XI ABSTRACT ART
Abstract art in Latin America also established strong ties to surrealism. In the 1920s in Brazil, Tarsila do Amaral painted abstract compositions that blend cubism and surrealism with native Brazilian subject matter. A similar combination of elements marks the art of Mexican painter Carlos Merida. In Uruguay, Joaquín Torres-García and his followers, known as the Montevideo School, developed an abstract art with strong connections to surrealism and to the spare geometries of the Russian constructivist and German Bauhaus movements.
After 1940 the abstract surrealism of Torres-García and Amaral came to dominate Latin American art, especially the works of Wifredo Lam of Cuba and Roberto Matta Echaurren of Chile. Matta also played a role in the development of abstract expressionism in the United States. Mexican painter Rufino Tamayo applied the lessons of cubism and surrealism to Mexican themes, although he avoided political messages in his work, unlike many earlier artists. The paintings of Lam, Matta, and Tamayo represent several major shifts in Latin American art after 1945: from the public stance of the muralists to private concerns, from strident nationalism to internationalism, and from the struggle for social change to personal explorations of ethnic origins and archetypal myths.
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