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by Andrea Giunta (Author), Peter Kahn (Translator)
The 1960s were heady years in Argentina. Visual artists, curators, and critics sought to fuse art and politics; to broaden the definition of art to encompass happenings and assemblages; and, above all, to achieve international recognition for new, cutting-edge Argentine art. A bestseller in Argentina, Avant-Garde, Internationalism, and Politics is an examination of the 1960s as a brief historical moment when artists, institutions, and critics joined to promote an international identity for Argentina's visual arts.
The renowned Argentine art historian and critic Andrea Giunta analyzes projects specifically designed to internationalize Argentina's art and avant-garde during the 1960s: the importation of exhibitions of contemporary international art, the sending of Argentine artists abroad to study, the organization of prize competitions involving prestigious international art critics, and the export of exhibitions of Argentine art to Europe and the United States. She looks at the conditions that made these projects possible--not least the Alliance for Progress, a U.S. program of "exchange" and "cooperation" meant to prevent the spread of communism through Latin America in the wake of the Cuban Revolution--as well as the strategies formulated to promote them. She describes the influence of Romero Brest, prominent art critic, supporter of abstract art, and director of the Centro de Artes Visuales del Instituto Tocuato Di Tella (an experimental art center in Buenos Aires); various group programs such as Nueva Figuración and Arte Destructivo; and individual artists including Antonio Berni, Alberto Greco, León Ferrari, Marta Minujin, and Luis Felipe Noé. Giunta's rich narrative illuminates the contentious postwar relationships between art and politics, Latin America and the United States, and local identity and global recognition.
Back Jacket
Andrea Giunta is one of the sharpest minds working in the post-World War II cultural field anywhere, and Avant-Garde, Internationalism, and Politics" is a work of amazing breadth, originality, and complexity. It touches on many facets of U.S. cultural life as well as on the many ways a Latin American country tried to find a suitable postwar identity in a ruthless historical moment. With this book, Giunta is redefining the parameters not only of art history in Argentina but of contemporary cultural discourses in general."--Serge Guilbaut, author of "How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War"
Author Biography
Andrea Giunta is a professor of art history at the Universidad de San Martín and an associate professor art history at the Universidad de Buenos Aires. She is the author of Goeritz/Romero Brest: Correspondencias and the recipient of fellowships from the Rockefeller, Getty, and Guggenheim foundations.
Peter Kahn is a Ph.D. candidate in Hispanic American Literature at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
