Import/export : raw materials, hemispheric expertise, and the making of Latin American art, 1933-1945

Abstract

Historians have tended to characterize Latin American art either as a self-evident term or as a category designated by U.S. institutions. This dissertation argues instead that artists from the region were agents in shaping this emerging field through their selective cooperation with, and resistance to, the United States' Good Neighbor Policy networks. Artists, haunted by criticisms that art in Latin America was a "cultural import" from Europe, engaged with a U.S. market that treated their art as a source of "exportable prestige." This dissertation analyzes the entanglement of this cultural discourse of import/export with the mechanisms of commerce as a new paradigm for thinking about Latin American art. The period that is the focus of this dissertation-l 933 to 1945-represented a transitional era between Latin America's "export age" (1870-1930) and postwar modernization, import substitution industrialization, and the birth of what would come to be known as developmentalism (desarrollismo). Framed by the Great Depression and by World War II, this "long decade" was coeval with the Good Neighbor Policy, in which the nations of the Americas pledged non-intervention in the hemisphere and more intimate commercial and cultural ties. Through case-studies of Candido Portinari, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Joaquin Torres-Garcia, and Nelson Rockefeller, the dissertation places special emphasis upon the relationship between materiality, raw materials, and import substitution industrialization in analyzing works of art and the networks in which they were mobile.