Becoming Modern, One Museum at a Time: Architectural Style, Cultural Translation and the Dream of an International Art Movement

• In Event: Negotiating Identity: The Art Museum in Latin America

Abstract

Around mid-century, Museums of Modern Art began to emerge all over Central and South America: Chile’s Museum of Contemporary Art was founded in 1947, the Museo de Arte Moderno de São Paulo in 1948, the Museo de Arte Modern of Rio de Janeiro in 1955, Buenos Aires Museum of Modern Art in 1956 and Mexico’s Museum of Modern Art in 1963. How does the foundation of these museums help redefine the concept of the modern art museum, or indeed, of what is modern art? In this paper I examine the role architecture played in shaping an image and a program for modern art in Latin America. Through the works of Oscar Niemeyer (MAM Sao Paulo), Affonso Eduardo Reidy and Roberto Burle Marx (MAM Río) and Pedro Ramírez Vázquez (MAM Mexico), I hope to trace a vision of modernity as an international phenomenon that could be inflected with a sense of place, a sort of “cultural translation” of modernity, to paraphrase a recent study on art circulation by David Joselit. By choosing the international style for the museum building’s architecture, Latin American modern art museums helped to establish the concept of the modern art museum as a brand, something that would happen much later in Europe and the United States. As such, this brand identified the rejection of nationalism and of figurative aesthetics as one of the preconditions of modern art.

Author

• Mercedes Trelles-Hernandez, University of Puerto Rico