December 16, 2024 marked the opening of a new exhibition at the Art Museum of the Americas, at the Organization of American States in Washington DC. This exhibition was curated by Michele Greet, Professor of Art History at George Mason University. The exhibition is entitled “Transatlantic Encounters: Latin American Artists in Paris, 1920-1970" and examines the work of Latin American artists who lived, worked, and exhibited in Paris in the middle of the twentieth century. As Greet notes, while in Paris the Latin American artists in Paris engaged with the great movements of modern art, from Cubism to Surrealism and Abstraction. Involvement in these movements not only affected these artists’ own trajectories and that of Latin American art more broadly, but the work of these Latin American artists also had an influence on artistic trends in Europe.
As the exhibition notes, Latin American artists had been travelling to Europe, and to France in particular since the nineteenth century, but a major wave of artists came in the wake of World War I and again after World War II. Once in Paris, Latin American artists grew acquainted with local artistic trends and with each other, especially through the open art academies of Montparnasse. In 1924, an exhibition at the Musée Galliéra presented more than 260 works by 42 Latin American artists then residing in Paris. In the decades that followed, galleries in Paris continued to show works by Latin American artists, and as Greet argues, it is in this context that “numerous expatriate Latin American artists developed unique artistic identities that merged their individual cultural roots with their cosmopolitan experiences in Paris.”[1]
After World War II, Latin American artists particularly interested in abstraction once again travelled to Paris, and once again found there rich opportunities for exhibition and enrichment. This wave included painters like Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar, Alejandro Otero, and the sculptor Edgar Negret. Some, like Manuel Rendón Seminario, Angel Hurtado, Negret, and Jesús Rafael Soto also exhibited at newly established Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, which sought to promote abstract, non-figural, and non-objective art.
Paintings in the exhibition are drawn from the rich collection of the Art Museum of the Americas. The exhibition is groundbreaking, for it shows the extent to which Latin American artists were part of, and contributed to, modern art movements in Paris and beyond. The exhibition is based on research that Greet conducted for her recent book, Transatlantic Encounters: Latin American Artists in Paris Between the Wars (Yale, 2018). Readers can also explore the project through Greet’s website: https://transatlanticencounters.rrchnm.org/
Transatlantic Encounters: Latin American Artists in Paris, 1920-1970, is on view now at the Art Museum of the Americas, 201 18th Street NW, Washington, DC 20006
[1] Wall text, “Transatlantic Encounters,” Art Museum of the Americas.
January 30, 2025