Desertor de un ejército forastero: Seoane y el movimiento para un arte abstracto en Argentina

This article analyzes how the Argentinean art magazine Ver y Estimar received the art exhibitions spanning from 1948 to 1955, in Buenos Aires, by the Argentinean-Galician artist Luis Seoane. During those years, the magazine, led by art critic Jorge Romero Brest, advocated for the imposition of geometric abstraction as the hegemonic trend to be followed in order for Argentinean art to engage with the international development of modernity. This essay shows the fictional quality of those accounts meant to institute hegemonic models for the consumption of cultural productions. These are processes leading to the configuration of a canon, composed by choices and omissions. And the main purpose of this canon is to legitimize a given discourse—rather than creating knowledge about an art object in relation to the conditions of its production. This article shows how, in analyzing Seoane's paintings, the first omission is related to his belief in an idea of a popular art as one meant to be effective beyond museums' walls. Critics of the time also disregarded Seoane's conception of his own work as a process based on an idealization of art's potential for building a transatlantic dialogue with both Galician history and culture. At the same time, Seoane's shapes are a result of his effort to establish a dialogue on art techniques, interacting with the different voices present in the metropolitan art scene of postwar Buenos Aires.