The product of Jacqueline Barnitz's more than forty years of studying and teaching, Twentieth-Century Art of Latin America surveys the major currents in and artists of Mexico, the Caribbean, and South America (including Brazil). This new edition has been refreshed throughout to include new scholarship on several modern movements, such as abstraction in the River Plate region and the Cuban avant-garde. A new chapter covers art since 1990. In all, 30 percent of the images in this edition are new, and thirty-four additional artists are discussed and illustrated.

This important and welcome volume is the first English-language anthology of writings on Latin American modern art of the twentieth century. The book includes some fifty seminal essays and documents - including statements, interviews, and manifestoes by artists - that encompass the broad diversity of this emerging field. Many of these materials are difficult to access and some are translated here for the first time. Together the selections explore the breadth and depth of Latin American modern art as well as its distinctive evolution apart from American and European art history. Included in this collection are fascinating ideas and insights on the impact of the avant-garde in the 1920s, the Mexican mural movement, Surrealism and other fantasy-based styles, modern architecture, geometric and optical art, concrete and neo-concrete art, and political conceptualism. For students and scholars of Latin American art, the volume offers an invaluable collection of primary and secondary sources.

Bringing together sixty-five primary documents vital to understanding the history of art in Latin America since 1900, Patrick Frank shows how modern art developed in Latin America in this important new work complementing his previous book, Twentieth-Century Art of Latin America, Revised and Expanded Edition. Besides autobiographies, manifestos, interviews, and artists' statements, the editor has assembled material from videos, blogs, handwritten notebooks, flyers, lectures, and even an after-dinner speech. As the title suggests, many of the texts have a polemical or argumentative cast. In these documents, many of which appear in English for the first time, the artists themselves describe what they hope to accomplish and what they see as obstacles. Designed to show how modern art developed in Latin America, the documents begin with early modern expressions in the early twentieth century, then proceed through the avant-garde of the 1920s, the architectural boom of midcentury, and the Cold War years, and finally conclude with the postmodern artists in the new century.

Bringing together sixty-five primary documents vital to understanding the history of art in Latin America since 1900, Patrick Frank shows how modern art developed in Latin America in this important new work complementing his previous book, Twentieth-Century Art of Latin America, Revised and Expanded Edition. Besides autobiographies, manifestos, interviews, and artists' statements, the editor has assembled material from videos, blogs, handwritten notebooks, flyers, lectures, and even an after-dinner speech. As the title suggests, many of the texts have a polemical or argumentative cast. In these documents, many of which appear in English for the first time, the artists themselves describe what they hope to accomplish and what they see as obstacles. Designed to show how modern art developed in Latin America, the documents begin with early modern expressions in the early twentieth century, then proceed through the avant-garde of the 1920s, the architectural boom of midcentury, and the Cold War years, and finally conclude with the postmodern artists in the new century.

Although it is one of Latin America's most significant postwar art movements, Nueva Figuracion has long been overlooked in studies of modern art. In this first comprehensive examination of the movement, Patrick Frank explores the work of four artists at its heart--Jorge de la Vega, Luis Felipe Noe, Romulo Maccio, and Ernesto Deira--to demonstrate the importance of their work in the transnational development of modern art. The artists were responding directly to a difficult and chaotic period characterized by civil strife, frequent changes of government, and economic shocks. They broke new ground in Latin American art, not only in their technique, but also in the way they engaged the social, political, and cultural climate in an Argentina still recovering from the Peron years. Building on postwar expressionism by working with unprecedented urgency and abandon, they combined spontaneous techniques of abstraction with collage elements and figural subjects. Their works exercised a creative freedom that broke taboos about the role of the artist in society. Frank combines analyses of each artist's paintings with discussions of their social, political, and artistic contexts. He reveals the works' connections to literature, popular culture, and film, broadening our understanding of modern art in the early 1960s.