In 1964, the Colombian sculptors Edgar Negret and Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar staged the two-man show Neoclásicos at the Galería 25 in Bogotá. The exhibition would establish their reputation as the so-called “group of two”: pioneering figures in the history of Colombian abstraction, and of Colombian modernism more generally. It would also cement the opposition between these abstract artists and Fernando Botero’s particular model of realism, setting up what art critic Marta Traba would later refer to as the two extreme lines of Colombian painting. Ana Franco’s Neoclásicos takes its title from the exhibition, and it is the exhibition and its historical importance in the history of Colombian art that connect the book’s two protagonists. Nevertheless, this is arguably not a book about Colombian art; indeed, very little of it takes place in Colombia at all. While the consecration of abstraction as the “the official language of artistic modernity in Colombia” (1) is a small part of the story here, this is primarily a tale of two postwar artists whose work, developing as it moves between sites and contexts, implicitly challenges such national and regional histories, or at the very least suggests their insufficiency. Posed in part as a response to Traba’s language of emergence and resistance that has long dictated the shape of Colombian art criticism, Franco offers us a radically distinct transnational approach.The first four of the book’s five chapters trade off covering Negret and Ramírez Villamizar’s careers individually, tracing the development of their artistic languages through their early training in Colombia and subsequent travels in Europe and the United States. We learn, for example, how Negret’s early materials and techniques—plaster casting—give way to iron and painted aluminum under the influence of artists such as Alexander Calder, David Smith, and Jean Tinguely (chap. 1). Franco’s extended study of his Aparatos mágicos (chap. 3), produced in New York in the late 1950s and early 1960s, places this important series of sculptures’ dual interest in modern technology and primitive spirituality in dialogue with the artists of the Coenties Slip, Louise Nevelson, and the Indian Space Painters. In the chapters on Ramírez Villamizar, we follow the artist as he adopts a geometric abstract style in Paris in the early 1950s under the influence of Jean Dewasne and Victor Vasarely (chap. 2), and we witness the evolution of his work from painting to monochrome relief sculpture in the late 1950s (chap. 4). While Franco argues that Ramírez Villamizar’s 1958 mural El Dorado served as a symbol of modernism and internationalism for a Colombian audience, she suggests that his closely related series of Relieves blancos, produced largely in New York in the early 1960s, are better understood in the context of “hard-edge” abstraction as it coalesced as a category during those years in the United States.The final chapter, in which the artists are treated together, is the richest for readers not necessarily invested in these particular artists’ work. It is here where the term neoclassical comes to the fore in all its complexities. Franco traces the appearance in the United States of the related terms neoclassicism, modern classicism, purism, and hard edge to describe painters on both coasts who challenged the dominance of gestural abstraction and the excessive romanticism that critics accused it of. It is in this generation of US-based artists, sandwiched between abstract expressionism and the emergence of minimalism and pop art, that Franco suggests we can most fully understand the work of Negret and Ramírez Villamizar. Significantly, she casts them not only as influenced by this group of artists, but also as formative members within it. And it is via these US art world associations that their reputation as “neoclassicists” made it back to Bogotá, where it colored their reception by local critics and the dominant understanding of geometric abstraction in Colombia, more generally. It is here that the slipperiness of the book’s central concept becomes evident. As an art of “order, equilibrium, and repose” (237, note 370), classicism could be made to stand against the outpouring of individual interiority that characterized gestural abstraction, in one case, or to oppose the social chaos and violence that Colombia had experienced, in another.While this chapter is revelatory as it is, Franco might have dug even deeper into the implied idea of classicism as a sort of traveling theory. The tendency of the term classicism to have its positive definition accompanied by a negative one (that which is not baroque, not romantic, not modern, or not avant-garde, to name just some possibilities), the capacity for its principal characteristics (order and harmony) to describe both the compositional features of a work of art and a set of social values, and its facility to shape broader histories in its own image (positioning itself always at the apex of historical processes), make it an especially apt vehicle for undertaking the transnational approach to modernism that Franco’s study proposes. While Franco gives us a very good sense of the work the term did in the postwar United States and its adaptation in Colombia, a broader examination of the stakes of a history told via such travels and refunctionalizations of works and concepts would have made the book’s methodological intervention even stronger. Yet even if this insight is not fully exploited here, it certainly opens up further avenues of research in that direction.The value of Franco’s study for the field goes well beyond the gap that it admirably fills in the literature. The author’s reading of Negret and Ramírez Villamizar does not just destabilize the national narratives of modernization or resistance their work has been lodged into; it also offers a fuller picture of the New York art scene that these artists had been largely written out of. It is this final point that I found most suggestive. Previous literature has clearly established that the long-held perception of mid-century geometric abstraction in Latin America as “belated” was a product of the postwar supremacy of gestural abstraction in the United States and the centrality of that country in prevailing histories of post–World War II art. But this book suggests something further: attending to dominance of these “neoclassical” artists in the history of Colombian modernism might allow us to look anew at a less-studied generation of US painters, rewriting its history in a transnational vein as well. Thus, the “two-track and multidirectional relations” (9) that Franco highlights in the careers of Negret and Ramírez Villamizar offer a model in which the histories of so-called peripheral modernism allow us to substantially rethink narratives of the center as well.