Art of the Fantastic, 1920-1987: An Unusual Latin American Celebration

Article # :	11831
Section :	THE ARTS
Issue Date :	8 / 1987	1,288 Words
Author :	Holliday T. Day and Hollister Sturges
The important contributions of Latin America to Western art and literature in the twentieth century are only beginning to be known in Europe and North America. Exploited as colonies of Spain and Portugal for three hundred years, racked by almost constant warfare throughout the nineteenth century, and catapulted into the industrial age in the twentieth, Latin American countries have received short shrift in the cultural scheme of things. The growth of modern communications, however, from the trickle of transatlantic ocean liners in the early twentieth century to the flood of jet flights today, has transformed Latin America's artistic energies into a dynamic force. Aviation has not only linked South America with Europe and the United States but has also connected the major cities within each country. And with industrialization and rapid transportation has come an increasing realization by each country of its own unique identity. Art and literature reflect that quest for identity. While Latin American writers have been acknowledged internationally since the literacy "boom" of the sixties, only a few visual artists have achieved comparable reputations, although many of their themes are the same. Both writers and artists have drawn on fantastic imagery to express the cultural forces that shaped their land. Fantasy in art has appeared throughout the twentieth century, most notably in Surrealism, but Latin American artists and writers have employed it with particular genius. Whereas Surrealism was a consciously intellectual movement first articulated in a manifesto by Andre Breton, the fantastic imagery of Latin Americans has not been rooted in doctrine. Surrealism and the fantastic in Latin America share in the primacy they give to imagination and intuition, but they evolved historically from different sources. Inspired by French Symbolist literature and Freudian psychoanalysis, Breton reacted against the limits of Western rationalism; artists in Latin America drew from their own cultural history, including pre-Columbian religious myths and practices. The Art of the Fantastic: Latin America 1920-1987, the first major thematic Latin American exhibition to be held in the United States since 1966, examines for the first time the achievements of twentieth-century artists who explore reality through the use of the fantastic. The exhibition, organized by the Indianapolis Museum of Art, opened there in June before going on a year-long tour in the United States and Mexico. Fantastic art is characterized by the juxtaposition, distortion, or amalgamation of images and/or materials that extend experience by contradicting our normal expectations formally or iconographically. Devices such as metamorphoses, incongruous hybrids, dislocations in time and space, and shifts in scale and materials create fantastic images that break the rules of the natural world. Although all of these elements may be present in Surrealism, Magic Realism, or Expressionism, fantasy itself is not an "ism." Nor is it what is merely exotic to North American eyes - a toucan, for instance, or a folk mask. A far broader concept, the fantastic may be an ingredient in almost any style, including geometric art. As a means of explaining the inexplicable in the external world, it may be perceived as a utopian element as well, in the sense that a mythic account, such as a creation story, can contain essential universal truths independent of actual historical events. By transcending the norms of perceived reality, the fantastic transports the viewer into a world where the implausible becomes ... Read Full Article