A Fascist Tango in Argentina: Exhibiting Novecento Italiano in Buenos Aires, 1930

Abstract

In 1931, Argentine artist Victor Cúnsolo painted a large still life titled Tradition (Fig. 1).1Tradition depicts an issue of Augusta, one of the first Argentine journals exclusively devoted to art, perilously perched on a table and surrounded by writing and painting implements, art books, and religious figurines. Augusta (1918–1920) was founded by photographer and gallery owner Franz van Riel, who in 1924 rented out some of his gallery’s rooms in Buenos Aires’s bustling Calle Florida to Amigos del Arte (Friends of Art), an élite art association that figures prominently in the following pages.2⁠ ... Tradition alludes in two other ways to Amigos del Arte’s politically ambivalent activities of 1930: at the left, an edition of José Hernández’s epic gauchesco poem Martín Fierro (1872), a touchstone of Argentine national identity (this particular edition was financed by Amigos del Arte and illustrated by leftist engraver Arturo Bellocq)3; and at the right, the catalogue of an exhibition of the Novecento Italiano (Italian Twentieth-Century) art group, which emerged and thrived under the Italian Fascist regime. The show opened at Amigos del Arte on 14 September and closed on 4 October 1930.4 The Novecento Italiano show, then, opened just a week after the Fascist-inspired military coup of General José Félix Uriburu – a coincidence that gave a serendipitous political relevance to an exhibition that at first had been carefully planned to conceal any evident associations with Fascism.