As the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) prepares to shift from temporary quarters in Queens, New York, back to newly renovated and expanded gallery spaces in midtown Manhattan this fall, it can take pride in its recent showcase of Latino art at the uptown El Museo del Barrio, located at 104th Street and Fifth Avenue, in the heart of Spanish Harlem. The exhibit, MoMA at El Museo, presented more than 150 paintings, sculptures and works on paper from the Museum’s permanent collection, many of them never seen before by the public. And though this represents only a small slice of MoMA’s considerable holdings of Latino art (more than 3,000 objects by 400 artists), the show is regarded to be the first large-scale exhibit of such works.
Says El Museo del Barrio’s Deborah Cullen, one of the exhibit’s curators: “As the premier United States institution dedicated to presenting, preserving and projecting the art and culture of Puerto Ricans, all Caribbean peoples, Latinos and all Latin Americans, the opportunity to collaborate with MoMA and bring to the public highlights from their fabled Latin American holdings was very important for us. We have been partners in this unprecedented undertaking, working together to present and publish information on these rarely-seen holdings and make these cultural treasures available to our Latino constituencies, as well as the broader public.”
MoMA was the first museum outside of Latin America to acquire modern art by Latino artists. The exhibit at El Museo traces the history of the Museum’s collection, beginning with acquisitions and donations made in the 1930s and ending with works acquired or donated in recent years. Of the nearly ninety artists represented, greats such as Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Fernando Botero, José Clemente Orozco and Wifredo Lam share the stage with lesser-known talents such as Antonio Berni, Pedro Figari, and Antonio Ruiz (Corcito).
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| The Jungle, 1943
Wifredo Lam (Cuban, 1902-1982). Gouache on paper mounted on canvas. Sheet: 94 1/4 x 90 1/2" (239.4 x 229.9cm). Inter-American Fund © 2004 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris
The Museum of Modern Art, New York |
Seventy years of artistic styles and movements are on view, including Mexican muralism, surrealism, abstraction, pop art, optical art and conceptual art. Iconic works are in abundance. One of the most celebrated is Wifredo Lam’s monumental surrealist gouache The Jungle (1943), the show’s signature piece, which hung for many years in the entrance to MoMA. Its use of African masks and fragmented forms evokes Picasso’s landmark Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), an emblem of early cubism and modern abstraction. The Jungle depicts a sugarcane field in the painter’s native Cuba and, as the richly illustrated catalogue indicates, carries a political message: “The chaos of the scene is intended to underscore the plight of the worker in the Cuban landscape, surrounded by the staple crop that signifies both livelihood and enslavement.”
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| Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair, 1940. Frida Kahlo (Mexican, 1907-1954). Oil on canvas, 15 3/4 x 11" (40 x 27.9 cm). Gift of Edgar Kaufmann, Jr. © 2004 Banco de México, Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Av. Cinco de Mayo No. 2 Col. Centro, Del. Cuauhtémoc 06059, México, D.F. Reproducción autorizada por el Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literarura.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York |
Frida Kahlo’s Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair (1940), one of 55 self-portraits she executed during her career, departs from her frequent depiction of herself in traditional Mexican dress with long, flowing tresses. Soon after her divorce from the Mexican painter Diego Rivera, she sends a message of defiance, painting herself sporting a man’s haircut and wearing a man's outfit—shoes, shirt and a suit that’s too big (one can speculate it belonged to Rivera). The starkly realistic canvas is strewn with locks of Kahlo’s newly-cut hair, which has a lifelike, kinetic quality that evokes the surrealist painters to whom she was often compared. Despite her dreamlike imagery, however, she tried to distance herself from the surrealist label, remarking: "I do not know if my paintings are surrealist or not, but I do know that they are the most frank expression of myself."
Fast forward to 1967 and the wickedly satirical political portraits by Colombia’s Fernando Botero (The Presidential Family) and Venezuela’s Marisol (LBJ). Exhibited side by side, Botero’s is a painted portrait, while Marisol’s is a wood construction; both owe a debt to pop art, a dominant movement of the 1960s, but draw on native artistic traditions as well. Botero’s hugely fat, quite comical figures, representing the elite classes in Latin America, suggest greed and corruption. Marisol’s monumental wood sculpture, with the head of United States President Lyndon Baines Johnson in the shape of a block—in other words, block-headed—speaks volumes about the artist’s view of the President who at the time was commander-in-chief of American forces engaged in the Vietnam war. This towering figure holds three little birds in his hand: his wife Lady Bird and their daughters, Lynda Bird and Luci Baines.
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The Presidential Family, 1967
Fernando Botero (Colombian, born 1932). Oil on canvas, 6' 8 1/2 x 6' 5 1/4" (203.5 x 196.2 cm). Gift of Warren D. Benedek. © Fernando Botero, courtesy Marlborough Gallery, New York
The Museum of Modern Art, New York |
But the show’s display of more recent works, rarely if ever exhibited at MoMA, gives it special distinction. From Brazilian Cildo Meireles’ Thread (1990-95), a free-standing haystack comprised of 48 bales of hay wrapped in 58 metres of gold thread and concealing an 18-carat-gold needle, to Cuban artistic-collective Los Carpinteros’ Coal Oven (1998), a watercolor of a giant espresso pot fashioned from bricks that doubles as a factory building, this provocative and highly entertaining exhibit is a window into modernism and the contemporary art scene in the Latin and Caribbean world.
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| Coal Oven, 1998. Los Carpinteros (Cuban). Watercolor, pencil and colored pencil on paper. Sheet: 86 1/4 x 51 1/4" (219.1 x 130.2 cm).Gift of Dean Valentine and Amy Adelson. © 2004 Los Carpinteros
The Museum of Modern Art, New York |
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