Diana Cid García’s story as an Exercise in the Imaginative Reinvention of the Art Worlds

Abstract

Diana Cid García (1861–1938) is less known than other Latin American women in the arts. Her story has intrigued many scholars working on early Latin American modernism, but it still remains obscure and generates doubts and misunderstandings. This essay partially reconstructs her trajectory in an attempt to draw a larger context for her transnational migration: as an individual, artist, and art historical trope. It focuses on Cid García’s first exhibition appearances in the 1890s and on some reactions that followed. Employing the instruments of feminist critique, the paper demonstrates how the legacy of this woman was (or was not) archived and historicized. With the help of visual analysis and close reading, I suggest revisiting some of the absences in the historical narratives that had been actively forgetting or misrepresenting Cid García in the twentieth century. I explore her involvement with diverse artistic circles in Europe, Argentina, and Brazil, and invite the reader to shift attention from the concept of the autonomous genius to a broader understanding of artistic creation as collective endeavor. For that matter, I weave her story into that of her collaborators, colleagues, friends, and critics as a way to reinvent the worlds of the past and highlight Cid García’s controversial input in many artistic phenomena of the epoch.