted him thus: "In Breton I salute Revolution! Not, however, this or that particular revolution, with its bovine disciplines and dogmatic idiocies." It was Cardoza y Aragon— born in Guatemala like Carlos Merida (pp. 57, 66)—who took the most balanced view both of the great achievements of the Mexican Muralists and of their unquestionable shortcomings. In his words of welcome to Breton, he was setting Surrealism up in opposition to the single track of politically inspired Muralism. Immediately after signing, along with Diego Rivera and Leon Trotsky, the "Manifesto for an Independent, Revolutionary Art" (1938), the French poet exalted the figure of Frida Kahlo (p. 63), describing her as a "bomb with a ribbon around it." In 1940 a Surrealist exhibit was held at the Ines Amor Gallery in Mexico City. Its organizers in Mexico were Wolfgang Paalen (1905-1959) and Cesar Moro; in Paris Andre Breton played a corresponding role. The local painters who participated were Carlos Merida, Frida Kahlo (1910-1954), Diego Rivera, Antonio Ruiz, Agustin Lazo, Roberto Montenegro (1881-1968), and Manuel Rodriguez Lozano. All this made Surrealism an object of discussion and controversy, particularly among poets and other writers. The reservations expressed by the group known as Contemporaries, especially Cuesta y Villaurrutia, Cardoza y Aragon's withdrawal from the movement, Octavio Paz's adherence to it, and the illustrations Tamayo (pp. 64, 65) did for the poet Benjamin Peret's book^4zV mexicain3 tended to situate Surrealism in the realm of literature. However, in the plastic arts one notes the increasing importance of Rufino Tamayo (1899-1991), and a group of women: Cordelia Urueta (b. 1908), Frida Kahlo,
Copyright © by the Inter-American Development Bank. All rights reserved. For more information visit our website: www.iadb.org/pub
• 62 • NEW BLOOD FROM THE AVANT-GARDE