Challenging or nuancing established narratives is one of the most important roles of new research. My current investigation focuses on abstract currents in Andean art (specifically art made in Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia) in the years 1950–1970. By abstraction I am referring to paintings that are entirely nonrepresentational and consist solely of creative arrangements of color, line, form, and texture. My research examines how a shift in perspective, and a focus on Andean regions, changes the stories we tell about the emergence, acceptance, practice, and role of abstraction in Latin America.

The standard narrative about the rise of abstraction in Latin American art is that the trend took hold first in Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela, and consequently these tend to be the only countries put forth as having a sustained and creative engagement with the practice. While abstraction was clearly an important development in these regions, the result of this received discourse has been to ignore or categorize as derivative any manifestations of abstraction in other Latin American countries. Similar to the model of positioning European modernism as a “center” in relation to non-European “peripheries,” in Latin American art-historical studies—especially those conducted outside the region—Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela have been deemed the “nuclei” of Latin American abstraction, and everywhere else constitutes the margins. My research proposes a recalibration to include alternative narratives both in terms of the art produced in and the critical discourse stemming from Andean regions.

In the Andes, geometric abstraction was a vibrant yet short-lived practice. Its emergence was more directly tied to contact with French artist Jean Dewasne (1921–1999) and the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles than to knowledge of concretism in Brazil and Argentina, however. Artists from all three countries in this study exhibited in Paris at the Salon des Realités Nouvelles: Araceli Gilbert (1913–1993) and Manuel Rendón Seminario (1894–1982) from Ecuador; Benjamin Moncloa (1927–2018), Jorge Piqueras (1925–2020), and Emilio Rodríguez Larraín (1928–2015) from Peru; and María Esther Ballivian (1927–1977) from Bolivia. Through my research, I have determined that, in addition to the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, the São Paulo Biennial, Museo de Arte Moderno in Bogotá, and Pan American Union in Washington, DC, were the most important international networks for engagement with abstract practices among Andean artists.

Perhaps the most significant form of abstraction to emerge in Andean countries in the late 1950s was ancestralismo, an approach to composition characterized by allusions to pre-Columbian legends, motifs, symbols, and processes. Ancestralismo was not a unified movement, but rather a strategy employed by artists across national borders to differentiate their approach to abstraction from that of their global contemporaries. Drawing on preconquest objects and legends as source material, artists sought to validate an aspect of Andean culture that had long been repressed and to reestablish a link to the imagined purity of ancient Indigenous culture. Rather than employing Indigenous techniques such as weaving, ceramics, or featherwork, they utilized modern abstract practices to evoke the past, presenting it as worn, fragmented, partially obscured, mysterious, and unknowable, thereby emulating the experience of viewing archaeological remains, as can be seen in the work of artists such as Oscar Pantoja (1925–2009), Rodríguez Larraín, Fernando de Szyszlo (1925–2017), and Enrique Tábara (1930–2021). In an act of defiance that transcends the legacies of colonialism, these works claim the geology, artifacts, legends, and cultures of the ancient Andes for the modern nation, inventing a new purpose for that which had been devalued, neglected, and often literally buried or built over. While these artists did not directly replicate specific objects or archaeological sites, their claim to an intrinsic propensity for abstract aesthetics established a distinct trajectory of abstraction grounded in ancient Andean creativity. This rhetorical assertion of legitimacy therefore differentiated Andean abstraction from narratives of European authority and countered assertions that their approach to abstraction was derivative of either European or Argentine, Brazilian, or Venezuelan art. 

The goal of my research is to demonstrate how challenging entrenched narratives about abstraction in the Andes can reveal a new understanding of modernism in Latin American art more generally. By looking closely at the art, artists, exhibitions, institutions, and timeline of events in the Andes, our understanding of the role of abstraction throughout Latin America and the world shifts to create a more nuanced picture of how abstraction was both globally practiced yet remained regionally distinct.

George Mason University
Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellow, 2024–2025

Michele Greet will return to her position as professor of art history and director of the art history MA program at George Mason University for fall 2025.