This book touches upon so many diverse subjects that it is rather difficult to summarize in a brief and concise manner. At its heart, Making Art Panamerican explores the establishment and cultural policies of the Visual Arts Section of the Pan American Union, an agency attached to the Organization of American States and located in Washington, DC. And it probes into the conditions that enabled this rather modest agency to become a major player in the world of Latin American arts. It thus contributes to a rapidly growing field of inquiry: the cultural Cold War in the Americas.

The rise of the Visual Arts Section occurred at a time when US–Latin American relations were at a low. During World War II, the US government had invested heavily in artistic and intellectual exchange in order to foster inter-American cooperation but had lost interest even before the conflict had come to a close. The wartime cultural offensive had been based on a dense state–private network involving, amongst others, metropolitan museums, philanthropic foundations, and large corporations with business interests in Latin America. With the coming of the Cold War, this network reshuffled and focussed elsewhere, on Europe and Asia, but in the inter-American arena it left behind a web of institutional connections and resources, which helped the newly established Visual Arts Section get on its feet. The Museum of Modern Art, for instance, lent some of its prize holdings of Latin American art and its organizational expertise to the new agency when the latter organized its first major exhibitions to be sent to Venezuela (Exposición Interamericana de Pintura Moderna, 1948) and other parts of Latin America (32 Artistas de las Américas, 1949–50). And US corporate sponsors provided much of the funding that was needed for the agency's wide range of activities.

Given that the Visual Arts Section fed on the remnants of a network that was geared towards US economic- and foreign-policy goals, the regionalist outlook it promoted may seem surprising at first sight. The wartime cultural offensive, as spearheaded by the US government, had sought to introduce US culture to Latin Americans and vice versa. By contrast, the Visual Arts Section was largely concerned with introducing Latin American art and, more precisely, modern art to audiences both north and south of the Rio Grande. This was an effort, Claire F. Fox argues, that was geared toward the development of “self-sustaining arts cultures in Latin America” (5). In this scheme of things, art institutions in the United States were being used as a kind of “export processing zone where aspiring artists had critical and monetary value added to their work before having it reexported to Latin America” (5). Moreover, by nurturing work that was “distinctive enough to appear original abroad, yet at the same time qualified to participate in the grand Anglo-European conversation about postwar modernism” (22), the Visual Arts Section sought to demonstrate that Latin America and particularly Latin America's metropolitan cities were as much at the forefront of modernity as any other center of the avant-garde. It thereby assumed “a protagonistic role in brokering corporate, political, and artistic linkages in the service of Latin American regional identity” (43).

Yet, if such a regionalist drive to decenter the Western art world might appear oddly subversive, the regional identity promoted by the Visual Arts Section was clearly not. This was a brand of Latin Americanism that was at ease with the United States, with US corporate interests, and with capitalism in general. Under its long-standing chief José Gómez Sicre, a Cuban lawyer turned art critic and curator and protégé of Alfred Barr, the Visual Arts Section aggressively promoted young artists such as José Luis Cuevas, who rebelled against nationalism and social realism. Fox's research into Gómez Sicre's private archives suggests, moreover, that this sponsorship went further than was previously known: thus it seems that Cuevas did not write his famous invectives against Mexican state policies and muralism all by himself, but relied heavily on Gómez Sicre as a ghostwriter (38 and chapter 3).

The Visual Arts Section emerged as what this book's blurb calls “a major transfer point of hemispheric American modernist movements.” Indeed, some have credited Gómez Sicre with single-handedly creating “Latin American modern art” as a category. To some extent, Fox implicitly reinforces this view in that she concentrates heavily on his career, on the friendships and enmities he built over the years (introduction and chapters 1–3). Yet she is careful not to overstate her case with regard to the importance of the agency in general and Gómez Sicre in particular: if the former was certainly not the only important institution in the shaping of the field of modern art, the latter proved unable to prevent Cuevas and other former protégés from developing in directions that he despised, for aesthetical and political reasons.

Not surprisingly given Cold War conditions and the aggressiveness with which Gómez Sicre intervened in the region's art circuits, his foes quickly accused him of being an agent of US imperialism, paid to undermine Latin America's potential for revolution from without and within. Gómez Sicre certainly drove a counterrevolutionary course, not least with respect to Cuba (see, for instance, 14–15, 134). However, as Fox shows, his crusade for modern art was more than a simple reflection of a policy agenda as defined by the United States. And rather than simply imposing a conflict from without, we may add here, the Cold War seems to have exacerbated and sometimes distorted existing tensions about what Latin American art (and, for that matter, society in general) should be.

To unravel this picture is a rather intricate task. In Making Art Panamerican, this task is further complicated by the author's penchant for addressing subjects that are too big or too tangential for the investigation at hand. Issues such as “continental consciousness” or “cultural citizenship” are important, but would have required sustained attention in order to avoid the drifting apart of larger chunks of the text, including chapter 4, which discusses HemisFair '68, an event too remotely connected to the previous chapters to merit inclusion in this book. Conventional historians, like this reviewer, would prefer a more focussed and more coherent organization of this genuinely important material.