This ambitious, far-ranging study examines Latin American art of the 1920s in relation to cultural history, and serial publications through accessible prose, making it appealing for specialist and non-specialist readers alike. Through case studies focused on Mexico, Peru, Argentina, and Cuba, Montgomery elaborates the early twentieth-century emergence of “American” art (7) as a transnational project fostered through artists’ movements and the circulation of periodicals. Her chapters not only highlight prominent artists, including Xul Solar, Emilio Pettoruti, Carlos Mérida, and Norah Borges, but also the critical reception of modern art that appeared in the pages of Amauta, Aurea, Martín Fierro, Revista de Avance, and other prominent journals.
The book's central claim is often rehearsed in contemporary criticism, articulated from postcolonial, decolonial, and global modernist studies: “Modernism … became an anticolonial stance in [Latin American] art and criticism, a means of expression that called into question not only the long-standing cultural authority of Europe but also the value of modernization itself” (1). In asserting anticolonialism as an expansive modernist value, Montgomery challenges previous critical frameworks that imagine modernism and modernity radiating outward from the European metropole to the Americas. The study gains critical weight in its exploration of the attendant claim that “unorthodox modernisms became highly valued as a means for expressing local experiences” (4), which in turn leads Montgomery to explore myriad modernisms, especially the ways that Latin American artists and critics took up the idioms of primitivism to “reassert … indigenous notions of creativity and beauty” (23) and engage in broad, transnational conversations about modernity.
Diverse strategies of modernist primitivism inform the study's six central chapters, which unfold compelling examples about how artists and critics valued and interacted with artes populares and the work of self-taught artists, as well as art produced by children, which often appeared on the pages of periodicals alongside illustrations of modern art. Each of this study's chapters could form the basis of a book in itself, and Montgomery draws effectively on regional and single-artist studies to develop her narrative.
The first chapter explores the anticolonialist position on American art advanced by the influential Lima-based journal Amauta, edited by José Carlos Mariátegui. Chapter 2 follows the career movements of Guatemalan artist Carlos Mérida from Paris to New York and Mexico, where he settled in 1919. Montgomery foregrounds Mexico City as an art center that drew artists from around the world, and from which “arte nuevo” was launched as a critical concept signaling an American challenge to the Parisian dominance of modern art. The following chapter turns to the Argentine reception of Xul Solar and Emilio Pettoruti upon their return from Europe and the primitivist strategies that these artists employed to assert the Americanness of their artistic production, a stance that resonated among critics in Lima and Mexico City.
Chapter 4 presents fascinating research about the circulation and revalorization of the woodcut as an avant-garde art form in periodicals and diverse settings in Mexico, Cuba, and Argentina. Comparing it to the self-conscious primitivism enacted by Xul Solar and Emilio Pettoruti, chapter 5 examines how Argentine artist Norah Borges intentionally performed femininity: “[B]y carving out a transnational, inter-Latin American space for visibility [her performance] also staked a claim for the feminine as a point of authentic and stable subjectivity that could travel along the sightlines that constituted the network of ‘Latin American’ art” (155). Finally, chapter 6 examines how art primers and children's art circulated within and beyond Mexico as a part of that country's postrevolutionary arts programs. Tracing widespread interest in children's art on the part of modernist periodicals, Montgomery finds that the figure of “the child artist” is imbued with racial and class identifications, as well as emergent connoisseurship oriented toward indigenous design and cultural artifacts.
Shifting the vectors of modernist movements to privilege American routes rather than transatlantic ones does not resolve interpretative questions, but rather multiplies them by drawing attention to differences and hierarchies within Latin American societies. Montgomery's analyses demonstrate that the meanings and values attributed to art depend in great part on the contexts of its reception, as for example, in her discussion of how woodcuts ran the gamut from organic, collective authorship to connoisseurship and the idioms of advertising, or her presentation of Carlos Mérida as both an anticolonial modernist and wielder of the tourist gaze. Her study is valuable for understanding debates about art and society that continue through post World War II era modernist movements and beyond.
