The look at the legacy of America before the Europeans named it America is intentional, a quality that will be considered the main access route to the magnificent and stimulating exhibition offered by the Juan March Foundation in Madrid. This is what should matter to us when entering the rooms, because the way of observing the effect of another art on the art of our world must be lively and above all rebellious as Franz Boas and his disciples wanted when they defended anthropology as an open window. to the study of the peoples that the humanist tradition, that of Montaigne, called savages.
Let us take advantage of the fact that the recognition of these research efforts on the identity of peoples who were once trampled by Western arrogance is in vogue to take a look at the small, but relevant, group of adventurers in the adoption of indigenous aesthetic values ??in the creation of modern art. They all agree in stating that on the other side of the Atlantic there were totally different humanities that, upon their access to them, shook all scales of similarity.
More than six hundred works exhibited here invite us to understand it through an immersion in the original sources of the culture of America before it was America, to establish the value of fusion, as stated by Rodrigo Gutiérrez Viñuales, who acts as guest curator. And both the current concept of the exhibition event and the materials presented as proof of a cultural story invite the viewer who approaches the rooms at 77 Castelló Street to think about what is defended here as a new look at the art created in America in the last two centuries.
New, in what sense? In the sense of verifying the effectiveness of the reception of art prior to the arrival of Europeans in the development of an “American” art with signs of identity, which can be observed from architecture, painting and sculpture to graphic design, ceramics or typography.
Important fact: the exhibition is structured chronologically due to the weight that cultural history increasingly has in the appreciation of the work of art. Thus, exhibition spaces are opened that respond to four phases: 1. Registration and reinterpretation, 1790-1910; 2. Reinterpretation and identity, 1910-1940; 3. Identity and invention, 1940-1970; 4. Invention and conceptualisms, 1970-2023.
In the first phase we taste the archaeological interest in the ruins of the 18th century enlighteners converted into a territory of the exotic that reaches the Universal Exhibition in Paris of 1889, and is done through the works of the Mexicans Antonio Peñafiel and José María Velasco, by the Peruvian Francisco Laso, but also by European authors such as Paul Gauguin, the archaeologist-artist Adela Breton or the drawings of the ruins of Yucatán by the British Frederick Catherwood, without forgetting the project for the lighthouse in memory of Columbus in Santo Sunday by Manuel Torres, today unthinkable to do.
In the second phase we detect the effect of the habits and customs of “before America” in the works of the artistic avant-garde of the first half of the 20th century, which allows them to go from majestic architecture to applied arts in the line Arts and Crafts. Fascinating is the wooden and leather armchair as a throne from the Mexican Pavilion from 1929, the stone fountain by Guillermo Ruiz from 1927, but also all the small objects, such as the evocative ceramics by Ladislao Ortega or Carlos Mérida and the domestic furniture ranging from desks to deco stoves.
Without leaving aside Elena Izque’s wonderfully modern and archaic designs for textiles and thus entering into the passion for the return to the primitive as one of the paradigms of modernity of the 1920s. That is why it is not surprising to also find some works by Man Ray in the exhibition. And from there to Art Deco. Or to the reflections on the path that America had to travel from a Marxist perspective in The Seven Essays of Interpretation of Peruvian Reality by José Carlos Mariategui from 1928, the work as an art critic by Antonino Espinosa Saldaña on Inca art from 1935, the reflections about the tradition of the abstract man of Torres García or the magazine Removedor, which, precisely, takes us to the third phase, where we delve into the wonderful story about the conceptual art of the central years of the 20th century, and where sculpture You will understand stone work and carving as an approach to abstraction.
Painting abounds in these rooms, with diverse themes, with works by Roberto Matto, Rufino Tamayo, Robert Raucschemberg or María Freire and where it is easy to understand that Liechtenstein himself joined the movement. Without forgetting the sculptures of Oteiza or Henri Moore. For them, the question to answer was: is the quality of pre-Columbian art similar to that of the Mediterranean of the classical era? In the fourth phase, American civility converges with the doubts present in a torn West and gives rise to a varied artistic proposal that ranges from painting to ceramics, passing through textiles inspired by ancient tradition, from The Lady with the Emerald in Carlos Mérida to the video Art and ancestral ceramics with which in 2016 Nadin Ospina plays shaking hands with an old pre-Columbian idol and a polychrome aluminum Martian figurine in his Rescue.
With all evidence, this exhibition demonstrates that the history of art does not obey the designs of a classical canon. The approach to an art product of another art created in America before it was America reasons the diversity of creation. Universalists are politely invited to step aside and embrace the need to provincialize knowledge.
Before America. Original sources in modern culture
Exhibition team: Rodrigo Gutiérrez Viñuales, guest curator; Manuel Fontán del Junco, Director of Museums and Exhibitions, Juan March Foundation, and María Toledo Gutiérrez, Head of Exhibition Project, Juan March Foundation. March Foundation, Madrid. www.march.es. Until March 10.