Hemispheric Integration: Materiality, Mobility, and the Making of Latin American Art by Niko Vicario (review)

In Hemispheric Integration: Materiality, Mobility, and the Making of Latin American Art, Niko Vicario demonstrates the process under which a new “geocultural category” called Latin American art came into existence toward the middle of the twentieth century. As was the case with their literary counterparts of the same era, Latin American painters were preoccupied with establishing cultural and artistic singularity along with a market for their work beyond their national borders. However, the author reveals how the success of this endeavor was largely due to a political and cultural shift in which the United States gained international prominence and New York became the center of the art world.

In the introduction, Vicario gives an overview of the sociocultural, political and economic terrain. He posits that prior to 1900, art was part of the import-export scheme that governed Latin American international relations where aesthetics came from abroad, mainly Europe. Influenced by José Enrique Rodó and José Martí, artists sought to break their cultural dependency by striving to create a mobile art, both national and Latin American, that could be exported and integrated in an international market. This shift occurred at the same time that the United States was displacing European domination and implementing the Good Neighbor policy that sought to integrate the hemisphere for strategic reasons, which included promoting closer intercultural relations. But even as they attempted to free themselves from the grasp of the West, Latin American artists were still in some way dependent on the metropolis for their existence, as the system retained the economic structure of import-export whereby art and painters substituted raw materials exported no longer to Europe but to the United States.

The opening chapter meticulously traces the travels of David Alfaro Siqueiros throughout North and South America, as well as Cuba, as he innovates with new materials to modernize mural painting and leave behind what he calls “folk art for export.” Siqueiros becomes mobile and able to successfully create a geographically expansive art that encompasses more than the national. Vicario emphasizes how the muralist went from a collaborative phase imbued by revolutionary fervor critical of the connivance of fascism and capitalism to a more personalized work espousing a view increasingly in harmony with the economic and political interests of the United States. This change in Siqueiros’s politics appears to coincide with his collaboration with Nelson Rockefeller who also pursued a model of regional integration on behalf of the United States and MoMA. In the end, Siqueiros comes across as another “Millionaire’s painter,” something he had accused Diego Rivera of being. However, Vicario leaves us wondering to what degree Siqueiros was aware of the contradictions that ensued from his association with American capitalists.

The second chapter focuses on Joaquín Torres-García, who after forty years of residing in Europe returned to his native country, Uruguay, to promote an alternative modern “morphological art” that stood in contrast not only to Europe but especially to Mexican muralism, as it downplayed politics and social realism. Torres-García likewise differed from the muralists in his attempt to produce art on an import substitution model that emphasized creating with resources at hand. This led to a mixture of primitivism and Constructivism posited as an autochthonous, modern, Latin American art, though Vicario rightly indicates its strong affinities with European artistic endeavors. The author highlights the importance of Torres-García’s work in shaping hemispheric integration underscoring the great influence he had on American artists, surpassing that of the muralists. His impact on Latin American painters was also remarkable yet in later years they rejected the “double aspect” of his art as retrograde.

The third chapter is most illuminating as it explores Nelson Rockefeller’s role in constructing hemispheric integration. Vicario deftly delineates how the American industrialist weaved a network of commercial, political and artistic ties with Latin America much to the benefit of the United States...