The Politics of Abstraction: The Tenth Inter-American Conference Caracas, Venezuela, 1954

Abstract

THE POLITICS OF ABSTRACTION: THE TENTH INTER-AMERICAN CONFERENCE CARACAS, VENEZUELA, 1954 Monica Boulton On March 1, 1954, Venezuela’s President General Marcos Pérez Jiménez gave a welcoming speech to the Western hemisphere’s government figures attending the Tenth Inter-American Conference, being hosted in Caracas, Venezuela. Sponsored by the Organization of American States (OAS),1 the Conference sought to foster economic, political, and cultural relations among the countries of the hemisphere. Despite local and international criticism of the anti-democratic practices of the repressive military regime of Pérez Jiménez, the organizers of the Conference promoted a climate of freedom and democracy. They emphasized the precepts of the OAS Charter, which stressed the solidarity of the American nations based on democratic principles. The hosting nation offered a variety of cultural events for the purpose of entertaining the delegates. Among these activities were two exhibits in separate venues that showcased artistic developments: La Pintura en Venezuela organized by federally-funded Museo de Bellas Artes de Caracas (MBA) and Six American Painters presented by New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).2 La Pintura en Venezuela offered a broad range of Venezuelan work that went from Pre-Columbian objects to contemporary abstract paintings, specifically geometric abstraction. The coordinators of this show presented abstraction as the culmination of a progressive development in Venezuela’s visual arts. Six American Painters, the U.S. artistic representation, consisted of one work each by six artists working in the style of Abstract Expressionism: William Baziotes, Arshile Gorky, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko.3 The presentation of Six American Painters in Caracas indicated the ascendancy and importance of abstract art in the United States. This interest in abstraction seemed to demonstrate a unified vision among United States and Venezuelan artists, U.S. foreign-policy makers, and the administration of Pérez Jiménez. What made abstraction so appealing to these various groups? I argue that despite the semblance of unity, each faction used abstract art to promote diverse and in some cases conflicting ideas and aims. This paper studies the means by which each group used abstract art to advocate cultural, political, economic, and ideological platforms during the Cold War period. The exhibition catalog of La Pintura en Venezuela culminated with the late 1940s and early 1950s geometric abstraction of Alejandro Otero, 83 SECOLAS Annals, Volume 52, 2008 Pascual Navarro, Oswaldo Vigas, Alirio Oramas, and Mateo Manaure.4 In these works, such as in Otero’s La Serie del Pote Azul (c. 1948), the absence of regional and representational forms as well as allegorical themes signaled the departure from Venezuela’s mainstream artistic tendencies, which focused on local landscape and historical episodes. Although the organizers of La Pintura en Venezuela intended to present abstraction as the new direction for Venezuelan art, only seven of the 132 works featured in the catalogue were non-representational. The small number of works in geometric abstraction indicated that history and landscape paintings were still favored by the cultural elite. In Otero’s La Serie del Pote Azul, a work from his Cafeteras (Coffeepots) series, the blue cooking pot referenced in the title was not discernible.5 It was transformed into planes of color fragmented by strong diagonal lines, and following Picasso’s Cubist grid, there was no distinction between forms and ground. Otero removed the visible form of the real object, as if revealing its inner structure. Otero asserted that in his Cafeteras, “There is a set organization, a structure, a series of forms that will result in a rhythmic idea. . . . But the process has not been a simple stylization. It is a comprehension. . . . It now exists in space. It is another concept. Intuitively, it is another situation.”6 In using abstraction, Otero was attempting to create a new reality that was autonomous and independent of the familiar world of mundane objects such as the blue cooking pot. Otero developed his Cafeteras in Paris after obtaining, in 1945, a travel grant from the Venezuelan Ministry of Education. Here he became a participant in the international art movement that went against tradition by rejecting naturalistic imitations of nature. In this period after the Second...