Lowe Art Museum,
Jan 30, 2003 - Apr 06, 2003
Coral Gables , Florida , USA
PARADISE LOST? Aspects of Landscapes in Latin American art
by means of Press Release
CORAL GABLES, FL -- Paradise Lost? Aspects of Landscape in Latin American Art, on view at the Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami, from January 30 - April 6, 2003, represents a panoramic view of Latin American landscape, from 1830 to the present, addressing both regional identity and uniqueness of individual artistic personality, as it explores the visual contributions of Latin America. The Lowe’s exhibition breaks new ground, because this is the first time that an exhibition comprehensively traces, explores, and interprets stylistic, thematic, and iconographic developments in Latin American art of Spanish and Portuguese speaking countries, from historic to contemporary, within the diverse genre of landscape. The exhibition addresses five art historical categories -- travelers; academics; modernity; contemporary classical tradition; contemporary idioms -- through more than 100 paintings, works on paper, mixed media, photography, and video, by 76 acclaimed and emerging artists representing 20 countries. Paradise Lost? is drawn from the Lowe’s permanent collection and augmented with important local, national, and international loans, including the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros. The first Latin American landscapes were made by Europeans in the 19th century, especially during the first decades, as artists from different nationalities rediscovered the continent. They arrived in these countries motivated particularly by the publication of the Latin American voyages of Alexander Von Humboldt (1799 and 1804). These painters, known as "traveling artists," left an important documentary production dedicated mainly to scientific, ecological, topological, and social topics. Columbus Taking Possession of the New World, a watercolor from around 1830 by German artist Johann Moritz Rugendas, from the Lowe’s collection, opens the exhibition. Still other European artists arrived in Latin America, carrying their fine arts academy instruction, and leaving an illustrative heritage in local landscape production. The first academy of fine arts on Latin American soil was the Academia de San Carlos, founded in Mexico City in 1785. Its illustrious students include Dr. Atl, a legendary figure in Mexican painting, one of whose works will be on view. Later came the Academy of Rio de Janeiro (1816), and then the Academia de San Alejandro, which was established in Havana in 1818. Cuban artists who studied there are represented in Paradise Lost? by Leopold Romaçach, Mario Carreno, Armando Menocal, and Tómas Sánchez. At the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century in Latin America, a new period of artistic investigation was marked by the search for national identity. In some ways we may understand Latin American 19th century landscape painting as partaking of, or appropriating from, North American art to create parallel statements of national self-identification at a time when the sovereignty of many nations in Latin America was often specifically threatened. José María Velasco’s Valley of Mexico, from 1892, is an early expression of his attitude. National identity as a strong tendency among Latin American artists persisted into the 20th century. It remained a guiding force in the work of numerous artists well into the 1950s and beyond, as witnessed in Claudio Bravo’s Landscape with Roses, 1959, for example. One aspect of the exhibition focuses on, the 1920s and the 1930s as an era of vanguard development. Many Latin American studied in Europe, absorbing and appropriating both the methodology as well as the ideology of modernism. They adapted modes such as Impressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism and other artistic strategies to their own aesthetic and social circumstances. In Dunas de Catia La Mar, circa 1925, a painting on loan from the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, by the historically important and influential Venezue
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