Making Art Panamerican: Cultural Policy and the Cold War

Abstract

In Making Art Panamerican, Claire Fox explores the shifting institutional landscape behind mid-twentieth-century attempts to create a unified artistic tradition in the Americas. She inscribes these attempts within the longer history of Pan-Americanism— formulations centered on the perceived or desired unity of the culture and history of the hemisphere’s diverse nations—which spans the last two centuries. Fox’s four chapters combine a keen analysis of an impressive array of archival sources with a lucid interpretation of artworks. The thread that connects the chapters is the career as a cultural bureaucrat of the Cuban-born José Gómez-Sicre (1916–1991). Gómez-Sicre’s career began in the Visual Arts Section of the Pan American Union (PAU), an office founded in 1910 in Washington, DC, by a series of governments of the Americas and that became the Organization of American States in 1948. US–Latin American cultural relations, a priority for the US government during World War II, became a more ambiguously defined prerogative at this early Cold War moment. Socially committed artistic movements, some of which challenged US cultural dominance, also became increasingly visible throughout the Americas. “Gómez-Sicre’s trajectory from progressive social democrat and communist fellow traveler to cold war liberal,” a transformation that took place as he navigated this scenario, serves as a foil for Fox’s compelling analysis of “the generational impact of the cold war on Latin American intellectual and cultural sectors” (pp. 20–21).Among the many notable episodes that Fox examines is Gómez-Sicre’s participation in the triangulation of artists and institutions in Havana, New York City, and Mexico City that lay behind the completion in Havana of then-exiled David Alfaro Siqueiros’s mural Allegory of the Equality and Confraternity of the White and Black Races in Cuba (1943). Fox shows how this embattled commission underscored tensions between Gómez-Sicre’s simultaneous sympathy for socially committed art and his desire to sponsor art with such universal value that it could transcend national contexts and become part of a hemispheric canon. Similar tensions animated Gómez-Sicre’s Exposición Interamericana de Pintura Moderna, a survey of Latin American art organized in 1948 in Caracas to commemorate the inauguration of democratically elected Venezuelan president Rómulo Gallegos, and its successor exhibit, the traveling show 32 Artistas de las Américas (1949– 1950), which Fox describes as likely the “first traveling exhibition consisting primarily of Latin American art organized for Latin American viewing publics” (p. 117). Backed by corporate funding tied primarily to US interests and supported by local Latin American government agencies, these shows attempted to fuse the perceived universalizing ethos of modern art with a developmentalist praise of liberal democracy and modernization, a melding together of aesthetic and political agendas that defined much of Gómez-Sicre’s oeuvre.In chapter 3, Fox provides a remarkable analysis of the rise to international prominence of Mexican artist José Luis Cuevas, which was significantly aided by a show of his work organized by Gómez-Sicre at the PAU in 1954. The defining aspect of Cuevas’s rise was his critique of the official art of Mexico, chiefly mural painting, as exemplified in his 1956 manifesto “The Cactus Curtain.” Cuevas’s rise is well documented, yet Fox adds substantially to its study by examining his “fluency in the languages of cold war universalism at the PAU and the urban cosmopolitanism of his Mexican coterie” (p. 139). Similarly enlightening is Fox’s analysis in chapter 4 of HemisFair ’68, the Pan-Americanist-themed world’s fair celebrated in San Antonio, Texas, in 1968. Fox illuminates the extent to which this fair, focused heavily on celebrating US-Mexican cultural dialogue at this border location, was influenced not only by local and international racial and ideological divisions but also by officially endorsed formulations of mestizaje, or cultural mixing, emanating from Mexico.Making Art Panamerican is an accessible text, and it contributes substantially to at least three current trends in scholarship. It offers much to recent studies of the Latin American Cold War, which characterize the region not as a passive recipient of superpower interventions but as a complex terrain of conflicts with global repercussions. It also adds to studies of Pan-Americanism’s multilayered cultural impact, and it is arguably the most significant contribution to this field to date. Thirdly, it contributes to the expanding literature on the governmental and institutional patronage of twentieth-century art in Latin America. With impeccable archival zeal, Fox demonstrates that evolving notions of a hemispheric artistic tradition as formulated during the Cold War and the idea of Latin American art as we know it today are powerfully interconnected. As such, her book is necessary reading not only for those interested in twentieth-century politics and culture but also for anyone involved with the expanding terrain of teaching and research in the visual culture of the Americas.