How did modernist art arrive in Latin America? 1

And here comes our question: What was happening in the meantime in what we call Latin America? What is the role of Latin America in modernity? How did modernist art arrive in Latin America? Does it actually arrive here or were we also, in a way, modern? Or were we never modern? Why do we look so much to Europe as a reference and standard of visuality?

Since the times of European colonization, the main mark of our political, economic and social marginalization is the absence of Latin America in the history of universal art. According to the perspective of many Eurocentric thinkers, we Latin Americans are destined to be eternally a “repeating culture”, reproducing models, not being responsible for founding or inaugurating aesthetics or movements that could be incorporated into universal art.

The very term Latin America serves to cloud this view, as it largely refers to countries in America, including the Caribbean, whose languages are derived from Latin. However, in Suriname, for example, Dutch is spoken, as well as in the Bahamas and Jamaica, English is spoken. There is also no geographic justification for the term, as we are not strictly speaking of the South, since Mexico, for example, already figures in what we call North America. For this reason, this term today is considered very problematic and imprecise, since, in theory, it would create an identity that, in fact, brings together countries that are very different from each other…
On the other hand, there is a common experience, from Mexico to Argentina, that can unite these diverse nations: we were all subject to colonial conquests, the enslavement of African peoples, the extermination of local peoples and the imperialism that until today maintains the region – even because the effects of these processes are felt until today, in the entire continent. These are countries with worrying environmental exploitation and intense deforestation; rural producing nations without industrial or service development; regions marked by authoritarianism, populism, brutal inequality – where poverty lives side by side with wealth accumulated in unbelievable proportions.

The truth is that, for a long time, official Art History did not even consider that an independent, living, valid Latin American art could exist. In his text for the first Mercosul Biennial, Frederico Morais recalled an infamous phrase by Henry Kissinger, who was US Secretary of State from 1973–1977: Nothing important can come from the South. History is never made in the South. that we know that this is not true – it was not true, and it still is not.

This narrative is reinforced by official art history, which states that modernity arrived in America through artists who – in the absence of art academies, the abundance of collectors and patrons, interest on the part of the government and the population – traveled to Europe to study and, impacted by the vanguards they witnessed, exhibitions they visited, artists they knew. They would return home carrying these references in their suitcase. In this way, modernity in Latin America, on the one hand, is written as a debtor of European modernity, reiterating this view that we are doomed to repetition, and on the other, as a cauldron of vibrant mixtures, capable of inventing its own modernity.

Perhaps it took us a few decades to catch up with the calendar of European vanguards, but that doesn't mean that what came later is just repetition, imitation, derivation. But there are other challenges in telling this story. It turns out that: Brazil, Peru, Chile and Argentina do not share the same antecedents of modernity, modernization or modernism. According to Nelly Richard, a Chilean researcher and theoretician, the development of cultural trends in these and other countries was neither homogeneous nor uniform, and each one's disposition towards modernity followed regional dynamics of specific forces and resistances, not comparable. Some countries, for example, established greater or lesser degrees of appreciation of the inherited indigenous culture – as is visible in Mexican modernity.

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