Rebellious Conformists: Exhibiting Avant-Garde Art in Mexico City and Buenos Aires, 1920-1929

This dissertation asks how and why works exhibited under the rubric "avant-garde" in the 1920s in Mexico City and Buenos Aires--in exhibitions that encompassed displays of modernist paintings, prints, and sculpture, and artes populares and children's art--were once believed to speak so vividly about modern American experience. Comparing displays of avant-garde art and their receptions during this period in Mexico City and Buenos Aires reveals that issues vital to defining the related concepts of national culture and middle-class taste coalesced around exhibitions. Young avant-garde artists, many of whom were returning to Latin America after working in Europe, encountered conditions during the early 1920s that prompted them to seek out urban middle-class audiences for exhibitions of advanced art. In Mexico City, a socialist post-Revolutionary government recruited avant-garde artists to help reform national culture and, in Buenos Aires, a booming capitalist economy supported a robust local art market. Five chapters focus on specific exhibitions and the issues they brought to light, as well as on the Lima-based magazine Amauta. Chapter One examines how avant-gardes refashioned popular culture as modern and cosmopolitan for audiences in Mexico City in exhibitions of Carlos Merida's paintings, and of artes populares and children's drawings. Chapter Two argues that the appearance of avant-garde painting at the Buenos Aires Salon prompted critical debates about the benefits of viewing abstract paintings for the emerging middle-classes. Chapter Three contends that young artists in Mexico City recoded the avant-garde woodcut as Mexican by displaying cubist woodcuts in cafes and tents. Chapter Four shows that the mainstream visibility of avant-gardism in Buenos Aires--spurred by a series of events, including exhibitions of Emilio Pettoruti's cubo-futurist paintings and of works by the Mexican artists Manuel Rodriguez Lozano and Julio Castellanos, and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's visit--caused avant-garde critics to distance themselves from European art. Chapter Five argues that by reproducing works by Argentinean and Mexican avant-gardes in Amauta during the 1920s, Jose Carlos Mariategui assigned these cultural "poles" symbolic roles in defining a remarkably open and cosmopolitan Latin American art capable of both absorbing indigenous culture and resisting U.S. hegemony.