Latin American art

Latin American art

Introduction

      artistic traditions that developed in Mesoamerica, Central America, and South America after contact with the Spanish and Portuguese beginning in 1492 and 1500, respectively, and continuing to the present.

      This article will not discuss the art of non-Iberian colonial holdings that began late in the 16th century and culminated in the 17th; for these territories, see individual country articles (e.g., Haiti, Guyana, Jamaica). For more technical explorations of media, see individual media articles (e.g., painting, sculpture, pottery, textile).

      The European discovery, conquest, and settlement of the Americas, which began in 1492, created enormous changes in the indigenous cultures of the region. When Europeans arrived, mostly from Spain and Portugal, they came with painting and sculpture traditions dating back to antiquity. (For these artistic traditions, see Western painting (painting, Western) and Western sculpture.) For centuries indigenous American peoples had similarly formed civilizations with their own unique artistic practices, from the large political structures of the Inca and Aztec empires to the more scattered presence of small groups of nomadic peoples. (For an exploration of these artistic traditions, see Native American arts (Native American art).) The importation of African slaves led to the presence of long-standing African visual-arts traditions in the region as well. (For these traditions, see African art (art, African).)

      Over the course of the decades and centuries after the European contact, Latin America underwent sweeping cultural and political changes that would lead to the independence movements of the 19th century and the social upheavals of the 20th century. Visual-arts production in the region reflected these changes. Latin American artists have often superficially accepted styles from Europe and the United States, modifying them to reflect their local cultures and experiences. At the same time, these artists have often retained many aspects of indigenous traditions. As Latin America has searched for its own identity, its artists have looked to their past, to their popular culture, to their religion, to their political surroundings, and to their personal imaginations to create a distinct tradition of Latin American art.

Historiography
      The appreciation of Latin American art and its history began as a nationalist endeavour in the second half of the 19th century, inspired in part by the independence movements that took place there at the beginning of the century. At first, discussions of the visual arts were generally written by learned amateurs, often priests or architects, or by wide-eyed foreigners. These writings often had the structure of a travelogue, in which the important monuments of each location were described in somewhat romantic, nontechnical terms. The writers generally did not possess a great knowledge of the history of art, but they often brought the knowledge of having lived in Europe and seen the famous monuments that inspired works in various Latin American countries. Following the secularization of church property in countries such as Mexico, some constructions were not maintained and their contents were looted, making such documentation important.

      Native-born art historians initially had to go abroad to be trained, but national institutes for the study of the arts were established in Latin America in the 1930s as part of governments or major universities. As Latin American scholars from this period studied their own visual history, they tended to focus on the history of one nation, and they would rarely examine it in relation to other countries.

      During World War II, numerous European scholars fled fascist oppression by exiling themselves to Latin America. These art historians applied European scholarly methods to the body of cultural material they saw and developed a chronology for the region that related Latin American artistic styles to those of Europe. Many scholars from the United States, blocked at this same time from doing the on-site research in Europe for which they had been trained, also applied their methodology to Latin America. Scholars from Europe and the United States tended to emphasize the similarities across national and regional boundaries in Latin America. Latin Americans themselves still tend to emphasize their national traditions, with a few exceptions.

      By the late 20th century, as the realm of contemporary art became increasingly global, Latin American art entered the mainstream of international art criticism, and its artists were widely recognized, whether they lived as expatriates in New York City or Paris or exhibited in the cultural capitals of their homelands. The Internet linked the world even more than jet travel, and international museums and critics became increasingly willing to look to Latin America for upcoming artists. At the same time, Latin American artistic centres such as Mexico City developed strong national art scenes with their own established critics, museums, and galleries.

Colonial period, c. 1492–c. 1820
 Spanish explorers first traveled to the Americas in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. Spanish immigrants settled in sociopolitical units called encomiendas, which were in effect government grants of land and people run by individual powerful Spaniards. Under the encomendero, the head of the encomienda, indigenous people served in a variety of capacities, and African slaves were also often imported for their labour. Ecclesiastics increasingly went to the Americas to function within these encomiendas and to convert the indigenous people to Christianity.

      The Portuguese were slower to become involved in the region. Although they laid claim to Brazil for many decades, it was not until the mid-1530s that they became more directly involved, granting sesmerias, or land grants, to prominent citizens. As in Spanish America, Christian missionaries became part of this framework. A huge number of African slaves were imported to Brazil, in part because of the needs of the sugar industry and in part because only a small number of often intractable native peoples remained in the area.

      As the colonial period began, a distinct divide at first existed between indigenous artists and European émigrés. In some instances indigenous artists continued to explore their own traditions and themes without alteration. Many European artists also took styles and themes from Europe in a literal manner that had little to do with Latin American culture. Increasingly, however, reciprocal influences could be felt from both groups as more cultural and ethnic mixing came to define the region.

Indigenous art at the time of conquest
      At the time of conquest, the indigenous artists of some areas, although titularly under European dominance, in effect remained free from such control. These artists included those in more remote areas such as southern and interior South America (especially tropical forest and desert regions), lower Central America, tropical forest Mesoamerica, and northern Mexican desert regions without mining potential. The arts that were dominant in the pre-Columbian era—including weaving, pottery, metalworking, lapidary, featherwork, and mosaic (see Native American arts (Native American art))—continued to be practiced unaltered in these areas in the postcolonial era. These regions were nevertheless indirectly influenced by the arrival of Europeans through the spread of diseases to which the natives had no resistance, the movement of native peoples away from the conquered areas, the spread of new technologies and species of plants and animals, and, finally, the importation of African slaves into those areas depopulated by their aboriginal populations.

      In areas more directly in contact with European influence, indigenous artists were taught by friars. Faced with a growing body of converts, the priests responded by creating artistic projects that clearly required the participation of these indigenous people. The most popular endeavour became the construction of enormous houses of worship within the encomiendas; loosely called monasteries, these were really nerve cells for the conversion of indigenous towns. In the early art of this period, the personal creativity of Indian artists was not encouraged—rather, skill and competence were. Indigenous artists were shown imported works by European artists that served as models.

      Genoese explorer Christopher Columbus (Columbus, Christopher) reached the Caribbean in his voyages from 1492 to 1502. In the chiefly societies of the Caribbean islands that he encountered, the chiefs had not been very demanding on their subjects for either goods or services. None of these pre-Columbian peoples had known of the pottery wheel (to form the vessel) or glazes (to seal them), although they did use methods of burnishing. The major crafts that did exist in the region—pottery and the carving of shell and wood—were considered minor arts by the Spaniards and other Europeans.

      On the island of Hispaniola, after European contact, local potters replicated standard Spanish utilitarian jars. Indian artists had once used the local Taino style of vessel decoration, which involved applying small spirit faces, but, since these images had religious overtones, the Roman Catholic conquerors forbade their use. Europeans instead had the local potters mimic Spanish vessel forms and geometric painted decoration styles imported from Mesoamerica. This hybrid style died out after only a generation, along with many of its makers. In later generations, when pottery was made locally, it was totally utilitarian, while glazed and decorated earthenware was usually imported from European centres. A few areas within the American colonies on the mainland came to specialize in blue-and-white and multicoloured majolica that was similar to wares produced in Europe at the time.

      Spanish explorer Hernán Cortés (Cortés, Hernán, marqués del Valle de Oaxaca) led an expedition toward the Mexican mainland beginning in 1519. In 1535 Spain established the Viceroyalty of New Spain (New Spain, Viceroyalty of) to govern all the land it laid claim to north of the Isthmus of Panama. In this region many highly skilled craftspeople did not stop making goods for their own communities after European conquest; weaving and the embroidery of textiles in particular continued to be strong traditions. Distinctive pottery forms, designs, and firing methods continued to be produced in different villages throughout Mexico and Guatemala. The craft of featherwork, which was much esteemed among the Aztecs—as the writings of Fray Bernardino de Sahagún revealed—also continued. Some objects taken back to Europe at the time of Cortés included examples of mosaic featherwork, but they copied European prints rather than continuing the geometric motifs of pre-Columbian feather mosaic.

 The Hispanic colonists after the conquest made use of several indigenous crafts for their own purposes. Most immediately, stone sculpture, at which the Aztecs excelled, was requisitioned for exterior decoration of colonial buildings, such as a fountain in the shape of a lion (16th century) for the mainly indigenous town of Tepeaca, Mexico. Since the indigenous carver had never seen a lion, he created an image similar to a preconquest feathered coyote. Baptismal fonts for the new churches in 16th-century Mexico were carved by indigenous artists in a coarse style with a minimum of details. In Mexico City, for example, an anonymous artist created the base of a European column (1525–37) from a recarved Aztec sculpture. The artist retained a relief image of an earth monster hidden on the bottom side, where it would go unnoticed by Europeans but would add secret religious power for the indigenous people.

  Indigenous artistic traditions that had their own religious significance were also sometimes usurped by the church. For example, some codex painting—on deerhide leaves that were folded like an accordion—had been used in precolonial times by the Aztecs and other Mesoamerican peoples to make ritual manuscripts by which they calculated auspicious days on the basis of the deities in ascendance. Clearly that function was not approved by the new church authorities, who took pains to destroy those manuscripts they could find. Other codices were dedicated to genealogies of Mixtec ruling houses. However, the same artists who produced the codices were used by the secular authorities to make a summary of life under the Aztec empire for the use of the first viceroy of New Spain, Antonio de Mendoza (Mendoza, Antonio de). Included in the Codex Mendoza (begun in 1541) were a tribute list, of great interest to him in the exploitation of the new domain; a summary of cultural ranks and behaviour expected from men and women at different stages of life; and a list of monthly religious observances, all the better to extirpate them. Native artists retained the Aztec codex tradition of using an entire page as one large field. This compositional device gave a sweep to early colonial manuscripts, such as the daily-life section of the Codex Mendoza and the monthly-ritual section of the Codex Borbonicus that was commissioned by the Spanish authorities in the 1520s. The figures in such works are floating on a blank ground and are not shaded, reflecting indigenous painting traditions. A blend of styles can be seen in Fray Bernardino de Sahagún's Primeros Memoriales (1557–65; “First Memorials,” Eng. trans. Primeros Memoriales) and his more extensive Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España (1570–85; General History of the Things of New Spain, also known as the Codex Florentino), which feature a varied series of marginal illustrations, some quite close in conventions to indigenous prototypes and others showing full perspective. Some of these drawings are tinted with colour and include the shading of figures.

 A combination of European and indigenous imagery led to unique religious art forms in Mesoamerica at the time of conquest. Indigenous sculptors often communicated Christian imagery via the symbolic language to which the indigenous people were accustomed. In place of the typical European-style crucifix, they erected a heavy stone cross, the crossbar of which sprouts foliage, suggesting that it is still alive. Mixtec manuscripts of pre-Columbian times also rendered trees in the form of crosses, but these are intended to be world trees (world tree) connecting the underworld to the heavens. Thus, in colonial times crosses could be read as both Christian and pagan symbols. The native sculptor emphasized the symbolic power by ignoring the naturalistic image of a hanging male torso and replacing it with abstract iconography of Veronica's veil (which, according to tradition, Veronica used to wipe Jesus' face on the road to Calvary, where he was crucified) and the tools used during crucifixion, applied in bilevel low relief. An example of the form is in Acolmán, Mexico (c. 1560s); there, Christ's face is represented at the centre of the cross, but by implication the rest of the cross becomes his outstretched arms and hanging trunk. Such art spoke to Indian and European viewers on different levels.

      In many Mexican churches of the period, European artists and friars worked closely together in the construction of retables (retable) (decorative wooden structures placed behind church altars). Spain began the tradition of large retables in the late Middle Ages. Their original shape was a triptych—a central panel with two side wings. By the late Gothic period in Spain, the retable filled the end of the church up to the vaulting, and, of course, at this size it could no longer be moved. High-relief panels of groups and scenes were the earliest forms of sculpture within the architectural framework, but freestanding figures were soon carved and placed into niches of retables. Many significant advances in colonial arts appeared first in retables, where the variety of artists involved—including painters, sculptors, carpenters, and gilders—encouraged innovation through competition, and these innovations were then later applied to more-independent forms of art. Early fragments that have survived from this period include low-relief wood carvings of saints executed in a blocky style, as seen in a former retable in Actopan, Mexico (c. 1570). These may have been works overseen by inexperienced friars who took advantage of the wood-carving skills of indigenous artists.

Peru and the Central Andes
      Explorers began to enter the Central Andes in the 1520s, and about 1531 the Spaniard Francisco Pizarro (Pizarro, Francisco) entered the Inca empire (pre-Columbian civilizations) in Peru. Inca traditions in pottery and metalworking continued after contact. The still-numerous Indian population also continued to weave textiles and to carve wooden cups for ritual toasting. The painting applied to these cups became much more naturalistic after contact with the Spanish artistic traditions; subjects included images of Inca rulers and scenes that incorporated the three groups—Europeans, Africans, and Indians—then settled in Peru. In pre-Columbian times, textiles from Andean weaving were a major element of exchange, ritual, and social status. Textiles remain an important highland Indian craft to the present day. The more geometric designs of the preconquest Inca empire could be continued without any objection by the Spanish authorities, but any disks referring to the sun god had to be eliminated. Often plant and floral motifs more typical of European folk traditions were used as space fillers.

      Other crafts practiced by skilled indigenous specialists in the Central Andes were converted into minor decorative arts in the service of the Roman Catholic Church and the Spanish oligarchy. Metalworking, which had been used for fine ritual objects by the Andean kingdoms, was applied to silversmithing in Peru, using the abundant raw material mined in the Andes. Pre-Columbian wood-carving traditions used for architectural sculpture and burials were also channeled to church needs such as pulpits, choir stalls, retables, and grill screens.

 Native artists in this region often adapted their techniques and styles to reflect European trends. A report equivalent to the Codex Florentino was written and illustrated with pen and ink on European paper by a Christianized son of Inca nobility, Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala, whose El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno (1612–15; “The First New Chronicle and Good Government,” translated in abridgment as Letter to a King) was an attempt to alert King Philip III of Spain to abuses in the colonial government. To document the worthiness of his people, the artist illustrated Inca history from its legendary beginnings through abuses by the Spanish in drawings that, while naive by European standards, still show European conventions such as one-point perspective, diminution of size to show depth, the overlapping of objects in space, and three-quarter views of faces. His drawings, which carefully show the differences between peoples from the four quarters of the empire, are the most reliable extant depictions of life from the time of the former Inca empire.

Early South America
      Spain had clearly established itself in Mesoamerica and Peru by the early 16th century, but much of the rest of South America remained relatively unexplored. In 1543 Spain established the Viceroyalty of Peru (Peru, Viceroyalty of) to manage Peru and the South American land under its control (including present-day Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Argentina, Uruguay, much of Bolivia, and at times Venezuela). Spain considered Peru and its vast quantities of silver to be its greatest holding, however, and so it did not focus heavily on its other South American lands in these early years. On the other hand, after treating Brazil largely as a fringe trading post for decades, in 1548 Portugal began to set up a distinct royal government there.

      In most parts of South America, very little art made by aboriginal societies has survived from the time immediately after European contact. Some wooden masks from the Tairona region of northeastern Colombia suggest a continuation of pre-Columbian culture and its carving style. Feather headdresses were collected for the king of Spain during the 18th century in the upper regions of the Amazon, documenting an art form that no doubt was preexisting and is known even today among Amazonian peoples. The perishable nature of these arts helps explain their scarcity, as does the lack of interest by Spanish colonizers in these less-rich regions. The presence of spindle whorls in Ecuador and Colombia suggests that these peoples also had a rich tradition of weaving domesticated cotton, but the region's considerable rainfall has rotted most remnants of this organic material. Only a few remains from highland caves survive to show the pre-Columbian tradition.

      Goldsmithing had also been a major art form in the region, but it was immediately co-opted by the Spanish and denied to the natives. Outstanding arts of the chiefdoms of the north Andean portion of South America that did continue include pottery and stone carving of seats and statues (but generally not of architecture). The arrival of European trade items such as beads and silver soon supplanted native traditions of time-consuming lapidary work, such as the drilling and polishing of beads and amulets. Aboriginal figurative amulets often had iconography in conflict with the Roman Catholic religion and were thus deemed unacceptable to wear.

      Since the aboriginal peoples of this region were not easily collected and controlled, slaves were imported from an early date. Brazilians of African descent developed a religious system known as Candomblé (Macumba), closely based on the orisha deity worship of the Yoruba of modern Nigeria and Benin. Wooden carvings of specific deities, dating to the late 19th and early 20th centuries around Bahia, may reflect later examples of a now-vanished colonial tradition that was permitted by the more religiously tolerant Portuguese but later was stamped out by the more conservative Spaniards. In this tradition, altars would have been set up in households in a manner reminiscent of Yoruba practice, where a number of power objects are assembled on a modeled earthen platform. A similar religious system in the Caribbean, known as Santería, became more assimilated to the dominant Roman Catholic faith. Its visual representations of the orisha take on the more popular form of images of saints, although they retain key traits of typical representations of Yoruba deities.

      Runaway groups of slaves, called “maroons,” coalesced in the more inhospitable areas of tropical forest, such as interior lowland Colombia and inland Surinam. Groups of different African peoples and cultures blended in these areas and re-created sub-Saharan traditions in wood carving and textile weaving. These cultures must have started forming soon after the Dutch established a colony there in the 17th century, although surviving work from this tradition dates back only to the 19th century.

c. 1500–c. 1820
      Many of these indigenous traditions continued virtually unchanged for centuries. At the same time, as settlements in Latin America became more established and as more European artists immigrated to the new land, Iberian artists took with them elements of the artistic styles that were current in Europe.

      The revival of Greek and Roman antiquity known as the Renaissance influenced the visual arts in Italy beginning in earnest in the 15th century. When this style was applied to the visual arts, anatomy was rendered with ideal proportions, and the contrapposto weight shift from antiquity, which had become stiffly stylized in the Middle Ages, was revived to give figures a lifelike fluidity. The architecture, painting, and sculpture of the early Italian Renaissance—by artists such as Filarete, Domenico Ghirlandaio (Ghirlandaio, Domenico), and Andrea del Verrocchio (Verrocchio, Andrea del)—were generally characterized by clarity and harmony.

      Northern European artists utilized Italian Renaissance trends but with a more believable sense of realism; figures in these works look like individuals with a variety of ages, shapes, and faces, and their bodies appear nearly lost under the folds of heavy clothing. Spain and Portugal were under the strong influence of Flanders (now part of Belgium), especially after the accession of the Hapsburg emperor Charles V to the Spanish throne in 1516. (Flanders was part of Charles's extensive Hapsburg realm.) As a result of these factors, the Iberian Peninsula also became “northern” in style.

      Examples of Flemish and German art were readily accessible to the Iberian Peninsula through the cheaply made religious texts and reproductions of important oil paintings. Whole walls were painted with black-and-white designs copied from the decorative title pages of European books. Artists in early colonial Latin America often painted intertwined circular loops of plants, borrowed from Roman painted and relief decoration, in monochrome fresco inside cloisters. On a larger scale, designs were applied in low relief to the facade of churches, such as that in Yuriria, Mexico (c. 1560). Such designs closely copied Renaissance models familiar to the Europeans. The dense bilevel exterior decoration corresponds to a pre-Columbian tradition of similar decoration in the architecture of Mitla and Tulum, both in Mexico.

      In the decades after European contact, an increasing number of indigenous artists undertook fresco painting. Inside the cloisters the plaster walls were painted primarily in black, apparently in imitation of the Renaissance-style woodcuts and engravings that the friars had taken with them from Europe. Illiterate lettering and the retention of indigenous designs, such as looped borders, on certain frescoes seem to indicate that indigenous hands did the copying. Because many wall frescoes in pre-Columbian buildings had also been monochrome, this was not a departure from native tradition. When no trained indigenous artists were available to execute frescoes, untrained artists created poorly executed fresco-secco paintings (in which the paint was applied after the plaster had dried)—as seen, for example, in Santo Domingo (in the present Dominican Republic) in paintings of saints placed between the columns of the Cathedral of Santa María de la Encarnación's front facade (c. 1540).

 Within parish churches built specifically for converts, indigenous artists created paintings derived partly from Europe and partly from their own traditions. At Ixmiquilpan, northeast of Mexico City, the parish church built for resident Otomí Indians presents a dramatic mural cycle (c. 1569–72) on an interior wall of the nave: against a backdrop of greatly enlarged plant coils that end in anthropomorphic busts, human figures dressed as warriors battle European-inspired monsters. These heroic figures, in quilted costumes and animal hides, represent Aztec knightly military orders and must symbolize Christians battling pagans. That the painting is rendered in full colour indicates that it was original, rather than a copy of a European print.

  Indigenous artists did not have their own tradition of easel painting, but evidence suggests that, in the latter part of the 16th century, many completely assimilated the European style. For example, the vaults under the lower choir loft in the Franciscan church at Tecamachalco, Puebla, Mexico, have paintings (1562) in full colour in oil on cloth glued to the masonry. Juan Gersón, the artist who created these works, was once believed to be European because he has a Flemish name and skillfully executes a convincing northern Renaissance style. However, closer study of the archives revealed that Gersón was in fact indigenous. As early as one generation after the Spanish conquest, he had assimilated the European style so completely that his compositions are very similar to woodcuts in a German Bible, but he often changed the format, turning horizontal rectangular borders into oval vertical paintings and adding colours and modeling to the black-and-white lines. This reveals how much some indigenous artists had gone beyond the model of the amateur friar teachers and were approaching the work of professional Spanish painters.

      In the mid-16th century, after indigenous artists had begun to gain recognition for their work in the Renaissance style, professional artists—no longer just educated friars—began to travel to Latin America from Europe to satisfy increasing numbers of commissions. They also went because of the increasingly strict requirements for artists who executed religious subjects; these rules were imposed by an ecclesiastical council in 1555 and reinforced in Mexico by the establishment of an artists' guild in 1557. The Flemish artist Simón Pereyns arrived in Mexico in 1566 and assembled around him an impressive group of European artists, who, by their skill and because of the increasing prejudice against Native Americans, began to supplant indigenous artists in the important civil and ecclesiastical commissions.

      Pereyns's paintings were incorporated in retables that filled the walls behind altars. As mentioned above, the commissions for retables inspired the creation of great sculpture. The earliest documented Latin American sculptural work was in the retable in the monastery church at Huejotzingo, Mexico, assembled in 1586 by the Spaniard Pedro de Requeña. Eight paintings by Pereyns were situated in the rectangular wooden architectural grid that he provided. Fourteen figures were carved out of the wood, possibly by Luis de Arciniega, in a style that is High Renaissance in its balance, strength, and stability; its heavily robed figures emerge from niches with conch-shell arches that appear to be sunburst haloes behind the figures' heads. Finally, a gilder took charge of applying not only the gold leaf but also the enameled skin tones (achieved through the painting technique of encarnación, literally, “putting on the flesh”) and of painting the draperies.

      By the time European artists arrived in the Americas in large numbers, Mannerism, a style characterized by artificiality and a self-conscious cultivation of elegance, had usurped the Renaissance style in popularity. The Spanish-trained painter Baltasar de Echave Orio established a dynasty of painters in Mexico that controlled official commissions there for three generations. This first Echave married the daughter of an important associate of Pereyns, Francisco Ibía (known as Zumaya), a skilled Mannerist. Echave painted in a shimmering Mannerist style during the early 17th century, well after the style had died out in most of Europe. Three of the 14 canvases he painted in 1609 for the retable of Santiago de Tlatelolco have survived: one, the Porziuncola, shows figures of Christ and the Virgin floating on clouds in front of a kneeling St. Francis. The compressed and distorted perspective of the scene is in the spirit of late Mannerism; all the holy figures have elongated bodies, stylized finger postures, and white zigzag highlights on their clothing. Two of this painter's sons (surname Echave Ibía) continued the Mannerist style even longer.

      In the later 16th century, the Viceroyalty of Peru, which included all of Spanish South America, attracted several important Italian artists. Bernardo Bitti was an Italian Jesuit who went to Lima about 1575. After working first on paintings at San Pedro in the viceregal capital, he went to a number of cities in the south highlands of what is now Bolivia and traveled twice to Ecuador. The size and shape of his long, large paintings suggest that they were originally intended to be placed in retables. His works from the turn of the 17th century are recognizably Mannerist—featuring elongated linear faces; swaying, gracefully curving, elongated bodies; and icy pastel colours—and recall those of Tintoretto in Italy and El Greco (Greco, El) in Spain. His European viewers would have known the style was fashionable, but his indigenous viewers were also receptive to the exaggerated style, since they were not accustomed to naturalism. Bitti also carved low reliefs in the surrounds of some retables, such as those of Challapampa and the original retable in La Compañía of Cuzco, both in Peru, the figures of which have the recognizable Mannerist twist and elongation.

      Other important Mannerist artists working in South America include Angelino Medoro, who practiced in what are now Peru and Colombia, using a Michelangelesque version of Mannerism. In 1617 he painted a deathbed portrait of the first saint of the Americas, known as St. Rose of Lima (Rose of Lima, Saint). Mateo Pérez de Alesio also utilized idealized Italianate imagery in true fresco applied to ceilings of churches in Lima, such as the Villegas Chapel in the Church of La Merced (1616), as he had done in Rome and Malta before immigrating to Peru in 1589. In Sucre, Bolivia, Cristóbal Hidalgo carved the choir stalls of the city's cathedral; the figures there are framed by strapwork in a flat-relief northern Mannerist style.

      By the middle of the 17th century, the Baroque (Baroque period) style of painting and sculpture had reached the Americas. Artists working in this style—some of them mestizo and mulatto, reflecting the increasing diversity of the region—preferred realistic directness and clarity and rejected the fantastic colours, elongated proportions, and illogical and extreme spatial relationships preferred by Mannerist artists. They strove to make the religious events depicted in their paintings seem realistic, causing viewers to feel as if they were participants. Painters of the early Baroque style rendered dramatically lit scenes of unidealized large-scale figures placed up against the front of the picture plane. This style, made famous by Caravaggio in Italy, became immensely popular with Spanish artists active in Seville, the city of departure for most Latin American settlers.

      The Baroque painting style became established in Mexico with the work of the Spanish immigrant Sebastián López de Arteaga. In his monumental canvas Doubting Thomas (1643), the subject is beautifully attuned to the aims of the Baroque: the apostle Thomas inserts his finger in the wound in Christ's side, leading the viewer to feel the presence of Christ and to experience his suffering. The life-sized protagonists on the canvas are surrounded by ordinary elderly men. From the left a single source of bright light spotlights the wound, emphasizing Christ's fleshiness. Here “the Word has been made flesh,” embodying the purpose of Catholic Baroque art.

      An anonymous painter known as the St. Jerome Master, based on the common theme of his work, employed the Caravaggesque style in Peru. His works include several half-length studies of St. Jerome—inspired by an Italian engraving—that show an aged man with a realistically furrowed brow, which is illuminated by a spotlight coming from his left side beyond the frame. The image seems to project in front of the plane of the frame, encouraging the sensation of the aging saint's actual presence. Although his works are undated, the St. Jerome Master may well have been an important early painter of the Cuzco school, which comprised mainly Indian and mestizo artists.

      In the early stage of the Baroque in Latin America, high-relief sculpture was used in facades and retables. In the church of San Francisco in Santafé de Bogotá, Colombia, for example, the wooden interior has a retable composed of square-framed biblical representations that were carved and painted anonymously in 1633. The scenes represent figures in rich tropical surroundings that suggest the lower altitudes of Colombia.

      When the Baroque style extended to freestanding sculpture, early Latin American sculptors often chose to depict emotionally charged moments of Christ's life in order to appeal to ordinary people, who could identify with Jesus' suffering. These statues created in the viewer a sense of Christ's physical presence by means of a life-size image, often dressed in actual garments. During major holy days these large wooden statues were paraded around the city on platforms carried by members of church fraternities. On the hill of Monserrate overlooking Santafé de Bogotá, a pilgrimage chapel contains Pedro de Lugo Albarracín's powerful Baroque image of the Lord of Great Power (1656), which shows Christ tied to a low stake as he bleeds after a scourging. The figure, looking at the faithful in suffering and anguish, is at once one of the greatest works of Baroque art and an image charged with great religious power. Many statues of the Virgin similarly were dressed in real clothing in Spanish America, and they were often displayed in a special room (camarín) behind the altar. The convent of El Carmen in Quito, Ecuador, dedicated an entire room for a life-size sculptural representation of the death of the Virgin, with the polychromed wooden figure of the Virgin placed on a bed surrounded by her son's disciples.

      The most important inspiration to Latin American painters became the Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens (Rubens, Peter Paul), whose art was known in the colonies through engraving and mezzotint copies. His paintings were reworked in numerous Latin American imitations, ranging from small painted marble slabs to huge canvases, and he created the grand manner used by Latin American nobility and the church for propagandist purposes. European Baroque sculpture supplanted the fine, balanced carving of the 16th-century Renaissance with more-compelling actively spatial carvings. Features of Baroque sculpture include life-size scale, realistic skin tones (encarnación), and the simulation of rich gold-threaded tapestry garments (which was achieved by estofado, or the application of coloured paint over gold leaf). Some Spanish Baroque masters, such as Juan Martínez Montañés, shipped their works to the Americas at the start of the 17th century.

      As the Baroque became established in areas such as Mexico and Peru, paintings—increasingly inspired by Rubens—once contained within architectural frames of retables were now presented on freestanding colossal canvases. Paintings by the Mexican-born Cristóbal de Villalpando best exemplify this new scale in two great cathedrals of Mexico. In the sacristy of Mexico City Cathedral, between 1684 and 1686, he glued canvases on the walls and stabilized them with arched frames, which fit right under the vaults of the ceiling. Fresco painting in the 16th century had occupied a position similar to this, but rarely was it so large in scale. One of Villalpando's paintings in the Mexico City sacristy, The Triumph of the Eucharist, is derived from cartoons by Rubens and shows a chariot pulling an aged pope. Villalpando was one of the few Latin American artists who utilized a Rubensian fluid brushstroke that simulated textures and communicated the urgency of the event depicted. He undertook illusionistic ceiling painting, the most quintessentially Baroque program, in a dome of Puebla Cathedral in 1688. He made the entire surface of the dome into an all-over composition of billowing clouds filled with angels and saints, from which descends a dove representing the Holy Spirit. The intense light of the cupola is meant to embody God's universal grace. Through this grand manner, Latin American Baroque painters tried to capture the emotions of their viewers and to actively engage them in the church's mission.

      In Spanish South America (still included in the Viceroyalty of Peru in the beginning of the 18th century), the Baroque style was not introduced as emphatically as it was in Mexico. Scholars may be ignorant of the development of the Baroque there, however, both because many works are unsigned or otherwise poorly attributed and because earthquakes (such as the one that damaged Cuzco in 1650) destroyed the work of early Baroque artists. Once the Baroque was established there after 1650, however, informal workshops of Baroque painters coalesced in regional capitals.

      Quito emerged as the most esteemed regional artistic centre in the Spanish American world. Among the important painters was Miguel de Santiago, a powerful mestizo artist who emulated such Spanish masters as Bartolomé Murillo (Murillo, Bartolomé Esteban) in his portrayal of the Immaculate Conception. Of special interest are his secular allegorical depictions of subjects such as the four seasons. His successor, Nicolás Javier de Goríbar (1665–1740), created portrait cycles of full-length standing prophets as well as round medallions containing half-length kings of Judah. In sculpture the mestizo artist Bernardo de Legarda stands at the pinnacle of the Quito school. Beginning in 1734 Legarda carved masterful sculptures of the Virgin of the Apocalypse that reveal the spatial extension characteristic of Baroque sculpture from the period; because his twisting figures demanded more space than had previous sculptures, they could no longer be confined within a small niche of a retable. The deeply carved drapery of the figure in the cathedral at Popayán, Colombia, for example, has large folds that serve to emphasize her dynamic motion as she plunges her lightning bolt into the writhing serpent that symbolizes Satan. Legarda commanded a workshop of many assistants, which produced similar compositions of slightly lower quality.

      Santafé de Bogotá emerged as another centre of Baroque in Spanish South America. Gregorio Vásquez de Arce y Cevallos, the finest painter there in the second half of the 17th century, depicted a wide range of monumental figures in print-derived landscapes that he executed with a sure hand in perspective, modeling, anatomy, and colour. In Potosí (now in Bolivia) in the late 17th century, Melchor Pérez de Holguín painted fluid renderings of biblical personalities and strikingly captured their individual emotional states.

 In Brazil the end of the Baroque period is represented by the work of the sculptor and architect Antônio Francisco Lisboa, known as Aleijadinho (Portuguese: “Little Cripple”), the son of a Portuguese architect and an African woman. Aleijadinho built a series of small square structures along the zigzag path up to the church of Bom Jesús de Matozinhos (begun 1757) in Congonhas do Campo. Inside each room he re-created scenes from the Passion of Christ in freestanding life-size polychrome wooden statues. Moving up to the church itself, he placed twisting soapstone figures of biblical prophets whose gestures reflect the turns of the double staircase leading to the top terrace. Their heavy features and faceted planes recall the wood-carving traditions of African sculpture.

      Most of the time, Baroque art in Latin America served the interests of the church. However, beginning in the late Baroque, portrait painting depicting local nobility became a significant genre, particularly in works by the brothers Nicolás and Juan Rodríguez Juárez. This genre, based on European models, developed distinct tropes. For example, in Nicolás's half-length portrait of the 2nd duke of Albuquerque (1693), he emphasized the status of the sitter by featuring the duke's coat of arms in the upper-right corner of the painting and by adding a short inscription below, outside the painted frame. His younger brother, Juan, also emphasized rank in works such as a full-length portrait of the viceroy, the duke of Linares (1723), in which the sitter's coat of arms is worked illusionistically into the curtain design, while a long inscription appears incised on the pedestal base of a column.

Latin American themes
      While religious themes and some portraiture dominated officially commissioned Baroque art in Latin America, native-born artists also began to adapt the lessons of the Baroque to reflect distinctly Latin American interests and themes. As Latin American ties to Europe became less immediate, this was perhaps connected to the artists' increasing sense of a distinctly Latin American identity.

      In Cuzco, Peru, an anonymous but probably native artist known as the Santa Ana Master incorporated the drama of Rubens into paintings commemorating actual Latin American rituals. His Baroque paintings have the sweep and lively colour typical of European art from the period, yet they depict what may be the first contemporary scenes of Latin American events, such as a Corpus Christi procession.

      Paintings of viceregal processions became popular in the late Baroque. A notable work in the genre is Villalpando's painting (1695) of the central square of Mexico City. Also striking is Pérez de Holguín's painting of 1716 showing the silver-mining centre of Potosí, on the occasion of the visit of the archbishop Rubio Morcillo de Auñón. In both artists' work the architecture of the city is carefully rendered, using an exaggerated one-point perspective. On the horizon in the background rise distinctive mountains associated with each city: the snow-capped volcanoes of Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl in the former and the silver mountain of Potosí in the latter.

      Moments from Latin American history also became popular subjects during this period. For example, in the 1690s the Afro-Mexican artist Juan Correa (an associate of Villalpando) rendered on a decorative folding screen—a format introduced through Mexico's trade with Japan—the meeting of Cortés and Montezuma. In this highly imaginative image, Montezuma is dressed in the feather headdress that had become the standard iconography for the allegorical figures of the American continent. (This style of dress was derived from illustrations in a book by the 16th-century Hessian soldier Hans Staden, who had escaped from captivity among the Tupinambá of Brazil.) In Correa's version of the historic meeting, he included all the symbols of pomp associated with Rubens's depictions of the meeting of European monarchs. This interest in Latin American themes gained momentum as Latin America moved toward independence.

The Mestizo style
      During the late Baroque era, artists in provincial areas in the Spanish viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru produced carved church facades and interiors that, while displaying the overall richness of colour and relief texture typical of Baroque art in the metropolitan centres, had a two-dimensional quality that many call Mestizo, a term referring to the culturally mixed ancestry of the inherited styles. The characteristic two-level relief of the carvings depends less on sculptural modeling than on drilling into the surface to create a screenlike effect. Similarly dense bilevel relief designs had been created in pre-Columbian stone- and wood-carving techniques, such as those of the Mixteca-Puebla style of Mexico and the Tiwanaku-Huari style of Bolivia and Peru. The areas producing Mestizo-style churches—the southern Peruvian highlands and Alto Perú (now Bolivia), southern and western Mexico, and Guatemala—were centres of high pre-Columbian civilizations and still contained a largely indigenous or mixed Spanish-Indian population, and so the Mestizo style reflected their traditions more successfully than a literally copied version of the European Baroque.

 The earliest appearance of the Mestizo style seems to have been in Arequipa, in a valley surrounded by the southern mountains of Peru and situated between strong pre-Columbian centres near Nazca and Lake Titicaca. Above the side door of the Jesuit church of La Compañía stands a relief (1654) of Santiago Matamoros (“Santiago the Moor Slayer”)—clearly executed from the enlargement of a tiny print. The relief changes in scale from one section to another and retains a flat quality. In alluding to the Reconquista of Spain and the expulsion of the Moors, the image was mentally and sometimes literally transferred to the conquest of the Indians. On La Compañía's front facade (1698), all the surfaces except for the columns were densely decorated with flat floral designs and half-figure Atlantean supports that are derived primarily from European woodblock book decorations.

 The painted and gilt stuccowork in southern Mexico during this period, especially that found in the states of Puebla and Oaxaca, have also been described as Mestizo style. The Rosary Chapel of Santo Domingo de Puebla (finished 1690) and the redecorated interior church of Santo Domingo de Oaxaca (late 1600s) both have stuccowork that conveys a skillful sense of sculptural movement and curves. Gilt paint and touches of other colours highlight the white relief. Exterior surfaces throughout Puebla, from domes to courtyards, were enriched by brilliantly coloured glazed tiles—derived from the Moorish tradition—that were painted in intricate floral and geometric motifs. Another excellent example of the use of these techniques covers the vaults, domes, and vertical walls of the parish church of Santa María Tonantzintla (early 18th century), near Puebla.

Ultrabaroque
      The most exuberant anticlassical style coming after the Baroque in Latin America is often mistakenly called the Mexican Churrigueresque (for the Spanish Churriguera family of retable designers) but is preferably referred to as the Ultrabaroque. Originating as a form of architectural decoration in southern Spain, the style is characterized by dense, elaborate decoration, and it eventually spread to sculpture and furniture carving.

 The style was introduced by Jerónimo de Balbás of Seville in Mexico, where it had its greatest flowering. Balbás designed a retable for the high altar of the Seville Sagrario in 1706. He went to Mexico in 1717 and designed a high altar known as the Retablo de los Reyes in a similar manner for the Metropolitan Cathedral in Mexico City. In this project he completely omitted the use of columns, replacing them with upward-flaring pedestals known as estípites, a form that defined the architecture and sculpture of the Ultrabaroque. These estípites support an irregular-sized pile of horizontal blocks that are linked by scrolls; these devices destroy any expression of weight being transferred fluidly from above to below. The sources of these designs may well be the still-surviving Mannerist woodcuts bordering the title pages of so many books, but the geometric forms—though they are much heavier—are also reminiscent of complicated floral designs of contemporary French Rococo wall surfaces. (French trends began to influence Spanish artistic styles after a royal succession placed a French Bourbon on the Spanish throne in 1700.)

      While Balbás used projecting estípites to create a sense of active space within the deeply curved half-dome of the Retablo de los Reyes, Mexican-born designers influenced by Balbás's design preferred to flatten the facades and align the estípites, creating less-dynamic works. Balbás's Mexican followers, such as Lorenzo Rodríguez in his Sagrario Cathedral (1749–68), typically flattened the deep curves of the Retablo de los Reyes and arranged their estípites projecting from a flat plane. They also created a stronger horizontal division between the first and second stories of the retable's facade, thus transforming Balbás's Spanish Ultrabaroque into the Mexican Ultrabaroque. The wealthy mining districts in north-central Mexico in the 18th century encouraged a building frenzy. In that area an early heavy version of the estípite appears on the facade of La Compañía (now La Trinidad) in Guanajuato in 1747; designed by Felipe Ureña, it is perhaps the earliest exterior expression of this feature.

      The heavy Ultrabaroque style quickly gave way in Latin America to the Rococo style, which was then popular in Europe. Characterized by lightness, elegance, and an abundance of curvilinear, natural forms, the Rococo was in many ways a reaction against the grandiose, rigidly symmetrical Baroque.

      The Viceroyalty of New Spain accumulated considerable wealth during the 18th century, especially from mining in north-central Mexico, which allowed a building boom. There, in the next generation, the Spanish commissioned retables in the Rococo style. These retables began to have more-delicate columns, which sometimes were replaced by niche-pilasters, such as those on retables (1758) by Balbás's son Isidoro Vincente in Santa Prisca y San Sebastián, Taxco, and in the portal (1768) attributed to the Mexican sculptor Pedro Huizar on the Santos José y Miguel de Aguayo mission church near San Antonio (now in Texas, U.S.). Huizar's quatrefoil baptistery window on the side of the church has asymmetrical framing with vegetative themes that bear a more than superficial resemblance to the frames on French Rococo mirrors. In such examples Latin American Rococo retable designs, though lighter than the Mexican Ultrabaroque style, tended to overwhelm the paintings and sculptures that in theory they framed or supported.

      Less commonly, Latin American interiors from this period reflected an intimacy and delicacy more typical of the European Rococo style. For example, the interior of Santa Rosa de Viterbo in Querétaro, Mexico, finished in 1752, has gilded wood oval frames that contain painted busts of saints on the great choir screen. On a side retable the simulated drapery, appearing to be pulled back by putti, makes a canopy over angled glass cases holding statues of saints. In spite of the considerable height of the vaulted interior, these details make its scale seem small, unlike the often dizzying height of Ultrabaroque retables.

      Latin American artists also extended the Rococo spirit to freestanding sculpture. In Santafé de Bogotá, which in 1717 became the capital of an independent Viceroyalty of New Granada, polychrome wooden sculpture was executed by its most dynamic creator, Pedro Laborio. The dramatic sway he gave his figures makes them appear to be in a dance; in St. Joseph and the Child Virgin Mary (1746), for example, he depicted a charming twisting interplay between St. Joseph and the child Virgin Mary that unites these two independent sculptures. Another freestanding Virgin Mary—The Virgin Mary of the Red Stockings (undated) by Bernardo de Legarda—was carved as a nude and given a lifelike lacquer shine. The figure was intended to be dressed, but it was not a mere mannequin like most such dressed figures at the time, which had only their heads and hands naturalistically rendered.

      The Rococo doll-like sculpture that was standard in Europe in the 18th century was best executed in Latin America by the Quito school. For example, Manuel Chil, an Indian artist whose nickname, Caspicara, referred to his pockmarked face, sculpted an infant Christ child covered with the soft pink-toned encarnación that epitomizes the Rococo; the work looks like a three-dimensional detail out of a painting by the French Rococo master François Boucher (Boucher, François). Guatemala filled a parallel role to Quito as the sculptural centre for the Viceroyalty of New Spain. Sculptors of all backgrounds produced fine late Baroque and Rococo work in Guatemala during this period, although it has not yet been documented.

      In addition to sculpture, the paintings of the Quito school displayed Rococo intimacy. Manuel Samaniego portrayed the Virgin as a good shepherdess in peasant costume and Joseph as a worker with his clothes unbuttoned and loose. These aspects are both found in his painting of a full scene (late 18th century) depicting Joseph's workshop, in which Joseph practices carpentry while Mary spins with the help of their young son, Jesus, who rolls the yarn; common people would instantly recognize and identify with these daily activities. Samaniego achieved small scale through the figures' slightly childlike proportions and also through their small size in relation to a building within a limited landscape.

      The living presence of the Inca culture could be found in 18th-century Cuzco in painted wooden beakers, folk weavings, and portraits of indigenous dignitaries. (Indeed, the Tupac Amaru (Tupac Amaru II) rebellion of 1780 reveals the continuing power of the Inca aristocracy.) Despite such strong Inca traditions, 18th-century Cuzco painting embodied many of the stylistic features of the European Rococo: small scale, soft colours, doll-like features, and a tender, intimate overall expression. However, the Inca preference for flattened design reasserts itself in the gold leaf stenciled on the surface, which does not follow the drapery's contours and thereby forces the viewer to see it as a surface pattern on the canvas. In these works the Virgin Mary is often dressed in Spanish peasant costume, further reinforcing the informal touch typical of the Rococo.

      The School of Ouro Preto, in the rich mining district of central Brazil, created 18th-century churches with wooden ceilings that were flat at the top, and painters such as Antonio Rodrigues Belo and Manuel da Costa Ataíde transformed these ceilings into illusionistic skies. Reminiscent of the ceiling paintings by Giambattista Tiepolo (Tiepolo, Giovanni Battista) in Italy and Bavaria at that time, their delicate figures and light colours are clearly Rococo.

Latin American art on the eve of independence

Latin American themes
      At the turn of the 19th century, while stiff and haughty portraits of aristocrats were still commissioned, the genre of self-portraits by native-born painters also emerged, leading to works that reveal a more informal, human quality. A fine example of this tradition is a pastel (an informal, spontaneous medium much favoured by Rococo artists) self-portrait by José Luis Rodríguez de Alconedo from 1810. He depicted himself as a mestizo, with tousled hair and an open-necked shirt. His torso, in half-length, is turned in a different direction from his head, which looks spontaneously out at the viewer. This posture, in combination with his disheveled dress, captures an informality much desired by Rococo artists, but it also reflects his identity as a Mexican. Soon after painting this self-portrait, he died in the war for independence.

      Signaling their willingness to go beyond the traditional commissions provided by the church and the government, Latin American painters increasingly created scenes of daily life in New Spain in its half-century before independence. In paintings created to document the viceroys' travels, these artists began to depict actual Latin American landscapes in the background, rather than idealized backdrops. Other works began to depict pure landscape and require no narrative pretext—whether religious or political—as justification. Artists such as Antonio Pérez de Aguilar also began to depict common forms of earthenware and blue-and-white majolica in their bodegones (kitchen still lifes). The land and daily life of Latin America were thus increasingly becoming legitimate subject matter.

      One of the more interesting genres to emerge from the period was the portrait that examined ethnic “types.” About 1725 Juan Rodríguez Juárez had created the first documented set of so-called “caste paintings,” which used 16 different scenes to show the effects of the intermarriages of indigenous people, enslaved Africans, and Europeans. This genre gained popularity on the eve of independence, when the different strata of colonial society were depicted in several series called castas created by artists who often chose to remain anonymous. The paintings represent the intermarriage of different “races” and assign terms to refer to each “caste,” or variety of mixture. Colonial legal restrictions on intermarriage are mocked in these paintings, which show people ignoring the law. The more ethnically mixed couples produce offspring with ironic names like “throwback” and “hanging in the air”; these motley families behave poorly and live in humble surroundings. One might expect the Spaniards, who were after all still the ruling class, to be presented in a dignified manner, yet “pure” Africans and Indians are also depicted as beautifully dressed and decorous. Castas often labeled the local products and animals, further highlighting the exoticness of the scene. Even though these households are more allegorical than historical, their painted backdrops, clothing, and lifestyles are believable renderings of 18th-century colonial life.

 Latin American identity—a reality deeply enmeshed with such cultural and ethnicity issues—was further explored by contemporary artists in South America on the eve of independence. A South American variant on castas appeared in Quito in 1783, when Vicente Albán created idealized portraits of indigenous and Latin American-born Spanish people in their typical costume. In his set of six paintings titled Fruits of Ecuador, both people and fruits are labeled. Similarly, about 1790–1800 an anonymous artist from Bolivia rendered pairs of different ethnic groups and social classes in their distinctive indigenous dress from the new Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata (Río de la Plata, Viceroyalty of the) (which had been formed in 1776 to include what is now Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Argentina). This interest in Latin American culture would be taken up by the costumbristas in the period after independence (see costumbrismo).

State-sponsored art and Neoclassicism
      As colonial Latin America thus began to develop its own traditions and culture, the Spanish and Portuguese became increasingly estranged from their colonies. In order to remedy this situation and to learn about his realm and document the range of animals, plants, landscapes, and humans in the empire, the Spanish king Charles III commissioned explorations by Spaniards and other Europeans. The first such exploration was the Botanical Expedition in New Granada (now Colombia) under the direction of Celestino Mutis (Mutis, José) from 1784 to 1817. This was followed by Antonio del Río's archaeological expedition to Mayan and other pre-Columbian ruins in Mexico from 1786 to 1787. Alejandro Malaspina sailed up the western coast of North America from 1789 to 1794. Finally, Alexander von Humboldt (Humboldt, Alexander von), a German naturalist and explorer, commanded the most extensive expedition, exploring all the Americas between 1799 and 1804. Draftsmen accompanying these expeditions made many illustrations highlighting the unique qualities of Spain's soon-to-be independent colonial empire.

      Spain attempted to discipline the increasingly independent, riotous colonial American arts by establishing the Royal Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City in 1783. The king sent Spanish artists to be the instructors of each area: architecture, sculpture, medal casting, and various types of painting. The first director of the academy was the Spaniard Antonio Gil, a medal designer who influenced the creation of coinage in Mexico. The painting instructor was Rafael Ximeno y Planes, best known for his airy, pale murals, including one in the dome of Mexico City Cathedral (now destroyed) and one in the chapel of the School of Mines illustrating the legendary appearance of the Virgin of Guadalupe to an Indian convert now canonized as St. Juan Diego.

 The Neoclassical (Classicism and Neoclassicism) style, which combined conscious Greco-Roman references with a return to the calmer, balanced, and more-rational forms of antiquity, became popular among Iberian academics in the period before the wars of independence; its clear connection to European history was no doubt appealing to Iberian rulers seeking to reassert their presence in the colonies. The most impressive Neoclassical artist associated with the academy in Mexico City was Manuel Tolsá, who at first taught sculpture and later served as the second director of the academy. Tolsá's major surviving sculpture is the equestrian bronze statue of Spain's King Charles IV, once situated in the central square of Mexico City. This larger-than-life-size Neoclassical work, cast in 1803 in a size not equaled in the art of the colonial period, conveys the command and benevolence of the king, who looks like the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius in his toga. Similarly Neoclassical is Tolsá's central retable in Puebla Cathedral, which is a clear, perfectly circular construction supported by Doric columns (on which are seated a number of polychrome wooden angels).

      In the Mexican mining state of Guanajuato at the turn of the 19th century, the architect Francisco Eduardo Tresguerras, born in Mexico and self-educated from architectural books, proved to be also a painter of considerable talent. His self-portrait recalls that of his Spanish contemporary Francisco de Goya (Goya, Francisco de) in its severe coloration, absence of background, and unflattering realism. In addition to designing the church of El Carmen for Celaya, his birthplace, Tresguerras painted the murals for one of its side chapels; these display geometric stylization and composition rendered in muted primary colours.

      About this time (1808–21), while Portugal itself was occupied by Napoleonic troops, the Portuguese moved the royal family and court to their colony in Brazil. In 1816 the monarchy brought over a group of French academicians for an artistic mission to make Rio de Janeiro an appropriate capital. Two such imports were the brothers Auguste-Marie and Nicolas-Antoine Taunay, each of whom had a separate task: Auguste-Marie created Neoclassical busts of the emperor and generals—a format from the Roman tradition—while Nicolas made Neoclassical oil paintings of Rio, with an emphasis on realistic details and the New World's great expanse of space. Nicolas also rendered impressive history paintings, depicting moments such as the arrival of the princess Leopoldina from Europe. In this and other paintings by academic artists of the period, human figures assume their accurate scale in relationship to their surroundings, rather than a dramatizing heroic proportion. These works were intended to reflect the stability and order imposed on the world by “enlightened” European rulers.

      Such attempts to establish colonial control over the Spanish and Portuguese Americas were no longer effective, however—in the arts or otherwise—and so, at the beginning of the 19th century, Latin America moved toward independence.

Postindependence, c. 1820–the present
      At the turn of the 19th century, a variety of conditions in Spanish and Portuguese America inspired fights for independence. In the second half of the 18th century, the Spanish Bourbon kings had increasingly decentralized the governance of the colonies, which brought a new “creole” class (people of Spanish descent born in the Americas) to power; these Latin Americans felt increasingly capable of governing themselves. At the same time, ethnic and cultural mixing had advanced to a point at which a large segment of society was of mixed ancestry, and these citizens increasingly demanded more opportunities than those afforded them in the various colonial arrangements. These conditions, in combination with the collapse of the monarchies brought on by Napoleon's invasion of Spain and Portugal in 1807–08, set the stage for wars of independence in Latin America. Between 1808 and 1826 all of Spanish and Portuguese America—except Cuba and Puerto Rico—became free from Iberian rule. In the years after liberation, Latin American artists would explore both their own indigenous traditions and those inherited from Europe, eventually creating an influential and distinctive Latin American art.

c. 1820–c. 1900
      In the 18th century the monarchies had imposed Neoclassicism on their main Latin American colonies in order to connect them to Europe and support the ruling establishment. After the wars of independence, however, this relationship became complicated. Neoclassicism continued to be propagated by some government-run academies, although the style was often used to depict indigenous themes.

      For example, the Spaniards who had run the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City had either died or returned to their native land during the war of independence. The academy was finally left in the charge of Manuel Tolsá's star pupil, Pedro Patiño Ixtolinque, whose mother's family name (Ixtolinque) reveals his indigenous heritage. His works include América (1830), a Neoclassical marble allegorical female figure, which he rendered with the same plumed Tupinambá headdress mentioned earlier but with European rather than Indian features. (Ultimately, the academy he headed had to close for lack of financial support from the state, which was then involved in numerous civil skirmishes.)

 The Neoclassical style continued to be used in some major government commissions. Mexican dictator General Porfirio Díaz (Díaz, Porfirio) commissioned Mexican artists to create a monument dedicated to Aztec emperors (erected in 1887). Within this monument the top statue, representing the last Aztec emperor, Cuauhtémoc, is placed on a base recalling both the architecture of Mitla and a rusticated Roman order. This heroic figure, raising a spear, wears a togalike cloak and a panache of feathers horizontally along his skull, like an Etruscan or Trojan warrior. While both items of dress are derived from the Codex Mendoza, their placement and style suggest Classical, not indigenous, traditions. Low-relief bronze plaques by different sculptors were inserted into the base to represent historical scenes of the time of the conquest, from the arrival of the Spaniards to the torture of Cuauhtémoc. Similarly, the Catalan artist Manuel Vilar inaugurated an interest in indigenous themes in his sculptures of Indian leaders such as Tlahuicol, whom he portrayed in plaster in 1851, using an overly muscular style reminiscent of the Hellenistic Greek Laocoön group. Once again, although the subject was pre-Columbian, the technique was Neoclassical.

      Yet in the 16 new republics formed after the wars of independence, self-taught painters, many of whom are anonymous, commemorated their heroes and the great events of their recent history in a simplified “popular” Neoclassical style, flatter and cruder than academic Neoclassicism. These artists rendered historical scenes such as battles from a normal human vantage point, with little rhetorical emphasis through either size or lighting. In accordance with Neoclassical tenets, figures in such scenes were small and subordinate to the dominant horizontals of the land and the architecture; lighting was usually even, almost flat; and the depiction of details was realistic, often with a clearly recognizable local character. In these works human faces had recognizable portrait details, and clothing was accurate to the period. Natural environments were often more generalized (unless they were in fact the subject matter).

      The Salas family of Ecuador exemplified such popular Neoclassicism in their work. Each of these artists presented a sharp, clear-eyed view of their homeland, with backgrounds abstractly simplified to direct the viewer's attention only to their human subjects. In 1829 the Salas patriarch, Antonio, took time away from his usual subject matter (saints) to paint the bust of the liberator Simón Bolívar in sharp, linear detail against a neutral background. His son Rafael depicted the general Mariano Castillo standing in his gilt-braided black military uniform against a golden background. Rafael's older half-brother, Ramón Salas, created a series of crisply linear watercolours depicting the common people of Ecuador, showing individuals such as an indigenous water carrier.

      In the 1820s José Gil de Castro, known as “the Mulatto,” rendered the heroes of Peruvian independence in a precise but boldly flattened and brightly coloured documentary style with little emotional expression. These works often reflect the colonial portrait formula of including a shield with documentary information in the lower corner of the painting. Mexican folk painters in regional centres of the 19th century also used this hard-edged and emotionally cold Neoclassical technique to portray the local bourgeoisie, sometimes in straight portraits, as seen in the work of José María Estrada of Guadalajara in the first half of the century, and sometimes in ex-votos (small religious paintings illustrating miracles), as seen in the work of Hermenegildo Bustos of Guanajuato in the second half of the century.

      In Europe at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries, Romanticism influenced many forms of expression and thought. Characterized by an emphasis on the subjective and irrational, Romanticism rejected the order and harmony of Classicism and Neoclassicism and often focused on “exotic” foreign lands. In the visual arts, this frequently meant using dramatic, often lush effects of light and colour to portray exotic scenes or powerful landscapes.

Foreign travelers
      The Romantic style was first introduced into Latin America by foreign travelers, who were eager to see for themselves the distant lands that had captured world attention by breaking away from their weakened colonial European masters after the Napoleonic wars. Bavarian artist Johann Moritz Rugendas began his South American journey in Brazil (1821–23). From 1831 to 1834 he lived in Mexico, and he then settled in Chile from 1834 to 1845, when he also painted in Argentina and Peru. Rugendas was unique in moving from one country to another but similar to other European artists in his search for the striking, the asymmetrical, the sublime, and the beautiful in Latin America. In addition, his painterly brushstroke, dynamic composition, and bright colours strongly recall the Romantic style that was then popular in European painting, where it was best exemplified by his acquaintance the French painter Eugène Delacroix (Delacroix, Eugène). Rugendas's sketchy, painterly style embodies the true spirit of the Romantic movement most clearly in his small oil sketches in preparation for major canvases, few of which were executed.

      Many foreign artists transmitted the beauty, excitement, and distinctiveness of the newly independent countries to European audiences hungry for Romantic imagery. Jean-Baptiste Debret, a member of the French artistic mission to Brazil in 1816, drew sketches of a variety of Brazilians, which he published in Paris as lithographs from 1834 to 1839. Other foreign artists in Latin America included Daniel Egerton, an Englishman in Mexico who rendered dramatic landscapes in the British Romantic tradition; Karl Nebel, a German who showed—primarily through his lithographs—the variety of social and ethnic populations across Mexico; Edward Mark, an English foreign-service officer stationed in Colombia, whose amateur watercolours render not only landscapes and people but also flora and fauna; Frederic Edwin Church (Church, Frederic Edwin), an American painter of the Hudson River school who went to Ecuador to document the land and by chance witnessed the dramatic eruption of the volcano Cotopaxi; and Martin Johnson Heade, an American landscape painter who traveled to Brazil and Jamaica to study hummingbirds and orchids and ended up revealing a microcosm of the tropics in his paintings. In addition to educating Europeans regarding aspects of Latin American culture, such work was also important to native-born Latin Americans. In fact, the government-sponsored Comisión Corográfica in New Granada continued the work of Mark in its geographic survey of 1850–59, when several artists built upon his example and rendered the great variety of people, landscapes, flora, and fauna of what is now Colombia.

Costumbristas (costumbrismo)
      The native-born artists who followed this Romantic direction were called costumbristas, a Spanish word meaning people who document local customs. While their styles were not always strictly Romantic—indeed, the range of styles was broad—they shared the Romantics' interest in the seeming exoticism of Latin American cultures and landscapes. These artists were typically wellborn, often educated in Europe (especially Paris), and cosmopolitan. They often experienced frequent changes of residence, sometimes caused by political instability. As a result, they sought out the unusual and unique scenes of their home countries, but they viewed these from a cultural distance, more as a European might rather than as a native. Unlike foreign travelers, however, these Latin American artists wished to examine the unique qualities of their home countries, possibly to provide a clearer sense of their national identity in the postindependence period.

      This interest in capturing the character of a specific region was shared by Prilidiano Pueyrredón, the son of one of the first presidents of the Argentine republic, who went to Paris with his family in political exile. He may have learned painting in the academy in Rio de Janeiro, but he made architecture his career after studying at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Successful in both arts, he turned solely to painting after 1860, making portraits and genre scenes of ordinary life in Argentina. In works such as his panoramic A Rest in the Country (c. 1860), he effectively captured the enormous flat expanse of the Pampas, the area that expanded to become the powerful nation of Argentina.

      Costumbristas who did not have the advantage of European study learned from the academic traditions in their native lands. Ramón Salas's younger cofounder of the Ecuadorian academy, Joaquín Pinto, changed his focus in the late 19th century when he began to document the Indian population and the animals and landscapes of his rich homeland. Agustín Arrieta, a local painter in Puebla, Mexico, applied realistic techniques to show the beautiful interiors of his home city, which was renowned for its brightly painted tiles and ceramics. He realistically rendered the abundance of fruits and flowers in Puebla kitchens along with the women who prepared them and the black or Afro-Peruvian vendors who supplied them. Although his technique remained Neoclassical in some ways, his colours expressed a lushness and dazzling beauty reminiscent of Romanticism. Importantly, his subjects were not great men but rather everyday people of all social classes.

      In the mid- to late 19th century, Latin American academies sought a new official style. In contrast to the severe Neoclassicism of the early 19th century, which had idealized and simplified its subjects, the mid-century academic style—sometimes known as “academic realism”—was more strongly realistic, with an emphasis on details. Preferred subjects included portraits of leading citizens, historical depictions of the military events that led to the formation of the new nations, and reconstructions of biblical scenes.

      General López de Santa Anna (Santa Anna, Antonio López de), the occasional president but longtime strongman of Mexico, favoured Europeans when he reopened the National Academy of San Carlos in 1843, acquiring from Spain and Italy a distinguished but conservative faculty that propagated Realism. (Ironically, many postindependence leaders looked down upon native Latin American artists and preferred to award commissions and give teaching positions to Europeans.) Pelegrín Clavé, a Catalan painter who had learned his art in Rome from the Nazarene painters, was the head of the revived academy. He painted some landscapes, but his most arresting subjects were the intellectual elite of Mexico City. The Italian Eugenio Landesio was hired to teach landscape painting. His works show a fascination with the distinctive local scene, but he rendered them in pastel colours, using focused lighting effects.

      Several academic painters in Mexico attempted to portray the culture of the Aztecs and the story of the conquest through realistic depictions of settings inhabited by indigenous people. These works were clearly based on live Indian models who posed in the studio and on costumes the artists saw in painted manuscripts from the time of the conquest. In London Lord Kingsborough published these works as lithographic copies between 1831 and 1848. Félix Parra also painted historical scenes of the conquest, empathizing with the suffering of the indigenous people. In The Discovery of Pulque (1869), José Obregón adapted the architecture represented in pre-Columbian Mixtec codices, but he misread the indigenous cross-sectioned conceptualization of temples, interpreting it as a naturalistic design for a throne. Obregón and his academic colleagues could not understand that the pre-Columbian codex painter had not intended to represent the appearance of actual architecture but rather aimed to capture its conceptual idea.

      In South America some academic artists chose to paint subjects of their Indian past in the realistic style. One painting, The Indian Potter (1855) by the Peruvian Francisco Laso, shows an indigenous man wearing an embroidered textile sash and carrying an effigy pottery jar clearly in the Moche style of the 5th century. Rodolfo Amoêdo of Brazil studied painting first in the Rio Academy; he then won a scholarship in Paris and returned in 1890 to execute major paintings in public halls. His female nude figure reclining in a tropical rainforest is an allegory of the town of Marabá in the Amazon basin. The painting's large size, glistening oil paint, and depiction of warm flesh set against jungle vegetation sensuously capture the subject. Amoêdo's colleague José Ferrez de Almeida, Jr., painted much more believable scenes of rural life. In Venezuela a strongly supported academic tradition was established by Martín Tovar y Tovar, who received numerous government commissions. En route to Paris in 1885 to execute some of them, he met the young Arturo Michelena, who became his protégé. Michelena, son of a painter, realized many fine atmospheric depictions of Venezuelan interiors, both historic and contemporary, before he died at age 35.

      Within this era of Realism, two excellent artists surpassed the academic Realist tradition by making their subjects truly tangible and accessible. In this way their work was allied with that of mid-19th-century Realist artists in Europe, such as Gustave Courbet (Courbet, Gustave), who swept aside sentimentality and instead emphasized the physical nature of the objects or individuals presented. Juan Manuel Blanes of Uruguay documented historical events and the gauchos in the open Pampas of the Southern Cone. He went beyond the sublime treatment of Romantic artists in the academy to focus more on the gauchos and their attitudes. Similarly, the Mexican José María Velasco achieved an arid realism focusing on the landscape itself, although his early paintings re-created Aztec hunting scenes and unexcavated views of the great pyramids at Teotihuacán. His extensive series in the 1890s of panoramic views of the Valley of Mexico, around Mexico City, profoundly analyze the structure of the landscape; his French contemporary Paul Cézanne (Cézanne, Paul) did the same with Mont Sainte-Victoire, in a more abstract, proto-Cubist style. In works such as View of the Valley of Mexico from the Hill of Santa Isabel (1877), which depicts the legendary founding of the Aztec capital, Velasco never attempted to create large, epic historical canvases; instead he relied on his own observation of the world he knew.

c. 1900–present
c. 1900–c. 1950

Modernismo (1890–1920)
      At the turn of the 20th century, many Latin American artists began to move away from realistic styles and to develop looser, more spontaneous techniques that expressed greater emotion. Scholars applied the Spanish term Modernismo—referring to a Hispanic literary movement favouring poetic, innovative metaphors and sensuous imagery over realistic description—to the expressive works of art created by Latin American artists from the period. This highly aesthetic art utilized exaggerated line and colour and placed less importance on subject matter than on the formal design by which it was rendered. In many regards it turned away from a conscious emphasis on a Latin American identity and looked inward to the emotions and creativity of the artists.

      Much Modernismo encompassed the work of artists inspired directly by Impressionism, which dated to late 19th-century France. Impressionist painters employed innovative techniques to record the optical sensation of light on the eye; their canvases were composed of separate brushstrokes of colourful pigments that, when placed next to those of complementary colours on the canvas, created visual vibrations. Camille Pissarro (Pissarro, Camille), a founding member of the Impressionists in Paris, grew up on St. Thomas in the then Danish West Indies. He pursued a looser realistic technique of landscape painting before moving to Paris in 1855. Another Caribbean painter, Francisco Oller of Puerto Rico, studied in France for a time with Courbet, the master of Realism; later he also turned to Impressionism. A Mexican lawyer, Joaquín Clausell, also began to pursue Impressionism while in Europe in the 1890s. Venezuela felt the impact of Impressionism, first from the academic Emilio Boggio and then from his pupil Armando Reverón, who reduced his ephemeral images to shimmering pale colours on a white ground of raw canvas.

      By the beginning of the 20th century, the Impressionist technique had become so accepted in Latin America that it was used by stylish society painters, such as the Peruvian artists Carlos Baca-Flor and Teófilo Castillo. In his paintings, such as the small oil-on-board Couple (1900), Baca-Flor built up a heavy impasto of contrasting bright and dark pigments. Castillo's subject matter depicted the colonial legacy. In Burial of St. Rose of Lima (1918), for example, his passionate, disconnected brushstrokes render the kneeling indigenous mother in strong colours in the foreground, while pale, insubstantial smoke from incense rises in the procession behind her.

      Many other early 20th-century Latin American artists practiced a version of the bright colour and sketchiness of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. Inspired by Spanish painters such as Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida (Sorolla y Bastida, Joaquín), who used this style to create scintillating scenes focusing on the regional variety of Spain, Latin American artists created art that remained more figurative than its European counterpart. Latin American artists who had studied in Europe, such as the Cuban painter Leopoldo Romañach, returned to their countries and applied modified versions of Impressionist techniques to local subjects.

      European Expressionism, a broadly defined movement that attempted to convey emotional states through exaggeration and distortion, also influenced Latin American Modernismo. The Argentine Fernando Fader studied in Germany, where Expressionist artists used intensified colour contrasts and visible brushstrokes. Fader used these techniques to depict the Argentine scene in the first decades of the century, depicting mainly landscapes but also intimate interiors and portraits charged with vibrant emotion. Expressionism also characterized the turn-of-the-century work of Andrés de Santamaría of Colombia, whose elongated figures were formed with a heavy impasto of disturbing colours. Also at the beginning of the century, Julio Ruelas, a Mexican graphic artist, created etched images depicting his own tormented-looking face. He incorporated black, twisted lines and swirling patterns similar to those used by his more abstract Norwegian contemporary Edvard Munch (Munch, Edvard).

Cubism to Formalism
 Many Latin American artists were also receptive to the European avant-garde style of Cubism, which flattened and twisted forms and presented them from multiple angles. In 1907 the Mexican government awarded artist Diego Rivera (Rivera, Diego) a scholarship to study in Europe. He ended up in Paris, where he associated with the Cubist circle. Rivera's subject matter often included the abstracted portraits and still lifes favoured by Cubism's originators, Georges Braque (Braque, Georges) and Pablo Picasso, but he also kept abreast of developments in Mexico and incorporated these themes into his work. By 1915 Mexico was embroiled in a major social revolution as the indigenous followers of Emiliano Zapata (Zapata, Emiliano) fought for ownership of the land. In Rivera's Zapatista Landscape (1915), he arranged the abstracted elements of a typical Zapata follower—straw hat, rifle, and serape—in a flattened collage against a simplified snow-capped volcano, thus using Synthetic Cubist means to represent a Mexican reality.

      Areas of South America that had small indigenous populations (generally, areas east of the Andes and in the Southern Cone) were particularly receptive to avant-garde European art movements such as Cubism. The Argentine Emilio Pettoruti was adamantly committed to Cubism, which he had learned from the Spanish artist Juan Gris (Gris, Juan). When Pettoruti went home to Buenos Aires in 1924, he enthusiastically exhibited his Cubist paintings to an often unreceptive public.

      Joaquín Torres-García of Uruguay was well established in the modern art scene in Europe. In his canvases and wood boards, he flattened three-dimensional objects into evenly coloured geometric shapes separated by thick black lines. Torres-García's work reveals the same underlying structural unity as that of his Dutch mentor, Theo van Doesburg (Doesburg, Theo van), a leader of the international Constructivist movement and a founder of De Stijl (Stijl, De), although his paintings were not as abstract as van Doesburg's. As with many Latin American artists at the time, Torres-García was not a strict adherent to the dictums of a movement. For example, the Constructivist philosophy attempted to achieve a universal sense of truth and therefore rejected national traditions. In contrast, Torres-García attempted to reconnect with the traditions of his native continent: while still in Paris, he searched through natural history museums to find pre-Columbian motifs that he could incorporate into his art. In particular, the geometric designs from the Nazca in Peru and Tiwanaku in Bolivia appealed to his architectonic aesthetic.

      After he returned to Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1934, Torres-García created divinities with Inca names out of geometric pieces of wood that he hammered together. In a park there he also erected a stone sculpture entitled Cosmic Monument (1938), which clearly reflects the proportions of the ancient Bolivian Gateway of the Sun. The Torres-García Workshop, which he founded in Uruguay to perpetuate his theories, remained strong long after his death. His influence extended across the Río de la Plata to Argentina, where a more geometric, nonrepresentational art movement called Concrete Invention was established in 1945. Concrete Invention artists created shaped, rather than traditionally rectangular, canvases painted in bold, flat colours.

      In 1922 the virtues of the European avant-garde were dramatically proclaimed during Modern Art Week in São Paulo, Brazil, South America's most modern city. Although its organizers were interested in Cubism and other modern art movements of Europe, they were also concerned with finding Brazilian themes that would lead to a national art. Anita Malfatti and Emiliano di Caralcanti used emotional Fauvist (Fauvism) colours, applied with slashing brushstrokes, to create the portraits typical of their early years. The leading Latin American Cubist painter associated with them, Tarsila do Amaral, returned to Brazil from Paris in 1924 to see Brazil with fresh eyes and incorporate it into her art. She soon created abstracted, geometric images of tropical landscapes and formed geometrically rounded portraits of women in the tradition of Fernand Léger (Léger, Fernand), with whom she had worked in France. Later in that decade, Brazilian artists used the term cannibalism to describe their 20th-century art, referring to the fact that they devoured outside ideas and then digested them to make them part of their own identity. Brazilian art during the period was emphatically avant-garde, but it was also always distinctively Brazilian.

      The Cuban artist Amelia Peláez, who had studied with Leopoldo Romañach, went to Paris and adopted a style that recalled the later, more-ornamental Cubist work produced by Braque, as well as the work of Georges Rouault and Henri Matisse. Upon her return to Cuba in 1934, she painted canvases with bright, carefully balanced colours that were separated by strong black lines that looked almost like stained glass. She incorporated her world of wrought-iron screens, sunlit patios, and fruit-filled dining tables into her subject matter. While her art fit within the international mainstream, it celebrated Cuba in particular. Peláez was the first Cuban artist to introduce a flat, geometric Modernist vocabulary into the island, and she encouraged other artists to follow her lead.

Populist art and the Mexican mural renaissance
      After the turn of the 20th century, Latin American art reacted against the conservative establishment of the academies by agitating for political change. In Mexico young artists admired the work of José Guadalupe Posada (Posada, José Guadalupe), a populist artist who engraved illustrations for newspaper broadsides in a number of graphic media, often incorporating skeletons of political leaders and eulogizing them in verse as if they were dead but actually mocking their dependence on European styles and their indifference to the plight of the indigenous peasants and workers. His art, simplified and expressive in its use of graphic marks and dramatic composition, was widely seen and admired by Mexican workers and by students such as José Clemente Orozco at the nearby academy.

      On the eve of the Mexican Revolution (1910–20), indigenous artists reacted against the government-sponsored exhibition of European artists intended to celebrate the centenary of Mexico's declaration of independence. Although by this point many more opportunities had opened up for native-born Latin American artists, the exhibition revealed that the biases of the 19th-century elites had thus not totally abated. Doctor Atl (Atl, Doctor) (the pseudonym of Gerardo Murillo), who had trained as an artist in Europe, organized an independent exhibition of Mexican artists. In his own portraits and volcanic landscapes, he incorporated increasingly Expressionist colours, dynamic diagonal lines, and untraditional waxy pigments.

      In 1921, after the revolution, the new Mexican secretary of education, José Vasconcelos, invited many Mexican artists—including those on scholarship in Europe—to paint undecorated walls in government-owned buildings with inspirational themes that would be accessible to all citizens. The artists who accepted the commission converged on the National Preparatory School for boys in Mexico City, a colonial building with three stories of vaulted hallways facing an interior courtyard.

 Among those chosen was Diego Rivera (Rivera, Diego), who greatly admired Italian Renaissance muralists' use of fresco painting to communicate their faith on the walls of public buildings such as churches. On the stage of the National Preparatory School's theatre, Rivera used encaustic (a heated coloured wax) to create a scene with angels—many depicted with mestizo features—in a Renaissance style. In his next project, for the Ministry of Public Education headquarters in downtown Mexico City, he abandoned allegorical and religious associations, but he incorporated the geometrically simplified figures and strong gestures that he admired in the works of Giotto (Giotto di Bondone) and other early Renaissance artists. He also adopted their tradition of buon fresco (“true fresco”) technique by painting directly on freshly plastered wall. While his techniques drew from European art history, his subjects were drawn from pre-Columbian sources and from Mexican history and represented aspects of modern mestizo activities and indigenous ceremonies. Rivera's fresco decoration for the National Agricultural School (1924–27) in Chapingo, inspired by Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel, relates to the architectural lines of the colonial chapel. The main surfaces contain mostly allegorical scenes of Mother Earth and power from the gods that are conveyed via recognizable images, while the side panels illustrate the generalized abuses before the revolution, the battles of the revolution itself, and the reforms established after it was over.

 Orozco (Orozco, José Clemente), the second major figure of the Mexican mural renaissance, also used an Italianate allegory, of a blonde madonna, in his first work at the National Preparatory School. His later work at the school became angrier than Rivera's, especially in regard to his view of an evil and brutal ruling class, but his human compassion still shone through in examples such as a beautiful stairway mural in which he depicted a Franciscan friar attending to an emaciated native. Most muralists condemned Europeans as the destroyers of Mexican pre-Columbian civilizations, but Orozco could also supersede politics to perceive the universal commonality among all peoples. Although the modern viewer can see the connection between Orozco's painting style and Expressionist developments in 20th-century Europe, his contemporaries saw his style as a rejection of the abstract tendencies of European movements such as Cubism. Admirers throughout the Americas saw his work as a model path for art in their own countries.

      The youngest and most radical of the Mexican muralists was David Alfaro Siqueiros (Siqueiros, David Alfaro). Devoting much of his time to union organizing and pamphleteering, Siqueiros was a fervent communist; as a result, his paintings are filled with highly simplified portrayals of proletarian masses. He embraced new industrial technology in his work and applied commercial materials such as pyroxylin paint with air guns, which permitted large scale and rapid execution. Typical compositions by the artist featured dynamic, sweeping lines stretching from one surface to the other. He suggested movement through extreme foreshortening and “lines of force,” which he had first seen in the Futurist (Futurism) style popular when he visited Italy but which he applied on a monumental scale, adding panels and lath to surround the viewer. When his radical politics made him unwelcome in Mexico, Siqueiros was invited to work in the Southern Cone. In the Escuela México in Chillán, Chile, in 1941, Siqueiros executed a band of colours sweeping from one wall across the shaped ceiling to the other wall. The respective walls depict the histories of Mexico and Chile, using parallel images of indigenous rulers, local conquistadores, and heroic liberators.

 As a result of the Mexican mural renaissance of the 1920s and '30s, for the first time in its history, Latin American art can be said to have dramatically altered the history of Western art. It offered a relevant alternative to nonrepresentational abstraction after World War I by making figurative works that reflected society and its immediate concerns. Many artists also preferred not to be an indistinguishable part of an international movement. The enthusiasm of adherents to the mural movement spread rapidly. Carlos Mérida (Mérida, Carlos) of Guatemala had participated in early Mexican commissions, but he returned to his native country and produced tiled mural reliefs and prints reflecting indigenous topics such as the Popol Vuh legend of the Quiché Maya. Oswaldo Guayasamín of Ecuador, active until his death in 1999, transitioned from his 1930s Social Realist (Social Realism) canvases depicting struggling strikers to Expressionist canvases of earthquake-shattered landscapes, with jagged black shapes overlaying a molten core. In Brazil, Cândido Portinari, who painted simplified scenes of labourers, was given mural commissions such as the 1937 Ministry of Agriculture in Rio de Janeiro and the 1942 entrance lobby of the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., in which he used monumental figures to personalize the settlement of Brazil. In 1944 to 1946, on the wall of the church of São Francisco in Pampulha, Brazil, he applied blue-painted glazed tiles on the inside and outside of the modern architecture by Oscar Niemeyer (Niemeyer, Oscar), thereby recalling a colonial Portuguese means of decoration and also providing a functional, water-resistant surface.

      Perhaps in response to the success of these murals, local leaders linked to the Revolutionary Party in Mexico commissioned public monumental figurative sculpture. The heroic gestures and muscular style of these works were intended to galvanize Mexican workers to continue fighting for social justice. Public sculptures commemorating the heroes of the wars of independence and the mid-19th-century reform under Benito Juárez were also commissioned. Such grandiloquent rhetoric links much Latin American art from the 1930s to the fascist and communist style of European dictatorships. However, the actual style of much art of this period was linked to the geometrically simplified Art Deco style in Europe, which reflected industrial, streamlined design.

      Perhaps the best sculptor in this political moderne style was Francisco Zúñiga, a transplanted Costa Rican who was naturalized and active in Mexico at midcentury. In his nearly life-size stone and bronze sculpture and drawings, he portrayed large-proportioned indigenous women whose stoic faces emerge from tightly wrapped shawls, conveying an image of an Earth Mother. Such indigenous themes were employed in South American countries with strong Indian traditions so as to better speak to the proletariat. José Sabogal led the indigenist movement in Peru, which produced mainly small oil paintings depicting highland Indian and coastal Afro-Peruvian culture.

      The graphic arts became another means of communicating with the masses. Building on the examples of Posada and the Mexican muralist renaissance, the Taller de Gráfica Popular (People's Graphics Workshop) was founded in 1937 in Mexico City, with Leopoldo Méndez as its leading artist. The group used simple carving techniques—such as woodcuts and lithography—to create spontaneously rendered designs. The Taller provided a collective work centre and also taught untrained artists the different printmaking media. Prints became a major artistic format in many areas of Latin America because of the ease of their production and their widespread visibility and affordability. Posters especially became a highly regarded art form in smaller countries such as Costa Rica and Puerto Rico.

      Throughout Latin America the European art movement Surrealism was enthusiastically accepted by certain segments of the artistic community. Many artists were drawn to Surrealism's emphasis on the irrational, the emotional, the personal, and the subconscious. In general, European Surrealist artists examined “primitive” art and folk art to discover an instinctive spirit, a reference point that was relevant to Latin American artists searching to establish a distinctive art based on their own multifaceted traditions.

 Highly influential in the implantation of Surrealism in Latin America was the founder of the movement, the French poet-philosopher André Breton (Breton, André). In 1934 the Chilean artist Roberto Matta (Matta, Roberto), who had worked in France for Le Corbusier, abandoned his training in architecture so that he could pursue art in Paris, where he became associated with Breton and the Surrealists. His early paintings placed nonrecognizable biomorphic forms onto a receding spatial grid. In his later works scratched and drawn figures occasionally take on the appearance of menacing Latin American generals, operating as one of the few references to his homeland in his otherwise generalized time and space.

 Surrealism also allowed many Latin American artists to explore their individual ancestry. Cuban artist Wifredo Lam joined Breton and his Surrealist circle in 1940, after they went into self-exile in Martinique. When Lam returned to Cuba, he began to examine his own African heritage: his mother was Afro-Cuban, and his godmother was a Santería priestess. He explored this heritage in his work, depicting tropical fantasies filled with forms suggestive of African sculpture. This emphasis on African forms also related to his contact with the Surrealists, who saw all “primitive” (narrowly meaning non-Western) artistic expression as connected with humanity's common subconscious forms and experiences. Lam was particularly influenced by his contact with Picasso (Picasso, Pablo), who early in the century had used African sculpture as an important inspiration for Cubism.

 Breton, who visited Mexico in 1938 and 1940 and stayed with Frida Kahlo (Kahlo, Frida), said he considered his hostess to be an instinctive Surrealist. In her compulsive portrayals of herself in various guises, she superimposed her imagination on otherwise realistic scenes from the visible world. She also incorporated into her work imagery from Mexican folk art and the pre-Columbian village arts of western Mexico, which she and her husband, Diego Rivera, collected. Kahlo has received more critical adulation since her death in 1954 than when she was alive, a change that perhaps took place because more personalized and individualized art usurped the universal and abstract concerns of earlier art as the century progressed. Her challenging self-portraits also took on important meaning for feminist critics in the later 20th century.

      The indigenous Zapotec painter Rufino Tamayo (Tamayo, Rufino), although once grouped with the three great muralists (Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros), began to make his most memorable images after 1940. In these later works he combined Surrealistic ancestral references to Mexican identity with geometric abstraction and Expressionistic colours. His Mexican images combine imagery from pre-Columbian art (which he collected), folk art, and typical tropical fruits such as watermelons. In line with the more private vision informing Surrealist works, he preferred easel painting to mural painting during this period.

c. 1950–present

Trends, c. 1950–c. 1970
       Abstract Expressionism, which arose in part out of Surrealism, dominated painting in the United States in the 1950s. It was better known in Latin America by its French name, Informalism, and it had many Latin American adherents. The name Informalism was preferred because it suggested the contrast between these intuitive abstractions and the more carefully plotted geometric shapes of such “formalist” artists as Torres-García. Beginning about 1960 the Costa Rican artist Lola Fernández and some of her so-called Group of Eight colleagues used colour, texture, and painterly gesture to convey emotion with multiple associations—some microscopic, some cosmic. Many Latin American Informalist artists referred to the primordial forces of nature in their native lands in their work. For example, Fernando de Szyszlo of Peru seemed to capture turbulent forces of creation in his art beginning in the 1950s. He uses Inca proper names, such as that of the martyred Tupac Amaru, for his titles, and his black shapes painted on colour fields communicate the undulating Andes as well as the turbulent history of the region. In the 1960s and '70s the Japanese-Brazilian artist Manabu Mabe painted intensely coloured canvases, using spontaneous brushstrokes, a technique that bypassed logical composition and went directly to the intuitive, recalling Zen techniques and the work of Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock (Pollock, Jackson). During this same period Alejandro Obregón of Colombia painted sensuously beautiful canvases that initially seem abstract but, through the suggestions of the titles or through representational glimpses, actually refer to elemental tropical nature. His images loom in and out of consciousness like the fantastic novels of his Colombian contemporary Gabriel García Márquez (García Márquez, Gabriel), which are also set in the lush Caribbean jungle.

      Other artists generated emotional reactions through the interaction of clearly defined forms and colours. This type of geometric abstraction can in some ways be seen as a hard-edged variant of Abstract Expressionism, as in the beautifully painted illusions, seemingly in low relief, by Gunther Gerzso of Mexico, whose geometric constructs took on a biomorphic presence in the late 1950s and '60s. In roughly the same period the work of the Argentine couple Sarah Grilo and José Antonio Fernández-Muro dealt with clashing geometry, often focusing on circles and X's. These works have some connection to the dispassionate target paintings of Jasper Johns (Johns, Jasper) in New York City—where the couple lived in the 1960s—and they also express the violence of that tumultuous era.

      Constructivist (Constructivism) art, an abstract movement that began in Russia in the early 20th century, became a national movement in Venezuelan sculpture in the 1950s. By the 1960s the closely spaced contrasting colours and textures used by Venezuelan sculptors also related to the Op art movement of the early 1960s. Jesús Rafael Soto's moving wire reliefs challenged the viewer's perception, and Alejandro Otero's works were sculptural and even architectural, as in his monumental stainless steel Solar Delta (1977) on the Mall in Washington, D.C. More abstract sculptures were constructed by a number of Colombians in the early 1960s; Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar and Edgar Negret made metal sculptures out of coloured planes, often bearing titles that suggest mental and spiritual processes, that were visually related to the contemporary Minimalist trends in New York, where both occasionally worked.

      In painting, artists such as Nemesio Antúnez of Chile used checkerboard geometry to create illusionistic canvases in the 1960s that seem to billow and scintillate with closely placed contrasting colours, qualities that also allied him with the Op art movement. Eduardo MacEntyre of Argentina, a founding member of Generative Art in 1959 in Buenos Aires (with Miguel Angel Vidal and later Ary Brizzi), created paintings that gave the illusion of volume with intersecting geometric lines. MacEntyre's acrylics on canvas recall early 20th-century Constructivist sculpture of Plexiglas, but their lack of tangible scale makes them seem infinite, like galaxies in the process of formation.

      Many Latin American artists after 1950 sought to achieve a personal transformation of canonical art. These artists referred to elements of art history in their work; reference and quotation was an important aspect of postmodernism, a trend that became popular in Europe and the United States after 1970, more than a decade after its tenets first appeared in Latin America. These artists challenged and even caricatured the received culture of Europe, reversing the trend of dominance that had characterized much of the region's art history.

      Beginning in the 1950s the Mexican José Luis Cuevas created self-portraits in which he reconstructed scenes from famous paintings by such artists as Diego Velázquez (Velázquez, Diego), Francisco de Goya (Goya, Francisco de), and Picasso—the great artists of the Spanish motherland. Whereas Kahlo had placed herself in the centre of her compositions, Cuevas placed himself on the side, as an observer. In this same vein, in the late 1950s Mexican artist and gallery owner Alberto Gironella began paraphrasing Velázquez's portraits of the Spanish court, changing them into menacing heavily textured designs. Both artists emphasize the transformation of received visual culture.

 Beginning in the late 1950s Fernando Botero (Botero, Fernando) of Colombia transformed famous European paintings, such as those of Peter Paul Rubens, by inflating the figures in his works to beyond-Rubenesque proportions. He often used these rotund figures to parody the stock characters of clichéd banana-republic scenes, lending his political figures an air of pompous absurdity. Later in his career, using the same inflated style, he created massive bronze sculptures of childhood images that made his point in three dimensions. Archetypal memories of childhood continue to loom large in the adult, even when he lives far from the place in which they were formed.

Trends, c. 1970–present
      In line with an international tendency at the end of the 20th century, some Latin American artists returned to more-realistic, figurative representations. Argentine Antonio Berni used figuration to speak to contemporary social and political concerns. In the 1960s and '70s he created two fictional characters—Juanito Laguna, a street urchin, and Ramona Montiel, a prostitute—and depicted their lives in his paintings. Although these characters symbolize urban poverty, Berni portrayed them with humour and compassion in large canvases that combine a flattened figurative style with mixed-medium collage.

      Figuration also drove Nicaraguan-born Armando Morales, who achieved fame in the 1960s for his boldly painted geometric abstractions. In the 1980s he created classically inspired images that recalled the proto-Surrealist style of Giorgio de Chirico. Although Morales lived in Europe, his art made reference to the political revolution in his homeland that brought the Sandinistas (so named for the Nicaraguan revolutionary César Augusto Sandino (Sandino, César Augusto)) to power in 1979. His painting Farewell to Sandino (1985), for example, commemorates the 1930s precursors of the revolution; the figures are composed as a sacra conversazione (“sacred conversation of the saints”), and their faces are de-emphasized by blurring and shading. His lush tropical forests, pressing in upon the viewer, recall paintings by José Gamarra, a slightly younger Uruguayan who also depicted dense forests inhabited by people dating back to the time of the conquest. In Gamarra's Links (1983), what may be the figure of Sandino appears like a vision to a bow-carrying Indian. Such fantastic images can be related to the magic realism of Latin American literature. Although neither Morales nor Gamarra lived in Latin America during the height of their fame, their subject matter refers to archetypal images of the region: bandolier-draped revolutionaries, thick jungles, exotic animals, and an unlikely mix of people.

      New folk trends also developed during this period. In Chile, after the 1970s military crackdown under Augusto Pinochet, women commemorated the lives of loved ones beaten, jailed, or “disappeared” with fabric remnants stitched on burlap, known as arpilleras (“burlaps”). Another form developed in the Central Andes, where tourist enthusiasm created a market for Indian textiles and portable wooden altars. In the Caribbean, tourists created a demand for Panamanian Kuna Indian molas (mola), trade cloth panels decorated with cut-out patterns that express the Kuna worldview.

      Trained artists often adopted folk styles dating back to the conquest, an attitude buttressed by a political rejection of European high culture at the end of the century. In the 1970s Oswaldo Viteri of Ecuador glued onto wooden boards tiny brightly coloured textile dolls bought from highland Indians. These he then selectively painted dark or left untouched, sometimes regimenting them, other times placing them randomly—thus suggesting how the indigenous population is manipulated by institutional forces.

      Religious folk images, another form of popular imagery, were also adopted by many artists. The ex-voto, a small commemorative painting honouring the intervention of a saint in its owner's life, had been produced as early as the 18th century. Formed out of tin or other scrap material, this folk art continued throughout the national period. The untrained style of ex-voto painting had been appropriated at mid-century by Kahlo, who believed they were the most authentic expression of Latin American art. Many late 20th-century assemblage artists and painters, such as Julio Galán of Mexico, also emulated the personal subject and naive style of the ex-voto. Bárbaro Rivas of Venezuela used cheaply printed reproductions of religious images, such as the Mexican Virgin of Guadalupe or the Sacred Heart of Jesus, in his collages of the 1970s. Juan Camilo Uribe of Colombia combined a Sacred Heart print with another of an admired Venezuelan doctor to create his own collage valentine in Declaration of Love to Venezuela (1976).

      A painter of Japanese-Peruvian descent, Tilsa Tsuchiya, used aspects of her Peruvian heritage to create her own folklore, notably of “birdwomen.” One of her paintings (1974) transformed the vertical, biomorphically carved “hitching-post” sun stone at Machu Picchu, the lost city of the Incas, into a figure rising like a Maya Chac Mool. Linked in some ways to earlier Surrealist experiments, Tsuchiya's work also addressed the contemporary issues of gender and identity.

      Political and social revolutions in Latin America in the late 20th century inspired a resurgence of muralism as a means to communicate with the non-gallery-going populace. Artists in Cuba (beginning in the 1960s), Chile (in the early 1970s), and Nicaragua (in the 1980s) all created murals painted on public walls, often as a group effort without any individual artist's signature. In Chile in the 1970s the Ramona Parra Brigade painted untreated walls with commercial paints, thus ensuring the impermanence of their work. The act of creation was more important to them than the durability of the finished product.

      Economic realities informed the work of many artists at the end of the 20th century. The rapid devaluation of South American currencies from the 1980s inspired Jac Leirner, a Brazilian assemblage artist, to make long strings of worthless cruzeiro notes, which she or curators rearranged into beautiful curves wherever they were exhibited. In this way, money served as the raw material of art, rather than as a final reward for the artist's talents. Brazilian Cildo Meireles stamped cruzeiro banknotes in 1970 with a political question—Quem matou Herzog? (“Who killed Herzog?”)—that put into doubt the official version of the death of the journalist Wladimir Herzog, placing this question on the very money printed to support the regime suspected of complicity. The notes were then put into circulation, creating a tension between their low value as money and their higher value as propaganda.

      The realities of the Latin American economy affected art in other ways. Some artists exploited the junk of industrial society in their art, partly as a way to save money but also as a way to reflect the marginality of Latin America in the industrialized world order. In the 1990s, using discarded material to express the garbage-filled environment in which the poor eke out a living, the Chilean artist Francisca (“Pancha”) Núñez constructed large sculptures from refuse, especially textiles, that she found in the streets around her home.

       performance art also gave voice to political and social issues in Latin America at the end of the century. After the repression of the Chilean revolution, artists of the Avanzada group created performances that pointed out the abuses of the new regime. For example, in 1980 Carlos Leppe had himself videotaped as he was imprisoned in a plaster cast. By this he suggested his abuse and confinement by society. Similarly, Diamela Eltit inflicted cuts and bruises on herself in a brothel in 1980. She then washed the sidewalk outside while the video of her self-abuse was projected on the wall opposite the brothel. In so doing, she alluded to the abuse prostitutes accept to escape poverty while also suggesting the need to clean the stains of a corrupt society.

      Latin American artists also used video, an emerging international medium, to address political concerns. After moving to New York City, the Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar in 1987 used a computerized light board over Times Square to confront viewers with his message; he superimposed the statement “This is not America” on a map of the United States. When the image electronically changed, the word America was superimposed on a map of the whole Western hemisphere. Remaining in New York even after the return of democracy in Chile, Jaar expanded his scope to dramatize abuses worldwide, such as experiences of Haitian boat people or the indifference of the mass media toward the genocide in Rwanda. These works were installed in museum settings.

      Throughout the 20th century many Latin American artists had become expatriates in Paris, New York, and elsewhere in search of artistic stimulus, better economic prospects, and political stability. However, with the return of democracy to countries such as Argentina and Brazil and the successful transfer of power to civilian rule in other countries, Latin America began to retain more artists and provide more economic opportunities. By 2000 Buenos Aires housed more than 60 contemporary art galleries as well as Latin America's leading auction market, held in the municipal pawn shop. Moreover, major New York auction houses devoted entire sessions to modern Latin American art, signaling the rising importance of this area in the international marketplace. At the turn of the 21st century, as the international art world focused on the social and political issues that had long occupied artists from the region, Latin American art increasingly gained a prominent place in the global discourse about art and its role in society.

John F. Scott

Additional Reading
Much of the scholarship on Latin American art has not been translated into English. The following bibliography focuses on major English sources as well as selected works that have not been translated.General studies of artistic developments from pre-Columbian times through the 20th century include Leopoldo Castedo, A History of Latin American Art and Architecture from Pre-Columbian Times to the Present, trans. from Spanish (1969), and Historia del arte iberoamericano, 2 vol. (1988); and John F. Scott, Latin American Art: Ancient to Modern (1999).General histories of Mexican art are Justino Fernández, A Guide to Mexican Art: From Its Beginnings to the Present (1969; trans. from Spanish 2nd ed., 1961), and Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries (1990), copublished by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The history of Colombian art is covered in Historia del arte colombiano (1975–77), published by Salvat Editores Colombiana. Brazilian art is explored in Carlos Lemos, José Roberto Teixeira Leite, and Pedro Manuel Gismonti, The Art of Brazil, trans. from Portuguese (1983), with an essay by architect Oscar Niemeyer.General studies of the colonial period include Santiago Sebastián López, José de Mesa Figueroa, and Teresa Gisbert de Mesa, Arte iberoamericano desde la colonización a la independencia, 2 vol. (1985), which is the most comprehensive study of colonial art and architecture to date. Damián Bayón and Murillo Marx, History of South American Colonial Art and Architecture: Spanish South America and Brazil (1992; originally published in Spanish, 1989), is also valuable but is more limited in scope. Other works on the period include Pál Kelemen, Baroque and Rococo in Latin America, 2nd ed., 2 vol. (1967); Diego Angulo Iñiguez, Historia del arte hispano-americano, 3 vol. (1945–56); George Kubler and Martin Soria, Art and Architecture in Spain and Portugal and Their American Dominions, 1500 to 1800 (1959, reissued 1969), part of the Pelican History of Art; Gabrielle Palmer and Donna Pierce, Cambios: The Spirit of Transformation in Spanish Colonial Art (1992); Diana Fane (ed.), Converging Cultures: Art & Identity in Spanish America (1996); and Gauvin A. Bailey, Art of Colonial Latin America (2005).Mexican colonial art has been studied more than that of any other countries of the region. General sources include Manuel Toussaint, Colonial Art in Mexico (1967; originally published in Spanish, 1948); Linda Bantel and Marcus B. Burke, Spain and New Spain: Mexican Colonial Arts in Their European Context (1979); Elizabeth Wilder Weismann and Judith Hancock Sandoval, Art and Time in Mexico (1985, reissued 1995); Mary Grizzard, Spanish Colonial Art and Architecture of Mexico and the U.S. Southwest (1986); and Marcus B. Burke, Treasures of Mexican Colonial Painting: The Davenport Museum of Art Collection (1998). Studies of 16th-century Mexican art in particular include Donald Robertson, Mexican Manuscript Painting of the Early Colonial Period: The Metropolitan Schools (1959, reissued 1994); John McAndrew, The Open-Air Churches of Sixteenth-Century Mexico: Atrios, Posas, Open Chapels, and Other Studies (1965); and Jeanette Favrot Peterson, The Paradise Garden Murals of Malinalco: Utopia and Empire in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (1993). The number of important studies devoted to Peruvian art during this period is second to that of Mexico: important works include Harold E. Wethey, Colonial Architecture and Sculpture in Peru (1949, reissued 1971); and Carol Damian, The Virgin of the Andes: Art and Ritual in Colonial Cuzco (1995).General studies of the postcolonial period include Lincoln Kirstein, The Latin-American Collection of the Museum of Modern Art (1943), a catalog accompanying the first major exhibition of art from all parts of Latin America; Stanton Loomis Catlin and Terence Grieder, Art of Latin America Since Independence, rev. ed. (1966); and Dawn Ades, Art in Latin America: The Modern Era, 1820–1980 (1989), with contributions by Guy Brett, Stanton Loomis Catlin, and Rosemary O'Neill.Twentieth-century art is covered generally in Gilbert Chase, Contemporary Art in Latin America (1970), which deals with art and architecture; Waldo Rasmussen, Fatima Bercht, and Elizabeth Ferrer (eds.), Latin American Artists of the Twentieth Century, 2nd ed. (2004), an excellent catalog accompanying an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City; Edward Lucie-Smith, Latin American Art of the 20th Century (1993, reissued 1997); Edward J. Sullivan (ed.), Latin American Art in the Twentieth Century (1996, reissued 2000); and Jacqueline Barnitz, Twentieth-Century Art of Latin America (2001), which contains the best coverage yet on art from the period, including architecture, although not all countries are represented.More-specialized writings on the 20th century include Thomas M. Messer and Cornell Capa, The Emergent Decade: Latin American Painters and Painting in the 1960's (1966), a catalog accompanying an exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City; Holliday T. Day and Hollister Sturges, Art of the Fantastic: Latin America, 1920–1987 (1987), a catalog accompanying an exhibition at the Indianapolis Museum of Art; Oriana Baddeley and Valerie Fraser, Drawing the Line: Art and Cultural Identity in Contemporary Latin America (1989); Barbara Braun, Pre-Columbian Art and the Post-Columbian World: Ancient American Sources of Modern Art (1993, reissued 2000), which includes the work of Latin Americans Diego Rivera and Joaquín Torres-García; and Mari Carmen Ramírez and Héctor Olea, Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America (2004).John F. Scott

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