Alstair Smart, journalist from The Telegraph, publishes a stunning review of: Radical Geometry: Modern Art of South America from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection, currently on exhibit at the Royal Academy in London. He describes the exhibition as stunning and not to be missed!
July, 2014
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Radical geometry, royal academy, review
1. Radical Geometry, Royal Academy, review: 'stunning'
The Radical Geometry exhibition of abstract South American work
utterly transforms our understanding of 20th-century art, says Alastair
Smart
By: Alastair Smart
I lose track of the number of exhibitions that have promised a “radical reappraisal”
of an artist or movement – only to be as revelatory as a soggy sock. The RA bucks
that trend utterly, however, with its new show of abstract South American art from
the Thirties to the Seventies.
As we all know, Abstraction had developed in Europe – via Impressionism and
later movements – in the early 20th-century, but where Radical Geometry comes
into its own is in revealing how vital artists from Montevideo to Caracas were in
taking things forward. They adapted the new visual language of abstraction –
specifically, geometric abstraction – to express the progress and prosperity
emanating from South American countries at the time.
In the wake of the Great Depression, Spanish Civil War and Second World War,
exiles and refugees aplenty made their way to the Americas to start anew. With
them came knowledge of the European precedents of geometric abstraction
(Bauhaus, Russian Constructivism, Mondrian) and our tale begins with Joaquín
Torres-García, who returned to his native Uruguay in 1934 after decades in Paris.
His grids are filled with pictographic elements that recall the relief stonework on
pre-Columbian temples: suns, anchors and fish in Constructive Composition 16’s
case. He united the ancient and avant-garde, in a bid to root a new artistic utopia
firmly in South America.
Across the River Plate, in Buenos Aires, artists were more explicitly political,
advocating geometric abstraction as the art form of coming social revolution –
given its universal language and anti-individualist aesthetic. As had been the case
in the early years of the Soviet Union, abstract art and communism dovetailed.
2. Among the standout works are Juan Melé’s Irregular Frames No. 2 (1946), a
geometric composition of jagged shape that overthrew the tradition of paintings
with rectangular frames, which since the Renaissance had illusionistically
suggested a window onto the world.
Joaquín Torres-García: Construction in White and Black, 1938
Time and again, we see a turning away from Europe. Indeed, in some way, surely
the very embrace of abstraction was a rejection of the strict figurative tradition that
the Conquistadores had promulgated in churches across the New World.
By the Fifties, our focus turns to newly democratic, fast-industrialising Brazil.
National confidence was expressed in its new, International Style capital, Brasilia.
In Rio de Janeiro, meanwhile, the Neoconcrete artists were making geometric
abstraction more participatory: through sculpture.
Lygia Clark’s Bichos are hinged, creature-like works of aluminium, with geometric
planes that you can bend into various arrangements. With his parangolés, in turn,