Jose Gomez Sicre and the "idea" of Latin American art

The young artists of America know that international centers of art are
being born in their own continents, and they already have as points of
reception New York and Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro and Lima, Mexico
City and Sao Paulo, Caracas and Washington.
--Jose Gomez Sicre, 1959

Jose Gomez Sicre (1916-91), chief of the Visual Arts Section at the Pan American Union, published an article in 1959 entitled "Trends--Latin America" in the magazine Art in America. (1) Pointedly describing the limited conception of Latin American art in the United States and Europe as "carnival-type, descriptive, and superficial pictorial chronicle of South American people and customs that appeal to visiting tourists." (2) He argued an opposite viewpoint: "Just as in the United States in the last 20 years there has evolved a magnificent art movement of very high quality and extreme importance, so in Latin America there are many artists--with more or less the same intentions and the same ambitions as the modern United States painter--who have been working in a progressive manner and with deep intellectual feeling." (3)

With this article Gomez Sicre was addressing, in the Latin American context of the 1950s and 1960s, the placement of the region's modern and contemporary art on the international stage. This text was part of a twofold strategy. First, he promoted a new generation of artists with a diverse yet decidedly modernist aesthetic (basing it on the paradigm of international modernism espoused by his mentor. Alfred H. Barr, Jr., at the Museum of Modern Art). Second, he rejected and criticized "the style and politics of Mexican mural painting, which was retardaire, academic, anecdotal, and folkloric and at its worst moments an instrument at the service of communism." (4) Since Gomez Sicre's most active and influential agenda at the Visual Arts Section took place at the height of the cold war, it is important to see his "warrior" role in attacking the Mexican school's style and politics with an "international" modernist alternative as very much a part of the "freedom versus communism" discourse of the time. (5)

Beyond the specific (and at times sinister) politics of his role, Gomez Sicre was among the first, if not the first, critic/curator to travel all over Latin America and comprehend the art of the region as a series of hemispheric visualities, with both common links and divergences. He presented emerging artists at the Sao Paulo Bienal and introduced both established modernists and contemporary artists to United States audiences (private collectors as well as public institutions). In 1965 he organized the ambitious Salon Esso, an "Inter-American" event that selected and made awards to artists under forty years of age from all over the Americas. The selected work was exhibited in the gallery at the Organization of American States headquarters in April 1965. All of the awarded works entered the corporate collection of Esso (which grew from Standard Oil and was the precursor of today's multinational ExxonMobil). (6) In the exhibition catalogue, Gomez Sicre's words reaffirmed his agenda of both capitalist patronage in a free world and the enduring value of modernism: "Of singular significance was the fact that it was private industry--the capitalistic initiative of a free world--that was thus seeking to foster the things of the spirit by an undertaking with broad cultural repercussions." He concluded, "Behind these compositions one can perceive the ferment of the youth of our hemisphere, who agreed to measure talents in fair combat, whose champions have now made themselves known. For those concerned with lasting values, the most significant lesson to be derived is that, with freedom of expression, with liberty to accept or reject direction, art continues its forward progress in the Americas. In the best tradition of the past, it confidently awaits the challenge of the future." (7)

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In spite of the triumphant tone of his words in 1965, Gomez Sicre's agenda would cease to be effective by 1970--partly due to the emergence of a pluralistic aesthetic on the part of the New Left in Latin America, the radicalization of artists throughout the region, and his own lack of interest in conceptual, installation, and performance art. He was a cold-war modernist in an increasingly postmodern world where clear political identification was becoming increasingly fragmented.

Gomez Sicre sublimated modernism into "enduring and universal" values in order to make his cold-war politics more palatable. Yet what remains is his aesthetic judgment; his ability to find and promote new, genuine, and important talents; and his hemispheric vision of the arts of Latin America. In the words of the Peruvian painter Fernando de Szyszlo, "The person who really promoted the idea of Latin American art was Pepe Gomez Sicre. Before him, there was Argentinean painting. Colombian painting, Venezuelan or Mexican painting. It was Gomez Sicre who was the first to speak of Latin American painting." (8)