How did modernist art arrive in Latin America? 2

The first common thread in the settlement of modernity is our colonial past. Loneliness, distancing and marginalization – the disastrous results of colonization – are some of our characteristics, suggesting the idea that “Latin American art participates in a culture to be discovered or explored, a culture to be conquered”, as Nelly Richard observes. Coloniality emerged as a new power structure as Europeans colonized the Americas and drew on ideas of Western civilization and also of modernity as the endpoints of historical time and of Europe as the center of the world.

According to Aracy Amaral, “with the empires and local cultures buried or repressed in this huge territory that today we call Latin America, the themes of the plastic expression of colonial society were imported according to the needs of the colonizers”.
The Revolutionaries, by David Alfaro Siqueiros
Walter Mignolo says that modernity was built on coloniality, and this is the darker side of western modernity. Currently, there is even a strong movement of “decoloniality” (or decoloniality) focused on Atlantic flows. Mignolo explains that decoloniality requires untying the colonial matrix linked to western modernity, and only then can we imagine and build global futures in which human beings and the natural world are no longer exploited. In this context, it is important to note that art was also an instrument of power, colonization and domination and, therefore, it is essential to think about what the idea of modern art in Latin America means, or what Latin American modernity can bring of alternative thinking!

The European Baroque brought here, for example, served the political domination of Latin America, and as Alfredo Boulton, a Venezuelan artist and intellectual, said, “Latin America was conquered with images, more than weapons.” It is notorious and symptomatic that, at the beginning of the 19th century, many European artists traveled through Latin America, integrating artistic and scientific missions, propagating the French academic teaching model, establishing yet another system of visual submission.

But in the last 120 years Latin America has been rethinking this power game. According to Francisco Alambert, a great Mexican historian used to tell a somewhat tragicomic anecdote: at an exhibition of pre-Columbian art in Mexico City, the poet Octavio Paz accompanied the French Minister of Culture, the writer André Malraux, when he would have heard from him , moved and amazed by what he saw, that “they”, the Europeans, had Greek art and “we”, the Latin Americans, had “that”, the vital pre-colonial art. The poet would then have interrupted the minister and said something like: “No. We have this and the Greeks.” This story helps us remember that we are not just Westerners, that our roots are not just European but also indigenous, pre-colonial as well as African. At the same time, it shows how much we end up being ingrained by Western culture, no longer able to dissociate ourselves from it.
The modern art that develops here, therefore, is influenced by Europe, but it is not exempt or isolated from non-Western local influences – it is not immune to candomblé, the caipira, the native. It is a big ball of contradictions, since it does start with constructions based on European aesthetic standards, but eventually it starts to be built also from local, regional aesthetic and cultural identities, also rising from its past precolonial.

Thus, it is important to mention, among the many manifestations of modernity in Latin America, the examples of Mexico and Uruguay that “created” artists such as Torres García, José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, among many others.

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