Many Latin American artists were also receptive to the European avant-garde style of Cubism, which flattened and twisted forms and presented them from multiple angles. In 1907 the Mexican government awarded artist Diego Rivera a scholarship to study in Europe. He ended up in Paris, where he associated with the Cubist circle. Rivera’s subject matter often included the abstracted portraits and still lifes favoured by Cubism’s originators, Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, but he also kept abreast of developments in Mexico and incorporated these themes into his work. By 1915 Mexico was embroiled in a major social revolution as the indigenous followers of Emiliano Zapata fought for ownership of the land. In Rivera’s Zapatista Landscape (1915), he arranged the abstracted elements of a typical Zapata follower—straw hat, rifle, and serape—in a flattened collage against a simplified snow-capped volcano, thus using Synthetic Cubist means to represent a Mexican reality.

Areas of South America that had small indigenous populations (generally, areas east of the Andes and in the Southern Cone) were particularly receptive to avant-garde European art movements such as Cubism. The Argentine Emilio Pettoruti was adamantly committed to Cubism, which he had learned from the Spanish artist Juan Gris. When Pettoruti went home to Buenos Aires in 1924, he enthusiastically exhibited his Cubist paintings to an often unreceptive public.

Joaquín Torres-García of Uruguay was well established in the modern art scene in Europe. In his canvases and wood boards, he flattened three-dimensional objects into evenly coloured geometric shapes separated by thick black lines. Torres-García’s work reveals the same underlying structural unity as that of his Dutch mentor, Theo van Doesburg, a leader of the international Constructivist movement and a founder of De Stijl, although his paintings were not as abstract as van Doesburg’s. As with many Latin American artists at the time, Torres-García was not a strict adherent to the dictums of a movement. For example, the Constructivist philosophy attempted to achieve a universal sense of truth and therefore rejected national traditions. In contrast, Torres-García attempted to reconnect with the traditions of his native continent: while still in Paris, he searched through natural history museums to find pre-Columbian motifs that he could incorporate into his art. In particular, the geometric designs from the Nazca in Peru and Tiwanaku in Bolivia appealed to his architectonic aesthetic.

After he returned to Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1934, Torres-García created divinities with Inca names out of geometric pieces of wood that he hammered together. In a park there he also erected a stone sculpture entitled Cosmic Monument (1938), which clearly reflects the proportions of the ancient Bolivian Gateway of the Sun. The Torres-García Workshop, which he founded in Uruguay to perpetuate his theories, remained strong long after his death. His influence extended across the Río de la Plata to Argentina, where a more geometric, nonrepresentational art movement called Concrete Invention was established in 1945. Concrete Invention artists created shaped, rather than traditionally rectangular, canvases painted in bold, flat colours.

In 1922 the virtues of the European avant-garde were dramatically proclaimed during Modern Art Week in São Paulo, Brazil, South America’s most modern city. Although its organizers were interested in Cubism and other modern art movements of Europe, they were also concerned with finding Brazilian themes that would lead to a national art. Anita Malfatti and Emiliano di Caralcanti used emotional Fauvist colours, applied with slashing brushstrokes, to create the portraits typical of their early years. The leading Latin American Cubist painter associated with them, Tarsila do Amaral, returned to Brazil from Paris in 1924 to see Brazil with fresh eyes and incorporate it into her art. She soon created abstracted, geometric images of tropical landscapes and formed geometrically rounded portraits of women in the tradition of Fernand Léger, with whom she had worked in France. Later in that decade, Brazilian artists used the term cannibalism to describe their 20th-century art, referring to the fact that they devoured outside ideas and then digested them to make them part of their own identity. Brazilian art during the period was emphatically avant-garde, but it was also always distinctively Brazilian.

The Cuban artist Amelia Peláez, who had studied with Leopoldo Romañach, went to Paris and adopted a style that recalled the later, more-ornamental Cubist work produced by Braque, as well as the work of Georges Rouault and Henri Matisse. Upon her return to Cuba in 1934, she painted canvases with bright, carefully balanced colours that were separated by strong black lines that looked almost like stained glass. She incorporated her world of wrought-iron screens, sunlit patios, and fruit-filled dining tables into her subject matter. While her art fit within the international mainstream, it celebrated Cuba in particular. Peláez was the first Cuban artist to introduce a flat, geometric Modernist vocabulary into the island, and she encouraged other artists to follow her lead.

Populist art and the Mexican mural renaissance

After the turn of the 20th century, Latin American art reacted against the conservative establishment of the academies by agitating for political change. In Mexico young artists admired the work of José Guadalupe Posada, a populist artist who engraved illustrations for newspaper broadsides in a number of graphic media, often incorporating skeletons of political leaders and eulogizing them in verse as if they were dead but actually mocking their dependence on European styles and their indifference to the plight of the indigenous peasants and workers. His art, simplified and expressive in its use of graphic marks and dramatic composition, was widely seen and admired by Mexican workers and by students such as José Clemente Orozco at the nearby academy.

On the eve of the Mexican Revolution (1910–20), indigenous artists reacted against the government-sponsored exhibition of European artists intended to celebrate the centenary of Mexico’s declaration of independence. Although by this point many more opportunities had opened up for native-born Latin American artists, the exhibition revealed that the biases of the 19th-century elites had thus not totally abated. Doctor Atl (the pseudonym of Gerardo Murillo), who had trained as an artist in Europe, organized an independent exhibition of Mexican artists. In his own portraits and volcanic landscapes, he incorporated increasingly Expressionist colours, dynamic diagonal lines, and untraditional waxy pigments.

In 1921, after the revolution, the new Mexican secretary of education, José Vasconcelos, invited many Mexican artists—including those on scholarship in Europe—to paint undecorated walls in government-owned buildings with inspirational themes that would be accessible to all citizens. The artists who accepted the commission converged on the National Preparatory School for boys in Mexico City, a colonial building with three stories of vaulted hallways facing an interior courtyard.

Among those chosen was Diego Rivera, who greatly admired Italian Renaissance muralists’ use of fresco painting to communicate their faith on the walls of public buildings such as churches. On the stage of the National Preparatory School’s theatre, Rivera used encaustic (a heated coloured wax) to create a scene with angels—many depicted with mestizo features—in a Renaissance style. In his next project, for the Ministry of Public Education headquarters in downtown Mexico City, he abandoned allegorical and religious associations, but he incorporated the geometrically simplified figures and strong gestures that he admired in the works of Giotto and other early Renaissance artists. He also adopted their tradition of buon fresco (“true fresco”) technique by painting directly on freshly plastered wall. While his techniques drew from European art history, his subjects were drawn from pre-Columbian sources and from Mexican history and represented aspects of modern mestizo activities and indigenous ceremonies. Rivera’s fresco decoration for the National Agricultural School (1924–27) in Chapingo, inspired by Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, relates to the architectural lines of the colonial chapel. The main surfaces contain mostly allegorical scenes of Mother Earth and power from the gods that are conveyed via recognizable images, while the side panels illustrate the generalized abuses before the revolution, the battles of the revolution itself, and the reforms established after it was over.

Orozco, the second major figure of the Mexican mural renaissance, also used an Italianate allegory, of a blonde madonna, in his first work at the National Preparatory School. His later work at the school became angrier than Rivera’s, especially in regard to his view of an evil and brutal ruling class, but his human compassion still shone through in examples such as a beautiful stairway mural in which he depicted a Franciscan friar attending to an emaciated native. Most muralists condemned Europeans as the destroyers of Mexican pre-Columbian civilizations, but Orozco could also supersede politics to perceive the universal commonality among all peoples. Although the modern viewer can see the connection between Orozco’s painting style and Expressionist developments in 20th-century Europe, his contemporaries saw his style as a rejection of the abstract tendencies of European movements such as Cubism. Admirers throughout the Americas saw his work as a model path for art in their own countries.

The youngest and most radical of the Mexican muralists was David Alfaro Siqueiros. Devoting much of his time to union organizing and pamphleteering, Siqueiros was a fervent communist; as a result, his paintings are filled with highly simplified portrayals of proletarian masses. He embraced new industrial technology in his work and applied commercial materials such as pyroxylin paint with air guns, which permitted large scale and rapid execution. Typical compositions by the artist featured dynamic, sweeping lines stretching from one surface to the other. He suggested movement through extreme foreshortening and “lines of force,” which he had first seen in the Futurist style popular when he visited Italy but which he applied on a monumental scale, adding panels and lath to surround the viewer. When his radical politics made him unwelcome in Mexico, Siqueiros was invited to work in the Southern Cone. In the Escuela México in Chillán, Chile, in 1941, Siqueiros executed a band of colours sweeping from one wall across the shaped ceiling to the other wall. The respective walls depict the histories of Mexico and Chile, using parallel images of indigenous rulers, local conquistadores, and heroic liberators.

As a result of the Mexican mural renaissance of the 1920s and ’30s, for the first time in its history, Latin American art can be said to have dramatically altered the history of Western art. It offered a relevant alternative to nonrepresentational abstraction after World War I by making figurative works that reflected society and its immediate concerns. Many artists also preferred not to be an indistinguishable part of an international movement. The enthusiasm of adherents to the mural movement spread rapidly. Carlos Mérida of Guatemala had participated in early Mexican commissions, but he returned to his native country and produced tiled mural reliefs and prints reflecting indigenous topics such as the Popol Vuh legend of the Quiché Maya. Oswaldo Guayasamín of Ecuador, active until his death in 1999, transitioned from his 1930s Social Realist canvases depicting struggling strikers to Expressionist canvases of earthquake-shattered landscapes, with jagged black shapes overlaying a molten core. In Brazil, Cândido Portinari, who painted simplified scenes of labourers, was given mural commissions such as the 1937 Ministry of Agriculture in Rio de Janeiro and the 1942 entrance lobby of the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., in which he used monumental figures to personalize the settlement of Brazil. In 1944 to 1946, on the wall of the church of São Francisco in Pampulha, Brazil, he applied blue-painted glazed tiles on the inside and outside of the modern architecture by Oscar Niemeyer, thereby recalling a colonial Portuguese means of decoration and also providing a functional, water-resistant surface.

Perhaps in response to the success of these murals, local leaders linked to the Revolutionary Party in Mexico commissioned public monumental figurative sculpture. The heroic gestures and muscular style of these works were intended to galvanize Mexican workers to continue fighting for social justice. Public sculptures commemorating the heroes of the wars of independence and the mid-19th-century reform under Benito Juárez were also commissioned. Such grandiloquent rhetoric links much Latin American art from the 1930s to the fascist and communist style of European dictatorships. However, the actual style of much art of this period was linked to the geometrically simplified Art Deco style in Europe, which reflected industrial, streamlined design.

Perhaps the best sculptor in this political moderne style was Francisco Zúñiga, a transplanted Costa Rican who was naturalized and active in Mexico at midcentury. In his nearly life-size stone and bronze sculpture and drawings, he portrayed large-proportioned indigenous women whose stoic faces emerge from tightly wrapped shawls, conveying an image of an Earth Mother. Such indigenous themes were employed in South American countries with strong Indian traditions so as to better speak to the proletariat. José Sabogal led the indigenist movement in Peru, which produced mainly small oil paintings depicting highland Indian and coastal Afro-Peruvian culture.

The graphic arts became another means of communicating with the masses. Building on the examples of Posada and the Mexican muralist renaissance, the Taller de Gráfica Popular (People’s Graphics Workshop) was founded in 1937 in Mexico City, with Leopoldo Méndez as its leading artist. The group used simple carving techniques—such as woodcuts and lithography—to create spontaneously rendered designs. The Taller provided a collective work centre and also taught untrained artists the different printmaking media. Prints became a major artistic format in many areas of Latin America because of the ease of their production and their widespread visibility and affordability. Posters especially became a highly regarded art form in smaller countries such as Costa Rica and Puerto Rico.