Little attention has been paid to the recent art of Latin America in reference works and histories of modem art with the exception of architecture and the Mexican mural movement. The publication of the present survey is significant in that it reinforces hopes that this condition, which has been chronic for the nineteenth- as well as twentieth-century Latin America art field, is substantively changing. Two books in English, published since 1965, that overlap the contents of Mr. Chase’s in different degrees are the now well-known brief survey of American art from these areas from Olmec times to the end of the 1960s, titled A History of Latin American Art and Architecture, by Leopoldo Castedo (1969) and the undeservedly much overlooked New Tendencies in Art by the Argentine critic Aldo Pellegrini (1966) which analyzes contemporary Latin American art as an integral part of world avant-garde movements from the end of World War II to the year of its publication. The present study covers painting, sculpture, architecture and “integration of the arts” and, to some extent, graphic art (drawings and printmaking) for South and Middle America as well as the Caribbean for all but the last five years of the period since 1920— the full synoptic range of modem art of the area. Given the actual title, one misses the critical developments of the 1960s. Still, the author has produced the most inclusive, detailed, and probably useful singlevolume summary yet to be published of what is really all of twentieth-century art of the Western Hemisphere outside the United States and Canada. In view of the fact that it covers so wide and little-researched an area, it can be considered an advance geography of the twentieth-century Latin American artistic landscape, strategic in scale, based in great part on direct knowledge of original work. As such it should prove especially valuable not only to future investigators in depth to whom this work provides a stepping-off point, but also to those surveying the relative proportions and relationships of the big regional divisions within themselves and to the prevailing east-west mainstreams of international art, to which Latin American art has contributed more than is realized.
The author comes to his subject—a complex and evolving phase of modem art history still largely unrepresented in university humanities programs—as a musicologist. His treatment of it takes the form of a descriptive review from the neutral ground of a North American observer experienced in empathetic study of the Latin American artistic scene rather than that of a strict art-historical analysis or that of an essay in wholly independent evaluative criticism. In covering nearly a half-century’s development and nearly the full geographical area taken as Latin America, his descriptive record makes a primary contribution through the large number of specific works cited (most of them regrettably not illustrated, but still valuable), the accurate perspective in which major developments in the larger centers of activity are seen, and the many revealing quotations from critical writings from a variety of published sources, including periodicals, that make up the body of interpretive comment on individual artists. This is a step toward a greatly needed systematic bibliography and archive for the overall modem Latin American art field. The book also follows a convincing progression in organizing its national entities in regional groupings that flow from centers of ethnic admixture from Middle America and the Caribbean through the Andes southward and eastward and terminate in Brazil, which is properly treated somewhat independently. The more universal problem of critical viewpoint; i.e., autocthonous versus international criteria, is handled by compromise (as it must always be except in the epicenters), but here it seems intuited rather than reasoned.
Lacunae and imbalances are inevitable in a work of such range and they do exist. Yet one must give high credit here, despite various omissions and only passing references to important developments (such as to the second generation of Mexican painters of the 1930s), for the rightness of the overall historical figuration, the significance and the order of the detail with which the various regions and major features within regions are presented, and finally, the authentic sense of fact and artistic character, as the author sees his subject, that comes from his wide and first-hand experience in Latin America itself.
