Michele Greet | George Mason University (original) (raw)
Journal Articles and Catalogue Essays by Michele Greet
![Research paper thumbnail of “Os artistas brasileiros nas exposições inaugurais da Maison de l’Amérique Latine em Paris, em 1923 e 1924” [Brazilian Artists at the Maison de l’Amérique Latin’s Inaugural Exhibitions in Paris in 1923 and 1924]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/120199724/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](1923 Os modernistas brasileiros em Paris, Gênese Andrade ed. São Paulo: Editora Unesp, 253-279. , 2024
“Dialogues on Modernist Bodies,” Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, 6:1, 100-104. , 2024
H-ART. Revista de historia, teoría y crítica de arte, no. 17: 177-186., 2024
Tarsila do Amaral's paintings of rural Brazilian landscapes present a natural world replete with ... more Tarsila do Amaral's paintings of rural Brazilian landscapes present a natural world replete with vibrant colors, whimsical creatures, and luxuriant plant life. By co-opting aspects of surrealism's visual lexicon, particularly biomorphism, Amaral created timeless myths that in their strangeness and indecipherability conveyed the uncertainly of the moment. When she exhibited these paintings in Paris in 1928, Amaral's adoption of surrealist notions of transformation, ambiguity and uncertainly was on full display. Her landscapes of this period present dichotomies between the rational and the irrational, the natural and the artificial, order and chaos, thereby challenging Parisians' imagined construct of Brazil, and creating an original and enigmatic interpretation of the natural world.
Hutchinson Modern & Contemporary, Study Room , 2023
Alejando Mario Yllanes, Ex. Cat. Ben Elwes Fine Art, London, 2023
Bolivian painter and print maker Alejandro Mario Yllanes (1913-c. 1960) produced unprecedented im... more Bolivian painter and print maker Alejandro Mario Yllanes (1913-c. 1960) produced unprecedented images of the struggles and exploitation of the Aymara people, while also celebrating the bold colours and swirling energy of their folk rituals. His Andean landscapes pulse with the patterns and rhythms of traditional textile and ceramic design, and his figures possess the exaggerated musculature and distorted bodies of a people accustomed to a life of toil. Colour for Yllanes is not tied to the natural world, but instead draws on the vibrancy of native costume, the hyperbole of local legend, and effervescence of the thin mountain air. Indeed, his images encapsulate the two poles of Andean life: backbreaking labour and the myths and rituals that sustain such a precarious existence. Working in the 1930s and 1940s, Yllanes' artistic career follows a distinct path from conventional narratives of Bolivian art history, which centre on artistic production in the capital city of La Paz. His outlook aligns more with the radically political manifestations of indigenismo in Peru, Ecuador, and Mexico than with the milder renditions of the trend practiced by officially sanctioned artists in Bolivia. Moreover, he was among the first Latin American artists (along with such figures as Adolfo Best Maugard (1891-1964) in Mexico and Elena Izcue (1889-1970) in Peru) to incorporate the motifs and design practices of indigenous peoples, in this case Aymara artistic traditions, in his work. Like Best Maugard and Izcue, Yllanes was inspired by the doctrines of education reform aimed at native populations, which manifested in his powerful murals for the Warisata school, an audacious experiment in indigenous education implemented in the high Andes. Together these practices make him one of the most innovative painters in pre-Revolutionary Bolivia. The history of modern art in Bolivia privileges Cecilio Guzmán de Rojas (1900-1950), who returned from Paris in 1929 and took over as Director of the Academía de Bellas Artes in La Paz in 1932. Guzmán de Rojas championed a version of indigenismo, that while elevating indigenous peoples as worthy subjects of fine arts, circumvented the socially critical and overtly political aspects of the trend and instead focused on decorative and symbolist renditions of an imagined indigenous past. Scholarly focus on artistic production at the academy left little room for figures like Yllanes whose clashes with the government and frequent absences from the country situated his work outside official narratives. His highly innovative work deserves reconsideration, however.
Historical Narratives of Global Modern Art: An Anthology. Irina D. Costache & Clare Kunny, eds. Routledge Research in Art History series. New York and London: Routledge, 2023, 192-203.
Archives of American Art Journal, 2022
This essay examines the work of New York-based Bolivian artist María Luisa Pacheco, whose groundb... more This essay examines the work of New York-based Bolivian artist María Luisa Pacheco, whose groundbreaking exhibition of abstract paintings in La Paz in 1962 helped validate abstraction as a legitimate form of artistic expression in Bolivia, where socially oriented figural painting still reigned supreme. The Pacheco Papers at the Archives of American Art illuminate the shifting circumstances and conflicting expectations the artist faced while exhibiting in different contexts throughout the Americas and bring to light the unique strategy—informed by her residence in both Bolivia and the United States—Pacheco developed to connect notions of the local to a style critics deemed “universal.” While many midcentury Latin American artists explored means of infusing abstraction with markers of local identity, Pacheco invented an innovative visual language that evoked the Bolivian landscape through shape, color, and texture, resonating across hemispheres.
Rómulo Rozo ¿Una vanguardia propia? Christian Padilla ed. Bogotá: Proyecto Bachué, 127-139., 2020
Rómulo Rozo ¿Una vanguardia propia? Christian Padilla ed. Bogotá: Proyecto Bachué, 89-120., 2020
Art Inquiries XVIII, no. 1, 2020
Exhibition review
Tarsila do Amaral. Exh. Cat. São Paulo: Museo de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand., 2019
Tarsila do Amaral. Exh. Cat. São Paulo: Museo de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, 2019
Lincoln Kirstein’s Modern. Exh. Cat. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2019
See link to article
Oxford University Press: Grove Art Online, Feb 27, 2019
New Geographies of Abstract Art in Postwar Latin America, 2018
Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos, 2017
*Errata The name of the 1926 "Salon de France" was incorrectly transcribed. The correct title of ... more *Errata The name of the 1926 "Salon de France" was incorrectly transcribed. The correct title of the salon is the "Salon du Franc"
M i c h e l e G r e e t I n the somber, circumspect climate following World War I, a new classici... more M i c h e l e G r e e t I n the somber, circumspect climate following World War I, a new classicism permeated the visual arts. This "return to order," as it came to be known, eclipsed the emphasis on the more radical aesthetic experiments-distorted flattened figures, bold non-natural color, and abstracted or entirely nonobjective compositions-that were the hallmark of avant-garde art before 1914. 1 Artists such as Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque turned to painting monumental nudes, idyllic peasants, and images of maternity and tradition, which conveyed the postwar desire for order and stability. 2 These paintings expressed a yearning to return to the land, nature, and traditional values after the chaos of war. 3 According to Kenneth E. Silver, "Picasso was the first, strongest, and most prolific practitioner of a wartime revival of traditional draftsmanship, brilliantly aping Ingres in portraits of his friends and colleagues. After the war, he was the best and most unabashed neoclassicist (while continuing to make Cubist art)." 4 These images were not a wholesale reversion to the past and traditional modes of painting, however; postwar artists were seeking an aesthetic model that emphasized continuity over rupture, while still expressing their modernity. Their notion of classicism was broad and their sources varied, including classical
Circulations in the Global History of Art; Studies in Art Historiography series. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Catherine Dossin, and Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel eds. Ashgate: 2015, 133-147.
Papers of Surrealism, 2015
Various scholars have suggested a contiguity or affinity between Brazilian artist Tarsila do Amar... more Various scholars have suggested a contiguity or affinity between Brazilian artist Tarsila do Amaral’s iconic painting Abaporu and surrealism; none have engaged in an in-depth analysis of her actual relationship with surrealism, however. This close reading of Abaporu will demonstrate that Amaral deliberately and systematically engaged with the tenets and formal languages of surrealism. Her engagement was not one of pure emulation; instead she turned the surrealists’ penchant for satire and desire to disrupt hierarchical schema back on itself, parodying the images and ideas put forth by the movement to create a counter modernism. Amaral’s sardonic appropriation of surrealism’s formal languages and subversive strategies was the very factor that made Abaporu the catalyst of the Anthropophagite Movement.
1923 Os modernistas brasileiros em Paris, Gênese Andrade ed. São Paulo: Editora Unesp, 253-279. , 2024
“Dialogues on Modernist Bodies,” Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, 6:1, 100-104. , 2024
H-ART. Revista de historia, teoría y crítica de arte, no. 17: 177-186., 2024
Tarsila do Amaral's paintings of rural Brazilian landscapes present a natural world replete with ... more Tarsila do Amaral's paintings of rural Brazilian landscapes present a natural world replete with vibrant colors, whimsical creatures, and luxuriant plant life. By co-opting aspects of surrealism's visual lexicon, particularly biomorphism, Amaral created timeless myths that in their strangeness and indecipherability conveyed the uncertainly of the moment. When she exhibited these paintings in Paris in 1928, Amaral's adoption of surrealist notions of transformation, ambiguity and uncertainly was on full display. Her landscapes of this period present dichotomies between the rational and the irrational, the natural and the artificial, order and chaos, thereby challenging Parisians' imagined construct of Brazil, and creating an original and enigmatic interpretation of the natural world.
Hutchinson Modern & Contemporary, Study Room , 2023
Alejando Mario Yllanes, Ex. Cat. Ben Elwes Fine Art, London, 2023
Bolivian painter and print maker Alejandro Mario Yllanes (1913-c. 1960) produced unprecedented im... more Bolivian painter and print maker Alejandro Mario Yllanes (1913-c. 1960) produced unprecedented images of the struggles and exploitation of the Aymara people, while also celebrating the bold colours and swirling energy of their folk rituals. His Andean landscapes pulse with the patterns and rhythms of traditional textile and ceramic design, and his figures possess the exaggerated musculature and distorted bodies of a people accustomed to a life of toil. Colour for Yllanes is not tied to the natural world, but instead draws on the vibrancy of native costume, the hyperbole of local legend, and effervescence of the thin mountain air. Indeed, his images encapsulate the two poles of Andean life: backbreaking labour and the myths and rituals that sustain such a precarious existence. Working in the 1930s and 1940s, Yllanes' artistic career follows a distinct path from conventional narratives of Bolivian art history, which centre on artistic production in the capital city of La Paz. His outlook aligns more with the radically political manifestations of indigenismo in Peru, Ecuador, and Mexico than with the milder renditions of the trend practiced by officially sanctioned artists in Bolivia. Moreover, he was among the first Latin American artists (along with such figures as Adolfo Best Maugard (1891-1964) in Mexico and Elena Izcue (1889-1970) in Peru) to incorporate the motifs and design practices of indigenous peoples, in this case Aymara artistic traditions, in his work. Like Best Maugard and Izcue, Yllanes was inspired by the doctrines of education reform aimed at native populations, which manifested in his powerful murals for the Warisata school, an audacious experiment in indigenous education implemented in the high Andes. Together these practices make him one of the most innovative painters in pre-Revolutionary Bolivia. The history of modern art in Bolivia privileges Cecilio Guzmán de Rojas (1900-1950), who returned from Paris in 1929 and took over as Director of the Academía de Bellas Artes in La Paz in 1932. Guzmán de Rojas championed a version of indigenismo, that while elevating indigenous peoples as worthy subjects of fine arts, circumvented the socially critical and overtly political aspects of the trend and instead focused on decorative and symbolist renditions of an imagined indigenous past. Scholarly focus on artistic production at the academy left little room for figures like Yllanes whose clashes with the government and frequent absences from the country situated his work outside official narratives. His highly innovative work deserves reconsideration, however.
Historical Narratives of Global Modern Art: An Anthology. Irina D. Costache & Clare Kunny, eds. Routledge Research in Art History series. New York and London: Routledge, 2023, 192-203.
Archives of American Art Journal, 2022
This essay examines the work of New York-based Bolivian artist María Luisa Pacheco, whose groundb... more This essay examines the work of New York-based Bolivian artist María Luisa Pacheco, whose groundbreaking exhibition of abstract paintings in La Paz in 1962 helped validate abstraction as a legitimate form of artistic expression in Bolivia, where socially oriented figural painting still reigned supreme. The Pacheco Papers at the Archives of American Art illuminate the shifting circumstances and conflicting expectations the artist faced while exhibiting in different contexts throughout the Americas and bring to light the unique strategy—informed by her residence in both Bolivia and the United States—Pacheco developed to connect notions of the local to a style critics deemed “universal.” While many midcentury Latin American artists explored means of infusing abstraction with markers of local identity, Pacheco invented an innovative visual language that evoked the Bolivian landscape through shape, color, and texture, resonating across hemispheres.
Rómulo Rozo ¿Una vanguardia propia? Christian Padilla ed. Bogotá: Proyecto Bachué, 127-139., 2020
Rómulo Rozo ¿Una vanguardia propia? Christian Padilla ed. Bogotá: Proyecto Bachué, 89-120., 2020
Art Inquiries XVIII, no. 1, 2020
Exhibition review
Tarsila do Amaral. Exh. Cat. São Paulo: Museo de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand., 2019
Tarsila do Amaral. Exh. Cat. São Paulo: Museo de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, 2019
Lincoln Kirstein’s Modern. Exh. Cat. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2019
See link to article
Oxford University Press: Grove Art Online, Feb 27, 2019
New Geographies of Abstract Art in Postwar Latin America, 2018
Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos, 2017
*Errata The name of the 1926 "Salon de France" was incorrectly transcribed. The correct title of ... more *Errata The name of the 1926 "Salon de France" was incorrectly transcribed. The correct title of the salon is the "Salon du Franc"
M i c h e l e G r e e t I n the somber, circumspect climate following World War I, a new classici... more M i c h e l e G r e e t I n the somber, circumspect climate following World War I, a new classicism permeated the visual arts. This "return to order," as it came to be known, eclipsed the emphasis on the more radical aesthetic experiments-distorted flattened figures, bold non-natural color, and abstracted or entirely nonobjective compositions-that were the hallmark of avant-garde art before 1914. 1 Artists such as Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque turned to painting monumental nudes, idyllic peasants, and images of maternity and tradition, which conveyed the postwar desire for order and stability. 2 These paintings expressed a yearning to return to the land, nature, and traditional values after the chaos of war. 3 According to Kenneth E. Silver, "Picasso was the first, strongest, and most prolific practitioner of a wartime revival of traditional draftsmanship, brilliantly aping Ingres in portraits of his friends and colleagues. After the war, he was the best and most unabashed neoclassicist (while continuing to make Cubist art)." 4 These images were not a wholesale reversion to the past and traditional modes of painting, however; postwar artists were seeking an aesthetic model that emphasized continuity over rupture, while still expressing their modernity. Their notion of classicism was broad and their sources varied, including classical
Circulations in the Global History of Art; Studies in Art Historiography series. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Catherine Dossin, and Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel eds. Ashgate: 2015, 133-147.
Papers of Surrealism, 2015
Various scholars have suggested a contiguity or affinity between Brazilian artist Tarsila do Amar... more Various scholars have suggested a contiguity or affinity between Brazilian artist Tarsila do Amaral’s iconic painting Abaporu and surrealism; none have engaged in an in-depth analysis of her actual relationship with surrealism, however. This close reading of Abaporu will demonstrate that Amaral deliberately and systematically engaged with the tenets and formal languages of surrealism. Her engagement was not one of pure emulation; instead she turned the surrealists’ penchant for satire and desire to disrupt hierarchical schema back on itself, parodying the images and ideas put forth by the movement to create a counter modernism. Amaral’s sardonic appropriation of surrealism’s formal languages and subversive strategies was the very factor that made Abaporu the catalyst of the Anthropophagite Movement.
In the years between World War I and World War II, Paris was the epicenter of the art world. Whil... more In the years between World War I and World War II, Paris was the epicenter of the art world. While the French capital attracted artists from the far reaches of the globe, the city held particular appeal for Latin Americans-in fact, over 300 arrived there dur-ing this period, engaging with nearly every major modernist development, including Cubism, Constructivism, Surrealism, and the more figural modes associated with the French academies. Their encounters with and participation in the international avantgarde community in Paris both shaped the future direction of modern Latin American art and expanded the worldview of European artists. Yet despite their conspicuous presence and remarkable achievements in interwar Paris, there has never been an exhibition or scholarly study focused exclusively on this formative episode, and the work of Latin American modernists remains underrepresented and undervalued in the art historical canon. Transatlantic Encounters: Latin American Artists in Paris between the Wars, 1918-39 will be the first exhibition to assemble the work of over forty Latin American artists who converged in Paris between 1918 and 1939 and explore their unique and significant contributions to modernism. This fascinating story of transnational cultural exchange and artistic transformation will be told through approximately 100 exceptional paintings, sculptures, and works on paper, as well as photographs, original exhibition brochures, and other archival material. Highlighting key artists and movements, presenting the range of artistic styles in their work, and displaying the dynamic interplay between the Latin American community and the Parisian art world, the exhibition will feature work by renowned artists, such as Roberto Matta, Diego Rivera, and Joaquín Torres García, and introduce lesser-known artists, such as Amelia Peláez, Emilio Pettoruti, and Juan del Prete. Exhibition curator Michele Greet's rich and comprehensive selection is drawn from prominent collections worldwide and includes many works that have never been exhibited before in the United States. Although Latin American artists had been traveling to Paris to study and exhibit since the nineteenth century, a major migration occurred after World War I, partly due to an increased availability of government grants from Latin American nations to sponsor artists' studies abroad. The highest concentration of artists came from the largest countries in South America, such as Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. Upon arriving in Paris, these students associated with artists from other Latin American countries through the open academies of Montparnasse where, for a fee, artists could participate in life drawing
André Lhote and His International Students, 2020
André Lhote and His International Students is a collection of 13 essays that illuminate the signi... more André Lhote and His International Students is a collection of 13 essays that illuminate the significant way in which André Lhote, through is teaching, his art practice and writing, was responsible for distributing a specific set of formal and theoretical modernist trends. This book thus not only pays tribute to an unjustly neglected artist, theoretician and teacher, but also examines how artists from around the world contributed to and reinterpreted modernist movements that took place in Paris during this period. André Lhote and His International Students is an account of a microcosmic version of the cosmopolitan Paris that was shaped by the flow and circulation of thousands of single artists from around the world.
https://rdcu.be/0F7J The following link allows access to the introduction for 60 days (until Aug.... more https://rdcu.be/0F7J The following link allows access to the introduction for 60 days (until Aug. 26, 2018). Full download not available. Purchase at https://www.routledge.com/Art-Museums-of-Latin-America-Structuring-Representation/Greet-Tarver/p/book/9781138712591
Since the late nineteenth century, art museums have played crucial social, political, and economic roles throughout Latin America because of the ways that they structure representation. By means of their architecture, collections, exhibitions, and curatorial practices, Latin American art museums have crafted representations of communities, including nation states, and promoted particular group ideologies. This collection of essays, arranged in thematic sections, will examine the varying and complex functions of art museums in Latin America: as nation-building institutions and instruments of state cultural politics; as foci for the promotion of Latin American modernities and modernisms; as sites of mediation between local and international, private and public interests; as organizations that negotiate cultural construction within the Latin American diaspora and shape constructs of Latin America and its nations; and as venues for the contestation of elitist and Eurocentric notions of culture and the realization of cultural diversity rooted in multiethnic environments.
Yale University Press, 2018
An unprecedented and comprehensive survey of Latin American artists in interwar Paris Paris wa... more An unprecedented and comprehensive survey of Latin American artists in interwar Paris
Paris was the artistic capital of the world in the 1920s and ’30s, providing a home and community for the French and international avant-garde, whose experiments laid the groundwork for artistic production throughout the rest of the century. Latin American artists contributed to and reinterpreted nearly every major modernist movement that took place in the creative center of Paris between World War I and World War II, including Cubism (Diego Rivera), Surrealism (Antonio Berni and Roberto Matta), and Constructivism (Joaquín Torres-García). Yet their participation in the Paris art scene has remained largely overlooked until now. This vibrant book examines their collective role, surveying the work of both household names and an extraordinary array of lesser-known artists.
Author Michele Greet illuminates the significant ways in which Latin American expatriates helped establish modernism and, conversely, how a Parisian environment influenced the development of Latin American artistic identity. These artists, hailing from former Spanish and Portuguese colonies, encountered expectations of primitivism from their European audiences, and their diverse responses to such biased perceptions—ranging from rejection to embrace to selective reinterpretation of European tendencies—yielded a rich variety of formal innovation. Magnificently illustrated and conveying with clarity a nuanced portrait of modernism, Transatlantic Encounters also engages in a wider discussion of the relationship between displacement, identity formation, and artistic production.
Penn State University Press, 2009
Bulletin of Latin American Research
The Americas: A Quarterly Review of Latin American History, 2015
A Contracorriente Revista De Historia Social Y Literatura En America Latina, 2011
Rethinking History, 2009
... following chapter Greeley moves on to Salvador Dalí. Through an in-depth analysis of several ... more ... following chapter Greeley moves on to Salvador Dalí. Through an in-depth analysis of several paintings created during the war years (Soft construction with boiled beans: Premonition of civil war, 1936; Autumn cannibalism, 1936–7; The metamorphosis of Narcissus, 1937; and ...
Nuevas miradas a los murales de la Secretaría de Educación Pública, Simposio Internacional, Salón Iberoamericano, Secretaría de Educación Pública, Mexico City, 2018
In 1928 the French journal La Renaissance de l’art français et des industries de luxe published t... more In 1928 the French journal La Renaissance de l’art français et des industries de luxe published the first images of Diego Rivera’s SEP murals to circulate in Paris. Accompanying the photographs was a condensed and translated reprint of an essay by Mexican born Latvian-American historian and art critic Anita Brenner “A Mexican Renascence,” which had originally appeared in the United States in 1925. The images chosen to illustrate the French publication were entirely different from the US version, however, and therefore told a different story. Following Brenner’s lead, in 1929 French critic Jean Cassou wrote an article entitled “La Renaissance de l’art Mexican” for the journal L’Art Vivant which also discussed Rivera’s murals, and in 1930 L’Art Vivant dedicated the entire January issue to Le Mexique, publishing an extensive spread of photographs of Rivera’s SEP and Chapingo murals, thereby significantly expanding on the images made available in 1928. This paper will examine the presentation of Diego Rivera’s SEP murals in the French Press, looking at how French journals served as a curatorial platform and shaped perceptions of Mexican muralism abroad through their selection, arrangement, and analysis of imagery.
Nuevas miradas a los murales de la Secretaría de Educación Pública, Simposio Internacional, Salón Iberoamericano, Secretaría de Educación Pública, Mexico City, 2018
was a known entity in Paris even after he left the city in 1920. Upon his return to Mexico, not o... more was a known entity in Paris even after he left the city in 1920. Upon his return to Mexico, not only did Rivera maintain contact with his European acquaintances and follow European developments, Paris also kept an eye on him. Almost as soon as Mexican muralism gained a foothold it grabbed the attention of the French press. The first photographs of murals to be circulated in Paris were images of Rivera's Secretariat of Public Education cycles. And even more significantly, the images reproduced in French journals were most likely the primary means by which the more than 300 Latin American artists living and working in Paris between the wars gained exposure to this modern Mexican art form. A robust transatlantic exchange of journals and magazines also would have kept those in Latin America and the United States informed. This paper will examine the presentation of Rivera's murals in the press, looking at how French journals served as a curatorial platform and shaped perceptions of Mexican muralism abroad through their selection, arrangement, and analysis of imagery. In 1928 the French journal La Renaissance de l'art français et des industries de luxe (slide) published, in conjunction with an essay by Mexican born Latvian-American historian and art critic Anita Brenner "Une Renaissance Mexicain," the first images of Diego Rivera's SEP murals to circulate in Paris. La Renaissance's decision to print Brenner's essay was not surprising since the journal was one of the first mainstream French art journals to take an interest in Latin American art. Established in 1918, La Renaissance, had paid no attention at all to Latin American art until 1926. Yet with the first survey exhibition of Latin American art in 1924 at the Musée Galliera a recent memory, and the significant presence of Latin American artists at the annual salons, the journal began to take notice of this vibrant population, asserting that it did not wish to "remain a stranger to this large and fertile movement" and that La Renaissance would therefore strive to "give an account to their readers of the most outstanding artistic and literary events of the Latin New-World." 1 In the fall of 1926 La Renaissance ran a special issue focusing entirely on Latin America, with articles on painting (slide), sculpture, and education. 2 After 1926 La Renaissance continued to highlight Latin American art, reviewing several exhibitions and in 1928 it featured the essay by Brenner (slide), a revised and condensed version of her essay of the same title that had originally appeared in the United States in 1925. 3 Interestingly, the images chosen to illustrate the French version of Brenner's essay were entirely different from the U.S. version, and therefore told a different story. The U.S. iteration of Brenner's text, published in the journal The Arts, opens with a photograph of a Zapotec Pottery Head from Oaxaca (slide), to illustrate Brenner's chronological overview of Mexican art that begins in ancient Mesoamerica. It isn't until twelve pages in, after an overview of the pre-Columbian and colonial periods, that she gets to the modern era. Here, her overall argument is that Mexican art, while influenced by European technique, "is not imported art, for it grows within the very body of Mexican tradition." (140) Her essay is a strong defense of the parity of Mexican art with European art, while at the same time insisting on its originality. The first illustration to represent what she calls the "painters of the Mexican Syndicate" is Diego Rivera's La Maestra Rural (slide), labeled in the text simply as "Decoration." After two works by Jean Charlot, she then includes a rarely reproduced detail of Felipe Carrillo Puerto, Martir flanked by two indigenous women from the Court of Labor (slide), and a few images later (again interspersed with works by Charlot), Rivera's El Abrazo (slide). The selection of images suggests
Latin American & latinx visual culture, Dec 31, 2023