Brought to Light:
Recent Acquisitions in Latin American Art
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
- Gabriel Perez-Barreiro -
The establishment in 2001 of a Latin American art department at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, sent shock waves through the Latin American art community in the United States, forcing other institutions to rethink and refocus their activities in the area. With characteristic ambition and verve, Peter Marzio of the MFAH hired Mari Carmen Ramírez from the Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas at Austin, where she led a signature Latin American art program for over a decade, brokering a relationship between UT’s unequalled Latin American resources (collection, library and research program) and the then-current multicultural discourse in American academia.
Since 2001, the MFAH has put on an impressive roster of exhibitions and programs, most notably the reconstruction of Ramírez’ mega-exhibition Heterotopías at the Reina Sofía in Madrid (2000), presented in Houston as Inverted Utopias in 2004. The translation of this exhibition from Madrid to Houston deserves a study in itself, at least to discuss the virtual erasure of its previous incarnation in the MFAH’s public presentation of the exhibition. (The one constant in the long and complex history of Latin American art collections in the United States is each institution’s belief that it “discovered” Latin American art on its own—and did so for the very first time in history.)
Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt), Reticulàrea, 1975
Stainless steel wire
82 11/16 x 102 3/8 x 7 7/8 inches
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Gift of AT&T
Perhaps even more than its exhibition program, the MFAH’s decision to collect Latin American art has transformed the market. The move away from a staple of Mexican masters and Botero-like magical realism to high-ticket geometrical abstraction and classical Modernism is partially due to the MFAH plowing its considerable resources, setting record prices in the process. Since 2001, the MFAH has created the equivalent of an 18-wheel juggernaut racing through the market. The exhibition Brought to Light: Recent Acquisitions in Latin American Art gives us an opportunity to see some of the results of these actions and examine the fruits of four years of intense labor.
The MFAH’s ambition is present in the introductory wall text, announcing: “the works in this exhibition constitute the core of what the MFAH envisions will one day become the most important collection of Latin American art in the United States” (original emphasis). While Inverted Utopias may well have been the most important survey exhibition of Latin American art ever presented in the U.S. (ironic, coming from the curator who made a career speaking against surveys of Latin American art), making the same claim for a collection is quite different, involving, as it does, a longer time frame, a closer relationship to the market and complex relationships with donors and trustees.
Many of the works in Brought to Light will be familiar to visitors of Inverted Utopias. In fact, the museum seems to have actively sought the purchase of many key works in that exhibition, which is certainly a logical acquisition strategy; however, the differences between Inverted Utopias and Brought to Light, particularly regarding interpretation, are considerable. The central argument of Inverted Utopias was that the Latin American avant-garde presents a model—an inversion of European trends. This argument, while certainly debatable, is at least a clear, seductive and, above all, an expedient thesis. The interpretative framework of Brought to Light, in contrast, seems to strip away much of the intellectual ambition and sociopolitical content of certain works in favor of a formalist and somewhat reductive list of “ground-breaking contributions” presented as bullet points (yes, bullet points) in the first wall text. The first of these bullets, which speaks of the “innovative printing techniques” of Antonio Berni, is so generic as to be virtually meaningless and reduces Berni, one of the greatest Social Realist artists of South America, to a mere technician. Likewise, the next bullet point, “The use of furniture-as-frame (Beatriz González),” leaves one wondering if this is really the second most important contribution of Latin American art to the twentieth century. And so on.
The exhibition opens with León Ferrari’s Cyanotypes of the early 1980s. These works, produced while the artist was in exile in São Paulo from his native Argentina, present scenes of crowded and nonsensical cities seen from above. Ferrari’s use of industrial blueprint techniques (the exhibition contains a rare Mylar “original” from which copies are made) represents one of the key moments in the democratization of art, with each work existing in a potentially infinite number of copies that can circulate at a very low cost—and, given the unstable nature of the inks, do not last very long. It is encouraging to see the MFAH embracing this kind of experimental and inherently unstable production, an aspect central to the history of Latin American art but often rejected by the market.
Lucio Fontana, Spatial Concept, Waiting, 1960
Water-based paint on canvas
49 1/2 x 39 5/8 inches
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Bequest of Caroline Wiess Law
Ferrari’s works are followed by a major and spectacular light sculpture by Thomas Glassford, a Laredo native living in Mexico City. Glassford’s inclusion represents the only significant contemporary work in an exhibition/collection focused largely on a Modernist sensibility. Glassford’s work also forces the fundamental question of whether it makes sense to present a Latin American collection in isolation from the museum’s broader Modern and contemporary collections. As most museums (e.g., MoMA, Tate Modern, Blanton) move toward ever-greater integration of Latin American material into their Modern and contemporary collections and displays, the MFAH has the opposite tendency, keeping this work separate and geographically defined from its larger, non-geographically defined Modern and contemporary collection. Indeed, during the first months of Brought to Light, visitors had the opportunity to see Acquisitions of the Last Five Years: Selections of Modern and Contemporary Art in one area of the museum and Brought to Light in the other.
The reasoning behind this decision—that art produced in Latin America needs to be kept separate from its European or North American counterparts—has two essential problems. First, Latin America does not present a single context. Over twenty countries, each with its own traditions, history and language, have historically been—and are still—relatively isolated from each other. The notion of a single Latin American identity has been elaborated outside these countries, largely following agendas of exotification or political expediency.
The second objection is rooted in the rich and intense dialogue and exchange between Latin American, European and American artists throughout the twentieth century. To classify Joaquín Torres-García, for example, as only a “Uruguayan” artist ignores or underplays his decisive role in the Parisian avant-garde of the 1930s. The division of a cultural map into two watertight halves does little to complicate and expand the definition of Modern and contemporary art away from a Eurocentric to a more global and accurate model. Binary opposition can create what a colleague of mine calls “inverted Eurocentrism.”
This same issue arises later in Brought to Light with the display of two slashed canvases by Lucio Fontana, an Argentine native who produced all of his most significant work in Italy. One of these works was acquired in 1965—before the MFAH’s Latin American collection existed—and the other arrived as part of Caroline Wiess Law’s 2005 bequest. The inclusion of these works in this exhibition—although Fontana’s influence in Latin America was virtually nil—rather than in the Modern and Contemporary exhibition leaves one wondering what the criteria for inclusion or exclusion could be.
The quality of works in Brought to Light is generally excellent and includes some of the major statements of the avant-garde, such as Xul Solar’s Jefa, Torres-García’s Composición Abstracta Tubular and Armando Reverón’s Untitled oil on canvas. The museum has also built a significant collection of Kinetic art, most notably by Julio Le Parc, Jesús Rafael Soto and Carlos Cruz-Diez. However, in certain cases, the rush to acquire seems to have left some questions hanging over certain works. Mira Schendel’s Variantes, for example, appears to be a posthumous work, “discovered by Ada, the artist’s daughter, after Schendel’s death in 1988.” It is difficult to judge what exactly this means. Did the artist assemble the ninety-three suspended monotypes and decide their composition, or was Variantes just an unrealized project or sketch? If it is the latter, this should engender healthy doubt about its suitability for a major public collection, particularly from a prolific artist whose resolved works are readily available.
Gyula Kosice’s iconic 1944 wood sculpture Röyi is another case in point. The original Röyi has been sitting in a private collection in Buenos Aires for over three decades. The MFAH had to know it was buying a replica, in which case convention dictates that the piece’s label and date should reflect this. The dating of Rhod Rothfuss’ “shaped canvas” paintings as 1946 should also be called into question.
These are minor points, but in claiming to assemble the most significant Latin American art collection, the MFAH has set very high stakes. One of the central risks inherent in this is that the category of “Latin American art” itself is made redundant by a greater understanding of the connections between Latin America and the rest of the world in terms of Modern and contemporary art. Of course, one of the great values of a permanent collection over a temporary exhibition is that the works will survive beyond particular interpretative frameworks under which they were acquired or displayed. With this in mind, one can look forward to the long term and to an increased dialogue between Latin America and the museum as a whole.