Redefining arte

Blanton exhibit might reshape the way people look at Latin American art

By Jeanne Claire Van Ryzin
AMERICAN-STATESMAN ARTS CRITIC
Tuesday, September 09, 2008

Originally published on Sunday, March 4, 2007

Patricia Phelps de Cisneros remembers very well the last time a portion of her Latin American art collection was exhibited at the University of Texas' Blanton Museum of Art.

In fall 1999, about 40 vibrant abstract sculptures and paintings from the 1950s and 1960s — just a sample of Cisneros' 3,000-plus collection, considered one of the best in private hands — went on view in a cramped second-floor gallery at the Ransom Center, which the Blanton was using for its exhibits. Though the venue was far from ideal, the kinetic, zoomy, geometric artwork made an impression on some UT administrators who came to the opening reception.

Just perhaps not the kind Cisneros had expected.

"I remember these officials walking in and exclaiming 'This is art from Latin America?? ? Cisneros recalled recently. "To see the shock on people's faces that something so pure and sophisticated could come from South America was a shock to me. I realized how important it was to explain to everyone possible that Latin American art wasn't all murals and figurative scenes, Frida Kahlo and bananas and watermelons."

Today Cisneros — who is the wife of Venezuelan media magnate Gustavo Cisneros — believes that's going to be easier to explain. It's not just because a new exhibit from her collection is now on view at the Blanton — the first major Latin American show the museum has presented in its spacious new building, a show accompanied by the publication of a major catalog and launch of an educational Web site.

It's because with "The Geometry of Hope: Latin American Abstract Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection," the Blanton — which has attracted 150,000 visitors since opening last April — finally has the means, and the potential audience, to trumpet the story it's been quietly composing for years.

Call it a breakout moment for Latin American art in this country. It's certainly a breakout moment for the Blanton. Its effort to change the misconceptions about Latin American art can be widely appreciated for the first time, instead of being shown in small, out-of-the-way campus digs that few found their way to.

Today, visitors to "The Geometry of Hope" can learn about the dynamic, logic-inspired abstract visual language that percolated in cosmopolitan South American cities in the 1950s and 1960s. Perhaps more importantly, they can wander upstairs and see "America/Americas," the permanent installation of modern and contemporary art that unifies the Blanton's collection of art from 1900 to the present day, organizing it based on chronology and aesthetic progression, not geographic origin.

In other words, the Blanton and "America/Americas" is proposing a startling proposition: It's not "Latin American" art. It's just art.

Geography and art history

Before this new art history could be written, though, geography had to be redefined. For one thing, Latin America isn't what — or even where — you might think it is. In the broadest sense, it spans both hemispheres and oceans.

"There's this perception that Latin America is one monolithic entity," says Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, the Blanton's curator of Latin American art. "And that all you do is go south of the U.S. and get there and everyone speaks one language — Spanish. And conversely, every one who speaks that language and comes from that 'one place' has the same traditions, ideas and beliefs."

"We have to rethink the way geography and culture intersect," he continues. "Previously, there was always some big art historical theory that unites everything in Latin American art, then compares it with art in the United States or Europe. That's just not accurate."

And that's why Pérez-Barreiro included Paris as one of six Latin American cities highlighted in "The Geometry of Hope," where abstract art fomented.

"Paris was most certainly a hub of Latin American abstract art," says Pérez-Barreiro.

After all, the creative exchange between the major Atlantic coast cities of South America and European cultural capitals was — and still is — inextricable. Caracas, Montevideo, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, fueled by their strong post-World War II economies, were hotbeds of modernist thinking and societal progress. A faith in science and its potential to better the world inspired artists to create a purely abstract aesthetic language of vibrating lines, clean geometric forms and kinetic shapes.

It's like the Blanton and scholars such as Pérez-Barreiro having been saying for years: The development of modern Latin America art is inseparably linked to the development of modern art the world over.

The art world takes notice

"(The re-hanging of the permanent collections at the Blanton) appears to be a small gesture, but it represents huge strides in the field," says Marysol Nieves, assistant vice president of Latin American art in the New York office of the auction house Sotheby's. "The market for Latin American art has continued to expand during the last decade with collectors no longer coming primarily from Latin America, but also from the U.S., Europe and Asia. That shift is directly related to the greater visibility museums and other cultural organizations have given to art from Latin America."

One of Brazil's foremost contemporary artists, Katie van Scherpenberg, who did a residency at UT several years ago, says, "The Blanton has the possibility to show Latin American art in another, much broader light, bringing people from all around to see and perceive unknown forms of expression— not only Frida Kahlo exists."

Van Scherpenberg's comment is a reminder that the presentation of Latin American art in this country has never been politically neutral.

As the world slid toward global war in the late 1930s, the United States developed a keen interest in the continent to the south and its abundance of natural resources. Art was the perfect cultural arm of this new diplomacy.

But after World War II, the U.S. had little need for Latin America. And hence Latin American art all but dropped off the radar in this country, regarded as little more than a footnote, folk art or exotica.

Then, in the 1970s, America began a love affair with magical realism, thanks to English translations of books by Latin American authors such as Gabriel García Márquez. That in turn sparked interest in artists such as Kahlo. But the popularity of Kahlo, Márquez and their like only served to perpetuate the misconception that everything Latin American was mystical, exotic and filled with fantastic color. In other words, ethnic.

Things were a little different in Texas, though, with its historical and cultural ties to Mexico. Back in 1940, UT was the first university in the country to establish an institute of Latin American Studies, leveraged in large part by a strong library of Latin American materials.

When UT founded its first art museum in 1963, director Donald Goodhall was a pioneer, collecting Latin American art when almost no other U.S. institution did so. In the early 1970s, New York art collector Barbara Duncan began giving hundreds of artworks from her collection, choosing UT specifically because of its serious study of Latin America.

More art world "firsts" followed. In 1981, UT established the first professorship of modern Latin American art history in the country. And in 1988, the Blanton became the first museum in this country to hire a full-time curator of Latin American art.

When discussions about a new museum building began in the mid-1990s, Blanton curators also began thinking of a new way to showcase their art of the 20th century. The forward-thinking "America/Americas" is the end result.

Cisneros picks the Blanton

Patricia Phelps de Cisneros has been watching UT for a while.

Cisneros, who turns 60 this year, founded her Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros in 1980. It's an offshoot of the Caracas-based Fundación Cisneros, the philanthropic arm of the Cisneros Group of Companies. One of the largest privately held media conglomerates in the world, the Cisneros Group includes in its vast holdings Venevision, Venezuela's primary television network, and significant shares in Spanish-language TV network Univision. The Cisneroses are ranked No. 114 on Forbes magazine's World's Richest People list, with an estimated net worth of $5 billion.

Through her foundation and collection, the petite, birdlike Cisneros spends her considerable energy promoting Latin American art by loaning works to museums, organizing traveling exhibits and developing art education programs and materials. The foundation just recently wrapped up an 11-country, eight-year tour of multiple exhibits around the world.

"I've always thought of the collection as functioning as a museum without walls," Cisneros says in her accent-free English as she wanders the Blanton exhibit before its opening. "Though we've lived with much of this art work in our home over the years, we're really just stewards of it. So it's important to me that the collection go out and have a life of its own."

As the great-granddaughter of New York-born, Harvard-trained ornithologist and businessman William H. Phelps, who settled in Venezuela in 1897, Cisneros received much of her education in the U.S. She and her husband have residences in Caracas, Madrid and Aspen, Colo., but spend much of their time in their Manhattan home.

For more than two decades Cisneros has been a trustee for New York's mighty Museum of Modern Art. She also sits on various committees at Harvard University, the Americas Society and London's Tate Gallery.

Yet when it came time to develop a more extensive relationship with an institution, she choose UT and the Blanton. Why?

"I would be very happy being a student here," Cisneros says with a laugh. "It has everything I want."

She has no current plans to divest her collection, and her financial donation to the Blanton covered the seminar, catalog and exhibit expenses (she declined to make public the exact amount). But involving the next generation of curators and art historians — and having the chance to broaden their knowledge of Latin American art — was the best way, Cisneros figured, to change the course of art history itself.

"We're fighting a lot of stereotypes about Latin America," says Cisneros. "But art is a way through which people can get past them."

jvanryzin@statesman.com; 445-3699