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Article

Arroyo (Castillo), Miguel  

Jorge F. Rivas Pérez

(Gerónimo)

(b Caracas, Aug 29, 1920; d Caracas, Nov 3, 2004).

Venezuelan designer, potter, educator, curator, and museum administrator. Arroyo was one of the first professional designers in Venezuela. He graduated in drawing and painting from the Escuela de Artes Plásticas y Artes Aplicadas de Caracas in 1938. From 1938 to 1940 Arroyo lived in New York City, where he worked at the Venezuelan pavilion at the New York World’s Fair (1939–1940) and assisted Luis Alfredo López Méndez with painting La Vida Venezolana on the ceiling of the canopy of the pavilion. Back in Venezuela, from 1940 to 1946, Arroyo taught art at the Liceo de Aplicación in Caracas. During this period, he taught and also worked as an interior designer (Librería Magisterio (1944) and Gran Exposición Nacional de Industria y Comercio de Maracaibo (1945)). From 1946 to 1948 he studied design and pottery at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, PA.

In 1949...

Article

Art museums in Latin America  

Abigail Winograd

Museums have played a central role in the cultural life of Latin American countries from independence to the present. Art museums in particular have featured prominently in civic, nation-building discourse throughout the region, with the opening of such museums often occurring concurrently with major economic and political changes. Museums, wherever they were founded, helped shape collective and social understanding; they were the institutions par excellence in which hegemonic cultural realities could be defined and reflected.

In the 19th century, countries across the Americas gained their independence from European colonial powers. The newly founded republics urgently felt the need to distance themselves from their colonial pasts and endeavored to establish and construct new national identities. Latin American artists and governments began a concerted effort to celebrate their independence through arts and culture. Both paintings (the preferred form) and cultural institutions aimed to create and promote a usable past: a history replete with heroes, founding myths, and “indigenous” symbols of patriotism. These founding myths favored large-scale history paintings, portraits of liberators, and romantic landscapes, housed in museums built by local elites and governments who understood cultural institutions (art museums as well as encyclopedic museums) to be ideal locations to enshrine the project of a cohesive national identity....

Article

Casasola, Agustín Víctor  

Mark Castro

(b Mexico City, Jul 28, 1874; d Mexico City, Mar 30, 1938).

Mexican photographer, journalist, and collector. Casasola initially studied typography before becoming a reporter in 1894. He probably began taking photographs to illustrate his articles and in 1902 traveled to Veracruz to photograph a tour by President Porfirio Díaz. Newspapers that publicly criticized Díaz or his government were often harassed or closed, thus articles and their illustrations often focused exclusively on positive aspects of Mexican life, such as the development of infrastructure, the growth of trade, and the pastimes of the elites living in Mexico City (see Monasterio 2003, 32–41). At the same time, Casasola sometimes photographed scenes of everyday life, traveling, for example, to haciendas near Mexico City to photograph the peasant farmworkers. In these images he took care, lest he attract the ire of the government, to avoid any display of the harsh conditions that characterized life for the majority of Mexicans outside of the capital.

In 1905 Agustín and his brother Miguel were both working as photographers for ...

Article

Cidoncha, Rafael  

Mexican, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 1952, in Vigo, Spain.

Painter. Portraits.

Rafael Cidoncha is known mainly for his portraits, notably those of the art collector Mrs Natasha Gelman (1996) in which he reproduces Frida Kahlo's 1943 Self-portrait with Monkeys. He has also received official commissions including a portrait of King Juan Carlos of Spain, commissioned by the city of Seville. Cidoncha has shown his work in exhibitions in Madrid, New York, Brussels and Frankfurt. In ...

Article

Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros  

Tom McNulty

[CPPCCisneros Collection]

Collection of Latin American art based in New York and Caracas. Founded in the 1970s by Patricia Phelps de Cisneros and her husband, Gustavo A. Cisneros, the mission of the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (CPPC) is to support art education throughout Latin America, and to promote the region’s vast contributions to the visual arts internationally. To this end, under the auspices of the Fundación Cisneros, the CPPC supports a rich and varied programme of collecting, exhibitions, and publications. The CPPC is organized around five major sub-collections: modern art, contemporary art, colonial art, the work of artists who recorded their travels to Latin America, and the art of the Orinoco region.

The modern art collection includes a great many important works by 20th-century Latin American artists, particularly geometric abstractionists from such countries as Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, and the Cisneros’ native Venezuela. This segment of the collection takes on a global aspect, with the inclusion of major European and North American artists whose work relates to the masters of Latin American art. Representative modernists include Joaquín Torres García, Gego, Lygia Clark, Roberto Matta, Hélio Oiticica, Francisco Narváez, and Alejandro Otero, among others....

Article

Garavito, Humberto  

Jorge Luján-Muñoz

(b Quetzaltenango, Jan 26, 1897; d Guatemala City, Jun 1, 1970).

Guatemalan painter, collector, and writer. He began his artistic studies in Quetzaltenango, where he was fortunate to come into contact with the Spanish painter Jaime Sabartés (1881–1968) and Carlos Mérida, with whom he became friends. He continued his studies in Guatemala City and then in Mexico City at the Real Academia de San Carlos, where his fellow students included Rufino Tamayo, Roberto Montenegro, and Miguel Covarrubias. He returned briefly to Guatemala only to leave for Europe. He studied in Madrid at the Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando and from 1924 to 1925 lived in Paris. He returned to Guatemala City in 1927 and in 1928 became director of the Academia de Bellas Artes. By then he had developed a style derived from French Impressionism, although he gradually moved toward a more naturalistic style, perhaps in response to the taste of his clients.

Garavito generally painted in oils on a medium or small scale, concentrating on the beautiful Guatemalan landscape, of which he can in a sense be considered the “discoverer.” His preferred subjects were the mountains, volcanoes, and lakes of the Guatemalan high plateau, and he was the first to incorporate in his works the Indians in their brightly colored clothes. He was the central figure and teacher of a group of figurative painters and painters working in a naturalistic style, such as ...

Article

Globalization of the art market  

Olav Velthuis

[emerging art markets]

Since the 1980s art markets have developed rapidly outside of Europe and the USA. In the so-called BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) this development has been particularly dynamic. With aggregate sales estimated at €11.5 billion, China is the second largest market for art and antiques in the world after the USA (McAndrew 2014). Works of art made by modern and contemporary artists from all four countries regularly fetch more than $1 million at auction.

The rise of the BRICs has coincided with the global integration of what used to be local art markets: demand for and supply of particular artists or artistic movements may now be dispersed across the globe. The boom which global art markets have witnessed in the new millennium can be attributed partially to new buyers from countries like China and Russia developing an interest in art, both old and new. In describing the emergence of the BRICs, the focus in this article will be on modern and contemporary art, since that is where market development has been most significant, both qualitatively and quantitatively....

Article

Larraín García-Moreno, Sergio  

Ramón Alfonso Méndez Brignardello

(b Santiago, 1905; d 1999).

Chilean architect, collector, and teacher. His family, in which he was the youngest of fourteen children, moved from Chile to Europe in 1919 in anticipation of Chilean political and social unrest. He had no formal training but learned much from traveling around Europe, attending some private classes and being in the company of adults. He knew the works of Proust, Apollinaire, Gide, and Picasso, and became interested in the arts and avant-garde thought, familiarizing himself with the Bauhaus, Gropius, Le Corbusier, and others. He decided to become an architect, and on returning to Chile studied architecture at the Universidad Católica de Valparaíso (qualified 1928), where teaching still followed Beaux-Arts methods. His first work was done in the practice of his cousin Jorge Arteaga, who passed on a commission to design the Edificio Oberpaur, Santiago (1929), reputedly the first work of contemporary architecture in Chile. The six-story department store and office space was influenced by Erich Mendelsohn’s expressionistic style. Characterized by its continuous “wrap-around” windows, the Oberpaur building was also the first in Chile to have ...

Article

Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica: Museums, exhibitions, and collections  

David M. Jones

revised by James A. Doyle

The collection of artifacts and information concerning ancient Mesoamerican cultures began in the immediate aftermath of the Spanish Conquest. Much of the plunder and tribute collected by Hernán Cortés and other conquistadores was sent to Europe, finding its way into the Kunstkammern of the nobility. Some gold objects of exceptional artistic quality survived the great meltdown and eventually entered into other museum collections (New York, Met.; Turin, Museo di Antropologia ed Etnografia; St. Petersburg, Hermitage). Several of the conquistadores also wrote histories of their exploits, incorporating valuable information about the cultures they had conquered; two of the most famous are Cortés’s Cartas de relación (1519–1526), written to Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, and Bernal Díaz’s Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España (1568). Descriptions such as those written by Bernardino de Sahagún and Diego de Landa in the 16th century (see Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica...

Article

Pre-Columbian South America: Museums, exhibitions, and collections  

George Bankes and Frederick W. Lange

revised by Joanne Pillsbury

See also Pre-Columbian South America

Comparatively few accounts exist of South American antiquities sent to Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries (see Pre-Columbian Mesomerica: Museums, exhibitions, and collections). Objects of silver and gold were melted down into ingots for ease of transport and trade; works in stone, ceramic, and wood were destroyed as vestiges of idolatry. Some finely woven textiles, ornaments, and other objects were sent to Spain and recorded in inventories, but most were lost to the vagaries of palace fires or neglect. By the 18th century, however, the importation of antiquities from South America became more systematic, and Spanish monarchs and their administrators established extensive collections of South American antiquities, particularly from the Central Andes.

In 1765 the Viceroy of Peru sent 7 Inka keros (drinking cups) and 263 Moche and Chimu pots from Peru for King Charles III’s Gabinete de Historia Natural, founded in ...

Article

Restitution  

Noémie Goldman and Kim Oosterlinck

Term for the return of lost or looted cultural objects to their country of origin, former owners, or their heirs. The loss of the object may happen in a variety of contexts (armed conflicts, war, colonialism, imperialism, or genocide), and the nature of the looted cultural objects may also vary, ranging from artworks, such as paintings and sculptures, to human remains, books, manuscripts, and religious artifacts. An essential part of the process of restitution is the seemingly unavoidable conflict around the transfer of the objects in question from the current to the former owners. Ownership disputes of this nature raise legal, ethical, and diplomatic issues. The heightened tensions in the process arise because the looting of cultural objects challenges, if not breaks down, relationships between peoples, territories, cultures, and heritages.

The history of plundering and art imperialism may be traced back to ancient times. Looting has been documented in many instances from the sack by the Romans of the Etruscan city of Veii in ...

Article

Reyes Ferreira, Jesús  

Leonor Morales

[Chucho]

(b Guadalajara, Oct 10, 1882; d Mexico City, Aug 5, 1977).

Mexican painter, sculptor, and collector. He led a very curious life, surrounded by the antiques that he collected. In Guadalajara and later in Mexico City he produced what he called his ‘smeared papers’: sheets of India paper painted with washes of brilliantly coloured aniline dyes that he prepared himself, with the occasional addition of silver or gilt. Horses and cockerels were his favourite subjects, but he also painted exhausted girls, bleeding Christs, angels, demons and angel–demons, skulls, clowns, prostitutes, circus performers, monks, doves, and flowers. His painting has a very particular charm, inspired by popular and colonial art, the aesthetic value of which he was instrumental in promoting. Though influenced by Georges Rouault and by Marc Chagall (whom he met in Mexico in 1942), he was one of the most original figures in 20th-century Mexican art.

Kassner, L. S. de: Jesús Reyes Ferreira: Su universo pictórico. Mexico City, 1978....

Article

Reyes-Ferreira, Jesús or Chucho  

Mexican, 20th century, male.

Born 1882, in Guadalajara; died 1977, in Mexico.

Painter. Figures, scenes with figures, animals.

Jesús Reyes-Ferreira was an antiquarian and a collector as well as an artist. He settled in Mexico in the 1930s.

In 2001 his work was included in the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, ...

Article

Tamayo, Rufino  

Xavier Moyssén

revised by Ana Garduño

(b Oaxaca, Aug 29, 1899; d Jun 24, 1991).

Mexican painter, printmaker, sculptor, and collector. He is one of a select group of Mexican painters who attained international reputations in the 20th century. Opposed to the ideological current represented by Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco, Tamayo was involved with an aesthetic search detached from nationalism and more interested in addressing pictorial and aesthetic questions. He was born in Oaxaca, a region noted for its traditions and indigenous groups, its Pre-Columbian art and highly colored popular art, all of which, together with Tamayo’s travels to New York and Paris where he experienced the impact of artists such as Picasso and Jean Dubuffet, produced a highly original appropriation of the popular, the “primitive,” and the modern. Tamayo, with his painting and declarations of the need for artistic independence, became a model for a new generation of painters in the 1950s and 1960s who broke away from the Mexican school of painting....

Article

Toledo, Francisco  

Teresa del Conde

revised by Deborah Caplow

(b Juchitán, Oaxaca, Jul 17, 1940).

Mexican painter, sculptor, textile designer, printmaker, and collector. He grew up in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, an area that was rich in legends, rites, and beliefs springing from a strong Zapotec tradition predating the Spanish conquest of Mexico. He began to draw and paint at a very early age, studying first in Oaxaca, where he produced linocuts in the graphic workshop run by Arturo García Bustos (1926–2017). In 1957 he moved to Mexico City to attend the Escuela de Diseño y Artesanía of the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes. After holding his first solo shows of gouaches and prints in 1959 in Fort Worth, Texas, and Mexico City, he moved in 1960 to Paris, where until 1963 he studied printmaking under Stanley William Hayter. While continuing to work within Western traditions, he became interested in the art of Asian cultures and in ancient Mexican art, especially in those forms that were not officially sanctioned....