Los Artistas del Pueblo: Prints and Workers' Culture in Buenos Aires, 1917-1935 (review)

Patrick Frank's carefully researched study offers the only book-length analysis of "the first sustained and organized movement of Social Realism" (p. 18) in Latin America. The Argentine printmakers Adolfo Bellocq, José Arato, Guillermo Facio Hebequer, and Abraham Vigo formed Los Artistas del Pueblo around 1917. (Frank leaves out sculptor Agustín Riganelli, the fifth member of the group, because he worked in a different medium and achieved greater recognition than the other four.) For the next two decades, they rejected both modernism and the stultifying Buenos Aires art establishment in order to produce prints that expressed a deep empathy for the poor and encouraged workers to organize and fight to improve their lives.

Frank provides a separate chapter on each of the four artists under consideration, in addition to several thematic chapters tackling such topics as the artists' relationship to modern art and their views on tango. The book's 100 illustrations, most of which are the author's photographs of privately owned prints, provide the reader with an outstanding introduction to a large body of work. Frank excels at formal analysis and often brings out aspects of printmaking technique that are difficult to see in the reproductions. He further illuminates the works through a consideration of intellectual and artistic influences. The Artistas' commitment to communitarian anarchism, their deep ties to the Boedo literary school, as well as the influence of such heroes of the international left as Maksim Gorki and French philosopher Jean-Marie Guyau are all usefully explored. Frank also expertly situates the Artistas in the larger Argentine cultural milieu, comparing, for example, José Arato's depiction of the Buenos Aires arrabal, or slum, with those of Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, Manuel Gálvez, and Evaristo Carriego. In several cases, Frank contrasts individual prints to similar works by well-known Latin American, North American or European artists. By considering Arato's Semana Trágica in conjunction with Reginald Marsh's depression-era print, Bread Line, he reveals that the workers depicted by the Argentine artist are both more vulnerable and less passive than those portrayed by Marsh. Similarly, he contrasts Facio's El Astillero with Joseph Pennell's End of the Day, Gatun Lock to show that Facio, like the other Artistas, was drawn to scenes of work for their human content, rather than for their aesthetic quality.

Perhaps the most important theme that emerges from Frank's analysis is the Artistas' troubled relationship to Argentine popular culture. In its early days, the studio hosted a bohemian circle that nourished the intellectual development of two of the most important figures in the history of tango: Juan de Dios Filiberto and Enrique Santos Discépolo. Yet despite these associations, the Artistas saw tango, as well as soccer and the popular theater, as dangerous distractions from the pressing need for working-class struggle. As Frank points out, the Artistas shared this skepticism with Argentina's anarchists and socialists. In their art, they rejected the picturesque, the sensationalist, as well as the overtly nationalist in an effort to produce an alternative high culture for workers. At least one member of the group became a member of the Communist Party, and the Artistas who survived into the 1940s responded with hostility to what they saw as the demagoguery of Juan Perón. In this sense, they were typical of Argentina's anti-populist left.

Frank's subtitle is a bit misleading, since his treatment of workers' culture is quite thin and relies on an incomplete reading of the historiography. He makes good use of Dora Barrancos' work on socialist and anarchist education, but ignores most of the recent literature on the culture of the Buenos Aires popular sectors as well as Adrián Gorelik's work on public space in the city. As a result, he sometimes conflates the ideology of socialist militants with the cultural...