The Politics of Taste: Beatriz González and Cold War Aesthetics 9781478004554

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The Politics of Taste

The Politics of Taste Beatriz González and Cold War Aesthetics

Ana María Reyes Duke University Press Durham and London 2019

© 2019 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper ∞ Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan Typeset in Merope and Alegreya Sans by Copperline Books Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Reyes, Ana María (College teacher), [date] author. Title: The politics of taste : Beatriz González and Cold War aesthetics / Ana María Reyes. Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2019. | Series: Art history publication initiative | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2019002426 (print) lccn 2019012478 (ebook) isbn 9781478004554 (ebook) isbn 9781478003632 (hardcover : alk. paper) isbn 9781478003977 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: lcsh: González, Beatriz, 1938—Criticism and interpretation. | Art, Colombian—Political aspects—20th century. | Art, Colombian— 20th century. | Pop art—Colombia—20th century. Classification: lcc n6679.g656 (ebook) | lcc n6679.g656 r494 2019 (print) | ddc 709.2—dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019002426

Cover art: Beatriz González, Los suicidas del Sisga, 1965. Oil on canvas, 120 × 100 cm. Frontispiece: Beatriz González, Vermeeriana sentada, 1964. Oil on canvas, 100 × 85 cm.

This book was made possible by a collaborative grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

contents

acknowledgments vii introduction

Dis-­cursis 1

chapter 1

Vermeer in Bucaramanga, Beatriz in Bogotá 33

chapter 2

A Leap from the Domestic Sphere into the Sisga Reservoir 73

chapter 3 “Cut It Out” 113

Impropriety at the MAMBO chapter 4

Notes for an Exclusive History of Colombia 153

chapter 5 Modernist Obstruction at the Second

Medellín Biennial 181

epilogue

Underdeveloped Art for Underdeveloped People 218

notes 231

bibliography 283 index 303

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acknowledgments

Writing a book is a laborious journey of self-­growth, criticism, and surrender. While it may seem like solitary work, it is truly a collective endeavor. This book is the culmination of many years of research, writing, and revising that would not have been possible without the many people and institutions that supported me. Just as this study sets out to demonstrate that artistic meaning is a contingent, collective, and contextual cocreation, its own existence is the product of many academic exchanges, as well as nourishing relations. My mentors, colleagues, students, friends, and family members engaged me in dynamic discussions that ultimately affected this study in profound ways. The publication of the book was funded by the Boston University Center for the Humanities, College of Arts and Sciences Humanities Research Fund, Department of the History of Art and Architecture, and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Research and writing was supported by the Santander Fellowship at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, Harvard University; the Boston University Center for the Humanities; and the Boston University Junior Faculty Fellowship. Funding for the early phase came from the Tinker Field Research Grant for Latin America and Iberia, the Hewlett Research Grant for Latin America, the National Hispanic Scholarship Fund, the flas: National Resources/ Fellowship for Language and Area Studies, the University of Chicago Department of Art History Field Research Grant, the University of Chicago Center for Latin American Studies Field Research Grant, and the American Association of University Women (aauw). This book began as a doctoral thesis from the University of Chicago. To state that my advisers at the University of Chicago, Martha Ward, Thomas B. F. Cummins, W. J. T. Mitchell, and Darby English are present in every page of this document would be an understatement. They have consistently pushed me and believed in the importance of my work. Marty Ward inspired me to think about the discursive frameworks of exhibition sites. Her demand for excellence required that I raise the bar of expectations. Studying pre-­Columbian and colonial art with Tom Cummins also gave me an understanding of the stubbornly persistent culture in Latin America and the significant role it continues to play in power relations. Tom’s and Marty’s unwavering support has been and continues to be central to my own persistence. I also extend my gratitude to W. J. T. Mitchell who gave me decisive encouragement. He taught me that violence could take on many, often undetectable, forms and that representations of violence could



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not be reduced to gruesome imagery; rather, violence constitutes a much more complex network of actions and references. Darby English pushed me to think beyond Colombia and how Beatriz González’s works paradoxically engaged the international art scene by deploying a strategic localism. A special thanks to Agnes Lugo Ortiz and Cécile Fromont for their support and insightful comments on my project. Undoubtedly, my mentors’ intellectual legacy runs through the best parts of this book. Since my arrival at Boston University, I have encountered extraordinary collegiality in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture (haa) and the Center for Latin American Studies. I could not have juggled the demands of teaching, service, and writing without their encouragement, support, and guidance. I especially thank my mentor, Michael Zell, and our haa chair, Alice Tseng, who went above and beyond their call of duty to ensure that I had the resources and time to develop the manuscript. I am also fortunate to count as my colleagues and friends Ross Barrett, Cynthia Becker, Emine Fetvaci, Deborah Kahn, Fred Kleiner, Becky Martin, Bruce Redford, Kim Sichel, and Greg Williams. I also counted on the support of Susan Rice and Christopher Spedaliere in securing high resolution images. At the Center for Latin American Studies at Boston University I am particularly indebted to Michael Birenbaum Quintero, Alicia Borinsky, Susan Eckstein, James Iffland, Adela Pineda, and Jeff Rubin. I give a special thanks to my Ph.D. students Julian Serna Lancheros and Constanza Robles Sepúlveda for their careful and diligent work on the manuscript and their help with securing images and authorizations. I am indebted to my graduate students, who enrich seminar discussions in ways that filtered into this manuscript. In Bogotá I encountered unforgettable kindness and generosity on the part of scholars and institutional professionals who made my work not only efficient but also enjoyable. I owe an immense debt of gratitude to Carlos José Reyes Posada, director of the National Library, and Jorge Orlando Melo, director of the Luis Ángel Arango Library. Many thanks to Alvaro Medina, Ernesto Monsalve, Jaime Pulido, and the late Gloria Zea at the Museum of Modern Art in Bogotá, and to Nicolás Gómez Echeverri at the Museo Banco de la República. I am grateful to Daniel Castro, Elvira Pinzón Méndez, Angela Eraso, and Maria Lucia Alonso of the Museo Nacional de Colombia; Diana Tabita Serrano Campo from the Museo de la Independencia Casa del Florero; and Paola Andrea López Lara of the Museo Quinta de Bolívar. I thank Marta Combariza at the Museo de Arte de la Universidad Nacional for giving me full access to the museum’s archives and for making possible the reassembly of González’s furniture pieces. Special thanks go to Luisa Reyes Trujillo at the Presidencia de la República de Colombia and Luis Armando Soto at the Ministry of Culture. I am profoundly grateful to Fidel Cano Correa at El Espectador for taking time out of his extremely busy schedule during national elections to help me secure image rights. I also express my deep appre-

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ciation to the art dealers and collectors who shared information and materials and who allowed me to spend time with González’s works, mainly Paula Arenas, Víctor Alfandary, Alonso Garcés, José Darío Gutiérrez, Ana María Mendieta, Francisco Reyes, and Vicky Turbay. A deep sentiment of gratitude for the artists who shared images and authorizations, including Pedro Alcántara, Alvaro Barrios, and José Carlos Ramos Gálvez. Equally I extend my appreciation to the rights holders who generously granted me authorization to reproduce works, including María Eugenia Martínez de Arango, Barbara Brizzi, María Cristina Celis Agudelo, Nicolás Consuegra, the Estrada Family, Pablo Leyva, Ernesto Monsalve Rodrigo Obregón Osorio, Marcos Roda, Pablo Roda, Pedro Roda, Juana Roda, Inés Rodríguez Berni, Rosse Mary Rojas, Margarita Salcedo, and Liliane Zafrani. My research and writing were nourished by conversations with violentologists Alejandro Reyes Posada and María Victoria Uribe, as well with the artists Antonio Caro, Juan Manuel Echavarría, Umberto Giangrandi, Oscar Muñoz, and Bernardo Salcedo, and the Nadaist poet Elmo Valencia. My work has been greatly enhanced by exchanges with the art historians María Iovino, Imelda González Ramírez, Carmen María Jaramillo, Víctor Manuel Rodríguez, and Eduardo Serrano, to whom I am also indebted for their hospitality. I fully acknowledge my admiration for Beatriz González’s works. I am deeply grateful for her generosity in granting me access to her personal archive and patiently agreeing to be interviewed day after day. The information I gathered from those twelve hours of interviews, which I attempt to contextualize in the pages that follow, is a treasure in and of itself. Thanks are due to her assistant, José Ruiz Díaz, who graciously helped me access important materials. In Medellín, Colombia, I also encountered astonishing hospitality and collegiality that proved invaluable for finishing this book. I owe special debt of gratitude to Leonel Estrada’s family, especially Martin Nova, Beatriz Estrada de Nova, Maria Isabel Estrada, and Natalia Vélez for generously granting me access to the Leonel Estrada and Coltejer Biennial archives. Thanks go to Juan Camilo Castaño and Yuliana Quiceno Cardona at the Museo de Antioquia for facilitating my study of the Coltejer Biennial art collection. At the Museum of Modern Art in Medellín I would like to thank the late Alberto Sierra for spending time with me at the Beatriz González retrospective and to Ana María Cano from eafit for visiting the exhibition and discussing the works with me. I would also like to thank Emiliano Valdéz for kindly granting me access to the archives of the mamm. I am fortunate to have found rare and precious friendships among my colleagues from which I continue to grow. This book would not exist without the unwavering support and intellectual exchanges I have shared through the years with Jill Bugajski, Jack Cheng, Ingrid Elliott, Tatiana Flores, Kyle Huffman, Aleca le Blanc, Lisa Meyerowitz, Harper Montgomery, Evelyn Carmen Ramos-­Alfred, Maureen Shanahan, and Gina McDaniel Tarver. Many thanks to my dear col-



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leagues from the University of Chicago, Carmen Fernández Salvador, Courtney Gilbert, Ray Hernandez Durán, Michael Schreffler, and Liz Segal. I owe a great debt to my collegues at drclas, Harvard, who challenged me to rethink key aspects of the manuscript and consider the permutations of the term cursi throughout the Spanish-­speaking world, especially Boris Muñoz, Maritza Navarro, Katie Sampeck, and Verónica Zubillaga. At Northwestern University I was inspired by Claudia Swan and Hollis Clayson, who challenged me to think about gender, domesticity, and representation. Frank Safford shared his kindness, time, and valuable insights on nineteenth-­and twentieth-­century Colombian economic history. A special debt of gratitude goes to Andrea Giunta for her support and her inspiring work. I am also deeply grateful for my Symbolic Reparations Research team, Marco Abarca, Julián Bonder, José Falconi, Robin Greeley, Lisa Laplante, Michael Orwicz, Luisa Peralta, Fernando Rosenberg, Yolanda Sierra, and Doris Sommer for challenging me to think beyond deconstructing symbolic violence and thinking about constructive forms of symbolic healing. I would like to express my profound gratitude to Gisela Fosado, editor at Duke University Press, for her enthusiasm, support, and stewardship along with her editorial assistants, Lydia Rose Rappoport-­Hankins and Jenny Tan, and others from Duke University Press: Amy Buchanan, Christopher Catanese, Emily Chilton, Ellen Goldlust, Janet Martell, Bonnie Perkel, David Prout, and Chad Royal. The first revisions of the manuscript were greatly influenced by the challenging questions posed to me by Ken Wissoker at caa. I am tremendously thankful to the readers at Duke for their careful reading and insightful feedback. No doubt their intelligent suggestions and gentle criticisms greatly improved the final manuscript. Mary Coffey’s observations challenged me to revisit the history of avant-­garde collage and consider how González engaged this practice in her own context. I owe a heartfelt thanks to Mary Roldán, who shared with me her impressive knowledge and helped me think about Colombia’s history in more nuanced ways. Her work on the role of religion in the Cold War has been transformative for my thinking. Embarking on an academic career has been possible because of my supportive and inspiring family. My parents, the late Pablo Reyes Posada and María Eugenia Duque, inculcated in me deep humanist values that have served as my compass and no doubt structure my scholarship. They encouraged me every day, sometimes twice, to pursue my professional dreams and intellectual passions and to contribute to future generations of Latinx scholars. I am both honored and humbled by the sacrifices they made for my benefit. I thank my two brothers, Juan Pablo and Diego, whom I love deeply and with whom I have endured great happiness and sorrow. My brother Diego taught me that humility and open-­ mindedness are rare and precious components of intelligence. While he is many

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years my junior, he has proved to be many years wiser. His ability to rise from adversity continues to be a daily inspiration. I am deeply grateful to my husband, Bill Gatti (my favorite B. G.), who met me at the beginning of this journey and who has lived it daily. While he probably never realized how long it would be, he has never hesitated in his support, making inconceivable sacrifices in the process. He has listened to gestating ideas, traveled back and forth to Latin America, read drafts, become an amateur art historian, and simultaneously given me the space and time to think, research, and write. I dedicate this book to him and to our three Gatti-­cos, Lorenzo, Lucas, and Lina, who fill my life with unconditional love, endless joy, and unbridled imagination.

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introduction

Dis-­cursis The weekly Colombian television show Correo Especial on June 7, 1978, begins by showing a woman walking through a narrow, busy, and cluttered flea market.1 She wears a traditional ruana, Colombia’s peasant wool poncho, with a short skirt. Massive demographic changes in the mid-­t wentieth century engendered this type of hybrid fashion, an attempt to resolve the local and traditional with the modern and international. This was a time rife with cultural tensions wrought by what the modernization theorist Walt Whitman Rostow called the transitional stage of development in a society ready for “takeoff ” toward modernity.2 The camera suddenly shifts to a pile of furniture for sale: a wicker crib, a metal bedframe, and a collapsible cot. The reporter Gloria Valencia de Castaño, barely visible through breaks in the crowd, announces that the Pasaje Rivas, this vibrant flea market in which she is standing, has “entered into history . . . thanks to the use and misuse [of its wares] by the artist Beatriz González.” As two men carrying furniture pass through the narrow market alley, we notice that the artist has been standing next to the reporter all along. A spectator familiar with González’s artistic production would immediately connect the wicker cribs to Baby Johnson in situ (1971; figure I.1), in which the artist assembled her painting of a Johnson and Johnson baby advertisement into a wicker carriage.3 The bedframes remind the viewer of Camafeo (Cameo [1971]; figure I.2), in which González inserted a medallion portrait of Beethoven into a pink metal bedframe decorated with stenciled flowers that the art critic Marta Traba called “repulsive open corollas.”4 The title Camafeo carries the double meaning of “cameo” and “ugly bed,” connecting a musical icon of legitimate culture in no uncertain terms with bad taste. Likewise, in Mutis por el foro (Exit Stage Rear [1973]; figure I.3) González placed her commercial enamel version of Pedro Alcántara Quijano’s El Libertador Muerto (ca. 1930) — a “representation of a representation” — in the place of a mattress on a red metal bedframe that she purchased at the Pasaje Rivas.5 The modest bed reminded the artist of Bolívar’s desolate passing in Santa Marta in 1830. Reflecting on Exit Stage Rear González dryly wondered, “Dead Bolívar, isn’t it best for him to rest on a bed?”6 All three works reproduce immediately recognizable images taken from the mass media or, in the case of Alcántara Quijano’s iconic patrimonial painting, repro-

I.1  Beatriz González, Baby Johnson in situ, 1971, enamel on metal plate, assembled on wicker baby carriage, 45 × 30 × 70 cm. I.2  Beatriz González, Camafeo, 1971, enamel on metal plate, assembled on metal bed, 125 × 100 × 75 cm. I.3  Beatriz González, Mutis por el foro, 1973, enamel on metal plate assembled on metal bed, 120 × 205 × 90 cm.



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duced massively on Colombia’s Extra de la Independencia lottery tickets of 1972. Alongside their punning titles, these works materially, stylistically, and thematically exemplify González’s critical incursions into the politics of taste, which she has provocatively displayed in art institutions. Her assaults on elites’ sensibilities have elicited responses in the media that disclose the processes by which these institutions mediate social and cultural difference. In 1978, González was already recognized as a leading artist, representing Colombia in various international exhibitions and art competitions, including the biennials held in São Paulo and Venice. Today González remains one of the most powerful cultural figures in Latin America, continuing to produce as an artist, curator, and art historian. While her artworks have consistently engaged the institutional and discursive framing of culture, as a curator of the art and history collections at the National Museum of Colombia and as a highly influential member of the acquisitions committee for the Banco de la República, the largest cultural organization in the nation, she has become a powerful agent of the institutions that legitimize cultural patrimony.7 Yet during the early years of her career she staged a sharp critique of those very institutions, the modernizing discourses that served as their aesthetic compass, and the exclusionary social structures they buttressed. Her artistic engagements with lowbrow subject matter and materials, saturated with local, gender, and class references, stood in stark contrast to the demands for artists to produce sophisticated, “exportable” works as evidence of Latin American modernity, best represented by the rise to prominence of geometric abstract, kinetic, and op art, along with new technological media, during the post – World War II period. This book analyzes González’s artistic practices; responses to her works, including the writings of the art critic Marta Traba, which helped to secure González’s position in the Colombian art world; and the institutions where they worked and contextualizes them within the dynamic historical processes that unfolded during the coalition government of the National Front (1958 – 1974) and after the Cuban Revolution. Colombia was just emerging from bloody internecine war that has come to be known as La Violencia that left hundreds of thousands dead and the authoritarian dictatorship of Gustavo Rojas Pinilla (1953 – 1957).8 With the return to democracy, the nation experienced a short period of optimism about peace, expanding democracy, and improving of the standards of living for all. The failure and erasure from historical memory of this dynamic and innovative period, what the historian Robert Karl calls a “forgotten peace,” reveals the limitations of democratic participation.9 Even the most progressive and well-­ intentioned reformists were unable to overcome elite distrust of the masses, described as el pueblo, and their fear of communism. This is a study of González’s emerging career (1964 – 1970) during the aftermath of this democratic experimentation, a time of disillusionment with the promise of state-­led modernization

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programs and hemispheric cooperation that motivated many to take up arms through guerrilla insurgency and others to stage their critique from within democratic and cultural institutions. The passionate and polarized responses that González’s paintings generated in the press give us insight into the social anxieties and political frustrations underlying Cold War aesthetic discourses. As a student of Marta Traba at the University of Los Andes (Uniandes) and her protégé at the Bogotá Museum of Modern Art (mambo), González’s triumphal debut materialized these institutions’ desire to cast Colombian art as modern, sophisticated, and universal. However, when González’s works turned to local and urban lowbrow culture, they unsettled the still pervasive binary definition of culture as eruditely universal or rural folklore propagated by the Ministry of Education for its cultural policies since the 1930s.10 Unpacking critical reviews of González’s exhibitions reveals the rigid hierarchical society perpetuated by the model of elite modernization that proved to be an insurmountable obstacle for social reform. Social, economic, and political modernization programs claimed to build a more egalitarian and democratic society — a reformist alternative to a Cuban-­inspired revolution. However, hemispheric elites perceived the impoverished masses as unruly and threatening, making these objectives contradictory and impossible to achieve. Both González and Traba lived through the turmoil generated by these social, economic, and political engineering programs. As modernization promises failed to deliver, the National Front started to crack down on social unrest, and as many Latin American nations began to experience military repression, including Traba’s native Argentina, her critical writings increasingly characterized U.S. culture as a dangerous neoimperial instrument. In tandem, González’s disavowal of a homogenized, rational, scientific, and international aesthetic resisted the underlying premises of an evolutionary or progressive modernization ideology. Instead, González’s recycling aesthetic looked to the heteroglossia of urban popular culture. She joined artists through the hemisphere, such as expressive figuration artists who attacked conventions of good taste as well as Brazilian artists Hélio Oiticica, Caetano Veloso, and those associated with the Tropicália movement, in resisting the demands of local elites by unleashing flamboyant and insubordinate creativity.11 Nonetheless, González’s erudite art of appropriation prompted viewers to express their fears and prejudices toward urban newcomers. Critics and intellectuals rehearsed a language of class condescension that reproduced rather than challenged social hierarchies and asserted their privileged distance from the “popular.”

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Art and Symbolic Violence The subject of this book arose from a question: How could Colombian art critics during the 1950s and early 1960s have reduced aesthetic debates to a decontextualized formalist analysis, given that Colombia was undergoing one of the most dramatic and dynamic moments in its history? How could art critics so conspicuously evade issues of violence as the country was emerging out of La Violencia, one of its darkest historical moments, and embarking on another phase involving Cuban-­inspired guerrillas and counterinsurgency initiatives? Instead of paying attention to myriad artworks that engaged social realities, critics and exhibition jurors, aspiring to an ideal of artistic autonomy, accommodated their descriptive language to formalist and internationalist art discourses. By doing so, critics disconnected artworks from their local contexts at a time when the nation was recovering from civil war and military dictatorship and attempting to transition back to democracy. I came to understand that at the center of political violence in Colombia were other forms of symbolic violence and detachment — among cosmopolitan elites, the provincial pueblo (populace), and rural-­to-­urban migrants; between the world of ideas and historical events; and between those who possessed aesthetic discernment, or “good taste,” and those who did not. González’s works serve as effective critical tools that interrogate the politics of taste, the boundaries of representation within cultural circuits, and art’s relation to symbolic violence. Colombia has endured several waves of violence and many coexisting conflicts that continue to dramatically alter the social landscape today. González’s career began amid a significant shift in these internal conflicts. To stop the bloodshed of the brutal partisan war between liberals and conservatives known as La Violencia, the country’s economic and political elites sponsored a military coup by General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla in 1953. After several years of intensifying authoritarian rule, the traditional ruling parties ousted the dictator and formed the National Front (1958 – 1974), a power-­sharing coalition government. The National Front alternated the presidency and divided power mathematically between the Liberal and Conservative Parties to end partisan resentments and, in theory, make government more pluralistic. By limiting power to the traditional liberal and conservative elites, the National Front government effectively ruled out all other political alternatives.12 Nonetheless, while many Latin American nations were succumbing to military dictatorships, this coalition government collaborated closely with the United States to preserve a fragile and restricted democracy through intense modernization programs designed to avert revolution.13 The initial phase of the National Front, especially under its architect and first president, Alberto Lleras Camargo, was a time of optimism and collaborative ingenuity in which the state and communities searched for grassroots solutions to

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violence and development. As part of this pax criolla, the state granted campesino combatants amnesty and loans to purchase and farm their land. Many other nongovernment organizations, including the Catholic Church, the Asociación Nacional de Industrialistas (National Association of Industrialists; andi), and the Federación Nacional de Cafeteros (National Federation of Coffee Growers; fnc) also searched for alternative ways to tackle social inequities and expand economic and political participation.14 One exceptional case was Acción Cultural Popular (Popular Cultural Action; acpo), created by an inventive rural priest, José Joaquín Salcedo, who was able to tap into a vast international religious network to channel anticommunist anxieties and funds into an ambitious and effective rural radio literacy program.15 Unfortunately, many of these historical actors soon learned that peace and democracy building would be impossible without major structural changes. For instance, enthusiastic peasant leaders of acpo, determined to elevate peasants’ well-­being and productivity through education, realized the program’s impotence in the context of indentured servitude.16 Many community development programs were blocked by old partisan political resentments at the local and national levels.17 Despite the efforts of many government officials, rural folk, and even former combatants, the traditional political elites acted to preserve the traditional order and turned against the peasant guerrillas who had been fighting on their behalf in the countryside. Even Lleras Camargo, who extended amnesty to the guerrillas and worked toward their integration into rural economies, was simultaneously instrumental in the developing anticommunist policies of the Organization of American States (oas) and of the United States in Latin America.18 Indeed, between 1958 and 1960, before the Alliance for Progress, Lleras Camargo worked with the Eisenhower administration to shift military aid programs reserved for external threats, according to the Caracas oas declaration of 1954, into internal security programs — that is, the beginnings of counterinsurgency operations that altered the course of the Cold War in the region.19 The Cold War was a period of ideological warfare that had significant consequences for the daily lives of people worldwide, and most dramatically in the global South. The 1960s in Colombia offer a compelling chapter in this complex history, a period when international forces interacted with national transformations closely tied with U.S. policies toward Latin America. Alberto Lleras Camargo, the director of the Pan American Union (pau) and first general-­secretary of its successor, the oas, as well as the architect and first president of the National Front, was a key figure in determining inter-­American Cold War policies. He was a highly respected Liberal Party statesman, a friend of Nelson Rockefeller, and deeply respected by John F. Kennedy; his ideals of liberal democracy matched the rise of postwar liberalism in the United States.20 The admiration he commanded from Kennedy and his brilliant diplomacy helped transform an ambitious plan



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of hemispheric economic collaboration, drafted as Operación Pan-­Americana by Brazil’s President Juscelino Kubitschek, into the Alliance for Progress.21 The Alliance for Progress materialized Latin American governments’ desires for increased U.S. economic aid and for refashioning the global role of the United States in accordance with modernization theories articulated from Ivory Tower social science departments. Modernization theories resonated with the traditional political class in Colombia, especially Lleras Camargo’s Liberal Party, which had already experienced an intense period of political, economic, and cultural modernization during the Liberal Republic (1934 – 1946), especially during the Revolución en Marcha under the presidency of Alfonso López Pumarejo (1934 – 1938). Lleras Camargo shared Washington’s fervent anticommunism and the belief that social, economic, and cultural modernization was a cure for all social ills.22 Colombia, along with Chile, thus became a “showcase” for the Alliance for Progress, a program intent on strengthening democratic institutions and alleviating the misery that jeopardized them. The 1960s in Colombia was a decade of economic, social, and cultural reform that followed several different development theories, including the Latin American desarrollismo formulated by the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America (ecla), U.S. modernization theories, and the many different community development theories that had circulated since the Liberal Republic, some of them tied to Catholic intellectuals.23 Working under the assumption that modernization programs would eventually foster a more egalitarian society, the National Front promoted accelerated industrialization through import substitution programs for manufacturing and by luring foreign investments in other areas. Other programs, such as acpo and the Peace Corps, followed theories of community development that sought to help find and implement local solutions.24 As this book elaborates, none of these development programs could surmount the obstacles posed by a deeply stratified Colombian society and the Cold War agendas of both the elites and U.S. foreign policy. Indeed, the public and private alliances of national and international elites proved to be instrumental to the resilience of hierarchical structures in Colombia. On May 18, 1964, just one month after the opening of González’s first solo exhibition, curated by Marta Traba at the mambo, the Colombian armed forces launched an air strike against the “independent republic” of Marquetalia, a small bastion of peasant communists that had consolidated from the liberal guerrillas of La Violencia.25 The attack intended to eradicate domestic communism once and for all but instead gave birth to the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia; farc) and opened a new chapter in Cold War history that continues to unravel to this day. Realizing that party leaders were operating in defense of elite rule and catering to U.S. interests, and inspired by the success of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, peasants, along

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with students, intellectuals, union leaders, and even radicalized priests, turned to class-­based guerrilla warfare against the state. The art world was deeply entangled in these processes. After the bitter aesthetic battles of the 1940s and 1950s between the conservatives who continued to support academic neoclassicism as a universal idiom superior to what they considered a degenerate modern language of the Americanists supported by liberals, the National Front also opened an era of updating culture through cosmopolitan modernism.26 Through newly founded cultural institutions such as the mambo and the International Coltejer Biennial in Medellín, many modernizing agents, in both the private and public sector, sponsored a controlled form of modernism to integrate Colombia into an evolutionary narrative and redirect the gaze of intellectuals away from political opposition by promising participation in universal culture.27 Many museums of modern art founded across the hemisphere during the 1950s and 1960s championed abstraction as a modern lingua franca. In Latin America, on the one hand, geometric abstraction, op art, and kinetic art provided a visual language of cultural advancement that trafficked with a faith in industrial, scientific, and technological universalism; geometric abstraction thus became the aesthetic partner of economic development, or the visualization of modernization. On the other hand, lyrical abstraction served to both foster Latin American global participation and, in its entanglement with discourses of spiritual elevation, supported a pervasive claim on Latin American spiritual authority above a materialist United States.28 The scholarship on the political uses and abuses of cultural internationalism during this period is vast and convincingly demonstrates how “internationalizing” culture was a facet of Cold War ideological battles, serving as a means to redirect the attention of artists toward participating in a cosmopolitan culture, coded as universal, and away from political involvement and ongoing armed struggles taking place in the global South.29 Cultural modernization proved to be an authoritative discourse that lured the support of diverse and at times antagonistic characters. In the United States, powerful institutions such as the Central Intelligence Agency, the Museum of Modern Art, the Rockefellers’ petroleum company Esso, the Center for Inter-­American Relations, and the pau sponsored abstraction as evidence of democratic freedom and capitalist free enterprise and used it as a weapon of the Cold War against dogmatic Soviet socialist realism.30 In Latin America, supporters included the industrial bourgeoisie invested in participating in global capitalism and the political elite eager to stake a claim for their nations amid Cold War redefinitions of power relations. Furthermore, intellectuals who had witnessed the pathological nationalism and racism of World War II now rejected race-­based indigenist and Americanist discourses that had occupied many of the Latin American avant-­gardes in the first part of the twentieth century. Abstraction’s iconophobia served as an antagonist to fascism’s iconophilia — 



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that is, the cult of leaders, as well as racialized and atavistic nationalism. Finally, the Roman Catholic Church, especially after the Second Vatican Council (1962 –  1965), found in abstraction a means to update and modernize a Catholic or universal art that could reveal the human soul through artistic intuition.31 In this context, the cultural sphere served as an important space for ideological negotiations to effectively shape a dynamic public sphere that contrasted with the political limitations of the National Front. Through the lens of González’s early exhibitions (1964 – 1970), The Politics of Taste looks at the role played by the arts and criticism within this restricted and precarious return to democracy, as well as at the effects of the modernization programs that were taking place within a deeply traditional and hierarchical society. In doing so, it allows us to access an important and previously neglected piece of the Cold War puzzle — that is, to understand the ways in which aesthetic discourses played out in a country considered the closest hemispheric ally of the United States during the Cold War.32 It also helps us trace how the failures of the National Front’s reforms became manifest in the cultural sphere as artists and intellectuals challenged internationalism. González’s ascendance to cultural prominence parallels the turn away from high modernist universalism toward resistance articulated as a form of regional, not national, authenticity, vaguely alluded to by critics as lo nuestro (that which is ours). González’s strategic provincialism and Traba’s theory of cultural resistance to cultural imperialism must be understood alongside this sense of frustration with a limited democracy and U.S. involvement in Colombian affairs.33 If we consider the discourse of cultural advancement as a companion to modernization theory, we could also conceive of the discourse of cultural authenticity as a companion to community development’s search for local solutions. Indeed, many critics and artists throughout Latin America during this era searched for regional aesthetic solutions as alternatives to importing neocolonial art trends. In repudiating both elite cosmopolitanism and nationalist folklorism of the Liberal Republic, González’s appropriation of urban popular culture, in all of its hybrid, diverse, excessive, and “fantastic irregularities,” served as resistance to the perceived elitism and homogenizing effects of international modernism and the ultranationalism of the Rojas Pinilla dictatorship.34 During the 1960s and early 1970s, González’s works helped critics revitalize a discourse of cultural authenticity, as reformulated from the urban marginal or geographic periphery, and not an idealized academically constructed folklore designed to articulate national unity.35 Precisely because González launched her career by successfully meeting the terms of cultural modernization, when she subsequently challenged and parodied those terms in explicit ways, she did so from a consecrated position. Therefore, critics could not easily dismiss her works and were obliged to react in support of or against them. González’s early exhibitions serve as privileged case

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studies because they managed to arouse passionate support and irritation, if not fright, from diverse historical actors. These responses demonstrate how people could express their positions on social and historical changes through the arts in ways that may not necessarily have been intelligible to themselves or socially permissible through other avenues. The varied responses to González’s aesthetic provocations on the battlefield of cultural and political realignments during the Cold War era demonstrate that her artworks challenged and aggravated many different cultural agents, including Colombian conservatives who were trying to preserve traditional patrimonial hegemony; progressive elites who enlisted culture in forging a modern nation; and European cultural agents who were competing with the United States for influence over the global South, among others. González’s artistic interventions with taste engaged with institutional categories of legitimate culture that attempted to fix and stabilize social distinctions; she parodied trends in the growing international art circuits in order to resist them. The Colombian context provides a valuable model for understanding modernism and modernity within a particular modernization process that emerged under the watchful eye of the traditional political and economic elites and in a deeply Catholic and fragmented society. Unlike many Latin American nations where liberalism had triumphed in the nineteenth century, initiating earlier processes of modernization and secularization, in Colombia the Conservative Party won the nineteenth-­century civil wars and consolidated its hegemony through the Constitution of 1886, which remained firm until 1991, and its close alliance to the Vatican with the Concordat of 1887.36 The role of the church in Colombian history runs deep; it has been a protagonist in the nation’s modernization processes. Therefore, while the 1960s witnessed a strong push toward secularization, Catholic discourses of morality continued to play an important part in cultural debates. Because of the longue durée of Conservative Party hegemony, Colombian national identity continued to be articulated primarily as Catholic and Hispanic. With limited success, intellectuals within the Liberal Republic, especially the Ministry of Education, made a concerted effort to secularize and unify Colombian identity through folklore. However, they were unable to create a cohesive narrative from the ambitious folkloric surveys of 1942.37 Therefore, the Colombian case serves as a contrast to Mexico and Peru, where cultural producers drew from pre-­ Columbian imperial civilizations to construct a strong sense of national identity; Argentina and Brazil, where a long history of industrialization inspired a sense of full participation in a modern and universal global culture; and Venezuela, where the magic of the petro-­state could create the mirage of modernity without modernization.38 This inability to construct a cohesive “imagined community,” as described by Benedict Anderson, in large part has been due to the absence of a strong, centralized state, a condition the National Front sought to correct.39 Fur-



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thermore, the difficult topography of Colombia, which is divided by the splintering of the Andes into three ranges, made for diverse regions that remained relatively isolated from one another until the beginning of air travel. Colombia is thus characterized by its biodiversity and multiculturalism, but also by its political and social fragmentation. Consequently, despite many attempts, Colombian cultural agents developed neither a strong sense of nationalism, as in Mexico, nor a sense of internationalism as a paradoxical form of nationalism, as in Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela. Instead, many artists, such as González, parodied and resisted artistic internationalism through a calculated regionalism that anticipated and influenced cultural Third Worldism and, eventually, multiculturalism. Lo Último Let us return to the 1978 interview in Correo Especial with which I opened. When González appears on camera, she is visibly more at ease than her interviewer, Gloria Valencia de Castaño, in the crowded street market. González asserts that the Pasaje Rivas is a “thermometer” that measures “the latest in artisanal crafts and decorative furniture.” The artist’s brief but revealing characterization of the informal market, so easily dismissed by Valencia in her haste to move the conversation along, was in fact carefully crafted with rich references, which I take up here as an opportunity to unpack some of the themes elaborated in this book. In evoking the metaphor of the thermometer, González was citing Marta Traba, who had famously called the National Salon the infallible thermometer of official Colombian art.40 We can surmise that this was no coincidence, as González cited Traba’s phrase again a decade later in the title of her essay on the salon’s history, “El termómetro infalible.”41 The relationship between González and Traba, between student and teacher and then artist and critic, was not only a close collaboration but also a key part of this era’s narrative. The Argentine-­born Traba, one of the most influential art critics in Latin America, was decisive in shaping González’s career as her professor at Uniandes, curator of her exhibitions at the mambo, and critical defender of her work in print. González was an attentive student who learned a modernist discourse from her professor. González’s first exhibition at the mambo in 1964, directed by Traba herself, launched both the artist’s career and the museum’s young artists program. Throughout this study one can trace a fascinating dialogical relationship in the works of both artist and critic, each influencing the other as they shifted ideological positions from modernist autonomy toward Traba’s theory of regional resistance and González’s strategic provincialism. In her monograph Los muebles de Beatriz González (1977), Traba grappled with her own aesthetic and social presumptions to defend González’s furniture assemblages.42 Indeed, when Traba articulated a theory of resistance to cultural dependence in the 1970s, she applauded González’s pop nacional style

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as exemplary of such artistic defiance.43 Ironically, Traba spent much of her critical energy in denouncing both aestheticized nationalism, which she regarded as a cancer emanating from Mexico, and U.S. cultural imperialism, which she called the “terrorism of the avant-­gardes” and traced in the mimetic adoption of trends such as conceptual art, happenings, and pop art. Although Traba admired U.S. pop art, she faulted Latin American artists for adopting styles that she considered pertinent only in highly industrialized consumer societies. González’s engagement with urban popular culture and the emerging mass media in the Colombian context forced Traba to reconsider pop art’s valence in neocolonial contexts. Thus, González’s heretical turn was one of the factors that influenced Traba’s change of course. Rather than think about the González-­Traba relation as an inversion of mentor-­student roles, it is crucial to understand both as unfixed cultural agents who mutually informed and influenced each other. An “infallible thermometer” seems like an odd metaphor for cultural assessment. The term presupposes a measurable outcome with a high degree of accuracy, one that involves experts that can decipher given technological data. This characterization of the National Salon seemingly contradicts Traba’s disdain for technolatry and González’s irreverence toward official aesthetic conventions, yet it reveals the degree to which the critic and artist valued the role of experts and institutions in determining aesthetic values. Traba’s thermometer was necessarily institutional in nature and presided over by professional art critics. Nonetheless, institutions were also shifting agents, themselves embedded in a complex web of local and international power relations. The notion of a cultural thermometer to measure lo último (the latest) implies not only a value judgment but also a temporal judgment — one that presupposes an evolutionary narrative of culture that depends on specialized experts who can perceive and foster this development. Paralleling Rostow’s stages of economic development, culture was presumed to be in the same need of updating as the industrial sector. Importing experts in just about any conceivable field to assess newly discovered problems in the newly conceived Third World was characteristic of the general political, economic, and cultural outlook of modernization theories.44 Under the ideology of cultural development, art institutions invited professional experts, mostly art critics imported from the industrialized world, to judge international artistic competitions. They rewarded artists who produced works that experts deemed international and not national, global and not local, universal and not provincial, sophisticated and not cursi (tacky). However, institutions did not generate these expectations in a vacuum; they were responding to larger forces that directed them away from local and toward international objectives. González’s use of this metaphor, even if ironic, reveals the extent to which this discourse of advancement permeated even the ideas of those who considered themselves resistant.



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Modernism in the arts became symbolic of the modernization programs of the National Front, which in large part explains why Traba secured such a prominent public role soon after she arrived in Bogotá from Europe in 1953. She introduced a rigorous modernist discourse at an opportune time to break the aesthetic impasse that dominated the National Salon debates in the two decades before her arrival. The cosmopolitan universalism of abstraction could satisfy the discursive needs of both the progressive liberals and the Catholic conservatives, putting an end to their bitter aesthetic disputes. With the arrival of television under Rojas Pinilla in 1953, the visual arts could join other forms of cultural democratization implemented during the 1930s that sought to expand the access of culture — that is, high culture — across the country through modern technology such as radio broadcasts, educational films, village and transportable libraries, and other printed material, including reproductions of artworks.45 Indeed, the Liberal Republic shared Walter Benjamin’s enthusiasm for mechanical reproduction,46 but rather than believing in its revolutionary potential, liberal intellectuals thought that modern media constituted a means of spiritually elevating the masses either through exposure to universal high art or the guided refinement of folklore.47 The art critic Casimiro Eiger also had been broadcasting his art criticism over the radio since 1946.48 With television, at least theoretically, the provinces could now visualize the artworks that were being discussed. Traba’s arrival in Bogotá coincided with the first television broadcasting in the country. Alvaro Castaño Castillo immediately hired her to work alongside Eiger at the cultural radio station hjck. Castaño Castillo was an important modernizing agent who founded the hjck station; was one of the cofounders of Uniandes, where González studied and Traba taught; and was married to González’s interviewer, Gloria Valencia. At hjck, Traba wrote and broadcast the radio shows Cincuenta años de progreso (Fifty Years of Progress) and Cómo nacen las empresas (How Companies Are Born), both sponsored by Esso.49 Traba would later work on a series of television shows for Radio y Televisión Inter­ americana (rti). Before the 1950s were over, and at a time of limited television programming, it is remarkable that Traba broadcast several shows on art history, including El museo imaginario (The Imaginary Museum [c. 1955]; figure I.4), Una visita a los museos (A Visit to the Museums), El abc del arte (The abcs of Art), and Curso de historia de arte (Art History Course). The last was an extension of her lessons at the Universidad de América in Bogotá.50 González recalled Traba opening up the conversation about art to a mass audience. “Before Marta, art critics would call each other on the phone to chat,” she said. “Then she came on television for all Colombians to see! A priest from [the department of] Chocó would send her letters thanking her for educating through television. In these letters we find people from the provinces who could now participate in [high] culture.”51 By linking new technology — radio and television — to the arts, cultural “advance-

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I.4  Marta Traba filming her television show El museo imaginario (The Imaginary Museum), c. 1955. Photograph courtesy of Nicolás Gómez Echeverri.

ment” coupled its new technical lexicon with didactic new media. González’s enthusiasm was more ideal than factual, since television remained a luxury item for many more decades.52 González participated in this emerging artistic public sphere, which included the opening of several museums around Colombia — including the Museo Zea in Medellín in 1955, the Museo la Tertulia in Cali in 1956, the Colección de Arte del Banco de la República in Bogotá in 1957, the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano in Cartagena in 1959, the mambo in Bogotá in 1962, and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Minuto de Dios in Bogotá in 1966 — and the establishment of several corporate sponsored art competitions, such as the Salón Intercol de Artistas Jóvenes in Bogotá in 1964, the Festival de Cultura in Cali in 1965, and the International Coltejer Biennial in Medellín in 1968.53 The Salón Intercol de Artistas in Bogotá, where González exhibited Vermeerianas (1964), was one of the many such efforts by private industry to sponsor the arts. In fact, the role of the petroleum industry in general, and of Intercol (the International Petroleum Company, affiliated with the Rockefellers’ Esso) in particular, must be considered in analyzing how new artistic values were promoted in Colombia. In a series of articles titled “La empresa privada del petróleo y el interés público” (Petroleum’s Private Enterprise and Public Interest [1964]), published first by the magazine Economía and later as part of the series Empresa Privada en Colombia (Private Enterprise in Colombia), Intercol outlined its economic, legislative, and cultural goals.54 Although various authors discussed separately the diverse aspects of Intercol and the petroleum industry, they all believed in global



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capitalism as free enterprise based on open competition. They warned against the dangers of nationalizing the petroleum industry in a way that resonated with Traba’s argument against the nationalist tendencies in art. Intercol translated the concept of open competition into its duty to Colombian culture.55 Through the sponsorship of “free competition” in venues such as the Premio Nacional de la Novela Esso and the Salón Intercol de Artistas Jóvenes, the petroleum company gave itself credit for patronizing and above all exporting the best of what Colombians had to offer.56 Following this logic, Intercol privileged the “stupendous examples” of Colombian art that “beg[a]n to appear,” a reference to emergent and new rather than the traditional or to the international rather than the provincial tendencies in art that could have been considered the most efficient testimony of an advancing culture. Intercol conceived Colombian art as playing a diplomatic role directed at North American and European audiences in the mission to attract economic investment.57 Florencia Bazzano-­Nelson demonstrates how Alberto Lleras Camargo, along with his close friend Nelson Rockefeller and Intercol, astutely conducted cultural diplomacy by sponsoring the exhibition “3,500 Years of Colombian Art” at the Lowe Art Museum operated by the University of Miami. While purportedly a comprehensive history of Colombian art, the exhibition highlighted two periods: pre-­Columbian civilizations and newly emergent modern artists, selected by Traba. Both Lleras Camargo and Rockefeller understood that cultural dissemination could feasibly accomplish what politics could not — that is, to testify to the sophistication and relevance of a nation. In this way, the exhibition crafted an image of refined ancient and modern societies that would counter descriptions of a violent country, especially against Protestants, that had coursed through the New York Times and other prominent media sources during the previous decades. Bazzano-­Nelson demonstrates the skill with which both statesmen seized the opportunity to promote their own interests — that is, to facilitate Intercol’s ability to drill for oil after losing its concessions in Barrancabermeja to Ecopetrol, and for the National Front to promote its main agricultural export, coffee, after its devaluation had disastrous effects on the economy. When Lleras Camargo visited the Lowe Gallery, he was on his way back from Washington, DC, where he had discussed increased aid for Colombia’s internal security with U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower. After leaving Coral Gables, the exhibition traveled to Washington, DC, curated by José Gómez Sicre, director of the pau’s Division of Visual Arts. The “3,500 Years of Colombian Art” exhibition was on view on the Washington Mall around the time U.S. officials deliberated on the fate of military aid for the National Front.58 Intercol was an important patron of the art world that González navigated.59 Intercol’s magazine Lámpara published texts by critics who sympathized with abstraction, such as Casimiro Eiger and Walter Engel. In fact, Intercol’s grant to the

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mambo was the decisive financial support needed to open its doors in October 1963.60 González was present at the museum’s founding in 1962 and recalls Traba rushing to liberate the patronage bonds of the mambo from the state, which she considered a necessary step in the emancipation of artists from the nationalist and political role they had played in earlier decades, including in the National Salon.61 Traba did not have to venture far. Her petition was met by generous and enthusiastic support from the private sector — domestic, as well as multinational, corporations.62 Traba also readily found corporate and multinational sponsorship for her own magazine, Prisma, where the Banco Cafetero advertised in its pages, “You Are in the Circuit of Progress.”63 Traba invited Gómez Sicre to consult on the future mambo in 1961. She had worked with him earlier, in 1959, when they organized an exhibition of modern Colombian art as part of an exhibition series of new, “exportable art” from Latin America for the pau.64 The exhibition catalogue, Art in Latin America Today: Colombia, gave Traba an opportunity to define what was representative of modern Colombian art on her own terms and, hence, strengthen her version of a new canon. She concludes her essay in the catalogue by saying, “Freedom from every interest except plastic.”65 Traba’s brief in the 1950s and into the mid-­1960s was for artists to be at once modern, autonomous from extra-­aesthetic concerns, and highly subjective; over time, she added authentic to that list. Her champion was the Spanish émigré Alejandro Obregón, whose gestural, abstract, and expressive style she viewed as the origin for a fully realized modernism in Colombia.66 The National Front’s Presidential Collection purchased Obregón’s Cóndor (Condor [1971]; figure I.5), a large-­scale painting that hung on the walls of the Salón del Consejo de Ministros (Ministry Cabinet) in the Nariño Presidential Palace, joined later by González’s painting La Constituyente (The Constitutional Assembly [1991]; see figure E.3). A caricature by Héctor Osuna that same year titled “The Remodeling of the Ministry Cabinet: Requirements and Specifications” (1971; figure I.6), published in the Sunday supplement of El Espectador, references the change of the ministry guard and parodies the government’s attempts to “update” the ministry by equating its efforts with interior decoration.67 Obregón’s recently purchased Cóndor figures prominently at the head of the table as the pictorial equivalent to government modernization. In the caricature, one sees the Ministry Cabinet redecorated to look more like a corporate boardroom than the nineteenth-­century neoclassical, Republican-­style rooms typical in Colombian government buildings. Osuna weaves together allusions to modernized furnishings with the goals of the new cabinet members — for example, “The air of the ministry [is] to be appropriate and conditioned” and “The lighting should illuminate the president, but never indirectly.” The text attached to Obregón’s painting reads, “Each minister should be ‘que ni pintado’ [as if painted] for the position.” The expression is a play on

I.5  Alejandro Obregón, Cóndor, 1971. Courtesy of Casa Museo Obregón. Colección Presidencia de la República. I.6  Héctor Osuna, “La remodelación del Consejo de Ministros: Requisitos y especificaciones,” Magazín Dominical, El Espectador, June 6, 1971. Courtesy of Fidel Cano, © El Espectador. Image source: Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia.

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words suggesting both that the ministers should be the appropriate “fit” for their nominations and that Obregón’s Cóndor seems to have been painted specifically for this room and occasion. Osuna comments on the symbolic value of Obregón’s painting in representing the nation as updated and modern, yet still authentically Andean, as symbolized by the national bird. Therefore, when Obregón, arguably the most iconic exemplar of Colombian modern art, lauded González’s first solo exhibition of the Encajeras (Lacemakers) at the mambo and called her the “revelation of ’64,” he tacitly passed the baton to a new generation. His endorsement could have been the most sacrosanct at the time, even if it amounted to no more than one phrase.68 Lo Cursi In the Correo Especial interview, González called the Pasaje Rivas a thermometer of lo último. In doing so she was describing the flea market as the measure not of the latest artistic trends — as high culture qua international — but of “the latest trends in artisanal crafts and decorative furniture.” Her strategic use of lo último to describe lowbrow, informal commerce, crafts, and second-­hand furniture at the market was both a satirical and a deliberate provocation that exposed a key theme that she explored from the beginning of her artistic career: the discursive constructs of taste and cultural legitimacy and how they function in Colombian society as forms of social exclusion and discrimination. Twenty-­seven years after that television interview, in 2005, González was again recorded at the Pasaje Rivas informal market for the art documentary series Plástica: Arte contemporáneo en Colombia. This time she said, “Mi trabajo es Pasaje Rivas” (My work is Pasaje Rivas [see figure I.7]).69 Why would González characterize her oeuvre in this way? It is clear that the cluttered, informal market had only grown in González’s esteem — or, perhaps, in its symbolic value — from termómetro de lo último (thermometer of the latest) to a metaphor describing her long career of accomplishments. Yet this is an unusual and provocative assertion. To begin with, only some of her works are materially resonant of this space. For instance, González painted several paintings based on popular lithographs printed by Gráficas Molinari in Cali — including the purgatorial souls (see figures 3.2 and 3.12), the mythological nymphs (see figures 3.7, 3.8, 3.13, and 3.16), and the Christ of Monserrate (see figure 5.1) — that were still being sold at the small commercial stands around the Pasaje Rivas. Other works, such as Baby Johnson in situ, Cameo, and Exit Stage Rear are multimedia pieces in which González attached her enamel-­on-­metal paintings to furniture she purchased at the Pasaje Rivas. However, the majority of her works are not so explicitly tied to this specific market, although she, along with critics, repeatedly associated her works with this space and the San Victorino shops along Tenth Street.



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I.7  Pasaje Rivas, Bogotá, 2016. Image source: https://www.flickr.com/photos /yonolatengo. cc by 2.i.

González’s description of her oeuvre as “Pasaje Rivas” from the position of a renowned artist forty years into her prolific career acts as a provocation similar to the one she put forth many decades earlier, both allying her artistic practice to cultural practices considered tasteless and even perhaps illicit — that is, cursi. The works studied in this book emphasize the connections between place and taste in subtle and complicated ways, conflating the world of consumerism and functional art and the critical world of high art. González drags into high-­art institutions the very social terrain the market connotes. In bringing the Pasaje Rivas into the modern art museum, National Salon, and international biennials, she satirically challenged cultural modernization theory and its ideological distinctions between the global, elite, and legitimate and the provincial, illegitimate, and cursi, in the process puncturing this divide. Many elite Bogotanos view the Pasaje Rivas as an excessive and unsophisticated, even a dangerous, space.70 This disdainful attitude betrays their anxiety over the so-­called invading cultures that stemmed from accelerated migration in the wake of La Violencia and the effects of industrialization, which transformed Colombia from a primarily rural society to a primarily urban society: while 70.9 percent of the population lived in rural areas in 1938, by 1973, 77.5 percent of the population lived in the cities.71 The massive migrations changed the face of cities such as Bogotá and sparked concerns about patrimonial and invading culture. As elite Bogotanos moved to the northern sectors of the city, they abandoned the historical center to the migrants and squatters. González herself migrated from

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Bucaramanga to Bogotá in 1957 to study at the university, giving her a privileged perspective on these social tensions. It is the sense of illegitimacy Pasaje Rivas possesses that makes it such an interesting referent. Like so much of the informal commerce that has emerged out of the expansive urbanization in Bogotá, especially around the old “doors to the city” in the San Victorino neighborhood, the resilient market stands as a testament to the entrepreneurial survival of urban newcomers and their creative production. The markets that developed in Pasaje Rivas and San Victorino sold the cursilerías that stylistically embodied Bogotá’s excessive growth. Yet the elites, nostalgic for the days that they held the city center, have mythologized these markets as places of dubious, illicit activity, in turn exposing their fear of the rural-­to-­urban migrants. These tensions are rendered explicit at the Pasaje Rivas. The market is adjacent to the city’s main Plaza de Bolívar, which houses the central government, legislative, and ecclesiastical buildings of Colombia. The Pasaje Rivas is behind and metaphorically obstructed by the French-­inspired architecture of City Hall (Alcadía Mayor de Bogotá, figure I.8). The street vendors’ appropriation of the back alleys in the historical sector of Bogotá is an abrupt contrast to the tightly controlled official zone surrounding the government buildings (figure I.9). The seats of central power are not only visually emphasized by the vast, open square, the Plaza de Bolívar; they are also harmonized by the uniform ochre-­colored limestone (known as piedra amarilla or piedra bogotana). The use of the local stone and neoclassical architectural style of the administrative buildings pay homage to the discourses of universalism and authenticity underlying national foundation. There is no doubt about the legitimacy of this space. No street vendors or solicitors are permitted in the unobstructed expanse of the central plaza. Indeed, after the Bogotazo riots of April 9, 1948, the Plaza de Bolívar was emptied of all features except the statue of Simón Bolívar to safeguard against unruly mobs. Despite warnings about petty theft in the alleys of the Pasaje Rivas, one is more likely to lose one’s camera in front of the Nariño Presidential Palace, as I discovered personally. As I was photographing the site in 2005, I was confronted by a military police officer who demanded my film and then the entire (digital) camera. It was only my academic credentials that spared my camera from becoming the property of the state; however, to keep it I had to agree to delete all images of the presidential palace. This anecdote reveals the government’s continued defensive attitude toward the public and is key to understanding the impassioned and polarized responses to González’s works during the 1960s. Members of the pueblo were conceived not as participatory agents in democratic institutions but as threats to the established order. I locate González’s work precisely at the interstitial space between official and informal spaces that come into productive friction at the intersection between



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I.8  Plaza de Bolívar: City Hall Bogotá, Ministries of Interior and Justice and the National Cathedral, Bogotá. Photograph: Ernesto Monsalve, 2017. I.9  Plaza de Bolívar: National Capitol, City Hall Bogotá and Ministries of Interior and Justice, Bogotá. Photograph: Ernesto Monsalve, 2017.

the Pasaje Rivas and the Plaza de Bolívar, pressing up against each other on the back walls of Bogotá’s City Hall. The physical proximity of these structures notwithstanding, the cultural gap is immense and provides metaphorical parameters for what the scholar Ángel Rama called the “lettered city.” Rama’s lettered city reveals a resilient legacy of colonialism in which the “New World’s” physical and social landscapes were reconfigured to accommodate European ideals of hierarchical order while disregarding the actual topographies onto which they were mapped, omitting the violent confrontations engendered by their conquest.72 As a consequence, a deep breach exists between the ideal, as articulated in the delineation of the civic grid and the formality of laws, and the social realities that have served as a site for ideological battles between governing elites, who Rama calls letrados (erudites), and the governed pueblo. Rama convincingly demonstrates the close relationship between the state, both colonial and republican, and the imagined ideals of social, political, and

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civic structure conceived by the letrados throughout Latin America. Proper spoken and written language became a marker of a letrado’s proximity to central power. After independence, linguistic forms were repurposed to reposition creole letrados at the apex of society, filling the vacuum left behind after the removal of the colonial enterprise and the figure of the monarch. The urban landscape, legal code, linguistic form, and social structure accommodated not a regional reality but a utopian world constituted through cosmopolitan ideals conceived on another continent. In Colombia in the 1930s, the liberal caudillo Jorge Eliécer Gaitán called this distinction the governing país politico (the political country) and governed país nacional (the national country). Just as formal language and law served to uphold social distinctions throughout Latin America, the letrados further buttressed their importance by advancing notions of buen gusto (good taste). Directly tied to the foundation of art academies as a way to elevate good taste in colonial societies such as Mexico, Brazil, and Cuba, and later in the young republics, the visual arts were charged with the task of aesthetic, as well as spiritual and moral, enhancement.73 This academic inculcation of a tasteful discernment echoed the civilizing missions that had justified colonial and then elite governance. The rhetoric of good taste was predicated on a presumed universality and atemporality, thus serving as a powerful and euphemistic device for social exclusion. When the Liberal Republic sought to rival the Catholic Church’s hegemony over spiritual guidance, it turned to the Ministry of Education and Division of Cultural Extension to fulfill the state’s obligation of uplifting the pueblo. When officials gave assurances that their cultural policies directed at democratizing culture would go beyond educating the masses in elite culture, they envisioned the role of intellectuals in terms of refining popular culture. They clarified that their cultural policies were intent on building a “spiritual climate” that could guide popular sensibility and “ingrain in the collective soul a permanent impulse toward progress and perfectionism . . . to allow that collective soul, that lost identity, to be expressed in clear and precise form, finding within intellectual culture the proper grammar and orthography to assure its correct public manifestation.”74 Put differently, rural folk would provide raw materials that intellectuals could polish into a unifying national culture.75 Indeed, the National Salon in Colombia was founded in 1940 under President Eduardo Santos of the Liberal Party and the Education Minister Jorge Eliécer Gaitán to further the state’s cultural mandates. In fostering artistic and aesthetic elevation, the National Salon would also cultivate public spirituality and morality. Until the 1960s, debates about national artistic production centered on which aesthetic would be the most appropriate to elevate the masses: conservative, Catholic-­inspired neoclassicism; Americanist indigenism; or modernist autonomy? Proponents of all three models continued to believe that the fine arts



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could serve as instruments for spiritual elevation, guarantors of public morality, and catalysts for national unity through cultural harmony.76 During the postwar era, significant parallels emerged between the discourses of uplifting and updating. Modernizing agents sought to enlist the cultural sphere in the battle against the so-­called backwardness of postcolonial societies, now on economic, scientific, and technical terms. Shifting away from an emphasis during the 1930s and 1940s on folklore being the “national soul,” Latin America the 1950s and 1960s would revive the age-­old tension between what was considered cosmopolitan good taste and what was considered provincial bad taste. Through a system of awarding prizes and providing other forms of institutional validation, abstraction came to signify elegance and sophistication, alongside technical advancement. Furthermore, geometric and constructivist forms connoted the masculine, rational, and universal character of the lettered city, one that refuted U.S. and European stereotypes of Latin American culture as feminized, irrational, and “primitive.”77 Despite this rapidly transforming cultural environment, “good taste” still held currency in the 1960s when González exhibited her works. As I discuss in the chapters that follow, reviewers in the salons in which González participated still considered beauty and good taste markers of artistic success and continued to remind audiences that she had demonstrated elevated discernment with her Lacemakers exhibition in 1964. That way, González’s incursions into lowbrow culture could be considered intellectual engagements with the cursi and not just cursi themselves. This distinction allowed critics to characterize González’s reference to the tabloid press in Los suicidas del Sisga (The Sisga Suicides [1965]; see figure 2.1), for example, as a heretical turn for both the artist and the National Salon. Even Gloria Valencia de Castaño affirmed in their interview that González began her career as “una niña que pintaba muy formalmente con todas las de la ley” (a girl who painted very formally with full authority).78 Valencia emphasized that González had conquered a sanctioned cultural space before her works took an unexpected provincial and lowbrow turn. González would later reflect on her dislike at being called “refined” and her preference for being known as a provocateur. When I asked her why she stopped working with furniture, she responded, “Because people started to like it.”79 González measured the success of her works in terms of the aggravation they provoked, not in terms of their validation of elite standards of taste. Once her furniture assemblages began to be viewed as tasteful, she moved on to another type of provocation. It was precisely because González belonged to the lettered city that her explorations beyond its borders could have a critical effect. Robert Karl describes a third social division in the mid-­t wentieth century, which he terms the país letrado — that is, the social scientists and intellectuals who mediated between the país político and the país nacional. González inhab-

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ited this país letrado, whose members did not belong to the subaltern peasants, workers, and precariat but who did level sharp critiques at the país politico. Other members of the país letrado included many intellectuals, most famously National University sociologists such as the Camilo Torres (the acclaimed guerrilla priest) and Orlando Fals Borda, whose frustration led them toward radicalization.80 Nevertheless, González’s appropriations of urban popular culture revealed the class condescension of the local elites, even of progressive intellectuals, and help us understand the limitations of their challenge. When González exhibited The Sisga Suicides at the National Salon in 1965, it was the first time that critics, including Traba, identified the cursi as an artistic strategy. From 1967 on, González’s referents to popular culture extended beyond subject matter and style to her choice of media. She began to work with industrial enamel paint on tin plates and, in 1970, to assemble these paintings onto objects purchased at popular Bogotá markets such as the Pasaje Rivas and San Victorino. Her choice of commercial materials accompanied her unequivocally urban popular, local, and even devotional subjects, including those with specifically national connotations, such as a double portrait of the Colombian founding fathers Simón Bolívar and Francisco de Paula Santander (1967; see figures 4.1 and 4.2) and the bed assemblage depicting Bogotá’s most venerated icon, Our Fallen Lord of Monserrate (1970; see figure 5.1). This strategically local turn that played with a so-­called underdeveloped sensibility elicited responses in the critical press that reveal the persistent equation of the cosmopolitan with good taste and the provincial with bad taste. That is, the cursi served as counterculture aggression against elite and internationalist aesthetic conventions and the will to modernize the arts. As this book demonstrates, the país letrado celebrated high art that referenced the cursilería of urban popular culture as resistance to cultural neocolonialism while never fully owning up to its own prejudicial coloniality.81 Cursi, like taste, is an unstable category. Despite González’s reputation as a painter of the cursi, she did not embrace the term initially. Rather, she characterized her work as desmedido (unbridled) — capturing the temperature of Colombian culture. “Cursi” is a disdainful word used to designate certain types of behavior. If a person desired a bed made from amaranth wood, with ivory inlay — a marker of social status and thus good taste — but instead purchased a faux-­wood metal radio bed (like the one González used in her assemblage Naturaleza casi muerta (Almost Still Life; see figure 5.1), she or he would be considered “cursi,” with the term unequivocally signifying bad aesthetic taste. While there are certainly overlaps between the intellectual uses of the terms “kitsch,” “camp,” and “cursi,” there are also subtle yet crucial differences worth mentioning. The term “kitsch” inherits the Marxist theoretical framework associated especially with intellectuals of the Frankfurt School, who distrusted mass culture as alienated and dominated. Theodor Adorno and Clement Green-



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berg, among other influential thinkers who wrestled with the popular rise of European fascism in the 1930s, lost faith in the masses as agents of progressive change and considered popular culture vulnerable to manipulation by nefarious forces intent on swaying their emotions.82 Traba adopted the term “kitsch” in Los muebles de Beatriz González (1977) to defend González’s furniture pieces as high art and as opposed to dominant popular culture. Following Adorno and Greenberg, as well as Herbert Marcuse and Henri Lefebvre, Traba was concerned with top-­down cultural coercion in popular culture by a techno-­dictatorship of highly industrialized consumer societies.83 Even though Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht were translated and widely read during this era, Traba never found any constructive potential in mass or popular culture; nor did she ever consider alliances between intellectual elites and the popular classes. Traba paradoxically claimed that González was “Brechtian without intending it.”84 In doing so, she unwittingly contradicted her own reading of González’s assemblages by equating them to Brecht’s engagement with the working classes, a relation that was antithetical to Traba’s own. Instead, Traba focused on the país letrado. While she was initially enthusiastic about corporate sponsorship of the arts, she later advocated for patronage by the professional middle classes as a way to liberate cultural production from the state and the dangers of populism. Nonetheless, Traba never questioned the ways in which her own definitions of taste perpetuated social hierarchies. She first used “kitsch” many years after she described González’s references to popular culture as strategizing “the cursi” in art. Thus, the term “cursi” certainly operated differently for Traba in 1965 from how she employed “kitsch” in 1977. When Traba describes The Sisga Suicides as introducing the theme of the cursi, she is referring to this strategy as one of biting humor. The fact that an amorous couple that committed suicide (or a homicide and suicide) could be considered comic and not tragic betrays the kind of class condescension central to understanding how González’s works functioned in the imaginary of Colombian spectators in the 1960s. “Camp,” following Susan Sontag, has come to denote one of the many counterculture movements that emerged in New York City during the 1960s. Sontag defended camp sensibility as the emergence of an Oscar Wildean dandyism, associated with urban homosexual communities and related to the psychic and social liberation advocated by Marcuse. She wrote about popular culture from an erudite position and differentiated these sophisticated nouveau-­flâneurs from the consuming masses as savvy discerners of camp who choose certain elements of consumer culture, perhaps even as a form of release from the rigors of intellectual life, the iconophobia of Judaism, or the Puritanism of Anglo-­Protestant culture.85 Undoubtedly, there are intersections between the lowbrow culture that Sontag considers camp and lo cursi. However, while Sontag celebrates the camp sensibility, the use of the term “cursi” in reviews of González’s work betrays a

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ridiculing attitude toward those who lack the proper form and good taste to appreciate and participate in high art and the lettered city. Furthermore, “cursi” is a term that connotes both sentimentality and excess and is used disparagingly to characterize women and the lower classes as volatile and dangerous. Therefore, notions of proper and improper behavior overlap in the language of both class and gender social discrimination. “Cursi” is central to this study not only because it captures the class and gender biases that González’s works elicited in reviewers, but also because it has a connotation of material, psychological, and behavioral excess that relates to the elites’ disdainful perceptions of the masses as irrational, unruly, and threatening mobs. Dis-­cursis, or the politics of taste, was one of the many weapons enlisted during the Cold War. In the context of the Cold War, the modernizing agents conceived of themselves as masculine, rational, and measured leaders combating irrational communists.86 Life magazine described Ché Guevara as an uncouth, irrational communist who helped validate U.S. Treasury Secretary C. Douglas Dillon’s speech at Punta del Este, Uruguay, when the beret-­wearing Cuban “tried to stalk out. But he chose the wrong door and led his entire retinue of pistol-­packing ‘secretaries’ into the ladies’ room.”87 The term “cursi” also insinuates the gendered tone employed to ridicule Ché’s emotional outburst. In a similarly dismissing and patronizing manner, the mainstream press repeatedly attacked Jorge Eliécer Gaitán during the 1940s for his lack of decorum and penchant for whipping audiences into a frenzy during his political speeches. “Cursi,” therefore, is a word saturated not only with class condescension but also with anxiety about a threat emanating from the popular classes, revolutionary fervor, and social changes engendered by modernity. The characterization of popular culture as “cursi” evokes the sociopolitical divide between the Pasaje Rivas and Bogotá’s City Hall. I locate González’s oeuvre, with all of its productive tensions and contradictions, at this interstitial space.88 The perceived threat of informal commerce and “invading” newcomers implicit in the unease around the Pasaje Rivas is crucial to understanding how her works functioned in the Colombian context. The excessive character of the market — its chaotic, perhaps uncontrollable — structure, denies any type of cultural cohesion or top-­down metanarrative. It metaphorically highlights the distinction between official models of culture and the diverse, hybrid, and contradictory elements that those models exclude. For an artist to characterize her entire oeuvre as “Pasaje Rivas” suggests an implicit understanding with her audience about classifications of social hierarchies and their relation to form and taste. González’s biography provides us with valuable insights into the process of habitus inculcation. Through the concept of the habitus, or a system of enduring and transferable dispositions that a person acquires through a long process of family and institutional education, the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu describes



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how human behavior contributes to reproducing social structures at conscious and unconscious levels.89 González’s upbringing in a privileged family from a provincial town in the midst of becoming a city gave her a particular vantage point on issues of class and taste. Yet her experience as a newcomer in Bogotá at a time of great concern about migration gave her exposure to the processes by which Bogotanos set out to distinguish themselves from invaders, which in turn reveals a crisis of confidence in civic categories themselves. González speaks with great self-­consciousness about the aesthetic dispositions that were inculcated with rigor by her family and her education. She credits her mother’s lessons on taste as having given her the capacity for critical thinking that she would maintain throughout her life, even as she later destabilized notions of good and bad taste. In doing so, she rationally uncovers what Bourdieu termed the “ideology of charisma,” in which taste is viewed as a natural talent. In other words, González turns her own cultural competence on itself in a sharp exploration of the function of taste: to “the area par excellence of the denial of the social,” as Bourdieu wrote — and, I add, to the political.90 Chapter Descriptions The genesis of González’s now iconic practices, in the first six years of her long career, divulge the contested terrain over cultural distinctions that were being forged through institutions during a period of limited democracy, intense modernization programs, and Cold War tensions. Each of the exhibitions I study here explores a different dimension of these tensions. Each chapter connects González’s artworks, Marta Traba’s critical support, and responses by the press with the underlying anxiety about the social changes engendered by modernization programs of industrialization, urbanization, anticommunism, education reform, and population control. I trace González’s exhibitions from her consecration in the Bogotá art world in 1964 through her debut in the international biennial circuit in 1970. Centering each chapter on a single exhibition of her works — at the mambo, the National Salon, or international biennial — helps us approximate the ways in which works of art engage in dialogue with institutional objectives.91 By examining these exhibitions, I evaluate how the artist’s aesthetic choices, institutional frameworks, and spectators’ responses — traceable through the critical press — together constitute a battleground for cultural signification. Through responses to González’s multivalent artworks, I show how these key institutions were implicated in shaping cultural expectations and judgments, often mediating a public sphere that was struggling to establish itself internationally in an increasingly globalized art market while also contending with the threat of revolutionary fervor within a deeply Catholic and stratified society. Through González’s exhibitions and Traba’s writings we can approximate how

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those expectations and judgments were constituted, challenged, and, in some cases, subverted. In 1964, the recently inaugurated mambo hosted a solo show of González’s Lacemaker series based on Vermeer’s The Lacemaker (ca. 1669). The show consecrated the young González as a force to be reckoned with. As noted earlier, the painter Alejandro Obregón referred to her as the “Revelation of ’64!” Chapter 1, “Vermeer in Bucaramanga, Beatriz in Bogotá,” contextualizes González’s success within the broader aims of the museum and its corporate sponsors. While the reviews of the exhibition focused exclusively on the Lacemaker series’s fulfillment of the cultural expectations González learned from her professors at Uniandes, a closer look at the development of the series shows that González was already calculating ways to subvert those demands. Critics lauded the Lacemaker series for its erudition, sophistication, and modernity. It headed the charge for “exportable” art that would place Colombia competitively in the international cultural arena. This legitimized position gave González a privileged platform from which to launch her subsequent critique. Her later cultural critiques were possible precisely because she was already sanctioned on the terms of the art establishment. The fact that González’s satirical critique in the Lacemaker series went unmentioned by the contemporary critical press betrays the degree to which modernization ideology served as the lens through which aesthetic judgments were made. The chapter contextualizes the Lacemaker series within the dominant artistic discourse in Bogotá of the late 1950s and early 1960s and illustrates why the internationalist push, within Cold War realignments of power, satisfied so many divergent agendas. As we shall see, none of those agendas could fully contain González. Chapter 2, “A Leap from the Domestic Sphere into El Sisga Reservoir,” examines González’s The Sisga Suicides, submitted to the Seventeenth National Salon of Colombian Artists in 1965 — a watershed moment in the artist’s career and in the history of Colombian art. The painting represents a press photo of a couple who purportedly committed suicide to “liberate [the woman] from sin.” The motives for the suicide reveal much about the accelerating industrialization and urbanization of Colombia and how those forces conflicted with traditional notions of feminine virtue in a nation that prided itself as being the most Catholic in the Western Hemisphere. Two weeks before the 1965 National Salon opened, former President Alberto Lleras Camargo hosted the first Pan-­American Assembly on Population. In his keynote address he declared birth control as the only viable solution to Latin America’s demographic explosion and, therefore, to averting a Cuban-­inspired revolution. The subsequent media frenzy influenced how spectators at the National Salon saw González’s painting, which sparked anxious phrases such as



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“crisis in the salon” and “spectacle of fraud.” The chapter analyzes how the polarized responses to The Sisga Suicides reveal entangled discourses of class conflict and reproductive rights. Marta Traba, by contrast, applauded González for introducing the cursi as subject matter in Colombian art. That critics were discussing a painting about a suicide pact in terms of the black humor it employed reveals the limits of decontextualizing formalist critique. Nevertheless, the painting’s subject matter, and its debased figurative style, marked a shift in direction for the National Salon, an institution that had articulated “legitimate” culture in Colombia since its inception. González’s second exhibition of painted faux collages at the mambo in May –  June 1967 — the subject of chapter 3, “ ‘Cut It Out’ Impropriety at the mambo” —  was seen by few at the time and has been largely neglected in the literature on González since then. The museum had relocated to the campus of the National University, where radicalized activities fanned revolutionary sparks. Less than two weeks after the exhibition opened, the military invaded the “inviolable” terrain of the university. Reviews of the exhibition consolidated González’s reputation as a painter of the cursi (tacky), the popular, and what is “ours.” Somewhere in the relationship among these concepts is embedded an understanding of a postmodernist critical discourse that was emerging alongside the student culture-­turned-­guerrilla insurgency of the time. Because of the location of the exhibition, attendance was low, and the critics who braved the violent confrontations between students and police tended to be those who shared the demonstrators’ politics. In fact, the language used by reviewers to describe González’s exhibition mirrored the grievances expressed by the protestors. The chapter studies how González’s works inspired by private and popular visual culture crossed wires with the political climate of the National University and positioned her amid class, gender, and generational clashes that were dramatically unfolding in 1967. “Plagiarism!” was the charge against González splashed across the pages of the newspaper El Siglo in November 1967. It was an indignant response by the famed conservative journalist Arturo Abella to the prize González won at the Nineteenth National Salon of Colombian Artists for her work Apuntes para la historia extensa I (Notes for the Extensive History I; see figure 4.1). The image under fire consisted of an enamel-­on-­tin medallion of Simón Bolívar, part of a diptych that included another founding father of the nation and Bolívar’s political rival, Francisco de Paula Santander. Not only was González accused of plagiarism, but the stylistic and material depiction of these patriotic emblems also prompted newspapers to publish irate letters by anonymous writers. Chapter 4, “Notes for an Exclusive History of Colombia,” reads between the lines of these strong reactions and relates them to broader anxieties about the

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changing face of the capital city after the Bogotazo riots of 1948 and the political discourses of the left. Simón Bolívar was no longer the fixed symbol of the Conservative Party of traditional Colombian historiography but a destabilized signifier. In fact, several years after the scandal over Gonzalez’s salon entry, the guerrilla group M-­19 stormed the Quinta de Bolívar museum in Bogotá and kidnapped Bolívar’s sword while claiming they were resuming the Liberator’s interrupted emancipatory project. What was at stake, then, was the authenticity not of the painting but of patrimonial culture and the social hierarchies this traditional understanding of history buttressed. The chapter shows how González’s Notes for the Extensive History struck a nervous chord with citizens who felt their status and patrimonial culture were being threatened by both rapidly changing social categories and Cold War revolutionary ideas. In 1970, González painted Almost Still Life, her version of the most venerated and miraculous sculpture in Bogotá, Our Fallen Lord of Monserrate, and assembled it onto a bed purchased at a popular market. Chapter 5, “Modernism Obstructed at the Second Medellín Biennial,” looks at her strategic provincialism in exhibiting this decisively local work, saturated with popular and devotional references, at an international competition. By inserting her paintings into elaborate furniture frames, González called into question the discursive frameworks through which art and culture were interpreted and presented. Embedded in her complex and hilarious assemblages is an interrogation of sight — proper versus improper forms of viewing — that are deeply related to both institutions of cultural circulation and Catholic modes of understanding the world. European jurors exposed their own geopolitical biases when they dismissed González’s Almost Still Life as a derivative and belated example of U.S. pop art while commending Latin American geometric abstraction as an organic continuation of European constructivism. Paralleling the development discourse in the economic sphere, the international biennial circuit tried to fit Colombia and Latin America into a larger global arena, with its accompanying evolutionary narrative. González confronted these hegemonic discourses with a bed saturated with local iconography that challenged the newness and radicality of new media expected from participants in the international biennials and instead parodied art trends and the jurors, who, like the clergy, tried to guide viewers in the “proper” direction. The book concludes with an epilogue, “Underdeveloped Art for Underdeveloped People.” It relates González’s cursilerías to the articulation of Latin American cultural regionalism, theories of marginality in avant-­garde practices, and dematerialized art during the Cold War. It then traces González’s turn from parody to tragedy in response to Colombia’s escalating violence since the mid-­1980s, when narcoterrorism and paramilitarism aggravated the armed conflict. Her



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works have become lamentations over Colombia’s staggering losses and incalculable suffering. González briefly interrupted her pictorial dirges to paint the Constitutional Assembly of 1991, employing her famous vibrant colors to mark the symbolic entry of the pueblo into the lettered city and multiculturalism into the Presidential Palace. Yet the popular rejection of the peace agreement plebiscite of 2016 demonstrates that González’s pictorial critique of coloniality remains relevant and urgent today.

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1.1  Beatriz González, Encajera, 1963, oil on canvas, 100 × 70 cm. 1.2  Johannes Vermeer, The Lacemaker, c. 1669 – 1670, oil on canvas laid down on wood, 24 × 31 cm. Musée du Louvre, Inv.: mi 1448. Photograph: Gérard Blot. © rmn-­Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.

chapter 1

Vermeer in Bucaramanga, Beatriz in Bogotá In 1964, Beatriz González was the toast of the Colombian art world. Leading art critics lauded her sophisticated abstraction. Alejandro Obregón, the most influential painter at the time, called her the “the future of Colombian painting.”1 As director of the Bogotá Museum of Modern Art (mambo), Marta Traba inaugurated the museum’s young artists program with González’s first solo show of Encajeras (Lacemakers), a series of abstract paintings based on Johannes Vermeer’s The Lacemaker (c. 1669 – 1670; figure 1.2).2 The engagement of the series with both formal modernism and traditional subject matter helps explain González’s triumphant debut. Press reporting on González’s debut repeatedly praised her artistic autonomy and international currency, as well as her aesthetic propriety, tastefulness, and sophistication, thus revealing the critics’ terms of aesthetic evaluation. These cultural principles resonated with the modernizing rhetoric of the National Front and its desire to update the nation through modernization programs so that Colombia could catch up with the so-­called First World.3 Unbeknownst to her critics, their terms of praise reinscribed an elite desire for progress that buttressed traditional social norms. As a series that was on point with both the art-­history and social concerns of its moment, the Lacemaker series can be understood as the stylistic and thematic embodiment of conservative modernization in Colombia. What critics picked up on in 1964 were consensus-­building properties of the Lacemaker series based on equating international modernism with social progress. González learned the criteria for artistic judgment at the University of Los Andes (Uniandes), where she studied with Traba, as well as with the artists Carlos Rojas and Juan Antonio Roda. González was quick to master modernist aesthetic values. This chapter demonstrates how the Colombian art world’s myopia rendered legible the ideological conditioning of its time. Critical responses to the exhibi-

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tion of the Lacemaker paintings at mambo reveal the value system that consecrated González as a serious artist whose works represented the elites’ will to control modernization and to enlist the arts as a form of social harmonization. These tensions also help us to understand the deep-­seated social contradictions that limited the country’s precarious democratic revival under its model of conservative modernization, leading eventually to violent repression. That is, the perceived threat that ultranationalism and international communism posed to the newly restored National Front democracy agitated elites’ fears of the masses to the point of restricting the potential for democratic participation. Modernizing without disrupting social conventions thus could be fulfilled only in the realm of art and the imagination. Not only did the modernization programs alter social expectations; they set in motion irreversible political dissensus that was beginning to boil over in Colombia and, as I develop in the pages ahead, in González’s own home state of Santander, where she painted the Lacemaker series.4 The language of praise for González’s Lacemaker works, and critics’ emphasis on her sophisticated international modernism, betrays the role ascribed to the arts by the economic and governing elites in their efforts to change the appearance of everything in order to change nothing at all — that is, to avoid larger structural changes. The Lacemaker series was González’s ticket to acceptance in the Colombian art world, yet what her supporters did not recognize in 1964 was that, within the series itself, the artist was developing a counternarrative to the hegemonic discourses of artistic autonomy and internationalism so often used to assess her series. Critics failed to respond to the subtle critique that González was beginning to stage and that she would develop explicitly in her later exhibitions. Furthermore, interpreting the various social tensions around the Lacemaker series in 1964 helps lay the groundwork for understanding the force and complexity of González’s later decisions and interventions. Telling Triumph Art historians have long recognized Johannes Vermeer for his masterly optical illusionism.5 Paradoxically, he is also a favorite Old Master among modernists who celebrate the formal self-­referentiality of his paintings, especially the gestural qualities of The Lacemaker.6 On the pristine canvas, which has been housed at the Louvre since the nineteenth century, a young woman intently concentrates on her lacemaking, surrounded by the prominently displayed tools of her trade — bobbins, pins, push pillow, and threads. The composition draws attention to the materials and process of lacemaking, as well as of the painter’s own practice. The worktable evokes the easel and stretchers, its edge echoing the canvas’s rectangular shape. The thinly applied paint of the background reveals the

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coarse fabric of the gessoed canvas. Broad gestural brushstrokes of green and blue paint loosely define the leaf pattern on the tabletop tapestry. Dabs of white and red paint, known as pointillés, pepper the canvas to highlight pristine accents on the pins, lace, and other fabrics. The artist conspicuously leaves a trace of his own hand dripping the vibrant red and white liquid paint onto the canvas to render loose strands of threads spilling out of a pillow-­shaped sewing box. The painting is thematically and stylistically a reflection on the aesthetic practices of both artist and sitter, hence anticipating by centuries the values of High Modernism dominant in the second half of the twentieth century.7 González, like Vermeer and the young lacemaker, also reflects stylistically and thematically on her own craft. She interpreted Vermeer’s The Lacemaker by transforming the picture into a series of abstract and highly subjective pictures. For the exhibition in 1964, mambo numbered and displayed the thirteen canvases of the Lacemaker series in chronological order.8 This sequencing allows us to follow González’s stylistic progression and to make inferences about her choices as she developed the imagery from one picture to another. In the early paintings of the series, there appears to be a progressive shift from representation toward abstraction. The later works return to figuration but diverge from fidelity to Vermeer to engage playfully with the subject of the lacemaker. Despite this, critics of the time focused exclusively on reading the Lacemaker series through an evolutionary narrative from figuration to abstraction that conformed to formal progression toward technical experimentation. In their reviews of the exhibition, critics such as Traba, Walter Engel, and Gloria Valencia Diago employed a language of praise that revealed expectations for “exportable” artworks in an increasingly international art field. They characterized abstraction, artistic autonomy, self-­criticality, and development of a personal style as the virtues governing the success of the Lacemaker paintings at mambo. Even mambo’s publicity material for González’s exhibition endorsed these principles (figure 1.3); the famed graphic designer David Consuegra interpreted The Lacemaker in his own geometric abstract style, both emphasizing the modernity of the museum’s exhibition and showcasing his artistic style. With the exception of Traba, who characterized González’s humorous colors as “terrible,” this evolutionary lens conditioned the critics’ narrative so powerfully that that they missed or refused to discuss the subtle critique the artist was posing. The first four Lacemaker canvases, which González painted in 1963, progressively move away from Vermeer’s complete picture toward fragments. In the first in the series, Encajera (Lacemaker [1963]; see figure 1.1), the viewer can discern the lacemaker, wearing the yellow dress with white collar, as she bends down toward her task. All of the suggestive and characteristic attributes of the figure at the Louvre are present: the ringlets in her hair, the downcast gaze in full concentration as her hands dexterously labor over the weaving, the blue sewing cushion

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1.3  David Consuegra, Design for the exhibition La encajera de Vermeer de Beatriz González, Museum of Modern Art Bogotá, 1964, Serigraph on paper, 49.5 × 34.8 cm. Courtesy of the heirs of David Consuegra. Photograph: Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá.

with red and white threads spilling out. González abbreviates details to their descriptive essential, just enough to conjure the citation. The light source enters the room from the same upper-­right-­hand corner, although González concentrates the effect of light on the lacemaker’s left side of her face, leaving half her face in the dark. Vermeer’s warm colors, dominated by the yellow dress and soft tan background, balance out cooler shades of the rich blues and greens of the sewing cushion and textiles in the foreground. González, in contrast, uses a predominantly cool palette of violet, ultramarine blue, and gray patches that leave the lacemaker in a dark, cold room. Although there is no doubt for a viewer familiar with Vermeer that his The Lacemaker is the source, González’s picture is somber, perhaps even melancholic, compared with the warm inspiration at the Louvre. The title of the second canvas, Encajera negativa (Lacemaker Negative [1963]; figure 1.4), betrays its source: a photographic negative of the seventeenth-­century Lacemaker. González painted Vermeer’s color antithesis. Incongruously, the actual photographic negative of The Lacemaker at the Louvre (figure 1.5) parallels the coolness of the cobalt and indigo blues of González’s first Lacemaker, while her Lacemaker Negative floods her earlier painting with warm colors: terra cotta, ocher yellow, and golden orange. Even the blues and greens are warm olive hues. Nonetheless, the figure disintegrates into larger, reduced blocks of paint that have lost their descriptive ability. Although the painting does seem to correspond

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1.4  Beatriz González, Encajera negativa, 1963, oil on canvas, 80 × 70 cm. 1.5 Negative of Vermeer’s The Lacemaker.

vaguely to Vermeer’s The Lacemaker, one would be hard pressed to make this connection if one saw the canvas in isolation. González engages in a pictorial dialogue with her seventeenth-­century colleague about process and technique, such as the use of broad regions of color with small dabs of paint. In the subsequent canvases from 1963, Encajera roja detalle (Red Lacemaker Detail; figure 1.6), Encajera Monte Onda (Mount Onda Lacemaker; figure 1.7),9 and Encajera dinámica (Dynamic Lacemaker; figure 1.8), González zooms in and elaborates on a fragment from the original painting. In Red Lacemaker Detail, the artist focuses exclusively on the collar of the lacemaker and the sewing cushion. The shapes give us an understanding of the compositional vignette, although the colors do not necessarily correlate to those in the original. Even the white plane that suggests the collar in González’s painting refers to a dark ochre section in the Vermeer. In Mount Onda Lacemaker, the yellow diverges toward an electric parakeet hue. While returning to the discernible figure of the lacemaker, the works that González painted in 1964, a total of nine canvases, move away from the painterly quality of the first four toward an increasingly flat, graphic style. Encajera almanaque Pielroja (Lacemaker Pielroja Calendar [1964]; figure 1.20) seems to float

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1.6  Beatriz González, Encajera roja detalle, 1963, oil on canvas, 70 × 100 cm. 1.7  Beatriz González, Encajera Monte Onda, 1963, oil on canvas, 120 × 100 cm.

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1.8  Beatriz González, Encajera dinámica, 1963, oil on canvas, 120 × 100 cm.

on a planar emerald green background. The dress and the sewing cushion now seem like a quilt of pale rose and maroon patches. In both Encajera animal (Animal Lacemaker [1964]) and Un busto a la encajera del imperio (A Bust to the Imperial Lacemaker [1964]), González places her up on a patchwork pedestal.10 In Encajera mona (Monkey Lacemaker [1964]; figure 1.9), the expanse of a large black background takes up almost three fourths of the picture plane and dwarfs the lacemaker at the bottom. The progressive detachment from the Vermeer and the increasing flatness of the color planes captured the attention of most critics that reviewed the show. The cultural journalist for El Tiempo, Gloria Valencia Diago, highlighted the abstract qualities of the Lacemaker series by pointing out that González had indeed ventured into nonobjective terrain. Valencia Diago paralleled González’s aesthetic journey to the evolutionary advancement of Western avant-­garde art toward abstraction.11 In her interview with the artist published on the day of the mambo opening, Valencia Diago felt compelled to remind viewers, “Beatriz considers herself a figurative painter, perhaps for her mastery of drawing, but with-

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1.9  Beatriz González, Encajera mona, 1964, oil on canvas, 100 × 85 cm.

out refuting abstraction. On occasions she astounds herself by painting, alternating with the Vermeer series, another one titled ‘The Abominable World of the Fistula,’ of complete abstract character.”12 For Valencia Diago, what made the Lacemaker exhibition forceful was González’s approximation to nonobjectivity. Another influential critic to endorse the Lacemaker series was Walter Engel.13 Although it is irrefutable that by 1964 Traba was a central personality in the Colombian art world, Engel held authority for those who were often at odds with Traba’s contentious personality. Aptly described by the editor Camilo Calderón Schrader as “the reconciling and optimistic Walter Engel and . . . demanding and devastating Marta Traba,” these two were, along with Casimiro Eiger, the most powerful critics of their generations.14 Almost thirty years Traba’s senior, Engel had been advocating for modern art in Colombia since the mid-­1940s, a decade before Traba arrived in Bogotá.15 Unlike Traba, he held a diversified approach to modern art and supported an earlier generation of modernists, including Marco Ospina, Jorge Elías Triana, and Carlos Correa, at a time that they were marginal among a generation of Mexican-­inspired Americanists, such as Pedro Nel Gómez,

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Ignacio Gómez Jaramillo, and Luis Alberto Acuña.16 Traba had either unfavorably reviewed or vehemently attacked the indigenism and social realism of the previous generation that preceded her protégés, who came to be known as Los Nuevos (the New Ones).17 Engel, in contrast, had supported many of these artists as they addressed social or indigenist themes in a modernist style. Therefore, Engel’s endorsement of González’s exhibition served as a different type of consecration that reached a broader audience. Like Valencia Diago, Engel found in González’s Lacemaker series a passage from figuration to abstraction; toward the end of the series, he regarded González as having reached a highly personal and pure style that was surprisingly mature for a young painter. Engel differentiated the works González made in 1964 from the Lacemaker paintings of the preceding year, saying that they marked the beginning of the artist’s own personal style — especially Encajera ave, created after she had moved away from the influences of her mentors, who included Antonio Roda, Alejandro Obregón, and Guillermo Wiedemann.18 Engel saw the first works of the series as similar in style to those of Roda, the most figurative of the artists he mentions. The following works he sees as analogous to Obregón’s lyrical abstraction. While more abstract than Roda’s work of the early 1960s, Obregón’s paintings of this time were still deeply embedded in the representational world. Finally, just before González liberated herself from Vermeer, her paintings evoked those of Wiedemann, whose works of the early 1960s were nonobjective paintings with thick impasto.19 González’s most decisive turn toward abstraction is Dynamic Lacemaker (see figure 1.8). In this canvas, she took the greatest creative license in transforming her source: it is a representation of movement, the antithesis of the steady concentration that characterizes the figure in Vermeer’s The Lacemaker. González wrote a reflective account of her trajectory: The first step to create a variation would be to enlarge the proportions and try to translate the emotion of Vermeer, which would lead to only one path: to make an abstraction of The Lacemaker. . . . [T]he Lacemaker became for me a yellow sleeve, a small tassel of a cushion floating in the sky. All this gave birth to the four gigantic details that dwarfed the small lacemaker, which, because of their proportion, would lose the figure and became more and more abstract paintings that seemed to be distinct forms, or cutouts — forms that fade away until they vanish.20 This vanishing effect is characteristic of Dynamic Lacemaker, which at first glance appears to lose all references to the representational world. However, González zoomed in on the diagonal section of the lacemaker’s right shoulder. Once we locate this section, then we can match certain details of the Vermeer to the quasi-­ geometric shapes in González’s painting. The hair ringlet of the lacemaker and

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the tassel of the sewing cushion have been reduced to gray and brown spheres. The general diagonal thrust of the central shapes creates a sense of dynamism that divides the canvas between a light, gray-­ocher top left and a series of warm-­ colored planes at the lower bottom right. The composition oscillates violently from side to side as the viewer anticipates the planes coming into collision, stylistically closer to a futurist exercise. Engel praised González as a “young artist [who] knew to sacrifice effects that were safe and largely guaranteed in the Bogotá milieu. Withdrawn in her studio in Bucaramanga she developed a pictorial diction of surprising purity and maturity.”21 This notion of artistic maturity resonates with the diplomatic role that Alberto Lleras Camargo, General Secretary of the oas, and José Gómez Sicre, director of the pau’s Visual Arts Section, envisioned for Latin American culture.22 They understood high art, especially an authentically Latin American modernism, as countering the stereotypes generated during the Good Neighbor Policy that represented Latin Americans as excessive, exotic, hypersexualized, and hyperracialized, as embodied in the characters of Carmen Miranda and Disney’s Los Tres Caballeros (1944).23 Gómez-­Sicre’s exhibitions, both traveling and at the pau in Washington, DC, showcased measured, sophisticated, and challenging modern art that represented Latin America culture as the rightful heir to Western modernism. In 1957, the pau hosted the exhibition “Three Colombian Painters,” showcasing the work of three female artists flirting with abstraction: Judith Márquez, Cecilia Porras, and Lucy Tejada.24 In this way, avant-­garde art would not play an oppositional role; instead, it would reinforce liberal-­democratic institutions. In her review of the Lacemaker exhibition, Traba wrote, “Of course there are young artists with talent!”; she likewise praised González for her formal virtuosity at such a young age. Traba evaluated González’s work with the same aesthetic criteria she had taught González at Uniandes — and the same that guided her choices as the director of mambo and as an art critic. Traba considered the virtues of the Lacemaker series to be inherent in the formal properties of the works themselves, and like Engel, she estimated that in these works González had liberated herself in stylistic terms from Roda. For Traba, the Lacemaker paintings were successful as “an exercise in style, as refinement of expressive media, as an affirmation of a clear will to paint.”25 Here Traba uses refinement not only to mean a fine-­tuning of the media but also to connote elegance and sophistication. Color was surely crucial to this judgment. In Traba’s opinion, color was the only purely optical element of painting, since form evokes, along with the visual, the tactile and the spatial. Before her decisive turn away from a homogenizing internationalism in the late 1960s, Traba considered abstraction the lingua franca of the twentieth century. She valued high modernist values akin to those of her mentor Jorge Romero

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Brest in Argentina and her colleague Gómez Sicre.26 In her first books and exhibition catalogues, El museo vacío: Un ensayo sobre el arte moderno (1958), Art in Latin America Today: Colombia (1959), and La pintura nueva en Latinoamérica (1961), she defined the aesthetic and philosophical conventions that guided her aesthetic evaluations. In these texts, Traba argues that abstraction constitutes a new mode of vision for modern man. In the article, “El genio anti-­servil” (Anti-­slavish genius; 1956) Traba evokes Immanuel Kant’s and Friedrich Schiller’s conception of aesthetic disinterestedness and autonomy.27 She explains that the artist, in exercising creative freedom, creates a moral product in a universal language that grants the public a moment of beauty, the revelation of dis-­alienated and emancipated experience. In her early writings, Traba considered modern art autonomous, experimental, innovative, and expressive of a subjective individual. Abstract forms express the modern subject’s intuition precisely because the artist is unaware of this shift in perception. While she never connected her writings to theological discourses, the Catholic Church embraced modernism under Vatican II as a means to reveal the human soul. In her review of the Lacemaker series, Traba credits González’s formal virtuosity for the rigorous self-­criticism that she learned as her student at Uniandes.28 Formal self-­criticality was a central tenet of the “modernist paradigm,” furthered by theorists such as Theodor Adorno and Clement Greenberg, who regarded modernist experimental practices as a means to reconcile the methodology of the Enlightenment and individual agency. According to Greenberg, “The essence of Modernism lies . . . in the use of characteristic methods of discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but . . . to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence.”29 Therefore, modernism continued the Enlightenment project of “questioning its own foundations,” limited now to probing the limits of its own medium. Indeed, Traba considered formal experimentation and expertise a guarantor of artistic autonomy. In La pintura nueva en Latinoamérica she explains that the only obligation artists must feel is to themselves and to their own time; therefore, they must also be freed from any political or social goals. Regardless of the degree of violence witnessed by artists, she reaffirms, they must find complete political neutrality. Artists must be free of all commitments to make way for their expressive, subjective, and intuitive will to be authentic or sincere. If the artist commits to extra-­aesthetic goals — political or social — then her or his work will be reduced to anecdote.30 As a pupil of Romero Brest in Argentina, Traba learned about the liberating possibilities of abstraction, particularly during the fiercely nationalistic and populist Perón era. Traba would later write that as a university student she had been forced to hide her books during Perón’s anti-­intellectual campaigns, which used the slogan “¡Alpargatas sí, libros no!” (Peasant shoes, yes; books, no!).31 Interna-

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tional modernism therefore resisted the rise of nationalist populism of the 1930s and ’40s. When Traba arrived in Bogotá, Colombia was under the military dictatorship of Rojas Pinilla, a regime whose populism and ultranationalism resonated with Peronism in Argentina. Traba’s call for artistic neutrality was music to the National Front’s ears, as it, too, was trying to rescue the nation from a bitter political war and move away from the Rojas Pinilla years. Abstraction could unite liberals, who believed in cultural progress; leftists, who sympathized with historical avant-­gardes; the church, which embraced its spiritual dimension; and conservatives, who rejected the folklorism of previous generations. Traba romanticized modern artists as solitary, creative geniuses, misunderstood and mistreated by society, whose disinterested need to express themselves would guide humanity to a greater good. Other key intellectuals of the Cold War era also summoned these mythic creators and agents of change — notably, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Clement Greenberg, Lleras Camargo, and Gómez Sicre, all of whom ascribed to avant-­garde artists the role of defending individual rights within democratic liberalism.32 Like so many intellectuals who witnessed the rise of totalitarianism and its abuse of Enlightenment principles for the extermination of its opposition, Schlesinger distrusted any unchecked scientific rationalism or social engineering that allowed for calamities such as the Holocaust. The solution was in the hands of creative individuals, whom he described as leaders who could preserve individual agency, critical awareness, and an ethical conscience. In his book How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, the art historian Serge Guilbaut demonstrates how U.S. Marxist intellectuals steered toward the “Vital Center” and came to represent postwar capitalist democratic liberalism.33 This shift from Marxist confidence in the working class as agents of historical change toward an elite liberal distrust of the masses was characteristic of intellectuals and politicians in both the United States and Latin America. In fact, Schlesinger went on to work for Adlai Stevenson and John F. Kennedy, both of whom also worked closely with Lleras Camargo. While the Colombian statesman’s political views did not match Schlesinger’s exactly, he concurred that creative individuals played a determining role in securing a “free society” by combating the mass mentality.34 Abstraction, as it came to symbolize the liberal ideals of individual rights and freedoms, or private property and free enterprise, suited modernizing agents in Colombia quite nicely. As the director of the pau and general-­secretary of its successor, oas, Lleras Camargo privileged culture as a key avenue in constituting new modern subjectivities that would help Latin American nations “take off ” toward modernity.35 Lleras Camargo’s close friend Nelson Rockefeller had already capitalized on abstract expressionism as a symbol of freedom (i.e., free enterprise) in countries in which his family petroleum businesses might lose out to

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nationalization policies, such as Mexico, Brazil, and, potentially, Venezuela. In Colombia, the Tropical Oil Company had already lost concessions to the Empresa Colombiana de Petróleo (Colombian Petroleum Company; Ecopetrol).36 Lleras Camargo transformed the pau from an institution devoted to trade commerce to a modern one that put special focus on cultural exchanges. Through Gómez Sicre and the aesthetic objectives of the Visual Arts Section, he supported erudite and cosmopolitan Latin American art. Nonetheless, by making creative individuals experts in their own domain, these modernizing agents also sought to protect against the threat of ultranationalism, intellectual radicalization, and the collectivism of the social realists. Abstraction represented the perfect combination of subjective individualism and expressive freedom without the freedom to venture into collective or radical oppositional politics. Nils Gilman demonstrates that the ideal of democratic participation in the postwar United States was not so much about political pluralism as about consensus. Therefore, it did not allow for the kind of dissent that would characterize the counterculture of the 1960s.37 This applied to Latin America, as well: abstraction became an ideal symbol of democratic freedom cast as counter to the ultranationalists of the previous generation and the totalitarian dogma of the fascists, fostered especially by an actively engaged Spanish refugee community.38 For noncommunist leftists and liberals, it was also important to steer intellectual activity away from political radicalization. While artists in Latin America worked in a wide range of abstract vocabularies — lyrical, gestural, and geometric — their disavowal of a fixed narrative served to satisfy many different, and even antagonistic, agendas. In Colombia, nonobjective abstraction never became completely dominant, although some practitioners, such as Edgar Negret, Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar, Guillermo Wiedemann, and Leonel Estrada, rose to great prominence.39 In most cases, Colombian artists approached abstract languages as subjective interpretation of reality, even addressing political violence, and rarely abandoned external references. Nevertheless, critics focused on formal analysis that unhinged works from their subject matter or extra-­aesthetic commentary. The scholarship on abstraction’s rise to international primacy as a product of Cold War ideological battles is vast and requires no further development here. Yet modernization theorists saw in modernism a language with which they could fashion their own, transformative roles as a social avant-­garde who could implement expert designs to build modern societies.40 Latin American modernizing agents, including Traba and Lleras Camargo, saw in modernism a way to combat the nationalist and politicized rhetoric of the 1930s and ’40s. As we shall see in the pages ahead, González’s Lacemaker series addressed a particular form of modernization model that sought to modernize without disrupting traditional political and social structures.

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1.10  Carlos Rojas, Mujer en faja, 1963, collage. Courtesy of the Carlos Rojas Estate. Photograph: Ernesto Monsalve/Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá.

Aesthetic Inculcation Reviews of the Lacemaker exhibition at mambo by the most influential Colombian art critics attributed González’s success in no small part to her education at Uniandes, where she had learned modernist values and the “pure gaze” from classes that included art history with Traba and studio classes with Antonio Roda and Carlos Rojas (figure 1.10).41 Engel acknowledged all of the players involved: the artist, the institution that inculcated her aesthetic sensibility, the museum that recognized the merits of her work, and the critic (himself ) who was able to foretell her accomplishment when he reviewed her student exhibitions in 1961 and 1962. He wrote, “When three factors as favorable as talent, good schooling, and consistency are combined, there exists a great possibility for success — a success like the one currently registered with the first exhibition of Beatriz González at the Museum of Modern Art in Bogotá, and in which participate, in addition to the artist, the Department of Fine Arts at the Universidad de Los Andes, and the Museum, which sanctioned the new artist.”42 In her review of the Lacemaker exhibition, Traba likewise applauded González not only as a successful artist in her own right, but also as a survivor of the rigorous curriculum at Uniandes where Traba herself helped raise the standard.43 The Lacemaker series fit mambo’s institutional objectives well precisely because González had acquired her aesthetic

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disposition from a university that itself was molded by the economic and political philosophies that sought to modernize the nation.44 Uniandes provided González with a unique form of cultural capital by channeling the ideology of its founders, who represented an emerging dominant class. González’s experience at Uniandes thus gave her the skills and disposition to help her succeed by these standards soon after graduation. As a university professor and director of mambo, Traba placed great importance on students and young artists. Each year, the museum joined Intercol’s Salon de Artistas Jóvenes (Salon of Young Artists) in launching the career of one promising young artist who otherwise would have had to gradually enter an art world saturated by more established practitioners.45 The future of Western civilization was in the hands of the young civilizations of the Americas, it was believed — whether through a refashioning of U.S. Manifest Destiny or Latin American Arielismo.46 “Youth” was valuable cultural capital in expressing a “New World” hegemonic order that many believed had emerged from the ashes of the “Old World” after World War II. The 1960s were also a period of global student protests and radicalization that fed into revolutionary aspirations. Students and young people in general were considered the most dynamic sector of society but also the most volatile and potentially subversive. Therefore, privileging youthful culture became a powerful ideological tool for modernizing agents, including mambo, the Intercol salon, and the pau’s Visual Arts Section, among others. Traba conceived of students as the imagined audience for mambo since they “constitute[d] the most active part of the middle class.”47 This connection between students and the middle class is a key feature of Traba’s theories, which she would continue to develop throughout her career. In turn, the two ills that she battled were a “cancer” emanating from Mexico (i.e., nationalist indigenism, which she considered political pamphleteering) and, later, the “contamination and radiation” of consumer culture emitted as a neocolonial strategy by highly industrialized societies, mainly the United States, which she characterized as the “estética del deterioro” (aesthetics of decay).48 By engaging the middle class, artists would liberate themselves from both the populist state and the golden handcuffs of elite patronage and the new forms of “technological dictatorship” emanating from consumer societies. In Traba’s estimation, the middle class, especially students whose attitudes were formed within the university atmosphere of interclass collaboration, could become the true agents of social change. Lleras Camargo also understood the important role that universities and students would play in modernizing the nation. Along with a group of progressive-­ minded leaders he founded Uniandes in 1948 and served as its president between 1954 and 1955. Indeed, it was the same year that Lleras Camargo, as director of the pau, helped reconstitute the union as the oas in Bogotá. Uniandes was modeled

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on U.S. liberal arts programs, especially Columbia University in New York, the alma mater of another founding member, Mario Laserna Pinzón. It was the first university in Colombia that was not affiliated with the state, the Catholic Church, or any political party. The institution received donations from the industrial sector and the United States, especially the Rockefeller Foundation, and worked in collaboration with U.S. universities so Colombian students could complete their technical degrees abroad. As Gloria Valencia Castaño recalled, “My husband, Alvaro Castaño, co-­founded the Universidad de Los Andes, attempting to make a new nation. It was elitist and desired to sustain this reputation.”49 To this day, Uniandes is considered one of the premier universities in South America. At Uniandes, Traba inculcated in her students, including González, modern aesthetics and a “disinterested gaze.” In La pintura nueva en Latinoamerica, Traba assigns art critics the task of teaching “true aesthetic values” and good taste. In her art history classes at Uniandes, Traba provided contextual history, yet González remembers her always emphasizing an attentive mode of looking. “Even if a slide was hideous,” she said, “it was truly amazing how she would make us see.”50 This method of teaching young students to distance themselves from subject matter reveals the inculcation of what Pierre Bourdieu calls the “pure gaze,” or the aesthetic disposition.51 While the pure gaze is presumed to be disinterested, it replicates social hierarchies by the nature of its acquisition and the value of cultural capital. As many professors do, Traba sent her students to the National Museum to write about a painting. González chose a painting she considered wonderful at that time: Interludio (Interlude [1941]; figure 1.11), by Santiago Martínez Delgado.52 This double portrait depicting two women wearing full satin gowns evinces the artist’s academic training and technical prowess, suggesting a form of academic modernism that was highly valued in the first half of the twentieth century in the Bogotá National Salon. Indeed, the Guía de Bogotá of 1948 presented as the main exponents of Colombian art a few academic artists, such as Diego Moreno Otero, who primarily painted portraits.53 Traba soon redirected González’s admiration for academic virtuosity toward modernist values. González recounted: [Traba] said she was astonished that a student as diligent as myself could have chosen such a bad painting. “Didn’t you see the Santamaría? Didn’t you see the Santamaría?” I made many mistakes in aesthetic issues. . . . When we went to the National Salon, Botero had won first prize for Camera degli Sposi [1958]. I wrote against it saying that I thought it was a terrible painting in compositional terms. . . . So I earned the reputation of “the girl who hates Botero.” One’s taste is molded by others, and mine was fashioned in a strict manner [by my family] to be discriminating. Yet [I knew] zero art history. I did not understand modern art. I did not look at the Santamaría or at the Botero.54

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1.11  Santiago Martínez Delgado, Interludio, oil on canvas, 190 × 140 cm. Courtesy of the Santiago Martínez Delgado Estate. Photograph: Museo Nacional de Colombia.

For Traba, there were absolutes in terms of artistic taste: to like the painting by Martínez Delgado was to be mistaken. To dismiss Botero was equally off the mark. Surely and quickly, González caught on. Only a few years later, Engel took note of the young student’s modernist paintings in her studio exhibition, and in 1962 González would paint an apple that even she recognized was in the style of Botero.55 At first it would seem contradictory that Traba would disparage Martínez Delgado, an artist who conversed with Latin America’s long artistic engagement with Northern European old masters, especially since she considered Vermeer as a beacon of light in seventeenth-­century Netherlands. However, Traba singled out Vermeer precisely because he was able to accomplish what no other painter of Dutch interiors could — to move beyond testimony and to craft a completely personal interpretation of domestic life that could transform real things into pictorial values.56 It is therefore not surprising that González, following her professors’ influence, would steer toward Vermeer for her senior art history thesis and again for the Lacemaker series.

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In 1960, González traveled with Traba and several colleagues to New York City and Washington, DC. They entered the storage rooms at the Museum of Modern Art and viewed works by abstract expressionist painters such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning. They also met the Colombian artist Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar, along with his close friend Louise Nevelson. In Washington, they visited an exhibition of Latin American art organized by Gómez Sicre for the pau. Also on the tour were González’s studio mates Gloria Martínez and Camila Loboguerrero.57 The three of them, and four others, held a group exhibition in 1961. Their only guiding rule was that they could not exhibit anything made for a class or in the style of any of the professors. “It was a declaration of independence!” González declared. Of course, complete liberation was impossible, and González’s university works reveal the influence of her professors’ style and aesthetic values. González was decisively influenced by two professors with whom she studied during her third and fourth year: Carlos Rojas and Antonio Roda. She remembers that Rojas discouraged his students from pursuing academic, illusionistic drawing and directed them toward a flat, abbreviated reduction of forms, telling them to “make an abstraction of everything, and look only at the contours.”58 Rojas was working on collage assemblages at the time (see figures 1.10 and 3.4), an aesthetic that would influence González’s subsequent works, especially her second solo exhibition at mambo in 1967. Further, González’s brushstrokes demonstrate Roda’s gestural influence. The declaration of independence by the young group of artists was not yet attainable. Nonetheless, the exhibition earned González a reputation as a talented colorist and even prompted Engel to single out her painting The Canary as marking her aesthetic maturity.59 When Roda assigned his class to paint a canvas during a one-­month absence, González spent most of the time painting Los crétinos de Pam Pam (The Cretins of Pam Pam), named for the Pam Pam Café, which she and her friends frequented with Roda. She wanted to capture humorous episodes of confrontation with a boys’ choir the artists called “los crétinos del Pam Pam” because they disrupted their conversations. However, eight days before Roda’s return, González decided to abandon painting from life and engage a reproduction instead. “In our studio hung a poster from the Prado Museum of The Surrender of Breda by Velázquez. I started to splatter turpentine, wonderful colors: yellows, greens. . . . When Roda returned, he was fascinated. Then Traba came to see the painting. Everyone was fascinated. I graduated with the glory and prestige of being the one who painted Velázquez, in the way that Botero painted Leonardo, etc.”60 This was a turning point for González. She had found inspiration in an inter­pictorial dialogue with a reproduction of another artist’s work. In this way, she was able to achieve sufficient distance from her subject and move toward abstraction. González departed from the Prado poster (among the many that “wallpapered

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1.12  Beatriz González, Versión de la Rendición de Breda (I), 1962, oil on canvas, 100 × 70 cm.

their studio,” she noted), which did not reproduce all of The Surrender of Breda, just a fragment. It is commonplace in Velázquez monographs to include details of his paintings in reproduction so the reader can appreciate the loose application of paint — the artist’s facilitá with the brush. The first painting in González’s Surrender of Breda series, Versión de la rendición de Breda (I) (Version of The Surrender of Breda I [1962]; figure 1.12) was inspired by a zoomed-­in view. The vignette focuses on the Spanish soldiers behind Ambrosio de Spinola and to the upper left of the horse in the foreground that forms a sharp barrier with the landscape behind. González completely eliminated the upright lances that give the painting its nickname, Las Lanzas. Instead, she divided the upper canvas into two broad rectangular color zones of cerulean blue and ocher yellow. While brushstrokes are still

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visible, the planes appear flat. Upon closer inspection, a few gradations of dark blue and gray patches at the left become evident and correspond to the smoke in Las Lanzas. Velázquez’s painting hardly captures the horrors of war, yet González provides a festive gathering. Heads and hats reduced to color patches crowd the bottom half of the canvas. Plumed hats take on a rather curious importance as they merge with the eight faces in the foreground. Broad dabs of paint, their quickly executed character and multidirectional thrust, evoke busy movement like a passing crowd. Engel accurately described the style as closer to Renoir’s Le Moulin de la Galette than Velázquez’s Las Lanzas.61 In the absence of the spears to ground the eye, González endows the scene with a dynamic energy lacking in the solemn portrait of capitulation by her seventeenth-­century Spanish counterpart. Velázquez was in the air in the 1960s. The Prado Museum commemorated the tricentennial anniversary of his death with an ambitious exhibition.62 Even Roda referenced the Siglo de Oro in 1961 with his Escorial series and would later exhibit at mambo a series of variations on Velázquez’s Philip IV (1965).63 Of course, there were important precedents that would have been familiar to González, such as Pablo Picasso’s series on La Meninas, Francis Bacon’s series on Pope Innocent X, Alberto Gironella’s works based on Queen Mariana, and Botero’s renditions of the Dwarf Francisco Lezcano (also known as El Niño de Vallecas). González said: What was happening was that in speaking so much about Velázquez, in Marta Traba’s class, about his brushwork, the ribbons. . . . I took those elements and gave them importance. I turned everything into Roda’s brushstrokes. All of it, that is, over a background that was very much my own, a lime green background, completely flat. I suppressed all the lances. From that moment on, it all started: Gloria Martínez working on Goyas, Luis Caballero working on Las Meninas. Re-­re-­creation. There were already antecedents for this, perhaps, in El Niño de Vallecas by Fernando Botero.64 Here begins González’s trajectory with appropriation and recontextualization.65 The lime green that González describes in this passage is characteristic of other versions, such as the Fragmento de la rendición de Breda (Fragment of The Surrender of Breda [1962]; figure 1.13) and Versión de la rendición de Breda III.66 The bright green colors constituted her artistic identity. Traba advocated for a subjective and intuitive expression in art, as well its personal interpretation. The greens and yellows that González’s professors noted had become internalized as a pictorial signature and made her interpretation of Velázquez more than a copying exercise. Having a recognizable style was a desired quality as evidence of an artist’s originality or authenticity. Consuegra acknowledged González’s signature green in the design of publicity material for the Encajera de Vermeer, thus embarking on a stylistic conversation. In fact, Roda painted a portrait of González the year of her graduation, in which he capitalized on the same palette (figure 1.14). Roda depicts

1.13  Beatriz González, Fragmento de la rendición de Breda, 1962, oil on canvas, 70 × 110 cm. 1.14  Juan Antonio Roda, Retrato de Beatriz González, 1964, oil on canvas. Courtesy of the Antonio Roda Estate.

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the young artist seated on an apple green armchair wearing a canary yellow dress while resting her crossed arms in front. He used the same multidirectional broad strokes to paint the dress as seen in González’s variations on The Surrender of Breda. The background, chair, dress, and even the shadows on her face are linked by lime green and bluish gray hues. Roda successfully captured the introverted yet stern demeanor of the young artist and paid tribute to her emerging style. While Rojas’s formal simplifications (depurificación) and Roda’s dynamic brushstrokes unequivocally served as sources for González’s interpretation of Velázquez, Traba’s writings can instruct us in how the seventeenth-­century master was channeled through a decontextualizing formalist lens. Traba asks, Which are the aesthetic values . . . that make Las Meninas an immortal picture? Las Meninas continues to be a testimony of that metamorphosis . . . a triumph of brushwork, color, light, and space; an apocalypse that fulminates the Dutch interior, leaving only the luminous angel Vermeer, the possession of the total secret of painting; the use of the princess Margarita, the meninas, the dwarfs, the dog, the ladies in waiting, the quartermaster, the painter, and the kings, like peons in a magical chess game, moving freely to register the independence and antisubservience of painting. . . . [E]verything else disappears to make way for the astounding genius of pictorial creation.67 Traba discussed Las Meninas as a work that transcends its moment of production. Velázquez’s incidental subject matter — the king of Spain, his family, and the artist himself — vanished as Traba asked her students to consider what she conceived as the truly remarkable aspects of these works: the formal properties. Therefore, it was a fortunate coincidence that the poster hanging in González’s studio would facilitate the initial cropping of the The Surrender of Breda so that the subject of the painting — a Spanish imperial conquest — was conveniently displaced by a close view of the masterly technique. By 1962, González had fully internalized this process of intimately studying an artist’s practice. As a teacher, she designed the art curriculum for Santa María de los Angeles, the girls preparatory school directed by her aunt Ester Aranda. In her article “Pedagogía artística,” González outlined her pedagogical methods, which were based on principles she adopted from Rojas, Roda, and Traba.68 First, students would analyze and copy works by modern masters such as Matisse, Braque, Mondrian, Picasso, and Ramírez Villamizar — in particular, she wrote, their lessons in the “free handling of formal elements, especially color and line will guide them toward a disinterested abstract composition. . . . Second, they would learn academic drawing in order to learn that all creations, as free as they can be, require previous discipline.”69 Rather than imitate nature, students were redirected by González to imitate art. In this way, they focused on formal experimentation and mastery of the medium rather than on illusionism.

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When Engel described González’s Lacemaker paintings as “pure aesthetic delight,” he referenced the aesthetic disposition that he identified with the artist’s educational pedigree. Engel described student works by González exhibited at the Sociedad Económica as displaying “cultivated taste, very good taste.”70 Engel associated cultivated, refined taste not only with art-­history connoisseurship but also, above all, with the capacity for abstraction, abbreviation. Indeed, the “jewel” of the exhibition for Engel was González’s El Sombrero de la rendición de Breda, the most distanced from Velázquez’s work and the least thematically associated with the historical genre.71 The flat rim of the hat dominates the canvas and approaches nonobjectivity more dramatically than any other detail in the Surrender at Breda series. This advocacy for a “cultivated sensibility” in Engel’s terms, or an erudite form of viewership, was in fact strengthening a form of social exclusion, per Bourdieu’s notion of charisma, which persisted in the structure of Colombian society. The language of art criticism served to locate artists and their works within this social map. In the Style of de Staël Following González’s interpretations of Velázquez’s painting, representing Golden Age imperial Spain, she shifted her attention to a Dutch domestic interior. Traba had singled out Vermeer among all of the seventeenth-­century Dutch painters of interiors as the solitary example of pictorial authenticity. Vermeer was Traba’s favorite painter; she even wrote a series of poems titled “Vermeerianas.”72 Traba passed on this enthusiasm to González, who chose to focus on Vermeer for her graduating thesis. “After reading all of the monographs I could find in the whole country — eight in total — and studying the opinions of the most influential critics,” she has said, “I considered it impossible to separate myself from the influence of this painter, his great compositional balance, the poetry and music of his work.”73 González’s privileging of the formal qualities and lyrical character of Vermeer’s works makes it evident that Vermeer passed through Traba’s modernist lens. However, to think about the Lacemaker series as merely a manifestation of Traba’s aesthetic principles would be a mistake. Traba may have inculcated her own rules of interpretation in González, but what the artist chose to do with these rules is more complex than a simple rehearsing of them. Critics have argued that the Lacemaker paintings served as evidence of Gon­ zález’s journey toward abstraction, or her liberation from her professors and the subject matter. What critics did not discuss was that in the process of reworking each variation, González distanced her paintings from the original Vermeer and released the lacemaker from the tedium of her craft. There is evidence from González herself that the Lacemaker paintings were not merely formal exercises. In 1964, she published a statement that suggests her concern about subject matter:

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I understood then that if my relationships were to be more with the lacemaker than with the painter, with whose shape and figure I should be totally familiar . . . , and if I could achieve this in sketches, then I could make the lacemaker obey me; make her look toward the opposite side; make her lift her head; transform her into a gargoyle, a caryatid, and bird, a monkey. That is how the exciting game began that would form part of my paintings of 1964. Obsessed by the accents in the Vermeer, his defined and fading forms, the flat colors that serve as space in the Pielroja calendars, and the desire to achieve independent colors somewhere between commercial and refined colors, I began to transform the lacemaker, breaking her away until she was released from Vermeer and, in her own environment, from herself. This desire points toward the last works in the series, the ones where she appears on the beach or in the landscape of Surrender at Breda.74 As this passage reveals, even though the works formally command abstraction, they were distancing conceptually from formal autonomy. In this way, the allusion to flight in Encajera ave (Bird Lacemaker [1964]; figure 1.15) reveals a metaphorical “takeoff” for the artist and for the lacemaker. Bird Lacemaker is a bold chromatic declaration, with large expanses of swimming pool blue, fire hydrant red, and plum magenta, with dabs of parakeet green and yellow that were gesturing toward commercial culture or pop art. From the Surrender at Breda series on, González posed a subtle yet powerful critique of artistic autonomy by making “representations of representations,” which she has continued consistently throughout her career. This reference to image appropriation and adaptation contrasts sharply with the tenets of gestural abstraction held so dear by high modernists. In other words, by appropriating images from the Western art canon in her earliest works, González was making “meta-­pictures,” to borrow W. J. T. Mitchell’s term — that is, pictures that interrogate picturing.75 Through astute titles, González prompts her viewers to consider the historical and social constitution of vision, a theme that becomes increasingly apparent throughout the following decades of her career and that I develop more fully in the following chapters.76 Encajera foto inversée (Reverse Photo Lacemaker) and Lacemaker Negative suggest not painterly copies but mechanical reproduction: the paintings depart from a reproduction, slide, or negative. Mechanical reproductions were widely used to teach art history in countries that lacked public collections and were important in the educational objectives of the Liberal Republic. For instance, Traba held up reproductions of “Masterpieces of Western Art” during her television programs (see figure I.4).77 The art gallery El Callejón, directed by the art critic Casimiro Eiger, held exhibitions of reproductions in efforts to educate the public about modern art. González recalled her first encounter with “masterpieces of univer-

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1.15  Beatriz González, Encajera ave, 1964, oil on canvas, 100 × 85 cm.

sal art” through high-­quality framed reproductions in her family home.78 Framing and mounting reproductions of artworks was pervasive across class lines. By referencing the photographic and pictorial reproduction of master paintings, González acknowledged pervasive modes of artistic circulation. There are obvious precedents for mass-­reproduction of art, such as the religious paintings that artists have copied for devotional purposes since colonial times.79 González engaged mechanically reproduced patriotic and devotional prints in subsequent exhibitions, which I discuss in chapters 3 and 5. However, like those of the colonial painters who deftly repainted Zurbarán’s Crucifixion, González’s reproductions are painterly, thus referencing modes of artistic circulation, both manual and mechanical copies, in which religious prints, calendars, and cookie tins become the means to access “universal” art.80 While many art historians focus on González’s pictorial engagement with the popular circulation of Western art in Latin America, few have connected this to the artist’s biting critique of artistic autonomy.81

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In Encajera Nicolas de Staël (Lacemaker Nicolas de Staël [1964]; figure 1.16). González parodies and complicates artistic autonomy and originality. Myths of originality and authenticity cater to the demands of the art market, whose logic favors artists who develop identifiable signature styles. Paradoxically, González’s university experience shows that copying the masters through the style of a professor can elicit praise. She punned the contradictory way of evaluating originality through an abstract rendition of a seventeenth-­century painting in the style of de Staël.82 In other words, the artist created an identifiably de Staël pictorial style with an identifiably Vermeer character in an authentically González painting. González’s choice of de Staël also carries a veiled critique of abstraction as freedom. In a painting such as Figure by the Sea — dominated by abstract, thick impasto and quasi-­geometrical patches of color — the title keeps the composition anchored to the representational world. If we place González’s Lacemaker Nicolas de Staël beside de Staël’s Figure by the Sea (1952; figure 1.17) we see how the titles alter our perception of the reduced forms and color patches. In postwar Europe, de Staël’s paintings represented a generation of artists who were negotiating between abstraction and figuration. As Alain Bowles describes: At the time of the 1952 London exhibition Staël was considered by many to be the most significant new painter to emerge in post-­war Europe. Several British artists fell immediately under his influence: his thick impasto and sensuous handling of the paint were imitated, and the kind of abstract painting that his work of 1948-­52 represented seemed to offer an example that was particularly relevant to those younger British artists then on the verge of abstraction but also reluctant to lose all contact with nature and the figure.83 When de Staël subsequently returned to figuration, his career did not fare well. His demise demonstrates that turning back from nonobjectivity was not an option at that time. By citing de Staël, González confronts the paradoxical dogma of freedom that critics ascribed to abstraction. For instance, the Peruvian critic Juan Acha wrote for Eco: Revista de la Cultura de Occidente: “Abstraction comes to be the maximum aspiration for contemporary painting. . . . In matters of art, freedom does not permit one to do what one pleases; here it is a matter of valuation and of a language that is subject to certain limits. Freedom is ‘toward advancement,’ to create or innovate but not regress, for the past signifies, precisely, imposition and lack of freedom.”84 Later, Acha’s aesthetic theories took a radical turn toward a politically compromised aesthetic of arte no-­objetual.85 Yet the contradiction in Acha’s early assessment is that “freedom” imposed limits on pictorial language reduced to a manifestation of nonobjective subjectivity functioning as a measure of aesthetic advancement. He implies that freedom is an aftereffect of social, technical, and economic progress.

1.16  Beatriz González, Encajera Nicolas de Staël, 1964, oil on canvas, 70 × 50 cm. 1.17  Nicolas de Staël, Figure by the Sea, 1952, oil on canvas, 161.5 × 129.5 cm. Photo credit: bpk Bildagentur/ Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-­ Westfalen/Walter Klein/Art Resource, NY.

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“Beatriz González de Vermeer” The Lacemaker series inhabited a space beyond the university and had an audience broader than just González’s professors. Indeed, the public life of the Lacemaker paintings did not end with the mambo exhibition. A few months later, González went on to win second prize for the Salon de Pintoras (Female Painters) at the Fourth Festival of Art, held in Cali in June 1964, for Reverse Photo Lacemaker; an honorable mention for her participation at the Intercol Salón de Artistas Jóvenes in Bogotá in July 1964 with the Vermeerianas (figures 1.18 and 1.19); and an invitation to exhibit for the first time at the National Salon (16th Salón de Artistas Nacionales Bogotá in October 1964), again with the Vermeeriana paintings.86 By any measure, these were remarkable accomplishments for an artist who only two years earlier had graduated from the university. The abstract style of the Lacemaker series only partially explains its success in Bogotá’s art world at that moment. Many other practitioners working with abstraction and formal experimentation did not receive such enthusiastic support. In the 1960s, artists outside Traba’s sphere of influence, especially in Medellín, Cali, and Barranquilla, were experimenting with poetry, theater, and film but did not enter the mainstream art world until much later. We might ask: Could it be that González’s subject matter resonated with her audience as strongly as, or perhaps more strongly than, her style? Let us consider the iconographic meaning of both Vermeer and The Lacemaker in the context of Colombia of the 1960s. González wove a refined interpictorial web that demanded a certain level of cultural capital from her audience. Yet her work contains important associations with the domestic interior, women’s craft and labor, and tension between the modern and the traditional that would hold meaning beyond the aesthetically inculcated. One way to arrive at some of these issues is to compare the difference between re-­representing the scene of military conquest and surrender at Breda by Velázquez and the re-­representation of the solitary task of lacemaking depicted by Vermeer. In her interpretation, González switched perspective from the triumphant Genoese General Ambrogio Spinola to the submissive Prince of Orange, Maurice of Nassau. Velázquez’s The Surrender of Breda is a history painting that commemorates the power and glory of the Spanish Empire, not only in terms of subjugation, but also in the civil manner in which it is accomplished.87 It was commissioned to hang above Francisco de Zurbarán’s Labors of Hercules in the Hall of Realms for King Philip IV, among other scenes of His Majesty’s military triumphs. The whole pictorial enterprise was meant to commemorate the Spanish king’s masculine strength and virility. The history of Las Lanzas, as well as the depicted historical moment, could not be further from Vermeer’s The Lacemaker, recovered from obscurity by the

1.18  Beatriz González, Vermeeriana V, 1964, oil on canvas, 85 × 100 cm. 1.19  Beatriz González, Vermeeriana sentada, 1964, oil on canvas, 100 × 85 cm.

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French historian Thoré-­Bürger in the nineteenth century.88 By contrast, Vermeer The Lacemaker portrays an anonymous young woman concentrated in her private and feminine task of weaving lace within a nondescript interior. Even though one can argue, as Simon Schama does, that the interior was a metaphor for the virtues of the Dutch Republic,89 the heroism of the picture is subtle, quiet, and mundane. It affirms that weaving is an appropriate aesthetic activity for women and implies that the home is the locale where this pursuit is situated. However, an interest in weaving does not sufficiently explain González’s choice. If that had been the case, she might have followed her stylistic interest in Velázquez and depicted one of his mythological scenes in Las Hiladeras (The Spinners; also known as The Fable of Arachne).90 This painting serves as metaphor for virtuosity and arrogant pride, in which weaving takes on the character of divine skill. Vermeer’s The Lacemaker, on the contrary, is an image of dedication, concentration, and measure. The young lacemaker adorns herself solely with the product of her craft: the lace collar and stylized woven hair. Vermeer depicts this young maiden dedicated to a highly skilled domestic chore as neither luxurious nor destitute. Not only are her interior space and craft appropriately feminine; so are her demeanor, understated attire, and downcast gaze. While measure and devotion were still considered virtues for young ladies in Colombia in the 1960s, the act of weaving had associations with the industrialization, which was exemplified so successfully by Colombia’s textile industry. Specifically, successful, large cloth manufacturers such as Coltejer and Fabricato were considered models of industrial sustainability throughout the developing world. Coltejer would also become a leading art patron with its International Biennial in Medellín, a competition in which González participated (see chapter 5). Thus, both because it relates to women’s aesthetic practices and alludes to textile manufacturing as a motor in Colombia’s industrialization, The Lacemaker would have been a meaningful choice for González. As I show in chapter 5, the connection of the canvas, the textile industry, and Colombian modernization would materialize later at the International Biennials held in Medellín (1968 – 1981), the first three of which were sponsored by Coltejer. Consideration of the traditional expectations for women that were pervasive throughout Colombia’s conservative society sheds light on the reception of both González’s work and her person. The theme of Vermeer’s The Lacemaker nicely suited an ethos determined to modernize while simultaneously upholding traditional values, materialized in the convivencia (coalition government) of the Conservative and Liberal Parties during the National Front. Even Engel’s descriptive language for the Lacemaker series betrays the normative logic used to evaluate the exhibition: “Her multicolorism is elaborated with certain artistic intelligence. We are never faced with effects that are too flashy, or excessive, or with gratuitous boldness. It is not an aggressive palette, but one balanced with cultivated sensi-

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bility. . . ; flat and solid colors, but colors and planes invented and structured with talent, with an honesty, and taste that is truly distinguished and exceptional.”91 Engel deploys normative language through a list of negations (never flashy, excessive, aggressive, or bold) and affirmations (intelligence, balance, cultivated sensibility, and distinguished taste) that define cultural legitimacy, especially in relation to women. Engel did not see in the Lacemaker series anything unsettling or provoking; rather, he saw paintings that embodied the very tenets of elegance and sophistication that served to justify a hierarchical social and political structure. Indeed, this comprehensive appraisal parallels language that was used to praise Lleras Camargo as the premier statesman, the great conciliator, whose measured, erudite, and pragmatic disposition distinguished him from the fanaticism of President Laureano Gómez, of the Conservative Party, and the excessive and emotional style of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, the Liberal Party leader.92 The press rehearsed this language of praise for First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy when she visited Bogotá with her husband in December 1961; she also became the model of feminine elegance for elite women.93 Engel thus provides a comprehensive list of attributes for cultural legitimacy. However, the enthusiasm that Engel demonstrated for the Lacemaker exhibition at mambo in June 1964 waned as he reviewed González’s Vermeerian themes later that same year, shifting from praise to gendered condescension. Engel considered the “renaissance of the figure” responsible for the tendency of many artists to experiment formally with works by the great Western masters. Picasso, Cuevas, Botero, and Roda were his examples of consecrated artists who had used Old Masters as points of departure for their new visions. Engel associated the young Colombian artist Saúl García and his variations on Rembrandt with this trend: García knew “how to evade the solely spectacular and display his artistic dexterity, with a sensitivity and temperament that is authentic.”94 In the same article, Engel reviewed new works by both González and her former classmate Gloria Martínez. Engel was not so generous in describing their reworking of Old Masters. The two female artists, he wrote, “are obsessed by two geniuses of the past, whom they continue to work with, in their research and in their art, and from whom they have not been able to set themselves free: ‘Gloria Martínez de Goya’ and ‘Beatriz González de Vermeer.’ Both assume very honorable, responsible and respectable attitudes . . . [and paint] very good, but not original, pictures.”95 In Colombia at that time, married women kept their own surnames but also appended their husbands’ surnames by adding “de” (of ). Engel thus was suggesting that Martínez and González were “married” to Goya and Vermeer, respectively, implying masculine ownership of the women, who were not able to dominate their subjects the way male artists could. Furthermore, by describing the attitudes of González and Martínez as “honorable, responsible, and respect-

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able,” Engel was reproducing the language of marital subservience expected of women. Yet what the words truly reveal was Engel’s own inability to disengage from gender-­biased assessment, as is also evident in his discussion of a later series of Vermeerianas: Both young painters, unquestionably talented, should make the effort, even force themselves, to little by little disregard the foreign vision, developing and cultivating the personal and the peculiar. It is a difficult task, indeed, but a necessary one. One day they should leave aside the mentality of opportunistic students and embark on the passionate adventure of their own creation. “It is very difficult to know the masters well,” said [the French painter Maurice de] Vlaminck. “It is much more difficult to forget them.”96 Engel thus discusses González’s later series in terms of dependence, which is ironic, given that these paintings depart the most from the source material she originally discovered in Vermeer. Nonetheless, this frustration with artistic dependence paralleled a much broader discourse about First World tutelage of the Third World. Modernizing theorists had been advocating for developing nations to imitate highly industrialized societies to reduce the time needed to “catch up.” By the 1960s, it had become clear that this acceleration, which purportedly would lead to liberation, in reality was leading only toward economic and cultural dependency, even as economists with the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America (ecla) who had turned to dependency theory questioned their own desarrollista ideology.97 After the Cuban Missile Crisis and the escalation of the Cold War, according to dependency logic, it became clear that the relation between industrialized centers and developing countries was not one of tutelage. Instead, it was a parasitic relation in which the First World’s wealth was being extracted from neocolonial posts. Engel’s frustration about female artists in Colombia continuing to be subservient and dependent on Western Old Masters thus betrays a broader self-­consciousness about neocolonial relations. In Colombia, 1964 was a year of economic crisis that eroded the National Front’s credibility and its claims that it would accelerate modernization and deliver a stronger economy with aid from U.S. President John F. Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress. Meanwhile, emerging guerrilla movements — both the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (National Liberation Army; eln) and Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia; farc) were constituted in 1964 — challenged the legitimacy of the National Front government in their close collaboration with the United States as imperial design. Notions of modernization and progress clashed against escalating class-­consciousness and claims for social justice. This general disillusionment with the failed promises

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of modernization were felt deeply in Bucaramanga, where González painted the Lacemaker series — a city that became an epicenter of ideological combat. Beatriz in Bucaramanga In the article “Beatriz González Aranda: Nuevo valor en la pintura,” the interviewer describes González as “our own fellow citizen” championing the new national values in painting.98 The newspaper in which the article ran, the Vanguardia Liberal of Bucaramanga, noted that González’s second place at the Salon de Pintoras in June 1964 was the only prize in the eleven open salons to be won by an artist from Santander.99 This triumph was newsworthy for readers from the state, which was developing at a rapid pace due to the growth of the petrochemical industry. González played an important role in breaking through small-­town attitudes toward art to match Bucaramanga’s urban expansion. Her works embodied the new, the young, and the modern; they favorably represented “our” painting for residents of Bucaramanga. Since the nineteenth century, Santander had been a Liberal Party stronghold. Not surprisingly, Colombia’s cultural policies had a great impact there and fostered a strong sense of regional identity. During this period, Santander underwent further modernization via the petrochemical industry, and reactions against these processes became more radical. Therefore, González’s triumph as being both modern and authentic commanded great purchase, bringing into relief the cultural contradictions of modernizing the periphery. Bucaramanga had been growing rapidly while González studied at Uniandes from 1959 to 1962. According to González, the city was shifting from the “Villa de Bucaramanga” — a slow, bucolic village of yesteryear — to a beautiful “City of Parks.” She remembered being proud of the progressive changes in the city’s public spaces, which earned it the title “best paved city in Colombia.”100 Bucaramanga became a large city with broad boulevards, modern high-­rise buildings, and pedestrian bridges. González also recalled mayors who removed or destroyed some of the city’s most characteristic idiosyncrasies during the modernization process, such as Spanish colonial architecture that was replaced with modern residential, commercial, and university buildings. González lamented the beautifully colorful Guayacán trees torn down by a mayor who planted Popayán tree seeds to impose order and uniformity. Nostalgia for the diversity of Bucaramanga’s architecture and flora prompted González to remember the colorful dome of the Sagrada Familia Cathedral, commissioned by Father Trillos. The “elegant people of Bucaramanga” were scandalized by the building’s bright glossy yellow tiles and vault ribs painted alternately red and aquamarine, González said, chuckling, because they thought it looked

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like a guacamaya (macaw). Father Trillos responded, “Guacamaya or no guacamaya, I leave you a dome!” González was amused by his matter-­of-­fact tenacity, with which she identifies her own character.101 This delight in his resistance to the demands of refined sensibility can provide insight into González’s conflicted relation to the homogenizing effects of cultural modernization and internationalism: she was fundamentally at odds with the notion of aesthetic standardization, which would soon translate into a resistance to hegemonic artistic discourses. Santander had become associated with notions of technical development from the nineteenth century. A second wave of German expeditions, along with the region’s forbidding terrain, contributed to important technological advancement in Andean transportation.102 Although the term “progress” was important in official discourse, it was really a modern term. In the nineteenth century, official discourse in Colombia was more concerned with the “happiness of the people.” Although they are not unrelated, it is a twentieth-­century notion that happiness is a side effect of economic development. The petrochemical industry steered the modernization process in Santander throughout the twentieth century. The city of Barrancabermeja, which today is called the “oil capital” of Colombia, is just 141 kilometers east of Bucaramanga on the Magdalena River. Tropical Oil purchased the De Mares concession in 1917 and dominated the area until the nationalization of its wells and refineries in 1951 with the creation of the Ecopetrol.103 The department became the central excavation and refinery center for petroleum in Colombia. Since the Revolt of the Comuneros in the eighteenth century, the department of Santander has been associated with radical politics, labor organization, and unrest, much of which has centered on the oil workers’ union in Barrancabermeja, where the Communist Party long operated.104 Oil workers’ strikes in the 1920s gave birth to a Bolshevik-­inspired movement in 1927, which historian Luis van Isschot has characterized as the first “communist uprising in Latin American history.”105 To develop the proper expertise required for the petroleum industry, the Universidad Industrial de Santander (Industrial University of Santander; uis) was founded in 1947. It had a profound and lasting impact on the life of Bucaramanga. Students and professors came from all over the country and the world. The university’s first dean, Rodolfo Low Maus, a well-­respected German-­born academic, was considered strategic in obtaining foreign financial support for the university, as well as developing the institution’s autonomy from “provincial cultural limitations and the unhealthy interference of the political class.”106 The uis became a university of great magnitude in the region, making Bucaramanga an educational center in Colombia.107 Between 1961 and 1964, a strong and organized student movement, the Asociación Universitaria de Santander (audesa), emerged at the uis. Many of the stu-

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dent leaders were affiliated with the more radical arm of the Liberal Party — that is, with Alfonso López Michelsen’s Movimiento Revolucionario Liberal (Liberal Revolutionary Movement; mrl). While González painted in her studio, student leaders at the uis were organizing an ambitious protest march against what they considered the imperialist agenda behind university modernization programs. In July 1964, the uis students marched 500 kilometers from Bucaramanga to Bogotá, a journey that demonstrated the overwhelming solidarity of rural folk with the students and the emerging discontent with the modernization programs of the National Front.108 Like many others frustrated with the impossibility of achieving major structural change through peaceful means, some of the uis students, including audesa’s leader Jaime Arenas Reyes, Víctor Medina Morón, and Julio César Cortés and Heliodoro Ochoa, went to the jungles of Santander, took up arms, and joined the eln along with the “guerrillero priest” Camilo Torres Restrepo.109 This was the tumultuous atmosphere in Bucaramanga when González painted the Lacemaker series.110 Lacemakers Weave a Veiled Critique The Lacemaker paintings stylistically and thematically suited economic and government elites’ desires for Colombia to modernize without disrupting the social hierarchies and traditional values that this very modernization could jeopardize. Yet González’s discontent with a homogenizing modern aesthetic prompts us to look at the critical dimension within the Lacemaker series. The titles of the works clue us in to an emerging critique of aesthetic propriety. What was conspicuously absent from the contemporaneous reviews of the Lacemaker series was discussion of the subject matter’s unsuitable elements. To examine this, we must turn away from purely formalist analysis and pay closer attention to the Lacemaker paintings’ interpictorial dialogue. In 1964, critics did not analyze the conceptual experimentation that underlay the series or González’s sequential passage from formal liberation to engagement with the subject matter. Traba was the only one to make the critical connection among the Lacemaker paintings: humor and class. “The Lacemaker versions are composed of two basic elements: color and compositional blocks,” she wrote. “Each picture is carefully articulated as color and as form, but it also responds to a climate, an idea developed with intelligence, good and caustic humor; such as the lacemaker placed over the terrible greens of the Pielroja calendar or the rutilant lacemakers on the beach.”111 The reader easily chuckles at the thought of a sunburned lacemaker on a beach. However, this commentary is a response to the title, since neither of the two versions of Encajera en la playa (Lacemaker on the Beach) depicts the lacemaker with glowing reddish skin tones.112 Instead, González chose blue-­gray flesh hues for their faces. Furthermore, the reference to

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1.20  Beatriz González, Encajera almanaque Pielroja, 1964, oil on canvas, 100 × 85 cm.

Pielroja cigarette calendars intervenes in Traba’s experience of color, prompting her to discern bad taste in the artworks’ “terrible greens.” She thus inadvertently revealed that González was activating more than a formal exercise. By describing the painting as humorous without elaborating on what she found comical, she implied an understanding of good versus bad taste among critic, artist, and audience. The green in the background of Lacemaker Pielroja Calendar (figure 1.20) is not as daring as the bright mint, lime, and apple green that González chose for the Surrender of Breda series. Not until a decade later, with the benefit of hindsight, did Traba characterize Lacemaker Pielroja Calendar as the introduction of kitsch into González’s work.113 Traba’s review was mostly formal analysis and did not discuss the dialogue

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that González established between the Dutch city of Delft in the seventeenth century and Colombia in the twentieth century, or between high art in the Louvre and the low culture of cigarette advertising calendars. Nonetheless, the Pielroja calendar was an unequivocal reference to local commercial mass culture. The throwaway calendar, which reproduced images of attractive, stylish women smoking against monochromatic backgrounds, were visible nearly everywhere the national Pielroja cigarette brand was sold; the calendar thus carried strong associations with popular urban culture and women, and the dialogical play between the title and the canvas evokes an emerging class and gender critique. Pielroja cigarettes were also laden with national and popular associations. The brand’s popularity allowed Colombia’s national tobacco company to resist being bought out by larger multinationals for a long time and served as a symbol of resistance.114 González’s pictorial reference thus shifts the artwork’s geographical reference from the Louvre to specifically Colombian gas stations and small corner mom-­and-­pop shops; the European masterpiece is transformed into a popular local work of art. With Lacemaker Pielroja Calendar, Vermeer’s The Lacemaker is thus provincialized. Colors also held a series of connotations that were enmeshed with constructs of class and women’s propriety that the next chapter develops more fully. González recalled her mother’s lessons in the decorum of color, each of which had a “proper place.” For instance, the González Arandas’ city house was very fashionable, containing designer furniture and rugs. González recalled their somber colors: ivory, mauve gray, and maroon. The family’s country house at Rionegro, however, had an entirely different color scheme: González’s mother painted the furniture there bright orange and royal blue. In other words, there was a discernment of propriety when it came to colors that acknowledged there were specific times and places for brilliance and solemnity.115 Color therefore could also be located on a social map. The colors of González’s childhood are also the colors in Lacemaker Pielroja Calendar. The broad sections of maroon and creamy gray, punctured by orange and blue, emerge from the flat green background. There is a visible progression of solemn to bright tones from the Lacemaker series to the last of the Vermeerianas; as she gained artistic confidence, González abandoned Vermeer’s Calvinist serva modum (be moderate) dictum and moved into the world of the carnivalesque. Vermeeriana V (1964; see figure 1.19) and Vermeeriana sentada (1964; see figure 1.20), move almost completely away from colors associated with Vermeer. Their chartreuse greens, canary yellows, coral pinks, oranges, and royal blues are loud colors — or colores chillones, as González would later call her palette.116 If one considers the complete series of variations on Vermeer produced by González in 1963 – 1964, one can trace a compositional as well as a thematic emancipation from the source. González liberated the lacemaker not only from Ver-

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1.21  Beatriz González, Encajera en la noche de la rendición de Breda, 1964, oil on canvas, 100 × 85 cm.

meer but also from the expectation that she will quietly labor in the domestic interior. In Encajera en la noche de la rendición de Breda (Lacemaker on the Night of the Surrender of Breda [1964]; figure 1.21), González presents an unlikely intruder into the bellicose world of Velázquez’s painting. She takes the lacemaker from a daytime domestic interior and transplants her to a nocturnal, masculine military scene — not the proper place for a decent lady.117 Although Colombian women had joined the industrial labor force out of economic necessity in the early twentieth century, upper-­and middle-­class women in the 1960s were still expected to keep their traditional domestic roles.118 Of course, this was a contested issue.

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Both Traba and González contributed to changing gender roles by virtue of their visibility in the public sphere. What was at stake was the breaking down of traditional values among the middle and upper classes who were the audience for the Lacemaker works and who were expected to uphold those values. The lacemaker as a genre could have resonated strongly with a young female artist such as González who was entering the professional labor force. Lacemaking is, after all, an aesthetic activity. Could Lacemaker on the Night of the Surrender of Breda be understood, then, as the artist’s remaking her self-­image from polite lady painter to militant cultural provocateur? Whether González consciously intended it or not, the Lacemaker series functioned as a cultural Trojan horse. Her sophisticated command of abstract painting and erudite dialogue with the European canon positioned her advantageously in the Colombian artistic field. This gave her exposure and the serious consideration that made her future work all the more effective as critique. Had González begun her career elaborating on issues of bad taste, her oppositional works most likely would have been condescendingly dismissed as provincial. After all, she was from the provinces — as Bogotanos, with their centralist discourse like to think of the Bumangués.119 In this era of intense modernization that demanded that artists engage with an international art world and produce “exportable” works, being provincial was not a desirable trait. Traba even emphasized that her “ruthless” teaching method involved learning to loathe “the provincial.”120 Therefore, the Lacemaker series can be read simultaneously as a reflection on and a rebellion against the aesthetic value system that González received at Uniandes, and through which her incipient career would be judged. By having dominated good taste, she could then go on to critique the politics of taste. The Lacemaker series demonstrates intelligent humor and irony that subtly upends notions of aesthetic, class, and gender propriety. While the associations of the series with the Pielroja calendar would insinuate distinctions between cultivated and popular taste, it was not until the following year, when she submitted Los suicidas del Sisga (The Sisga Suicides [1965]) that her work engaged unequivocally with issues of lo cursi — tacky, or poor, taste.

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2.1  Beatriz González, Los suicidas del Sisga, 1965, oil on canvas, 120 × 100 cm. 2.2  Image accompanying “Doble suicidio de ‘El Sisga’: El día de su Santo, escogido por Martínez para la tragedia,” El Tiempo, June 29, 1965, 3. Image source: Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia.

chapter 2

A Leap from the Domestic Sphere into the Sisga Reservoir The year following her debut at the Bogotá Museum of Modern Art (mambo), Beatriz González won second prize for painting at the Seventeenth National Salon of Colombian Artists with Los suicidas del Sisga (The Sisga Suicides [1965]; figure 2.1). In terms of subject matter, The Sisga Suicides was a radical departure from her Lacemaker series. Rather than interpreting a pristine Old Master painting, González chose to rework a faint black-­and-­white photograph of a couple posing before they allegedly committed suicide in the Sisga reservoir, just north of Bogotá. The image was printed in the newspaper El Tiempo on June 29, 1965 (figure 2.2), one day after it was first published in a full-­page spread in El Espectador’s yellow-­press paper El Vespertino.1 In a televised interview with Marta Traba following the salon, González said that she was attracted to the picture primarily because of the flat and distorted effects of serial reproduction.2 However alluring the visual properties may have been, González anchored the painting to its tragic story through painting’s title and explained to the television audience that the suicide pact was intended to “librarla del pecado” (deliver the woman from sin).3 She said, “The enamored couple left their last photo; they had it taken as a souvenir for their relatives. The lovers, whose cadavers were found in the frigid waters of the Sisga Reservoir, had announced, ‘we will leave forever’ — a sinister pact, carried out for sinister reasons — that is, delivering her from sin and saving her from evil through death.”4 González had already given subtle messages through the titles of works in the Lacemakers series that clued her audience in to underlying subtexts. In other words, while she proclaimed formal autonomy, she suggestively connected the painting with the press distortions and the gendered terms of sexual morality. Today, The Sisga Suicides is considered an iconic work of twentieth-­century Latin America art. Traba retrospectively characterized its debut at the National Salon as a watershed moment that marked a new way to view Colombian art. The

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Sisga Suicides (along with two later versions, Los suicidas del Sisga II and Los suicidas del Sisga III) celebrated its fiftieth anniversary at the exhibition “The World Goes Pop” at the Tate Modern in London, prompting several commemorative articles in major newspapers and magazines in Colombia.5 Nonetheless, in 1965 the painting received far from unanimous praise. In fact, all of the awards at the salon that year, including the second prize given to The Sisga Suicides, sparked fierce debates in the critical press not seen since the polarized years leading up to La Violencia. Unsympathetic critics condemned the awards as affronts to what they considered true values of art, while supporters, including Traba, defended them as new aesthetic positions that “implicate[d] a radical renovation of values.”6 Among these new positions, Traba lauded Suicides for being the first to engage lo cursi (the tacky) in Colombian art. As discussed in the pages ahead, Traba and other critics who reviewed the work favorably made clear that the qualifier “cursi” referred to the subject matter, not to the painting itself. González, they explained, treated the cursi with refinement, intelligence, and a piercing sense of humor. She was dubbed the painter of cursilería from that moment forward, a term that she initially rejected but that nevertheless stuck to her artistic production. No critic or art historian to date has asked: Why would a painting of a suicide meant to preserve a woman’s moral status be perceived as tacky rather than tragic? To understand this, we must focus on the painting and the reactions it prompted to grasp what people in August 1965 saw or failed to see, and what went without saying and what needed to be said. That month, the press in Bogotá was busy not only covering the National Salon. All of the major Colombian newspapers, magazines, and even television and radio stations were reporting on the shock waves set off by the inaugural Pan-­ American Assembly on Population.7 The assembly took place in Cali on August 11 – 15, 1965, and concluded just five days before the salon opened, on August 20. Former President Alberto Lleras Camargo served as the assembly’s chair and delivered a combustive keynote address reprinted in its entirety by El Tiempo.8 The population assembly, organized by the Rockefellers’ Population Council and Columbia University in New York, met to discuss what the delegates considered the most urgent problem for underdeveloped nations: demographic explosion and population control. In the atmosphere of the Cold War, overpopulation meant increased vulnerability to revolutionary appeal. According to Ramiro Delgado García, president of the Division of Population Studies in Colombia, unchecked fertility rates would reduce living standards “to a level where social unrest will lead to bloody revolutions with their sequels in death, hunger, and misery,” thus suggesting a connection between demographic growth and the Cuban Revolution.9 In the following months, writers across the political spectrum engaged in a heated debate over birth control, morality, and the threats of population growth.

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At no time did these international debates address women or their rights. Rather, the discourse focused on the role of population growth in increasing worldwide misery, the threat of communism as an appealing solution, and the Catholic Church’s role in the destiny of Colombia. Women’s bodies served as one of the Cold War’s battlegrounds. The heated debates over human reproduction that unfolded in the press in August 1965 may at first seem unrelated to the polarized and anxious reactions generated by González’s painting of a suicidal gardener and domestic worker. However, as historians we need to consider the painting; the suicide tragedy; and the discourses around population control and the threat of communism, women’s sexuality and reproductive rights, and internal coloniality as deeply intertwined. Chandra Mohanty’s seminal essay “Under Western Eyes” shows that the conception of Third World women as ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradition-­bound, domestic, family-­oriented, subjugated, and victimized serves as a foil to constructing an image of First World women in antithetical terms: “as educated, modern, in control of their own bodies and sexuality, and having the freedom to make their own decisions.”10 We can detect this same colonizing attitude, so often invoked by the Latin American left against feminism, as part of the letrados’ condescension toward the masses, especially at a time that urban educated women had access to birth control and statesmen around the world blamed the poor and their excessive reproduction for the world’s misery. Critics’ valuation of the cursi as a daring artistic strategy reveals such internal coloniality. In a society where art was held to spiritually elevate the masses and where good taste continued to hold great purchase, praising the cursi in art was a radical turn. As a backlash to the internationalizing demands of the art world, letrados returned to authenticity as an important measure of aesthetic success. However, unlike in the 1930s and ’40s, when intellectuals sought to define authenticity through academicized folklore, during the 1960s many turned to urban popular culture as an expression of the “joy of underdevelopment.”11 González’s Suicides marks that turning point at the National Salon; hence, its iconic status in Colombian art history. As the pages that follow demonstrate, this reformulation of urban popular culture came from a genuine desire to articulate lo nuestro (that which is ours), but the joy came from the letrados’ amusement at the lower classes and their perceived poor taste. Their own class condescension was the caustic black humor they detected in Suicides. This chapter shows how Suicides, in style and subject, pictorially embodies the contradictions that were embedded in the National Front’s conservative modernization programs. The tense and awkward responses to Suicides, along with the class condescension expressed in the term “cursi,” reveal the general disconnect between social classes that obstructed the democracy that the National Front so diligently protected and, hence, the legitimacy of the state.

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Tragedy or Farce in The Sisga Suicides Like the Lacemakers series, Suicides found its source in a photographic reproduction. Yet there is a world of difference in the hierarchy of cultural signifiers between an art history illustration and the pages of a tabloid newspaper. On the one hand, Vermeer’s The Lacemaker represents an image of traditional feminine behavior, a woman rehearsing an appropriate aesthetic task within a domestic interior. On the other hand, Suicides represents a couple whose amorous passions led them to tarnish her purity and consequently end their lives, two cardinal sins according to Catholic dogma. Even though González takes the lacemaker out of a domestic interior and paints her into a nocturnal battlefield, this was a subtle provocation that required viewers to make an informed assessment of the title Lacemaker on the Night of the Surrender of Breda. Reviewers in 1964 did not describe the works in the Lacemakers series as critiques of women’s social norms; rather, they rehearsed them by praising the artist’s sophistication, erudition, and technical virtue. In contrast, the title The Sisga Suicides sufficed to inform viewers, if they were not already familiar with the press coverage, that the couple portrayed had killed themselves. According to press reports, the gardener Antonio María Martínez Bonza, the man in the photograph, wrote a suicide note declaring the deaths a double-­suicide and an act of moral cleansing for his girlfriend, Tulia Vargas, not for himself.12 It was not clear from the evidence whether Tulia Vargas had agreed to commit suicide or this was a case of murder-­suicide. However, Gonzalez’s description in the television interview of the event as a double-­suicide became more strongly associated with the painting than the newspaper reports and would affect how viewers understood the painting. González was not the first artist to use a story from the sensationalist press as a subject for painting. In New York, Andy Warhol treated the theme of suicide in his Disaster series, which included A Woman’s Suicide (1962) and in which he engaged the sensational effects of mass reproduction by repeating an image taken from a newspaper of a woman falling from a building.13 A Woman’s Suicide formally and thematically recalls another famous painting, The Suicide of Dorothy Hale (1938) by the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. However, more akin to The Sisga Suicides is Kahlo’s Unos cuantos piquetitos (A Few Small Nips [1935]; figure 2.3).14 All four paintings can be considered historical paintings in that they record events that actually occurred. Suicides and A Few Small Nips share the backdrop of sexist norms and deal with social problems that amount to nothing less than honor killings. In A Few Small Nips, a painting in retablo format, Kahlo likewise painted a subject from a newspaper report describing the brutal murder of a woman by her jealous partner. When confronted by the police, he dismissively replied, “But I only gave her a few small nips.”15 While González and Kahlo painted in different historical contexts with obvi-

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2.3  Frida Kahlo, Unos cuantos piquetitos, 1935, oil on canvas, 15 × 19 cm. Museo Dolores Olmedo Patiño. Photo credit: Bob Schalkwijk/Art Resource, NY.

ous compositional differences, a comparison of the two paintings provides insights. González’s painting does not represent violence in the overt manner, as does the murder scene depicted by Kahlo. In A Few Small Nips, the naked body of a brutally stabbed woman lies on a bed; only one nylon stocking with a garter belt and one high-­heel shoe remain, suggesting an earlier moment of seduction. The woman’s hand and face extend toward the viewer in an interrogative fashion, as if to say, Why have you let this happen? Kahlo accentuates the grotesque nature of the narrative by splattering red paint throughout the painting and onto the frame. The private drama thus spills over into the public, echoing its appearance in the press. The perpetrator, still wearing his tipped hat, stands nonchalantly with a hand in his pocket. His body language evokes the dismissive words held up by the two “love birds” above: “unos cuantos piquetitos.” González’s suicidal man displays a similarly nonchalant gaze. González painted the woman solemnly, gazing downward with a melancholic smile. The man smirks toward the right side of the canvas as if something or someone else has caught his attention. His demeanor does not correspond to that of a man resolved to commit suicide. The woman’s head is covered by a blue headscarf in the manner used by women in church, even evoking bridal attire, whereas the tilt of the man’s hat seems more flirtatious than somber. Even though both figures are brightly clad,

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the woman’s blue-­green clothing does not seem as inappropriate as the man’s red blazer. Her shoulder jets out toward the spectator and out of the lime-­green frame that confines the rest of the body, as if trying — in vain — to escape the picture plane. Their fingers fuse together, as did their fates. If we read between the lines of the text accompanying the report of the suicides in El Tiempo, several gendered ideological positions emerge. First, a woman’s chastity is held to be significant social capital. Second, there is the conception of sexuality as sinful, where the woman carries the moral burden. The “other face of machismo” in Latin America, according to Evelyn Stevens, is Marianism, the social positioning of women as morally superior.16 According to Marian logic, men are exempt from the same social scrutiny because of their inferior moral faculties. This may help explain why Antonio María Martínez, the man in the photograph, declared the double-­suicide an act of moral cleansing for his girlfriend but not for himself.17 The machismo-­marianismo moral divide suggests how black humor operates in the painting: while the woman stages solemnity, the man performs sophomoric irreverence. If we think about The Sisga Suicides in general rather than particular terms, it engages the harsh social consequences of not upholding a woman’s moral virtue. This tragic love story may have seemed like an anachronism in a city where visible signs of modernity were beginning to dominate the urban landscape. The translucence and faintness of the photograph reproduced in El Tiempo gives it a timeless quality, as if the picture could have been taken much earlier. In fact, the double-­suicide (or possible murder-­suicide) took place on June 21, 1965, in the Sisga reservoir, built in 1954. The reservoir was the embodiment of modernization in Colombia, an engineering feat that rechanneled the waters of the Sisga River to meet the demands of the growing urban population of Bogotá.18 It had also become a site for public recreation, which presupposed a modern conception of leisure as repose from the workweek. The idea of escaping the hustle and bustle of the city with an excursion to the outskirts was itself a sign of modernity. The lovers’ unchaperoned retreat to the Sisga reservoir was a fundamentally modern act, an indication that women in the city had more freedom than those in the countryside. Why, then, would this young couple feel compelled to end their lives? Why was the woman’s chastity so valuable that death would amount to its only proper exchange? The picture and the suicides were caught in what the modernization theorist Walt W. Rostow characterized as a dangerous transitional stage of development before “takeoff” from a traditional to a modern society that required government guidance.19 Indeed, Lleras Camargo considered unchecked population growth as the greatest obstacle to Colombia’s “takeoff” into modernity.20 Likewise, the formal qualities of the painting were positioned between traditional and modern

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techniques. In the television interview with Traba, González defended her position as a traditional painter. In Suicides she painted an illusion of formal experimentation, saying, I consider my technique connected to the most rigorous oil painting tradition. That is, in my painting, up to now, I have resisted using “collages,” foreign objects or textures, such as sand, plastic or wax, that constitute what is called “mixed-­media.” In my most recent works, the figures appear to be cut out and placed over a space created by either similarity or contrast of strong colors, treated without gradations. Even within the figures, there are fragments and shifts in execution, such as the different techniques used for the face and the clothing that gives the sense of “applied object.”21 While studying at the University of Los Andes (Uniandes), González had worked with Carlos Rojas, who in 1963 was producing several different series of collages with mixed media, including Limones amarillos (figure 3.3) and Untitled, from the series Mujeres en faja (figure 1.11). That same year, Pedro Alcántara Herrán had won first prize at the National Salon for drawing with his collage Insecto (Insect [1963]; figure 2.4). Abstraction took a mixed-­media turn in the 1960s, especially in the works of Guillermo Wiedemann, Beatriz Daza, Álvaro Herrán, Leonel Estrada, and Alberto Gutiérrez, among others. Estrada’s collage Veneno: Murato de potasio (Poison: Potassium Chloride [1964]; figure 2.5), for example, deliberately connects mixed-­media abstraction with hemispheric collaboration by using burlap sacks in which the Alliance for Progress shipped fertilizer. Álvaro Barrios, likewise, famously expanded on collage’s potential with works such as Comedia (Comedy [1965]; figure 2.6).22 The interest in mixed media certainly was not exclusive to Colombia. Many postwar artists around the globe were experimenting with new techniques and media, many working with collage, assemblages decollage, and found objects, including those associated with the pop art, Nueva Figuración, and Nouveau Realisme movements, such as Jasper Johns, Rosalyn Drexler, Arman, Jacques Villeglé, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Marta Minujín, to name just a few iconic examples. A few years earlier, in 1962, the Argentine artist Antonio Berni had won first prize for prints and drawings at the 31st Venice Biennale for his collage and xilo-­collage series Juanito Laguna. At the Venice Biennale in 1964, Robert Rauschenberg became the first U.S. artist to win the grand prize, with Express (1963). Nontraditional material compositions — that is, applied objects — were the talk of the art world, so what is noteworthy here is González’s insistence that her work be regarded as a painting that resembles collage. Although Suicides was as advanced formally as other media experiments shown at the salon, González asked her audience to locate it within a longer tradition of oil painting. There-

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2.4  Pedro Alcántara, Insecto, 1963, collage. Courtesy of the artist and Fundación Arte Vivo. 2.5  Leonel Estrada, Veneno: Murato de potasio, 1964, collage, 121 × 82 cm. Courtesy of the Leonel Estrada Estate. Photograph: Camila Mora. 2.6  Álvaro Barrios, Comedia, 1965, collage, 70 × 100 cm. Courtesy of the artist. Photograph: Ernesto Monsalve/Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá.

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fore, the composition in Suicides is a perceptual deception: it appears to be more modern than it really is, as the press image appeared older than it really was. González developed this concept of lo falso (the fake) in subsequent works, especially in her famous mobiliario (furniture assemblages) discussed in chapter 5. Suicides frustrates the temporal categories dictated by an evolutionary logic of media innovation. Put differently, the style and subject of Suicides ambivalently collapses the artificial binary of traditional and modern. The photograph, along with its mass-­media dissemination, is a modern mode of representation; the formal double-­portrait looks old-­fashioned, like an artifact from a bygone era of studio portraiture, even though it was taken just a few months before the salon was held; and the subject is a story of modern love turned tragic due to traditional sexual norms. Like the suicidal couple, the painting embodies the multiple temporalities and tensions of this apparent modernity as understood through a dichotomy of modern and traditional. Totem and Taboo in the National Salon The National Salon of Colombian Artists played an important role during periods of political turmoil such as La Violencia and the escalating tensions of the Cold War. The salon’s mandate to convoke the pueblo to judge art opened up a critical forum for defining the broader stakes of Colombian society. Given the limited democracy that reduced political participation to the two traditional parties, the cultural sphere became an arena for dissensus. In her article “The Infallible Thermometer” (a title that plays on Traba’s famous term for the salon from 1965), González characterizes the National Front era as a golden age for the salon in which artistic scandals became front-­page news, generations of masters were crowned and dethroned, and everyone believed firmly in the necessity of the salon as a public forum.23 The National Salon of 1965 gives us insight into the charged atmosphere of aesthetic debates during a volatile time in which the economic crisis of 1964 – 1966, the return of guerrilla warfare in the countryside, and escalating Cold War tensions threatened Colombia’s fragile and limited democracy. The state was no longer capable of upholding the promise and optimism of the 1950s, and the arts became one means by which to express frustration, outrage, and shifting aesthetic values. The National Salon’s history of oppositional politics is significant for understanding the role it was assigned within larger cultural debates from its conception. The salon had three beginnings. The first, in 1886, was an exhibition organized by the conservative Alberto Urdaneta as part of the activities of the newly formed Colombian Academy of Fine Arts; the second was in 1930 as part of the Liberal Party reforms of President Enrique Olaya Herrera; and the third was in 1940, under the Education Minister Jorge Eliécer Gaitán during the administra-

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2.7  Manuel Briceño and Alberto Urdaneta, Self-Portrait, lithograph, 46 × 31 cm., El Mochuelo, no. 1, September 27, 1877, front cover. Image source: Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia.

tion of President Eduardo Santos. Only the third attempt was successful in establishing an annual national artistic competition.24 These three historical figures were in their time political provocateurs. In the first issue of his short-­lived journal El Mochuelo (1877), Urdaneta portrayed himself as a guerrilla (figure 2.7) armed with “el lapis y la pluma” (the pencil and the quill). The year before, he had been a member of the conservative guerrilla group Los Mochuelos; the journal, therefore, was a way to move his struggle into the lettered city.25 Urdaneta’s first iteration of the salon displayed works of art for public scrutiny, thus linking art and public participation.26 The founders of the third, successful version of the salon opened on November 12, 1940, at the Biblioteca Nacional, under the directorship of Daniel Samper Ortega, who led many democratizing cultural initiatives of the Liberal Republic, including the bibliotecas aldeanas (village libraries).27 The salon was conceived as a feedback loop between artworks and audiences that put faith in the pueblo for

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aesthetic discernment and, in this symbiotic relation, to lead the nation toward spiritual elevation and cultural authenticity. Gaitán’s inaugural speech emphasized the role of the pueblo as the true judges of art: The National Ministry of Education fully declares its mission satisfied, if, with the exhibition of this First National Salon of Colombian Artists, it has provoked a healthy agitation that reintegrates, in our incipient spiritual life, aesthetic preoccupation into an eminent plane to which it corresponds by right. The intervention by the pueblo in this cultural episode should not be circumscribed to the passive role of a mere spectator. On the contrary, its essential role should be of conscientious judge who decides, at the end of the day, whether there is or is not an authentic art.28 Gaitán invoked the Liberal Republic’s paradigmatic position on democratizing culture. Intellectuals working for the Ministry of Education envisioned rural folk (the pueblo) as uncultured and in need of elevation, but they also conceived of the provincial pueblo as the locus of national authenticity.29 The salon would thus become the site of exchange between cultivated artists, who could refine cultural raw material (or what the Ministry called the topsoil of the “national soul”), and the pueblo, who could assess their authenticity.30 What made Gaitán dangerous to the establishment was that he addressed the urban underclasses who were the base of his political constituency. Gaitán’s relationship to the pueblo was complex. He was perceived to be of the pueblo, emanating from it and representing its interests. His social philosophy was not devoid of paternalism, yet he made crowds feel important and intelligent and called on their “instinctive wisdom” to judge high culture.31 Calling on the urban poor and working classes to judge art was antithetical to the state’s understanding of cultural authenticity — that is, as a dialectical relation between urban intellectuals and rural folklore. This was a bold affront to Colombian elites who conceived of themselves as the sole possessors of civility. Indeed, riots unleashed by Gaitán’s assassination confirmed the elites’ disdainful attitude toward the urban underclasses they regarded as threatening mobs. Gaitán sought in the salon a means to integrate the urban lower classes into national debate, aesthetics into public discourse, and the spiritual into the social. The degree to which el pueblo participated in the salon is impossible to measure. However, we can trace through the press that the salon’s audience included primarily educated urban elites, students, and letrados. Nonetheless, it is clear that, from its beginning, the salon was regarded unanimously as a site for legitimization and provocation. This history created expectations that mediated how spectators interpreted and judged Suicides. In fact, when González submitted one of her Vermeeriana paintings to the Sixteenth National Salon in 1964, Traba called it a fatigued “stage” of her work, even though she had debuted the series at mambo

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just a few months earlier.32 For Traba, the museum was the appropriate place to exhibit a prolonged aesthetic elaboration through a series, whereas a variation on a theme did not meet the expectation for renewal and innovation at the salon. Traba invoked Gaitán’s call for the salon to incite “healthy agitation.” González divides the “Infallible Thermometer’s” history into four distinct stages, the second one spanning 1957 – 1969, roughly coinciding with the National Front. She characterizes the first phase of the salon, 1940 – 1948, as an incubation period during which aesthetic and moral issues often came into conflict. For instance, employees of the salon hid works that offended their moral sensibilities (e.g., Débora Arango’s paintings in the first salon) or that the church condemned (e.g., Annunciation, by Carlos Correa, in the second salon).33 Following the salon’s intermittent closures during conservative hegemony and the dictatorship of General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla (1953 – 1957), the second phase witnessed a definitive shift toward international modernism and the move to the forefront of the artists called Los Nuevos (the New Ones), which coincided with Traba’s growing influence on aesthetic judgment.34 Although the salon had sporadically awarded artists following modernist trends in several previous competitions, such as Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar in 1946 and Fernando Botero in 1952, it was in 1957 that jurors consistently recognized international modernist works. Even though González describes a second phase ending in 1969, the dominance of a universalizing modernist discourse in the National Salon lasted only a short seven-­year period, between 1957 and 1964. By the 1965 National Salon, Traba, who had been its most influential proponent, described her former protégés as outmoded.35 González marks another turning point in 1962 when Alejandro Obregón was awarded first prize for Violencia (Violence; figure 2.8). No one could deny the decisive impact made by Obregón’s canvas of a pregnant female corpse exhibited the same year that Germán Guzmán Campos, Orlando Fals Borda, and Eduardo Umaña Luna published La Violencia en Colombia, the first comprehensive account of the atrocities in the Colombian countryside. However, Obregón painted this denunciation of violence in a lyrical style that had made him the leading modern artist in Colombia. Critics responded to the painting by commending its formal merits. Traba defended Obregón’s work for its pictorial integrity, not its political expedience.36 She argued it should not be considered an overtly political work; instead, she compared it Picasso’s Guernica, which she valued as a revolutionary formal means to express human suffering. Not all agreed with this assessment, and, in effect, Violencia joined Obregón’s Estudiante muerto (1956) and other works that referenced political violence in fracturing the formalist discourse that had been dominant since 1957. What made Violencia such a watershed work was that it responded to the publication of La violencia en Colombia, a book that revealed to the lettered city the severity of the armed conflict in the countryside.37 Nonetheless, it was at the Seventeenth National Salon of Colombian Artists,

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2.8  Alejandro Obregón, Violencia, 1962, oil on canvas, 150 × 185 cm. Courtesy of Casa Museo Obregón. Colección Banco de la República.

held at the National Museum on August 20 – September 20, 1965, that jurors and critical reviewers recognized a passing of the baton to a new generation and a changed course concerning aesthetic criteria, this time privileging assaults on aesthetic conventions. Furthermore, the scandalous reactions to the 1965 award shifted debates away from universal participation toward counterculture impulses that hinted at political engagement.38 The jury of admission consisted of the art dealer Alicia Baraibar de Cote Lamus, the poet and intellectual Jorge Zalamea, and the architect Hernán Vieco, a founding member of Uniandes.39 The award jury consisted of the Venezuelan art critic Inocencio Palacios, the poet Fernando Arbeláez, and Traba.40 Camilo Calderón Schrader characterized the salon as “a triumphal party for the young. . . . At no salon since the eleventh, where the first generation of ‘the great ones’ came to the fore with the triumph of Botero, has there been such a stage for change and generational relay as this one.”41 Palacios described “a profound transformation in contemporary Colombian fine arts.”42 A rift emerged between those who sought to uphold the primacy of international modernism and those who advocated for a combative rupture. The shifting position of artistic and critical tendencies put former collaborators at odds with each other. With

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Suicides, González’s repositioned herself from modernist champion to counterculture artist who challenged those very hegemonic notions of modernity and progress. Reviews in the press varied in position but not in their passionate tenor. Whether critics called the salon a “triumph,” a “crisis,” or a “fraud,” the admissions and awards at the 1965 National Salon caused a critical deluge in the art community of Bogotá. According to Jorge Zalamea, “There are no typhoons in China or hurricanes in the Caribbean that can compare in violence or destructive capacity to the tempests that annually unleash among us the prizes awarded at the National Salon for Painting and Sculpture. This year has not been an exception to the rule.”43 However, Zalamea singled out the 1965 National Salon for the level of belligerence reached, motivating him to write in La Nueva Prensa a code of conduct for future disagreements. Likewise, Traba declared the Salon to be the “Seventeenth battleground”: The punishment by garrote vil appears many times in Goya’s print series as a sign of the ignominy and intolerance of the authorities of his time. With time, this mode of suffering was replaced by deaths no less atrocious but less exposed to public humiliation, such as the electric chair or the gas chamber. The condemned is exempted of shame; his punishment slides surreptitiously, denying others the bloody feast. The first two weeks of the National Salon would have called for Goya’s pencil to testify to the extraordinary and incredible fact that the garrote vil has not completely disappeared. The garrote vil was not exercised with works of art, which would have been more tolerable, but with the artists. They were strangled alive, dragged through the comic strips, deprived of all honesty and sincerity. . . . This [1965 National Salon] should be renamed the First Garrote Vil — the first and, one hopes, the last, because it is not through vulgar disparagement of artists that we can route good public opinion but by analyzing their works, even when those analyses force us to formulate harsh judgments.44 Traba always welcomed a good battle. However, she echoed Zalamea in stating that the “vulgar disparagement” surpassed the limits of constructive criticism. While Traba championed rigorous criticism, even its destructive role, she concealed her biases behind a professional veneer. The fact that Traba, often vilified for her harsh assessments, would call the Seventeenth National Salon a forum for public humiliation, or “garrote vil,” betrays the extent to which the salon sparked zealous responses.45 One incendiary article by El Tiempo’s art critic, Carlos Medellín, called the salon “a spectacle of fraud.”46 What the critic saw as a crisis in need of rectification was the deviation from pure art, uncontaminated by politics and literature and particularly devoid of sensationalism or spectacle. “True artists” Medellín wrote,

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dwelled in complete solitude, abandoned. He protested the absence of the great Colombian masters such as Fernando Botero, Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar, and Guillermo Wiedemann, and the lack of recognition of works by others, such as Alejandro Obregón or Luciano Jaramillo. The modernism so hard won in the previous decades by institutions such as mambo and by critics such as Medellín and Traba ought not expire so quickly. He perceived the crisis to be temporary and, to some degree, expected, saying that the “true aesthetic values” of modern art would be restored. Luciano Jaramillo, one of the abstract painters ignored by the jury and mentioned by Medellín, also decried the absence of “true” painting at the salon, saying, “On this occasion, the jury’s verdict for the Seventeenth National Salon of Colombian Artists has been disconcerting. It is the negation of painting. What has been exalted is the spectacular, the shocking, the hastily concocted — all which is opposed to true painting. The works in which true painting was absent were awarded prizes. The works that were truly accomplished were rejected: Roda, Obregón, me . . . They discarded us as if we were nothing.”47 Jaramillo’s lament echoes that of a forsaken lover who has been discarded and forgotten. All of the investments that artists, critics, and institutions had made to enthrone abstraction — that is, what Jaramillo termed “true painting” — no longer held cultural purchase, signifying the end of an era. Meanwhile, Traba characterized the previous year’s salon as a lifeless pantheon that stood in stark contrast to the “Battle Number 17” of 1965 — a battle that she felt was worth fighting: This Salon is not a pantheon like the one that took place last year. Many of the deceased have decided to die off completely and did not even participate. . . . What has been awarded is not the same as usual. . . . [I]t is the unexpected, brutally ripped out of so-­called romantic expressionism . . . , the involuntary consequences of the Obregonian style, that drove a great deal of Colombian art toward conformity. Against this conformity pictorial values are being reestablished sufficiently to defend, with equal determination, Battle Number 17 from the low blows administered by a strange but incomprehensible alliance among offended ladies, the “calibanists,” and the philo-­Marxists.48 In terms of history, it was a short time between Traba’s fervent defense of Los Nuevos in the mid-­1950s and their metaphorical death and burial at the 1964 National Salon. Traba objected to the conformity of artists who followed formulas set by the modern masters and felt that the National Salon should be a forum for introducing new aesthetic tendencies. If they did not contribute “new” propositions, they became obsolete in the Salon. Nevertheless, the discourse of artistic modernism, as discussed in the previous chapter and broadly studied by scholars of Latin American art, was closely tied to modernization and development theo-

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ries. Many modernizing agents trafficked in the belief that catching up with the models of industrialized West was the goal of economic and cultural reforms. What was at stake was not only the life span of an artistic tendency but, more profoundly, faith in Latin America’s participation in a universal culture as well as the claim that modernization would solve all social problems. Traba quickly reacted to Medellín’s accusations concerning scandals, publicity stunts, and deceit (estafa), writing, The most inadequate word to scrutinize the salon is “crisis,” because it is synonymous with absence, lack of energy, repetition, and paralysis, all of which are inappropriate in describing the salon. It does not fit, first of all, because some of the awarded artists, such as Norman Mejía, Pedro Alcántara, Feliza Bursztyn, and Beatriz González, sustain their outstanding new positions in Colombian art with greater affirmation and strength than they did in their earlier work. . . . It is perhaps normal for the public, facing works of art they do not understand because they lack information or sufficient pictorial erudition, to feel deceived, but it is abnormal for more responsible people to echo such a defensive and easily wounded position.49 In this passage Traba is defending the artists who received the controversial prizes, including Norman Mejía, who won first prize for painting; González, who won second prize for painting; Feliza Bursztyn, who won first prize for sculpture; and Pedro Alcántara, who won first prize drawing. Mejía’s painting, La horrible mujer castigadora (The Horrible Castigating Woman [1965]; figure 2.9), depicted a violently disfigured and bloody female nude. Through the title, Mejía ensured that viewers interpreted the figure not as a victim but as a vicious castigadora (chastiser). Baraibar had exerted much pressure on the admission jurors just to include the painting. Moreover, the executives of the paper company propal, the salon’s financial sponsor, had a difficult time accepting the painting, given that all of the awarded works would be reproduced in its promotional calendar.50 Palacios defended Mejía’s “awarded work — the horrible castigating woman, . . . violent heartrending testimony of its time — [as] a fully integrated work.”51 Like Palacios, Traba further clarified that the painting worked at a formal level to express the inner turmoil of the artist:52 The Horrible Castigating Woman by Norman Mejía is a magnificent picture. . . . It isn’t necessary to clarify from the beginning whether the aesthetic sensations produced by these works are positive or negative: but they are breath­ taking. And something else happens here. Beyond even the most detailed analysis that permits us to recognize [Mejía’s] intelligence, his talent to compose, draw, allocate color, and invent forms and movements, the overwhelming barroquismo, the formidable impression prevails that he must paint in or-

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2.9  Norman Mejía, La horrible mujer castigadora, 1965, oil on canvas, 204 × 147 cm. Courtesy of María Cristina Celis Agudelo. Photograph: Ernesto Monsalve.

der to breathe and survive. When he unloads that massacre onto the picture plane, his entire secret life is transmitted to the canvas without tricks, editing, or fear.53 While exercising formal analysis, Traba’s language revealed sympathy toward the work’s destructive character. Traba described Mejía’s work as breaking barriers without mercy by using language that matched the aggressive tone of the painting. However, she stopped short of explaining what exactly was destroyed. Like Suicides, Mejías’s massacre on canvas was more than an attack on pictorial conventions. It served as an assault on traditional notions of femininity and women as objects of contemplation. Feminine beauty, along with virtue, held great currency in Colombian society.54 Mejía’s woman disrupts a way of representing and looking at the female body whose only antecedent in Colombian art was Débora Arango’s grotesque representations of prostitutes.55 The Horrible Castigating Woman is devoid of Obregón’s poetic denunciation of violence through a

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metaphorical female nude. Mejía’s femme fatale evoked fear among the same audience who would have recently read Lleras Camargo’s warning about the threats to civilization posed by sexual reproduction and demographic explosion. The chastising woman has agency; she cannot be controlled or be victimized. The title tells us that much. Bursztyn’s Mirando al norte (Gazing North [1965]; figure 2.10), made with welded metal scraps, won first prize for sculpture.56 In contrast to Edgar Negret’s polished and brilliantly colored industrial configurations, Bursztyn’s chaotically welded rusted metal sculpture suggests urban detritus. A cartoon by Velezefe titled “Escultura moderna” (Modern Sculpture [1965]; figure 2.11), published in the newspaper El Espacio, depicts a visibly perplexed spectator in front of Bursztyn’s sculpture, saying, “No wonder automobile replacement parts are out of stock.”57 The cartoonist thus captured the frustration of modern experience —  in this case, the shortage of car parts — rather than the utopian optimism of industrialization as the great class-­leveler that was being promoted by the agents of modernization. The sculpture resonated with those whose experience of the city’s “demographic explosion” was far from orderly or sanitized, the image represented in modernist architecture and its geometric corollary in sculpture. The title of Bursztyn’s erratically assembled rusted metal structure, Gazing North, suggests how absurd it was for nations of the global South to look to the industrial North for tutelage and inspiration; it also, perhaps, was an allusion to the tragic ecological consequences of doing so. While the sculpture’s materials forewarn of a ruinous modernization process, its production also symbolized the exit of women from the domestic interior into the welding garage. In the literature on Bursztyn’s work one can find many photographs of her welding in her studio. Gazing North deploys a postmodern and feminist challenge to the patronizing discourse of modernization emanating from governing parties who enlisted experts to make recommendations about women’s bodies and rights in the interests of development. Jurors awarded the first prize for drawing to Pedro Alcántara Herrán for his pen-­and-­ink sketch De esta tumba, de estas benditas cenizas no nacerán violetas (From This Tomb, from These Blessed Ashes, Violets Will Not Be Born [1965]; figure 2.12). Like Mejía in The Horrible Castigating Woman, Alcántara disfigured the figures in this drawing beyond recognition, suggesting human features such as hands, eyes, open and bleeding mouths, displaced noses and reconfiguring them in the same chaotic manner as the rusted metal of Bursztyn’s Gazing North. According to Traba, the drawing formed a perfect trilogy with Mejía’s and Bursztyn’s works. It “unleashes talent to allow the plume or pencil to lead and speak, accuse, deform, martyrize without scruples: [it is] torrential creation that will not permit any contraction or limit whatsoever,” she wrote. “It is [Alcántara’s] ability to potentiate one element — in this case, the line — to the most radical

2.10  Feliza Bursztyn, Mirando al norte (left), in her studio, 1965, mixed media assemblage. Photograph: Pablo Leyva.

2.11  Velezefe, “Escultura moderna,” El Espacio, August 24, 1965. Image source: Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia.

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2.12  Pedro Alcántara, De esta tumba, de estas benditas cenizas no nacerán violetas, 1965, pen and ink, courtesy of the artist, 50 × 70 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

extreme.”58 Her endorsement of Alcántara seems to be at odds with the reaction of Medellín, who proclaimed: “What grave damage has poster literature done to Colombian art! What great injury when so many works exhibited acquiesce to being simply graphic illustrations for literary texts such as ‘From This Tomb, from These Blessed Ashes, Violets Will Not Be Born.’ ”59 In representing the sterility of violence, according to Medellín, Alcántara’s drawing became the type of panfletismo (overt political art, pamphleteering) that Traba had fought so hard to eradicate a decade earlier. However, Traba saw the opposite in Alcántara’s work: an abstract and highly subjective response to a cruel reality. For Traba, drawing was an ideal medium not only because its immediacy made it the perfect conduit for subjective expression, but also because its material allowed for ease of circulation and patronage from the professional middle class, which she, along with the students, saw as progressive agents of social change. Medellín characterized the salon’s prize winners as purposely using cheap tricks to scandalize their audience rather than to express profound aspects of the national reality. Medellín did not object to representations of violence per se. He had, after all, applauded Obregón’s poetic representation of Violencia in 1962. But he appeared to be offended by low-­culture representations of violence, such as those found in political pamphleteering and the yellow press — that is, “not the motif of violence extracted from profound social pain, from the authentic Co-

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lombian tragedy,” he wrote, “but from a vulgar conflict at a no-­name hotel.”60 Medellín characterized González’s Suicides as vulgar and as degrading to the official character of the National Salon. Even Eduardo Arbeláez, one of the award jurors, admitted that the painting elicited discomfort, saying, “I admit that I could not be left alone with [the prize-­winning works] without experiencing a vague sense of terror. The Terrible Castigating Woman [and] The Sisga Suicides . . . are paintings that I would not desire to own privately. . . . [But] I have no difficulty defending them as new imaginative and creative expressions.”61 Arbeláez also noted that the works could “induce profound fear in decent bourgeoisie without jeopardizing their regular incomes” and admitted that, although the works would not start a revolution, they would alarm those who benefited from the hegemonic order.62 Why would a painting of a suicidal couple frighten the bourgeoisie? In theory, a suicide should be unsettling, regardless of class membership, yet within the context of the Salon González’s painting operated as an antiestablishment statement. The young artists, Traba wrote, “seek to baffle, offend, and, in any case, surprise” the audience for their work.63 As intellectuals radicalized, art became a weapon with which to offend the social and aesthetic values of a closed society and expose its grotesque reality.64 A shift in Traba’s critical concerns toward the extra-­aesthetic would later characterize her position as “art of resistance.” This combative attitude offended those who preferred a constructive rather than destructive approach to cultural development. Medellín picked up on these oppositional tactics. The National Salon, along with other cultural institutions such as mambo, had fought hard to bring abstraction and artistic autonomy to the fore as part of an effort to imagine a modernized and sophisticated nation. The artists of the 1965 National Salon disrupted this daydreaming by putting the image of cruelty, chaos, anarchy, and violence in their audiences’ faces. The economic crisis of 1964 had discredited the utopian rhetoric of the modernization programs pursued by the National Front and Alliance for Progress; the emergence of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia; farc) and Ejército de Liberación Nacional (National Liberation Army; eln) a year earlier expressed this discontent. In the aesthetic realm, the prizewinning artists at the 1965 National Salon paralleled the combative strategies of guerrillas in the countryside who vented their frustration with the failed reforms of the early National Front and were confronting a society with its accepted inequities.65 Many artists in previous decades, among them Débora Arango, Luis Angel Rengifo, and Carlos Correa, had used expressionistic means to break down ossified elite aesthetic values that they considered undemocratic. It was during the mid-­1960s that the National Salon recognized this scrutinizing position. Through their awards, the jurors legitimized works that assaulted social conventions and that addressed violence, urban deterioration, and Colombia’s rapidly changing demographics. The critics’ aggressive, uneasy, and awkward

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responses to those awards reveal a greater frustration with the failures of modernization discourses. Cursilería The Sisga Suicides fits uneasily in this paradigm. Within the context of the National Salon, Suicides served to remind progressive Colombian intellectuals that the battle for women’s legal rights was insufficient. The painting represented a tragic story about a couple — or, more specifically, a woman — punished for deviating from traditional sexual norms. In spite of that, Suicides was received not as a tragedy but as a farce. Critics who reviewed the 1965 National Salon agreed on the use of the term “cursi” to describe the painting’s subject. For them, the question was whether the work of art was a tasteless breach of the boundaries of decorum (Medellín) or whether the artist had deftly introduced lo cursi as a critical and challenging strategy (Traba). Traba understood that a new tone was being represented in the works and in the artists’ attitude. She credited González with being the standard-­bearer for the counterculture challenge to hegemonic notions of taste. While Traba’s criticism had an undeniable impact on González’s career, the reverse could also be argued — that is, that González’s works influenced Traba’s reformulation of theory. What Traba described as black humor or intelligent handling of the cursi in González’s works were the extra-­aesthetic elements that she had overlooked a decade earlier. Traba’s defense of Suicides in 1965 created the theoretical prism through which González’s work would be interpreted for the next decades. “Speaking of black humor, The Sisga Suicides stole the show at the salon,” she wrote. “One of the most interesting characteristics of contemporary art is the adaptation of the cursi in painting: Beatriz González, who besides being an excellent painter has an acute critical mind, could realize this task like no one else within Colombian art. And she has done so with The Sisga Suicides.”66 In contrast to her evaluation of the Lacemakers series at the previous year’s salon, Traba described González’s 1965 submission in terms of “black humor.” This change in Traba’s conception of taste in art is also apparent in her evaluation of the work Obregón entered in 1965, Mujer mirando un eclipse (Woman Gazing at an Eclipse; figure 2.13), which she called “the worst of the salon”: It may seem fierce to assail the work of Alejandro Obregón, but it is not. I am motivated by nonconformity and a stubborn resistance to accept that a painter of his genius, his creative capacity, could present something that is not even ridiculous but a cursilería. It is not that it is poorly painted; it is meagerly and wretchedly painted. He presents a figure from a cheap calendar, some loose

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2.13  Alejandro Obregón, Mujer mirando un eclipse, 1965, oil on canvas. Courtesy of Casa Museo Obregón.

accumulated elements for no apparent reason, some incomprehensible arrows, and a candelabra and proposes a figuration that is definitively dead and buried, which has nothing to do with his previous notable creations.67 Indeed, Obregón’s Woman Gazing at an Eclipse seemed like a respite from his previous salon entries that represented political violence, such as Violencia (1962) and Genocidio (1963), a theme that he reassumed the following year with Ícaro y las avispas (Icarus and the Wasps [1966]). For Traba, Woman Gazing at an Eclipse evoked only cheap giveaway calendars, while in her view González’s Lacemaker Pielroja Calendar astutely engaged with them. In other words, in Traba’s view Obregón simply presented a popular aesthetic sensibility while González reflected on it with critical distance. Traba’s use of taste is complex and prevalent through her art criticism in general; it also reveals that these works were challenging her own preconceptions. Traba’s use of taste was ambivalent, and she oscillated from using it as a means to discredit some works while praising others. It allowed her to assert her aesthetic discernment and own critical distance from artistic subjects, including herself in Carlos Rojas’s painting Marta Traba cuatro veces (Marta Traba Four Times [1965]; figure 2.14). “To make a picture like this one,” she wrote, “one has to have a purified and perfected craft, so that the final ‘object’ can be impeccable. Carlos Rojas indisputably achieves this, because he has always had technical skill and good taste in abundance.”68 In another instance, Traba called on bad taste to applaud an aesthetic strategy in the work of Carlos Granada at the 1965 National

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2.14  Carlos Rojas, Marta Traba cuatro veces, 1965, mixed media. Courtesy of the Carlos Rojas Estate. Colección Banco de la República.

Salon, writing, “Carlos Granada is not a painter who intends to ridicule or defraud the public with an act of bad taste. Instead, his works, which are indisputably of abominable taste, attempt to express in a brutal manner his repugnance toward systems, conventions, and maliciousness in the world that surrounds him.”69 Writing in response to Medellín’s accusation of fraud, Traba clarifies that Granada uses abominable taste as a strategy of social protest, in contrast with Obregón’s miscalculation. “Cursi” became the prime descriptor of González’s work from the debut of Suicides, despite the artist’s insistent disavowal of the term. Traba went as far as titling the text for the 1971 São Paulo Biennial Beatriz González: La cursilería como arte.70 Taste, of course, is subjective; the suicide that took place at the Sisga reservoir seems either tragic or ridiculous depending on the social standing of the spectator. Suicides made intelligible this perceptual divide within a contested social landscape. Traba presupposed an understanding with her reader in not offering an explanation about what exactly was cursi about Suicides. Another critic, Hernando Giraldo, apparently contradicting Traba, Medellín, and others, wrote in a review of the propal calendar that Suicides showed “exquisite taste.” However, he then revealed the type of beauty he associated with the painting: “naivety as beautiful as a sunset in Tolú.”71 Thus, in Giraldo’s eyes, the beauty in Suicides

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was of a facile, untutored, and unsophisticated type that anyone could appreciate without training or proper inculcation, like a painting of a Caribbean sunset with palm trees over pristine white sand.72 The same could be said about Suicides if one compares it with the Lacemaker series. González’s variations on Vermeer exercise a highly tutored form of vision — one based on a modernist gaze that is simultaneously loaded with references to Velázquez and Nicolas de Staël. These works presume a command of art history information that would be relatively rare in Colombia in the 1960s. Suicides required a different kind of vision. Its complexity came from a simple dialogue with the familiar and local that allowed spectators to formulate an interpretation without having to draw from erudite cultural capital. Traba thus clarified the difference between subjects and artist. Alfonso Bonilla Aragón, best known by the pen name Bonar, also made this distinction in his review of two other versions of the painting — The Sisga Suicides II (see figure 2.15) and The Sisga Suicides III (figure 2.16), displayed at the museum La Tertulia in Cali in December 1965 — which he called “variations of the beautifully cursi or the cursimente beautiful.”73 Like Traba, Bonar was careful to draw the distinction between “cursi lovers” and Beatriz González, whom he described as “refined, petite, sweet, and intelligent”: The Sisga Suicides, prized in its original form at the National Salon, is the apotheosis of the cursi, elevated to the aesthetic degree. One needs courage and confidence to elevate those two characters from the yellow press to the walls where the best new painting in Colombia rests. The [subjects] are a pair of workers or empleadillos [little employees] in their Sunday best posing before the artist — as they must have done before the studio photographer with the large-­format camera — before giving up the secret of their love without secrets to El Sisga Reservoir.74 In the passage Bonar stumbles at the intersection between gender and class by portraying the tragic story of suicide as a folkloric Sunday activity. He commends González for her daring act of reassigning a subject from one sector of society to another, yet his disdainful tone in describing the couple as “empleadillos endomingados” (little employees dressed in their Sunday best) reveals much about condescending attitudes held in Colombia toward the underclasses. On numerous occasions, González rejected the term “cursi” as a characterization of her work, preferring desmedido (unmeasured) or desbordado (unbridled). She explained, “Cursi is something minute, small, and local. However, an atmosphere, a temperature for the country does not fit into the concept of the cursi. . . . [Gabriel] García Márquez is not cursi, but he is not measured, either. His attitude and way of thinking has no limits.”75 González insistence on the concept of boundless creativity evades the ridicule inherent in the term “cursi.” Nonetheless, González was deliberately challenging her audience to think crit-

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2.15  Beatriz González, Los suicidas del Sisga II, 1965, oil on canvas, 120 × 100 cm. 2.16  Beatriz González, Los suicidas del Sisga III, 1965, oil on canvas, 100 × 85 cm.

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ically about the connections between aesthetic judgements and social discrimination. Her social origin played a decisive role in the inculcation of an aesthetic sensibility that would inform her questioning of taste with Suicides. Her mother’s rigorous lessons on taste; her father’s democratic convictions; and her own formal education in a Franciscan school for the underprivileged gave González a unique experience in discernment of legitimate culture combined with a firm belief in social equality. Clementina Aranda de González taught her daughters three lessons on taste discernment that would have bearing on González’s later work: elegance relates to measure, just as its corollary, cursi, relates to excess; colors are socially encoded and contextually proper; and sentimentality is ridiculous and to be avoided. These three lessons critically resurfaced in Suicides as strategies of social contestation. The González-­Arandas were a distinguished family of liberal coffee growers (the Gonzálezes) and pedagogues (the Arandas) from the Department of Santander. Beatriz González’s father, Valentín González Rangel, held important offices in government and commerce throughout his life. He was a loyal member of the Liberal Party who believed firmly in democratic values. While Beatriz and her sister, Lucila, began their formal schooling at an elite school directed by the Hermanas de la Presentación (Catholic Presentation Sisters), they were soon transferred to another private Franciscan school founded to educate underprivileged girls. Enrolling their daughters in a socially mixed school was in keeping with both their father’s liberal political outlook and their mother’s (and aunt Esther Aranda’s) pedagogical values.76 Beatriz González described her school experience as “a lovely type of inequality because we were raised with girls who belonged to a different social class from our own. My mother and even the nuns were aware of the differences in taste and comportment. . . . [T]here was no segregation whatsoever.” At home, González’s father molded her sense of social equality but valued a hierarchy of comportment. “My father taught us to treat people of all social classes in a very cordial manner,” she said. “The idea of gente bien — used frequently in Bucaramanga [to connote upper classes] — was not used in our home. We had a sense of nobility in spiritual terms, such as a spiritual elegance — people should be admired for their cordiality with everyone.” Standards of decorum and a behavioral disposition located a person within a social map and were inevitably associated with rigorous inculcation. Clementina Aranda de González, the artist recalled, “had a keen eye for elegance” and habitually educated her daughters in aesthetic propriety. She taught them that elegance was something to be achieved through simplicity, restraint, and discretion. The opposite was undesirable and unacceptable. As González recalled with ironic humor, “My sister and I were educated on how not to be ridiculous.” Her mother feared “loose lips,” she said, “and judged people who had too much tongue [tiene mucha lengua] or went overboard with expensive displays

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[echan la casa por la ventana].” Clementina Aranda de González warned her daughters not to exceed the boundaries of decorum, using as negative examples those who talked, behaved, or consumed excessively or indiscreetly. González also learned that colors were contextually coded and could be considered forms of aesthetic excess if used out of place. She recalled her mother’s lessons in color decorum, saying, Mother would point out the red doors in the town of Rionegro, Santander —  Rionegro was considered a liberal city [the color red is associated with Colombia’s Liberal Party] for its position during the War of a Thousand Days — so liberal that they would put [the statue of] General Santander facing the other way during mass and would even stab the [conservative icon] Virgin of Chiquinquirá. When we passed through Rionegro . . . mother thought the doors painted in red were horrendous, that [the color] was in the wrong place. For Doña Clementina, a red front door was an improper place that excessively advertised the resident’s political affiliation. Certain colors had proper and improper contexts. González used various shades of red throughout Suicides. She took great creative license with the black-­and-­white photograph to depict the subjects’ clothing, painting the man wearing a bright cadmium red blazer. No doubt, for Bogotanos accustomed to a somber clothing palette — usually gray and black — a red blazer would be conspicuously inappropriate or tacky.77 No Cundo-­Boyacense man — neither a gentleman from the Jockey Club or Gun Club of Bogotá nor a peasant or gardener — would be caught dead (pun intended) in a red blazer, especially while posing for a solemn last picture.78 The artist’s choice of red therefore unequivocally signified inappropriate excess across class lines. Traba described González as an avid colorist since her days at Uniandes and even found affinities between the vibrant palette of Suicides and the paintings of Henri Matisse. “Beatriz González has always defined herself as a colorist,” she wrote, “but with Suicides comes a perfect domination of chromatic resources. Her palette, which reminds us of the fulminating richness of Matisse especially in the oranges and greens, suddenly picks up grays of surprising delicacy.”79 In Suicides, the gray yellow hues of the faces, which capture those in the fading photographic reproduction, contrasts with the primary colors of the clothing and flowers. González framed the central portion of the canvas with dark maroon paint to emphasize the brightness of the subjects’ clothing — the woman’s bright emerald green dress and cerulean blue headscarf; the man’s pristine white shirt, contrasting with the red blazer and matching hatband. It was the excess of these intense colors that prompted Bonar to call the subjects “little employees dressed in their Sunday best,” a reference not to elegance but to their excess — the textile equivalent to “echar la casa por la ventana.”80 While Bonar ridiculed the couple depicted in the black-­and-­white photograph, he responded to González’s colorful

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version and thus rehearsed an elite tendency to generalize the lower classes as a homogeneous mass. The red flowers serve as the focal point in The Sisga Suicides. They are centered directly above the merging hands and outlined with a dark green pyramidal section below. It is not clear in the black-­and-­white source photograph what colors the subjects wore or what color the flowers they chose were, although they are a light color, most likely white or yellow. González fused the couple and the flowers by choosing subtly contrasting and equivocal red hues, such as the cadmium red of the blazer, the suggestive scarlet band around the woman’s neck, and the vermillion and persimmon flowers. Furthermore, the red flowers function as symbols of carnal love that interlace the lovers, thus violating another rule of decorum: excessive sentimentality. Indeed, the notion of decency fostered by the González-­Aranda family had close associations with taste and comportment. González described her experiences as an adolescent by saying, When we were older and had boyfriends, [our parents] would tell us not to “walk around everywhere like blind girls holding hands with your boyfriends.” Mother, I think, found her way to educate through criticism. She made us see what was cursi. Therefore, in a certain manner we were even repressed . . . so that no one would ridicule us. . . . Mother thought that one should never do anything embarrassing . . . or say anything silly, even in literature. I remember when my first boyfriend sent me a letter that I thought was so cursi that I broke up with him. I thought what he wrote was very ridiculous. That sense of the ridiculous was inculcated in me by my mother.81 Any behavior deemed sentimental was discouraged. According to these standards, not much could be more ridiculous, or cursi, than Suicides. The love story was saccharine; the suicide itself was an excessive overreaction to sexual desire and intercourse, and González painted the sitters wearing loud and inappropriate colors for their final picture. Suicide may well have seemed like an overreaction to an urban middle-­and upper-­class audience. By 1965, a large majority of upper-­class and upper-­middle-­ class women in Bogotá had access to some form of artificial birth control through private doctors, private clinics, and drugstores.82 Yet for many, birth control was still a moral issue deeply influenced by the Catholic Church’s prohibition of contraception. It was also in 1965 that the physician Fernando Tamayo opened the first Profamilia clinic in Bogotá, which provided fertility services to middle-­and lower-­class urban women and eventually became the largest planned-­parenthood organization in the world.83 Before 1965, oral contraceptives and intrauterine devices were accessible primarily to educated urban women in families with middle to high incomes.84 Nonetheless, according to a survey taken in 1964, most urban women were open to using some form of birth control.85 The Catholic Church

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hierarchy, recognizing the global challenges posed by overpopulation, had also been cautious and vague on the issue of birth-­control pills; following Vatican II’s aggiornamento (1962 – 1965), devout Catholics were awaiting Rome’s response to oral contraceptives that suppressed ovulation in women and prevented pregnancy.86 It was not until July 25, 1968, that Pope Paul VI issued the encyclical Humanae Vitae declaring all forms of artificial birth control to be against Roman Catholic doctrine.87 The Colombian church hierarchy launched a public attack on the National Front’s sponsorship of planned-­parenthood programs, including Profamilia, even though Profamilia’s later success in the countryside was due in large part to its cooperation with Catholic Acción Popular’s Responsible Procreation initiative.88 Even without intervention by the church hierarchy, the task was monumental, considering that issues such as gender inequality, domestic violence, and sex were taboo not only among urban elites but especially among rural peasants.89 It is important to note the radical reduction in Colombia’s fertility rates (the rate in Bogotá alone dropped 45 percent between 1964 and 1972) and dramatic increase in contraceptive use show that women across class lines were ready and willing to take control of their bodies and sexuality.90 Yet in 1965, as I show in the pages ahead, decisions about women’s sexuality were the domain not of women but of statesmen, international foundations, and religious elites, who conceived of them, along with the lower classes, as inextricably bound to excessive sentimentality, sexuality, and reproduction and thus in need of control. From the perspective of someone who would not suffer these social, economic, and moral consequences — notably, the critics of the 1965 National Salon — the double-­suicide at the Sisga reservoir would have seemed excessive, antiquated, and “cursi,” a term that unequivocally connected feminized notions of sentimentality and melodrama with the lower classes. So when Bonar applauded The Sisga Suicides by saying “abajo la inteligencia, arriba el corazón” (down with intelligence, up with the heart), he was celebrating the loosening of stifling social norms while retaining gender and class condescension.91 As we will see in greater detail in chapter 4, Colombia’s governing elites had long stigmatized the lower classes as disorderly, hysterical, and violent to justify limiting their participation in democracy. Excessive Fertility, Population Control, and Women in Bogotá Alberto Lleras Camargo delivered a paradigmatic Cold War oratory in his inaugural speech at the Pan American Assembly on Population in Cali less than ten days before the 1965 National Salon opened. He proclaimed that demographic explosion was the single greatest threat to civilized humankind and would bring misery and murderous communism to underdeveloped nations. “If we keep multiplying ourselves in ever shorter periods,” he remarked, “we condemn our

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children and our grandchildren, and many more successive generations, to very bitter days. . . . We destroy our hope of takeoff toward economic development and social welfare.”92 In the speech, he was expressing widespread international anxiety about the consequences of world population growth, especially in the global South. As an important component of modernization and inter-­American cooperation, population control was a central issue for Lleras Camargo in his persistent defense of Colombia’s restored democracy. Lleras Camargo and the Colombian governing elites were not the only ones who feared the impoverished masses. The process of post – World War II decolonization in Africa and Asia stimulated deep-­seated anxiety among Western authorities concerning the “newly discovered poverty” in the global South.93 After a trip to Japan, John D. Rockefeller III became deeply concerned about the effects of overpopulation on the world’s political stability, prompting him to create the Population Council in 1952. Statesmen around the world invoked predictions by Thomas Malthus (1766 – 1834) of calamitous famines that would ensue if overpopulation were not curtailed. For Lleras Camargo, the Rockefeller Foundation and Ford Foundations, and the Population Council, population control was a matter of global urgency if the “free” world was to safeguard itself against communism. Unchecked demographic explosion would make revolution and communism appealing. The ensuing misery would lead to massive extermination through hunger and repression, as Lleras Camargo characterized Soviet, Chinese, and other communist modes of population control.94 The United Nations held its first Conference on Population in Rome in 1954, with a second, held in Belgrade on August 30 – September 10, 1965, taking place just weeks after the Pan-­American Assembly on Population in Cali.95 That same year, the United Nations commissioned the International Planned Parenthood Federation as an adviser to its Department of Economic and Social Affairs.96 According to Lleras Camargo and proponents of population control, demographic explosion was also one of the greatest obstacles to economic and social development. He argued that, through scientific and technical advancements, industrialized nations had triumphed over epidemics and diseases that previously had kept population growth in check. While the process of industrialization in Europe had correlated population growth to economic growth, the inverse could be stated about underdeveloped or developing countries, where access to modern medicine had significantly decreased mortality rates while increased fertility rates taxed available material resources and services. Therefore, excessive fertility undermined a nation’s ability to improve the quality of life for all of its population, a professed goal of development. With mortality rates falling, Lleras Camargo considered it urgent to reduce natality rates, prompting him to explicitly declare, “The human solution, the Christian solution, the economic and politically sound solution is birth control — the sooner, the better.”97 Leaders of both

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the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party regarded the former president as the most trusted and respected public figure of his time; thus, his endorsement of birth control was a milestone moment for Colombian society. Lleras Camargo’s impeccable reputation as a man of reason and measure (the New York Times characterized him as “the great conciliator”) lent enormous weight to a new era for birth control. Although family planning programs were just beginning to emerge in Colombia in 1965, Lleras Camargo’s speech launched a dynamic public debate about population growth, development, the threat of communism, and social misery. The National Front never developed an official population policy; yet through national and international funds, Colombia became an exemplary case in reducing fertility rates over the following decades.98 From the mid-­1960s through the mid-­1990s, the average number of children per woman decreased by more than 65 percent, and 70 percent more women used artificial contraceptives.99 This dramatic reduction in childbirth is remarkable, given the great resistance on moral grounds that was coming from social conservatives and the Catholic Church, as well as the formidable opposition mounted by leftists who characterized population control as a form of U.S. imperialism.100 The church and conservatives were particularly outspoken after the papal encyclical Humanae Vitae was issued in 1968, denouncing from the pages of El Siglo and church pulpits the National Front’s funding of fertility research and planned-­parenthood programs, especially during the presidency of Carlos Lleras Restrepo (1966 – 1970). The left pointed toward international funding sources, especially the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Rockefeller Foundation and Ford Foundation, and the Milibank Memorial Fund, as well as the Population Council, to denounce the United States’ involvement in Colombia’s internal affairs.101 This was not unfounded, given that the National Front government, through Lleras Camargo, had worked closely with Washington, DC, on other delicate issues, such as redirecting military aid restricted for external threats toward counterinsurgency operations in an internal crisis. The collaboration between private and public organizations allowed the state to move these programs with some degree of discretion.102 The temperature of the Cold War was beginning to rise, and women’s bodies became a front line in the battle. Lleras Camargo thought it was facile to blame the Catholic Church for the population dilemma on the basis of its ostensible failure to “prevent, with all its stubborn moral rigidity, millions of Latin Americans from living in non-­ traditional families not blessed by [the church’s] sacraments and millions of children from being born into illegitimacy.”103 The true culprits, he believed, were the impulsive and reckless lower classes. According to this logic, the lack of sexual restraint among the masses led to excessive illegitimate births and increased illegal abortions and child abandonment that resulted in growing numbers of street

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urchins crowding the country’s big cities.104 Irresponsible parenting was endangering the well-­being of humankind. Unsurprisingly, the discourse on human reproduction took on a moralistic and paternalistic tone, employing phrases such as “responsible parenthood” and “responsible procreation.”105 Neither Lleras Camargo’s speech nor the public debates that followed it discussed women or their reproductive rights. Rather, they were illustrative of Cold War politics and modernization theories, saturated with condescending remarks about the poor, whom Lleras Camargo characterized as disorderly, unproductive, irresponsible, and prone to violence. Population control, therefore, was about controlling not just reproduction and sexuality but all forms of behavior. This is why the term “cursi,” rather than “kitsch,” is so revealing of the latent anxieties beneath the nervous laughter elicited by Suicides. “Cursi” connotes excessive behavior over tasteless objects. The Sisga Suicides is a modern painting about a cursi subject, an excessive behavior related to the clashing of traditional and modern social norms engendered by massive demographic shifts from the countryside to the cities. The international discourse on population control focused more on fertility than on population migration. However, the more dramatic demographic explosion was unfolding as peasants and provincial folk moved to the cities. Colombia before the 1950s was a primarily rural, agricultural society. By 1965, it had transformed into an urban one. In Bogotá, this transformation was most pronounced between the censuses of 1951 and 1964, when the city’s population increased from 831,800 to 1,878,000.106 In a little more than a decade, the number of city residents more than doubled. Infrastructure did not keep pace with urbanization, and by 1965 Bogotá had massive problems due to its inability to accommodate newcomers with employment, housing, and services. In his speech to the Pan American Assembly on Population, Lleras Camargo attributed population growth to improved medicine and reduced mortality, although this rural-­to-­urban migration was motivated by other factors that included political violence, the lack of educational opportunities in the rural areas, the expectation of improved lifestyles that contrasted with strenuous agricultural work, and the loosening of social norms from stifling traditional values.107 Lleras Camargo considered demographic explosion the gravest threat to Colombia’s restored democracy. Reminding his audience of the uncontrollable rural violence of earlier years, he warned of continuous rural-­to-­urban “invasions.”108 Demographic transformations nonetheless had profound effects on the lives of women. Paul Schultz’s statistical research shows that roughly the same number of men and women migrated out of rural areas, yet more women than men tended to migrate to the cities. Women had more to gain from urban relocation, not only in terms of labor and educational opportunities, but also by leaving the rural social structures.109 In his research in the Barrio Tulcán in the city of

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Popayán, Michael Whiteford found that “for women in particular the process of migration is a liberating, or freeing process.”110 Deeply pious rural society in Colombia adhered to the strictest norms of gender behavior. The Catholic Church held great power in the countryside and defined women’s roles as subservient wife to a husband, caretaker of children, and domestic laborer.111 Women who migrated to the city found that urban realities advanced their experience beyond the home — out of necessity rather than ideological conviction. Whiteford also found that more women were forced to make important extra-­household decisions and to become engaged in economic activities to ensure their own and their families’ successful transition to the urban environment.112 Nonetheless, these significant changes in the real lives of migrant women did not alter their perceptions of the “ideal.”113 Many women who experienced freedom that was unfathomable in a rural context maintained a belief in the desirability of traditional marriage, as well as a feminine ideal of chastity and abnegation. It is not clear what effect rural-­to-­urban migration had on men and machismo, although from the suicide note left behind by Antonio Martínez Bonza, one can speculate that he held on to stringent Catholic notions of sin and sexuality. González herself was a migrant, like many young women who left their homes for larger cities to further their educations. While she came from a prominent family and was entrusted to the care of her aunts in Bogotá, the fact that she entered an elite university and set up a studio with her classmates placed her in a sphere that traditionally was reserved for men. González’s migration to the capital city allowed for an increased chance to participate in public life. As a member of a privileged class, she could feasibly benefit from the legal gains feminists had achieved in the previous thirty years. Women had legally won the battle to manage property in 1932 and the right to a higher education in 1933.114 Although the military regime of Rojas Pinilla had granted women the legal right to vote and to be elected to office, it was not until 1958 under the National Front, when González was studying in Bogotá, that women could actually participate in an election. It is not clear how these new political privileges translated into the social experience of women of different social classes.115 Nevertheless, it is one thing to pass a new law and another to change deeply held social norms. Like the discourse on population control, debates about women’s suffrage rarely considered what was best for women. This traditional attitude also applied to their rights to higher education. In the children’s journal Rín Rín, women, presumed to be mothers, were addressed with the words, “It is for you to study and for you that all schools have been opened. The time when women were admired as dolls has passed. The fatherland needs mothers who can cultivate generations that are good and innumerable, wise and conscious, and that is your mission for the future.”116 The magazine’s editors considered education a women’s patriotic and maternal duty, even under the reformist climate

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of Alfonso López Pumarejo’s Revolución en Marcha. After all, it was the Liberal Party that was alarmed by the role women had played during the rise of Francisco Franco’s Falangism in Spain. Some members of the Conservative Party had championed the right to vote for women because they believed women’s virtue would ensure the propagation of traditional Catholic values; others, however, saw it as the demise of the family and loss of rights for children. Some Conservative Party members of the 1933 Constitutional Assembly believed that women should participate politically on equal footing with men because “they, through their moderation, their accurate and truthful instincts, can soften our democratic struggles by imposing their morality, order, sound judgement, and decency onto electoral debates.”117 These terms were the same ones used to praise Lleras Camargo as a natural leader and that can be considered the opposite of cursi. Of course, the environment that González and other women entering their professional and reproductive lives faced in the 1960s was different. They were still navigating a male-­dominated world. Nonetheless, more and more women were holding important positions in the public sphere, including General Rojas Pinilla’s daughter María Eugenia Rojas. In the arts and cultural sphere, many women played leading roles, including Traba in art criticism, Fanny Mikey in theater, and Gloria Valencia de Castaño in television. While most of the celebrated artists were still men, many women were regarded as important contributors to their generation, including Judith Márquez, Cecilia Porras, and Lucy Tejada, as well as Feliza Bursztyn, Beatriz Daza, and González. Yet traditional notions of femininity were pervasive, and the subject of women’s sexuality was still taboo. Indeed, in the following year, Bernardo Salcedo won first prize at the Dante Alighieri International Salon of Painting, held at the Italian Embassy, for Lo que Dante nunca supo (Beatriz amaba el control de la natalidad (What Dante Never Knew: Beatrice Loved Birth Control [1966]; figure 2.17). The assemblage presents the audience with an open white box that creates a theatrical zone with pronounced foreshortening, paying homage to the invention of linear perspective during the Italian Renaissance. Toward the horizon line one sees the opening of a second box — a box within a box — from which several eggs spill out. In the background, three small baby-­doll hands reach out as if hatching from an egg. Salcedo pairs a satirical title with his opened, sterile white box that exposes infants’ hands and abundant eggs — at least fourteen eggs are about to tumble forward — to comment on the scientific discourse on excessive human fertility. It is likely that a Bogotá audience in 1966 would have associated this white cube with a clichéd symbol of modern art institutions, as well as public debates about modernization and population control. The work was denounced as an insult to the Italian people, yet the press never mentioned how it connected to the Vatican’s ongoing deliberation of birth control. In fact, critics defended the work based on its for-

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2.17  Bernardo Salcedo, Lo que Dante nunca supo (Beatriz amaba el control de la natalidad), 1966, mixed media assemblage, 120 × 80 × 87.7 cm. Courtesy of the Bernardo Salcedo Estate. Photograph: Ernesto Monsalve.

mal innovation as representative of “new tendencies in art,” not on the basis of its critical or satirical stance. The fact that the critical press did not openly discuss the elephant in the room — that is, women’s sexuality (“Beatrice Loves Birth Control”) and its comedic relation to modernization — reveals how women’s sexuality and reproductive rights continued to be taboo in 1966.118 Although a heated debate about population control dominated the public arena, Colombian society had still not come to terms with the political character of private life and conduct. The double-­suicide, or murder-­suicide, that took place at the Sisga reservoir was an attempt to preserve sexual morality within a charged political atmosphere. González’s The Sisga Suicides thus confronts the viewer with an excavation of the layers of representation implicit in the construction of gendered subjectivities. It is an interrogation of the role of representation in gender constitution and discrimination. Just as we continue to understand Mexico’s Frida Kahlo as an artist who conflated private tragedy with the public realm, González took a specific incident and raised it to the status of history painting about pervasive social attitudes that lead to such crimes and dismissive attitudes. Both engage a couple’s tragedy, a private moment, that has broader

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implications for gender and violence when brought into official cultural debates. In this light, the suicidal couple can be considered victims of changing social norms within a traditional machista society, while Suicides punctures the promises of modernization discourse just as Kahlo’s works punctured the emancipatory rhetoric of the Mexican Revolution in feminist terms. This feminist attitude was not pervasive in either 1930s Mexican society or 1960s Colombia.119 So when Carlos Medellín reviewed Suicides at the National Salon and described the banality of a “vulgar conflict at a no-­name hotel,” he revealed unchallenged attitudes that cast violence in the private sphere, or cruelty behind closed doors, as less serious than public violence, the “profound social pain” of political brutality during La Violencia.120 González not only painted a private tragedy; perhaps more significantly, she painted it for the National Salon. Public display in this highly visible and official venue charged the work with discursive power. Rather than thinking of Suicides as a humorous representation of excessive popular melodrama, one can view its prominence at the National Salon as a prompt to think about it within the historical and allegorical genre as a tragedy of conservative modernization. The year 1965 was critical for population control discourse worldwide. Articles concerning both the populations conferences in Cali and Belgrade crowded international newspapers at the same time that González was displaying her painting depicting a enamored gardener and domestic worker posing for a photo before their death. Thus, we need to consider the insistence of critics in describing the subject of the painting as “cursi” in relation to Cold War anxieties over excessive fertility, women’s sexuality, and population growth, as well over the potential for revolution in the global South and invasions of cities by rural masses. With this in mind, let us return to the Seventeenth National Salon of Colombian Artists, where the awarded works contested notions of refinement and good taste, as well as traditional representations of femininity. In a society that valued feminine virtue as political and social capital and feminine beauty so much that beauty pageants were at the heart of the nation’s identity, the brutalized female body of The Horrible Castigating Woman (see figure 2.9) would have been deeply upsetting — even as the subject represented a perpetrator rather than a victim. Mejía depicts a violated woman’s body, her head diminished, if not decapitated. Her reproductive organs take central stage, but they are bloody and mutilated: her vaginal canal is swollen and lacerated; her pregnant belly seems to be under X-­ray scrutiny; and she is covered with blood that flows from her neck, down her breasts, toward her vagina. The composition looks more like an autopsied corpse than a dominatrix. The title derails any facile reading of the image, but the artist leaves no doubt about the violence on the woman’s body. Alcántara’s pen-­and-­ink drawing (see figure 2.12) is also grotesque and presents an image that is difficult

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to discern. The scene could be read as violent killing of a couple after sexual intercourse. The man (at the left), who is perhaps handcuffed, has his head hanging down and his penis exposed and mutilated. The woman (at the right) seems to be screaming in horror, her breasts depleted and her womb severed and bleeding. To the right of the postcoital couple is a large head with open mouth, perhaps an aborted child. To the left of the composition two strange figures under one top hat turn away from the gruesome scene. The artists denies us a clear narrative, but his title, From This Tomb, from These Blessed Ashes, Violets Will Not Be Born, alludes to sterility and violence. Bursztyn, conversely, was challenging standards of femininity just by engaging materials (factory leftovers) and practices (welding) in her prizewinning sculpture Gazing North that were typically associated with masculinity.121 There was something illegitimate about Bursztyn’s incursions into the mechanic’s garage — she was no longer the object represented in art but the actor who molded her environment. Reactions to Bursztyn’s salon entry demonstrate how the construction of masculinity was represented in the material world, and therefore how the “feminine” was produced through denial of her subjectivity (see figure 2.10). After considering these works and the underlying critique of González’s Suicides, it becomes clear that the 1965 National Salon was characterized by provocation rather than consecration. Michael Baxandall provides an insightful analogy to this process of cultural realignment by comparing it to a billiard game in which each new contribution within the artistic field (the ball being played) repositions the remaining agents (the balls on the table).122 Likewise, in 1965 artists came to the billiard table of the National Salon with great fury and repositioned all of the other actors in the Colombian art world. They even discredited some heavyweights or eliminated them from the arena. González’s billiard game was a victory. By introducing a new artistic source —  in this case, the reproduction of a photograph from the sensationalist press — she simultaneously challenged the conventional sources, such as Obregón’s female deminude and Jaramillo’s abstract paintings, by making them look outmoded. In her own work, González turned the taboo into totem, the tabloid picture into a viable history painting for the National Salon. Her triumph at mambo the year before with the sophisticated Lacemaker paintings proved that the issue of taste was a thematic choice and not a provincial handicap for the young artist from Bucaramanga. Bad taste, from this vantage point, was humorous, not pathetic. Although mambo launched González’s career in 1964, her polemical position in the history of Colombian art was established the following year with The Sisga Suicides at the 1965 National Salon. Her award signaled a shift in aesthetic values from optimism about international modernism to a more general malaise over the idea of modernization as a whole. However, the use of the term “cursi” to de-

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2.18  Feliza Bursztyn welding in her studio, c. 1965. Photograph: Pablo Leyva.

scribe the narrative, but not the painting, reveals the class condescension implicit in both the National Front’s modernization discourse and among the letrados, the group who considered themselves the most progressive sector of society. In many ways, the 1965 National Salon lit a slow fuse. The nervous laughter generated by this paradigm shift anticipated the belligerence and radicalization that would come in 1967.

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3.1  Beatriz González, El jardín de las Hespérides, 1967, oil on canvas, 110 × 136 cm.

chapter 3

“Cut It Out” Impropriety at the MAMBO On May 30, 1967, Beatriz González opened her second solo exhibition at the Bogotá Museum of Modern Art (mambo). She chose to exhibit fourteen paintings based on reproductions of commercial devotional, allegorical, and commonplace media pictures she had been collecting since she discovered the thematic source of her work The Sisga Suicides in the pages of El Tiempo.1 As she did in Suicides, González appropriated existing images that circulated widely and transformed them into faux collages (figure 3.1). Rather than re-­present a single photograph in collage-­like flat color planes, the paintings in the second mambo exhibition actually reference multiple sources lifted from private and popular culture and painted onto canvas as if they were coarsely cut and boldly juxtaposed. With their references to mass and religious media and private scrapbooking, the canvases drew attention to the process by which people, including the artist, appropriate and transform images to serve their individual or collective purposes. By layering multiple thematic and stylistic registers, the works in the mambo exhibition of 1967 function as allegories of both individual and collective identity constitutions. Within the picture plane and as a collective body of works, the exhibition set into tension dichotomies instrumentalized by the modernization discourse, such as traditional and modern, religious and secular, and backward and advanced. Simultaneously, the works entered into dialectical relation with their site of display: the museum had recently relocated to the campus of the National University. The exhibition references the process by which modern subjectivities are constituted and opened a space for reconstituting resistant collective identities. By 1967, Cold War tensions had been escalating throughout Latin America as counterinsurgency objectives overrode development projects and military dictatorships sprang up with help from the United States. Consequently, the norm of the day was repressive violence against young intellectuals and students who increasingly identified with Cuba’s barbudos (bearded revolutionaries), especially

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Ernesto “Ché” Guevara, who at that moment was being pursued by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (cia) in Bolivia and who would be executed a few months later, in October. The prior year in Colombia, the famed guerrilla priest Camilo Torres, who was also a professor of sociology at the National University, was killed in combat, intensifying the revolutionary conviction of many students.2 The highly politicized campus served as an arena for protests and strikes by radicalized professors and students. Less than two weeks after the exhibition’s inauguration, the military invaded the university. Few critics reviewed the exhibition, and proportionally fewer spectators visited the museum. Reviewers who braved the precarious atmosphere described González’s exhibition using language that evoked grievances expressed by student protestors. Furthermore, reviewers found in González’s works an opportunity to express their enthusiasm for regional resistance to internationalism as a criterion for assessing aesthetic value. The Marxist writer Luis Fernando Lucena, who, along with the radical artist Clemencia Lucena, founded Editorial Bandera Roja (Red Flag Press), wrote: The figures that we find in [González’s] pictures, surrounded by cursilería, are not the product of something accidental but totally the contrary: they have been extracted from things that are very characteristic and representative of our milieu. Neither are her exuberant colors accidental; they are the product of a sincere observation of our people and their “bad taste.” In other words, Beatriz González has extracted her painting from the environment to which it belongs and from a deep experience of it. A true identification with that naïve aesthetic sensibility seems to exist in the artist. This may be a result of a profound identification or a superficial sympathy that Beatriz González experienced, and it may or may not guide her in a positive direction. If it is a real identification, it is probable that in these creations by this artist we are witnessing the beginning of an art with authentic properties that allows lo nuestro to have a universal prognosis.3 González’s works traffic in irony. What Lucena and others see as “that which is ours” are references to competing forms of universalism: classicism, Catholicism, and modernism. Communism looms in the margins as the threatening other present in the González’s subtle references to avant-­garde practices, the radical politics of the university, and the fear that was motivating the National Front’s conservative modernizing reforms. What Lucena diagnosed as characteristic of “our milieu” was not thematically or stylistically determined. Rather he responded to the process by which the popular classes appropriate universal referents and transform them into cursilería. “Lo nuestro” no longer signified the essence of Americanism, as it had for the so-­called indigenistas; nor did it signal a kind of updating — an art of “our time” — as it had for Traba just a decade earlier.



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Instead, “that which was ours” was located in popular dispositions found in urban spectacles, religious rituals, and “bad taste.” This was a take-­it-­or-­leave-­it attitude that accompanied theories of cultural resistance to imperialism: it may not be pretty, it seemed to say, but it is ours. It was also a declaration of independence from what was regarded as good taste by extrangerizante (“foreignizing”) elites and their reliance on foreign expert critics to discern aesthetic quality.4 Lucena conveys a broader turn in Latin American high culture toward the vernacular and regional, manifest primarily in the literary boom that was under way but that was also developed in Traba’s theories of resistance. After all, 1967 was the year that Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Hélio Oiticica’s “On Adversity We Thrive” were published as part of the Tropicália movement in Brazil. Intellectuals blurred the lines of popular and erudite culture as an antidote to the alienation of highly industrialized societies imported through the mass media or, according to Traba, the “terrorism of the avant-­gardes.”5 Under this logic, according to Lucena, the “bad taste” of “our people” manifest in exuberant colors recast cursilería as authenticity. As noted in the introduction, reviews of the mambo exhibition of 1967 consolidated González’s reputation as a painter of the tacky, the lowbrow, and that which is ours; somewhere in the relationship of these concepts is an aesthetic critique of modernization processes that resonated with the growing opposition to the National Front government and its close relationship to U.S. aid programs. By setting into dialectic relation traditional oil painting and avant-­garde collage and scrapbooking, González made deliberately unstable, multivalent, and ambiguous compositions that allowed spectators to associate her works with the belligerent historical events unfolding around mambo and the National University. Collage and Modernity Nine of the canvases shown in the 1967 exhibition reference popular chromolithographs of devotional or sentimental mythological scenes; three paintings represent children’s commercial photography; one is a painted rendition of a nuclear family from a newspaper clipping; and one, titled Lassie, is based on the American television series, which was airing at the time in Colombia (see figure 3.19). González painted in oil on canvas sharp and coarse edges that look like torn, cut, and pasted paper to create the illusion of mixed-­media collage. In Ánimas benditas (Holy Souls [1967]; figure 3.2) she juxtaposed several figures from identifiably different sources, implied by differentiated coloring or discoloring of the green, blue, and flesh tones. Holy Souls gives the impression that papers of different colors — burnt sienna, maroon, black, and brown — were cut or torn and layered over a salmon-­colored base. A jagged green contour divides the burnt

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3.2  Beatriz González, Ánimas benditas, 1967, oil on canvas, 120 × 100 cm.

sienna top and burgundy middle, suggesting forceful tearing. The middle of the left edge looks like fragments of hastily ripped maroon paper glued back onto the green plane underneath. The figures are equally distorted, which prompted Traba to comment, “[González] has amputated parts of the figures and stretched them and flattened them; she has made them opulent or dwarfed them, operating within the limits of color. What is cruel about these deformities is softened by the harmonic and perfect distribution of chromatic zones.”6 Traba’s language picks up on the violent alteration inherent in collage making: repurposing existing images through cutting and disfiguring, coloring, and reconfiguring. In addition, González prominently painted large photo corners on many of the canvases. In doing so, she mounted another referent onto avant-­garde collage and photomontage — that is, private scrapbooking. González’s choice of collage and scrapbook aesthetics was a calculated engagement with the history of modernism, but her choice of oil paint, as discussed in chapter 2, collapses the dichotomy of modern and traditional that is implicit



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in an evolutionary narrative of artistic development. A brief overview of avant-­ garde collage proves insightful to understanding González’s provocation. In the late nineteenth century, Antonio Gaudí built walls with tile fragments while Ruben Darío composed eclectic poetry that captured both the violence of colonialism and the creative potential of cultural hybridity.7 In the context of the early twentieth-­century Europe, Cubist collages from the outset were an appropriation of commercial and private visual practices. Looking to newspaper and magazine layouts, city walls covered in pasted posters, and the private practice of making scrapbooks, Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, Georges Braque, Diego Rivera, and other collage makers captured new modes of viewership and readership that negated an academic contemplative gaze. Instead, they evoked a new and modern, fragmented, nonsequential engagement with the visual world. The term “collage” itself refers to the act of cutting and pasting. Therefore, the term alludes to the participatory and constructive relation of the viewer or reader to the avalanche of visual and textual information presented and re-­presented in urban life. While collage and scrapbook makers may deliberately have juxtaposed distinct cut-­out materials to make controlled, albeit ambivalent, provocations, city walls, newspapers, and magazine layouts set up chance dialectical relations. This form of dialectical viewing emphasized its transience and contingency, where the fragments enter into reciprocal and mutually constitutive relation with one another and foster nonsequential, kaleidoscopic visual experiences.8 Thematically and stylistically, González’s faux collages overtly set Cubist collage and Dada photomontage against their own negations — that is, by fixing collage’s ephemerality in oil paint and emphasizing the expressive and mystical potential of photomontage, they become allegorical.9 González witnessed a critical row over Limones amarillos (Yellow Lemons [1963]; figure 3.3), which her professor Carlos Rojas was making while González was his student at the University of Los Andes (Uniandes). When Rojas first exhibited the collage, it sparked a debate over whether he was “belatedly” imitating Cubist collages. Critics such as Walter Engel defended Rojas for his experimental appropriation of the medium and genre. Neo-­avant-­garde artists revived collage as commercial objects and mass-­media images increasingly saturated the visual realm at higher volumes and velocities. Pop artists in England and the United States, Otra Figuración artists in Argentina, Situationists and Nouveau Réalistes in France, and myriad artists who were beginning to build installations in the 1960s appropriated existing visual culture and offered new and potentially subversive reformulations. These multimedia rearrangements of found objects critically engaged the capitalist belief that society could consume itself into equality. By extracting, reconfiguring, and recontextualizing the visual world, artists produced charged but also deliberately ambiguous works that invited spectators to

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3.3  Carlos Rojas, Limones amarillos, c. 1963, collage, 65 × 53 cm. Courtesy of the Carlos Rojas Estate. Colección Banco de la República.

engage their material world critically and imagine alternatives to it. Whether as an antiestablishment offense or in the efforts to bridge the gap between art and life, mixed-­media collage and assemblages allowed artists to deconstruct and simultaneously create something new. Therefore, collage was related to a particularly modern sensibility, but as the example of Rojas illustrates, it was located on an evolutionary grid that was at once both modern and outmoded. González’s works engage this history uneasily yet corrosively. By referencing collage and not three-­dimensional assemblages, as she began to do three years later, she internalized the contradictions prompted by the medium. Put differently, the outmoded quality of this modern sensibility echoed the 1965 photograph of the suicidal couple that seemed to belong to an era long past.



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Collect, Cut Up, Display The fractured, fragmented image planes of collage have served as easy metaphors for social turmoil in the twentieth century. But the sense of disjunctive representation and narrative disruption in collage drew artists to the medium as they sought to exploit its intrinsic potential for visual discordance to amplify a specific mood or message. The choice was no less motivated by these factors in Colombia in the 1960s, where modernization, industrialization, war, and class tensions at times violently transformed social roles and hierarchies that destabilized scopic regimes. Migrants from the countryside restructured their own, hybrid identities within urban neighborhoods, factories, and universities and thus engaged in dynamic negotiations among their native culture, the realities of urban life, and the imaginary expectations of what it meant to be urban. Moreover, elites pushing agendas of modernization saw the university as the premier avenue for Colombians to advance socially and economically: young people were being educated to embrace a new type of modern subjectivity. Thus, the university served as a site of subjective negotiation, personal reinvention, and — more significant — interpersonal exchanges that were rare in Colombia’s highly stratified society. With this in mind, I suggest that González’s painted faux collages materially embody the contradictions of control and mobility that characterized elite modernization programs. González’s images, both fixed and fragmented, mirrored the tensions of her moment. The National Front capitalized on opportunities to engineer social change only insofar as that change served to safeguard and reproduce the established orders of power. After La Violencia and the dictatorship of Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, the National Front regime was intent on preventing armed revolution through various policy reforms that included population control, as well as agrarian and educational reforms, among others. Education served as a means to control social mobility.10 The National Front invested heavily in higher education by increasing the percentage of the national budget dedicated to this purpose and by soliciting both private funding and foreign aid for the expansion of the national and regional university systems.11 Under the rectorship of José Félix Patiño (1964 – 1966) the National University went through massive modernization that included streamlining the curriculum; merging some faculties and creating others; and building the León de Greiff auditorium, the central library, a student center, and several campus museums. The relocation of mambo to the campus was part of Patiño’s reforms. These developments coincided with the belief that a growing university student body would not only secure the technical expertise Colombia needed for economic and social development, but it would consolidate a robust middle class necessary for democratic institutions to thrive. Just as former President Alberto Lleras Camargo called on policy makers to sidestep demographic catastro-

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phe via birth-­control policies, the National Front sought to modernize university education as a means of securing social reforms that would avert a communist-­ inspired revolution. During this period, women entered the university system in record numbers, launched professional careers, and constructed their identities with a broader array of opportunities than were previously available to them. However democratizing the reforms’ objectives may have been, the effects they had on the National University were far from the desired control over social changes and circumvention of revolutionary activity. In fact, students’ increased exposure to classmates of different gender, racial, socioeconomic, and regional backgrounds served to awaken them politically.12 Like so many university campuses worldwide, the National University became a hotbed of radicalization. Students and professors alike were deeply inspired by Ché Guevara and the success of the Cuban Revolution. A new and highly politicized sociology faculty nurtured student agitation, fueled in large part by one of its founders, the charismatic Camilo Torres, who had joined the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (National Liberation Army; eln), a guerrilla organization in González’s native Department of Santander, and was killed on February 15, 1966, during his first combat mission, a fate that made him a martyr for social justice among National University students.13 Amid this fraught milieu, González hung her collage-­like paintings at the National University. In the mambo exhibition, González complicated identity formation as an exclusively passive assimilation of images and norms. She deliberately painted awkward and clumsy borders that drew attention to the constructed nature of both the composite image and feminine social roles parodied in the works. Her paintings prompted spectators to interrogate the means by which individuals manually alter consumer culture to suit private visions yet hold desires that are deeply influenced by their ideological and visual environment. They render visible the agonistic relation between consuming established models and transforming them through individual manipulation. By painting faux photo corners and beveled decorative mats on the canvases in the mambo exhibition, González referenced domestic picture hanging and scrapbooking. The colorful painted mats that surround the portraits of three children in the Foto estudios (Studio Photos) series cite the framing of cherished family photographs and their display — a gesture at once sentimental and nostalgic — to freeze a transient moment in a beloved child’s life. Studio Photo I, Studio Photo II, and Studio Photo III (figures 3.4 – 3.6) depict commercial photographs of children at different stages of development: as toddler, infant, and young girl, respectively. Such photos are cherished — collected in albums or framed and exhibited in the home or sent to far-­off relatives. With each function, the photographs serve to enact a family’s private curatorial project of delineating its identity and emphasizing cohesion, both in the home and with those among whom the images circulate.



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González’s paintings emphasize how consumers of photographic portraiture make aesthetic choices, such as selecting decorative matting or framing to match interior décor or to invest a picture with added meaning and associations. González’s lavishly colored triple-­window mat — an elaborate framing choice — in Studio Photo III (see figure 3.6) cites Colombia’s tricolor yellow, blue, and red flag, the colors corresponding to the flag in sequence and proportion. The private domain, this suggests, can serve as a site of reproducing or reflecting nationalist values, literally reframing the domestic sphere to perform civic engagement. Encoded in the image are its multiple authors and sequential transmutations — from photographer and patron to painter. At each stage, the image has been modified through the transfer from one individual to another, blurring a clear delineation of authorship and expressive means. Yet this self-­referential nature does not erode the overt sentimentality of the portrait: the child remains earnest in expression, feminine in a full skirt, and playful with her blue ball. The composition thus points instead to the shared object and social exchange. González framed two figures of women, La Marsellesa and Hotel Edén (figure 3.7), with decorative half-­oval mats bearing a floral motif.14 The half-­dome framing suggests a niche, a structure of classical architecture that might hold a statue. Indeed, the female figures, turned in three-­quarter pose away from the viewer, echo the form of classical sculpture, with their draped fabric, loose hair, and exposed skin. While citing ideals that evoke the goddesses of antiquity, the images dually suggest the reproduction of these archetypes on contemporary mass-­ market postcards or in calendars. In Rionegro, Santander (figure 3.8) González created a hybrid work that conflates a regional reference, a Greco-­Roman reference to Arcadia and feminine beauty, and the three colors of the Colombian flag (yellow, blue, and red) that insert a bather into a dialogue with local and national identity. González paints photo corners on Rionegro, Santander to associate it with an imaginary private album that is in dialectical relation with hegemonic culture in a constructive, albeit contradictory, manner. The photo corners suggest a personal embrace of a national allegory, made familial through its inclusion in a domestic scrapbook. Even the painting Lassie (see figure 3.19) suggests that a photograph was cut from a newspaper, double-­matted, and then hung on a domestic wall or pasted in an album. The works thus allude to the process by which individuals appropriate images from the mass media and recontextualize them privately. Estirpe (Lineage [1967]; figure 3.9) points to how collecting and transforming sources from the mass media fulfills social desires for mapping an individual within broader racial and class terrains. The picture looks like it has been manipulated several times: cut from the newspaper, trimmed with patterned scissors, mounted on a golden mat, and embellished with another color cut-­out pasted

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3.4  Beatriz González, Foto estudio I, 1967, oil on canvas, 70 × 80 cm. 3.5  Beatriz González, Foto estudio II, 1967, oil on canvas, 70 × 80 cm.



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3.6  Beatriz González, Foto estudio III, 1967, oil on canvas, 121 × 81 cm.

atop. González based Lineage on a clipping from El Tiempo that depicted Nicolas Liévano and his wife, Cecilia Rodríguez de Liévano, and their daughters, María Victoria and María Eugenia. The article’s front-­page headline, “Liévano: Estirpe de reinas,” roughly translated “The Liévano Family: A Lineage of Queens,” could allude to a beauty queen dynasty or to the obsessive cult of beauty of reinadomanias (beauty pageant mania). It may have been this picture that prompted Traba to refer to this exhibition as pop colombiano and to claim that González’s work engaged popular culture, from the New Kingdom of Granada to the contemporary “beauty pageants of Cartagena.”15 The Spanish word estirpe translates as “lineage,” “stock,” “origin,” or “race.” The ironic title “Estirpe de reinas” undermines the concept of nobility, pointing instead to social mobility based on a woman’s physical beauty. In the painting,

3.7  Beatriz González, Hotel Edén, 1967, oil on canvas, 92 × 107 cm. 3.8  Beatriz González, Rionegro, Santander, 1967, oil on canvas, 92 × 107 cm.



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3.9  Beatriz González, Estirpe, 1967, oil on canvas, 92 × 107 cm.

González depicts three members of the family in muted ochre hues that evoke the yellowing of aged paper. A bright pink baby wearing brilliant red-­and-­blue clothing stands out in the foreground as if pasted onto the newspaper. The title Lineage calls attention to the baby’s different skin color, relating it to the Hispanic concept of blood lineage. In satirical terms, it recalls the colonial convention of gracias al sacar (purchasing whiteness), a practice that continues to operate in subtle ways. Nevertheless, the picture remains vague, unstable, and contingent on the information available to the spectator, raising questions rather than providing answers: Does the baby belong to a different family? Is this collage-­like addition a way to “improve” the picture, the family, or the bloodline? As Traba implies, contemporary modes of social differentiation carried over the colonial legacy of a hierarchical racial logic. The multimedia collage aesthetic of Lineage, with its sources drawn from newspaper and pop culture, references a practice of picture scrapbooking that functions with respect to both gender and class structures. Since advent of mass-­ produced cartes de visite in the nineteenth century, private albums had become a means by which individuals could transgress some social rules by engaging in creative and even flirtatious behavior within the safe context of strategically constructed pages.16 Indeed, photo collaging as a domestic hobby emerged alongside photography in Victorian England as a proper aesthetic practice for upper-­class ladies, including members of the Royal Family.17 Private collage albums allowed

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their creators to orchestrate imaginary social interactions that could further their position in a strictly hierarchical society. Albums per se were not markers of class, as far as the availability of image-­based paper ephemera was concerned, but their contents often were. Like framed photographs displayed throughout the home, albums divulged important information about one’s social connections, travel, clubs, schools, and other status markers. Albums were, and continue to be, self-­ consciously constructed personal narratives that contain important social cues. The Dada artist Hannah Höch mined this tradition for its subversive potential. Her most famous photomontage, Cut with a Kitchen Knife (1919), complicates gender, class, and race discourses in Weimar Germany.18 Decades later, feminist artists took up Höch’s charge by reconfiguring media constructs of women with provocative text — for example, Barbara Kruger’s Your Gaze Hits the Side of My Face (1981) and Your Body Is a Battleground (1989). Antonio Berni, who had won the grand prize for printing at the 1962 Venice Biennial, made complex multimedia collages to denounce the effects of unfettered capitalist development in Argentina. That same year, he made La gran ilusión o la gran tentación (The Great Illusion or the Great Temptation [1962]; figure 3.10), which elaborates on his character Ramona Montiel, a frustrated seamstress-­turned-­prostitute. In the large collage, Berni depicts the frustration of many young women who were lured to the city by the promise of personal advancement through consumption, only to be relegated to the periphery in slums to become objects of consumption themselves through prostitution. Looming above Ramona and her coworkers is a towering billboard on which an Evita Perón – like blonde woman offers a car as bait — an impossible ideal that exists only through the media.19 Collage allowed Berni to juxtapose the mirage and the temptation represented in the glossy and attractive advertising images with urban detritus that constituted the material reality of most newcomers to the city. Berni comments on the powerful effects of the media on the imagination and desires of spectators and its disparity with their harsh living conditions. González’s commentary on the relationship of individuals to the mass media is less denunciatory and more nuanced. González’s paintings propose a critical reflection on these symbolic reformulations of available print culture. She offers the viewer ambiguous juxtapositions that visualize tensions generated when subjects both consume images and actively transform them. More specifically, Lineage problematizes the cult of feminine beauty as a means to objectify women as commodities and, at the same time, as an avenue for social mobility — in this case, through the roles of wife and mother. The painting emphasizes processes of creative image manipulation, editing, and cropping that raise questions about consumers’ complicity and defiance vis-­à-­vis the media’s role in constituting subjectivities. In other words, the painting makes manifest gestures of social control and social mobility that characterize unequal power relations within a hegemonic order.



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3.10  Antonio Berni, La gran ilusión o la gran tentación, 1962, mixed media collage on wood, 245 × 241 cm. © Derechos Autoriales A. Berni.

In addition to foregrounding cultural points of reference based on class and gender, González’s painted faux collages expose as flawed the artificial dichotomies of modern and traditional, and of secular and religious, presumed by modernization theory.20 At both the formal and the iconographic levels, González’s paintings allow these categories to coexist and enter into dynamic tension. Drawing visual technology and contemporary mass media together with oil-­on-­ canvas painting and traditional Catholic or classical Greco-­Roman iconography, the series evokes both radical transformations of everyday life and neocolonial or Catholic forces that weighed deeply in the way a new generation envisioned their social roles. The Catholic Marian conception of women’s social roles — that is, the “properly” feminine — is worth interrogating here in the context of the 1967 exhibition. In Doble retrato de Náyade (Double Portrait of Naiad [1967]; figure 3.11), González paired a Catholic visual trope, the ánima sola on the upper register, with a pagan one, a naiad, or fresh water nymph, on the bottom, both derived from prints published by the firm Gráficas Molinari. The Molinari print Sueños de ondinas (Undines’ Dreams; figure 3.12) depicts river nymphs around a Greek goddess, perhaps Calypso, adorning her with fine jewels and flowers as she slumbers. According to Greco-­Roman mythology, nymphs act as guardians of chastity in a

3.11  Beatriz González, Doble retrato de Náyade, 1967, oil on canvas, 107 × 92 cm. 3.12  Gráficas Molinari, Sueños de ondinas, chromolithograph.



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3.13  Beatriz González, Náyade y nenúfares, 1967, oil on canvas, 70 × 80 cm.

constant battle with the mischievous Cupid. The nymph also appears in the bottom register of Double Portrait of a Naiad, as well as in Náyade y nenúfares (Naiad and Water Lilies [1967]; figure 3.13) and La Marsellesa. Similar to the repetition of water nymphs, González recycles the ánima sola religious trope in other paintings in both Double Portrait of a Naiad and Holy Souls. The ánima sola depicts a woman in purgatory perpetually ravaged but never consumed by flames, her hands bound by the chains of her own sins.21 In Holy Souls, the ánima sola looms over three supplicant women in purgatory derived from the Molinari print of the Virgen del Carmen (figure 3.14). By juxtaposing familiar votive icons, these compositions reference the constructed character of femininity through traditional processes. While images of chaste and pious women conform to Marian notions of femininity of devout nurturers and mothers, the sequential manipulation embedded in the form unmasks how the individual consumes, perpetuates, and contributes to those ideals. Devotional acts can serve as a means to advocate for private interests with a higher power. Individuals may petition saints or souls in purgatory to intercede on their behalf or on behalf of their deceased loved ones so that their souls may enter paradise. In the same manner, such negotiation and intercession also happen in the public sphere: individuals negotiate their needs within a broader ideological framework that also may include favors and power dynamics. In other words, “praying” as such can be associated with both celestial and terrestrial agency and social mobility. Materially and conceptually, the imagery repeated in

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3.14  Gráficas Molinari, Virgen del Carmen, chromolithograph.

these paintings implies the complicity of individuals in reproducing hegemonic categories of the Catholic and the “feminine” while their formal reconfigurations point to their potential for subjective transformation, however modest. Out of Place at MAMBO The “out of place” character of González’s subject matter opened a dialectic relation with those subjects that would be “in place.” Her evocation of private, gendered, and popular practices foregrounds the cultural exclusion institutions such as mambo used to define aesthetic propriety and counteracts signals that were emanating from other dominant national and religious institutions.22 González reminisced about her explorations into recontextualizing coded objects, saying, “I was interested in exploring a cultural phenomenon whereby the values of a culture are radically changed when its icons or products are inserted into new cultural contexts. It is a sort of transmutation.”23 The transmutation of González’s



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1967 exhibition operated in two registers: in one, the artist repurposed images from the mass media into artistic compositions, and in the other, she relocated popular culture to mambo, an institution that sanctioned material culture as viable contemporary high art. These material and conceptual displacements not only destabilized ideological constructs circulating in the mass media. They also challenged definitions of legitimate official culture. Understanding this terrain of social struggle allows us to see how González’s paintings stressed practices of cultural formation and, thus, of political engagement. González’s fellow artists in Colombia were also deeply engaged in material appropriations and relocations. Carmen María Jaramillo has mapped González’s work onto the broader artistic landscape in the 1960s and 1970s, where social and political elements from the everyday were repositioned into aesthetic terrain. Jaramillo described González’s artistic strategy — along with that of Feliza Bursztyn, Beatriz Daza, Bernardo Salcedo, Carlos Rojas, and Alvaro Barrios—as one of recontextualization. By inserting found objects into the cultural realm, these artists called attention to a virtual universe in order to “construct a gaze upon different gazes.”24 Therefore, they referenced the contingency and polyvalence of materials and subjects, as well as the historical and social constitution of vision. Politically, this dialogue about the propriety of private and public practices began during Jorge Eliécer Gaitán’s political career in the 1940s. According to the historian Herbert Braun, the press coverage of Gaitán demonstrates that private lives of politicians were not considered appropriate for discussion in the public sphere.25 Until then, the governing elites had justified their privileged economic and political status — what Gaitán called el país político — precisely by holding that their moral and social disposition allowed them to put their private interests aside for the betterment of society.26 Conversely, they argued, governing elites considered the masses — el país nacional, in Gaitán’s terms — incapable of moving beyond the personal to think of the collective good. What Gaitán accomplished in his short political career was to convince the Colombian masses that through public service, elites were in fact advancing their own interests, and the interests of el pueblo should equally be part of public discourse.27 González’s paintings place referents to private practices in an institution created to catalyze public discourse, thereby implicitly claiming that the private is worthy of attention in the public sphere. The two institutions in which González’s works were presented in 1967 —  mambo and the National University — informed the viewers’ assessments of her artistic strategies. In the context of the political processes unraveling at the National University, the paintings’ built-­in ambiguities allowed for multiple readings. In one vein, critics discussed the works not as domestic or even particularly feminine but, rather, as unequivocally high art about popular culture and the masses, referencing spaces outside the realm of high culture. In a brief review of the mambo exhibition illustrated with a faint reproduction of Naiad and Water

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Lilies, an anonymous author wrote, “The pictures are framed two or three times, similar to the popular prints sold at the shops of Tenth Avenue.”28 The article probably amused González. This anonymous author had anchored the painting to a very specific place: not Latin America, Colombia, or even Bogotá, but specifically Tenth Avenue, where the Pasaje Rivas is located. Hence, the author clearly linked González’s aesthetic strategies with the informal market. Specific references such as this one are not merely associations among objects, styles, or aesthetic source materials. They also speak to who occupies these spaces: the people and their social strata who transact with the referents. Traba also invoked socio-­spatial relations in her review “El color al ataque” by connecting the paintings to intercity buses, beauty pageants, and chromolithographs. Traba revealed her own condescension toward cursi prints and untutored popular painting by writing, “[González] has taken that world from newspaper photographs, cursi popular prints and the irreproducible landscapes painted in the back of intercity buses. With caustic humor and tenderness, she has translated the naive meanings of these themes to her own language.”29 Traba makes it clear that the “color attack,” as she titled her review, came not only from González’s use of acerbic color and cruel deformations, but also from her daring subjects. While Gráficas Molinari based its prints on Western art, the prints were nevertheless kitschy renditions made in garish colors and excessively crowded compositions. They embody the notion of desmedido (excessiveness), the very vice about which González had been forewarned by her family. As when she defended Suicides, Traba again recognized the centrality of the popular sourcing for the work’s humorous mordacity, yet she distanced González from popular culture by firmly asserting that she was an erudite and technically deft artist. Her work was about popular culture but lacked its naiveté. For Traba, the aim was not to blur the lines between high and low culture but to train expert artists who could use uncultivated sources in the sophisticated pictorial debates of legitimate culture.30 Traba’s repeated distinction between González’s work and the “irreproducible paintings on the backs of intercity buses” reinforces the letrados’ attitudes toward the lower classes as innocent people in need of tutelage.31 Traba sought to reconcile the apparent provincialism of González’s work and the universalism required of serious art, picking up on the deceptive appeal of her paintings. “Beatriz González’s paintings are ‘attractive with a ruse,’ ” she wrote. “At first glance, the pure, clean colors surface. The spectator is left beaming. During the second inspection, laughter, mockery, attack, and the capacity to destroy and deform become more readily apparent.”32 This passage reads as if Traba herself experienced the very deception of which she wrote. Once the bold colors had the critic’s attention and González had her in the pictorial trap, she pulled the gaze from the universal to recognize its underlying sources, the provincial. The “pure, clean colors” Traba so admired optically drew her into González’s compositions.



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Yet as the brain caught up with the eye, viewers could readily discern the visual referents from lowbrow culture, effectively contaminants of “pure, clean” universal abstraction. Was the violence Traba spoke of against the images therein, in recognition of their rough cut-­and-­paste aesthetic or against the unsuspecting viewer who was abruptly denied a transcendent encounter with modern art? In his review of the mambo exhibition, the art critic Álvaro Burgos communicated a similarly ambivalent response to the painting. His article put forth a patronizing description of González’s feminine naïveté as well as admiration of her sophisticated ability to elevate the commonplace to the universal: [González] makes pictures with the happy frenzy of a fifteen-­year-­old girl who takes colors and gives them a naïve and tender joy, with elementary purity as its only sophistication. . . . She achieves a difficult task: to transform an anecdote known only to a small social group into a universal theme, executed with her luminous chromatic fruition and with a composition that does not exclude the photo corners of peasant albums or the frames of Christmas cards. Beatriz González, with the seriousness of her work, rescues and revalues those popular elements that have been discredited artistically either because they are disregarded by many artists or treated falsely or badly by others. This is without considering her status as pioneer: one of the first, or the first, Colombian artist to make figures out of flat color planes, with which indeed she anticipated many painters of our country.33 Burgos’s review valorizes formal innovation, cultural hybridity, and political engagement at the same time that he infantilizes the painter. To elevate the regional to the universal is to achieve the paradoxical mandate for the periphery: to be modern and authentic. He praises González’s for her technical and scholarly prowess, which give her the ability to reconcile the anecdotal and the universal: Beatriz González decided to dabble in sociology and take newspaper photographs, where one finds outlandish, tragicomic things reverberating with black humor; things that make one vacillate between screaming and jumping for joy; things that occur in our lovely country. She arranges them, reorganizes them, and places them (because that is just what she does) in a colorful frame, gives them title with intention, sets an expensive or cheap price, depending on her savings, and puts on her large fashionable glasses and goes to Bucaramanga to wait until they sell, rot, or are eaten by the boogieman. This social intention, beautifully executed, with the good taste and refinement that only an authentic artist can do, is present in the work of the painter.34 This passage reveals Burgos’s attempt to define González’s social position vis-­à-­ vis her subject. On the one hand, he imagines that she approaches newspaper reproductions in an academic, erudite manner, as a sociologist approaches his

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or her subject with presumed scientific detachment. On the other hand, he gives her agency to transform bad taste, the outlandish, into something in good taste. He thus holds on to the association of artistic virtue with refined taste. Nevertheless, Burgos reads into González’s work a sociologist’s tendency to distinguish the erudite self from the subaltern other. In doing so, he sustains the hierarchy that positions him, also a cultivated person able to discern these subtle distinctions, in an elevated position on the social spectrum. It is not a coincidence that González’s exhibition at the National University would remind Burgos of the famous Sociology Department where Torres, along with Orlando Fals Borda and the authors of La Violencia en Colombia, rallied students toward radicalization.35 In this way, he locates González in the país letrado summoned to mediate between the país nacional and the país politico. According to Burgos, after the research and transformative stage, González returns to her social station — fashionable and Bumangués — and waits for her works to sell or for the boogieman to eat them. Evidently, Burgos is delving into González’s own strategy of conflating interclass signifiers. This type of provincial language and intermixing of erudite and lowbrow referents is characteristic of the writing of Gabriel García Márquez.36 Burgos was an enthusiastic supporter of González’s journey from the Louvre to the Pasaje Rivas and the shops along Tenth Street. This zeal was part of a larger context of youth culture that was starting to brew the perfect storm at the university campus. Burgos’s review connects González’s subject matter to the urban working classes swelling Bogotá through its “demographic explosion,” the very sector of society that alarmed the National Front government and that modernizing agents considered vulnerable to revolution. Burgos’s mise-­en-­scène allows the reader to identify or relate to the urban subjects defined by a pattern of consumer behavior and class-­associated struggles. For the critic, the paintings conjured a whole series of class and spatial associations. He wrote, González attempts to think about our conventional family, worried about the rent; the rise in the price of milk, cigarettes, and public transportation . . . ; the freezing of salaries to prevent inflation; contraband; house and car raffles; the crowded movie theaters on Sundays; crime, pickpockets; the armed boss with his secular bullying. If Beatriz González wants to look at that family on a sunny Sunday, lined up to enter the stadium to see a democratic soccer match, she is faced with the problem of doing it well. So she does. And we see in the museum Lineage, with a man wearing sunglasses bought at Sanandresito [Bogotá’s black market]; his wife, wearing a colorful shirt; and the most elementary expression of the demographic explosion: her two children yet to come.37 Burgos locates the “conventional family” on an economic spectrum: working class with some economic power to consume.38 This family is worried about its



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income and the ability to make ends meet yet is still able to indulge in certain “democratic” practices, such as watching sports events at the stadium. Members of this social class inhabit crime-­ridden areas of the city and fear overbearing bosses. They also engage in leisure activities on Sunday, their day off work. They cannot afford to travel abroad, so they shop at the contraband import market Sanandresito, where they can buy brand-­name foreign products as the National Front government pursues import-­substitution industrialization policies. The family Burgos associated with the painting Lineage was worried about the cost of transportation. This comment was not rhetorical on June 1, 1967 — the date his review was published and soon after Carlos Lleras Restrepo’s government announced a fare hike. The rising cost of living in Colombia may seem relatively commonplace, yet it pointed to the failure of a modernization program that promised to elevate everyone’s standard of living. Lleras Restrepo’s announcement aggravated students’ grievances and prompted them to break out into angry protests at the National University’s White City campus. Only two days after Burgos’s article appeared in print, the military reacted to student protests by invading the university. The heightened tensions at the university, protests by students and professors, and military invasion took place while González’s exhibition was on display. “Los Violentos no Fueron el Ejercito!” Its new home on the National University campus infused mambo with a radicalized air.39 Since 1965, Traba had been lobbying Patiño to provide space for mambo on-­campus. He not only agreed; he named Traba the university’s cultural director.40 As Traba and Patiño signed an agreement to ensure the museum’s autonomy, the politicized context of the National University influenced the way in which Traba’s curatorial work would be received. The National University had become stigmatized as “a dangerous subversive cavern.”41 On June 13, 1967, just thirteen days after the opening of González’ exhibition, the national army invaded the university. Students protested by throwing rocks at police cars, earning them the sobriquet “stone throwers.” To quell the student agitation, tanks rolled onto the campus. There was little restraint. According to a woman who identified herself as a neighbor of the university, soldiers “ripped out students’ beards in front of the ladies.”42 In the days that followed, the press covered this dramatic episode in polarized ways. El Tiempo, the long-­standing liberal newspaper, defended President Lleras Restrepo’s actions as a necessary use of force to maintain order, quoting him in the front-­page headline: “The Country Will Not Return to Disorder.”43 This remark associated student protests with the Bogotazo riots and La Violencia, which had ravaged the countryside for two decades.44 El Tiempo justified Lleras Restrepo’s military intervention by saying

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that order and peace needed to be restored at all costs. Furthermore, the newspaper characterized the conflict as emanating from a small group of violent subversives within the university who did not represent the entire student body. This characterization acted as a synecdoche for the revolutionary guerrillas whom the state continuously discussed as a group of minor delinquents. El Tiempo’s stories highlighted injured police and soldiers rather than students, who were characterized as violent aggressors.45 El Siglo, by contrast, published accounts of the incidents of June 13 that were sympathetic to the students.46 Although the newspaper’s founder, Laureano Gómez, had used his ultraconservative paper to persecute liberals, which it cast as atheistic communists during La Violencia, it published not only a detailed account of the disproportionate and excessive use of force against a small group of students in 1967 but also printed declarations and petitions by the Asociación de Profesores de Enseñanza Secudaria (Professors and Teachers Unions) and the Federación de Educadores (Federation of Educators), as well as by the university’s Medical Association.47 El Siglo also published Lleras Restrepo’s statements but edited them in such a way as to emphasize his condescension and intolerance of the students. El Siglo reported a declaration from the government that, even though “transportation costs [were] lower than [the price of] beer or a Rio del Totogol [lottery] ticket, a scandal was raised by a minimal number of students.”48 Implied in this statement is disdain toward the lower classes, who are characterized as more willing to spend money on drinking and gambling than on going to work or school. At stake was the rising cost of living, and while the newspaper trivialized transportation costs, it inflamed frustration with the National Front’s and Alliance for Progress’s promises that modernization would address poverty and inequality and avert armed revolution. As a clarification, El Siglo noted the next day that its critique of the Lleras Restrepo administration did not equal support for the politicized students: “Ninety-­nine and a half percent of the young students want to study in the same way that peasants [campesinos] want to work. Serious students do not want to pass for street urchins [gamines]. But there are those who want to fall back into old ways, block the passage to the airport, and keep throwing rocks.”49 The statement that a few students had reverted to “old ways” (volver a las andadas) reiterated a connection between student protests and the violent approach to social conflict characteristic of the Bogotazo riots. Calling civil unrest “reversion” fit the Colombian elites’ perception of el pueblo as an unruly and dangerous mob.50 Furthermore, the official response to the student protests paralleled attitudes toward the growing guerrilla forces in the countryside. Guerrilla fighters understood themselves to be a belligerent manifestation of class struggle, whereas the establishment described them as foreign-­controlled agents who disturbed the peasants’ tranquil life and work. The government “would feel frustrated if the



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cities were delivered to the mobs,” the article continued. “The government has the obligation to work this way: to protect students from subversives.”51 As the state university and, at the time, the most academically rigorous institution in the country, the National University would define the next generation of professionals. For the National Front regime, a populist-­inspired student movement had much greater implications for the survival of the social order than a specific protest against rising transportation costs would appear to have. By the time Traba came to aid activist students at the White City campus, her aesthetic theories had radically shifted from championing formal autonomy to denouncing cultural dependence.52 Traba’s move from the elitist private Uniandes to the larger, public, and radicalized National University swayed her to see the important role of intellectuals in social and political change. Traba sided on numerous occasions with the demands and protests of the National University students. She even helped pick up injured students in her car during the invasion.53 When Traba invited two students to speak on her television show Puntos de Vista, armed police and soldiers interrupted the show before they went on the air. Traba later claimed that the students were not going to comment on the university’s strained relations with the Lleras Restrepo regime but had intended to discuss academic matters exclusively.54 Giving airtime to students from the National University was a perceived threat nevertheless. When Traba, an Argentine national, made strong antigovernment declarations after the military invasion, Lleras Restrepo ordered her deportation. Thanks to the intervention of a great number of intellectuals and influential figures in Bogotá, including her ex-­husband, Alberto Zalamea, son of the renowned intellectual Jorge Zalamea, she was able to remain as the mother of Colombian children. Nevertheless, Lleras Restrepo considered her a political threat and barred her from having access to students: “We [the nation] cannot allow the precedent where foreigners can carry out Castro propaganda associated with subversive activities that are costing our country much money and preoccupation.”55 The president accused Traba of being a Castrista agent of subversion: “Marta Traba has been carrying out a pro-­Castro campaign in this country and has declared that Cuba is the only free territory in the Americas.”56 The prior year, in 1966, Traba had received a literary award from the Casa de las Americas in Cuba and had published an account of her guided trip to the island. The result was a bitter battle with Cuban exiles fought through El Tiempo and soon after published as the book El són se quedó en Cuba. Beginning with the military invasion of the National University during González’s second solo show, the Colombian state declared Traba dangerous, an agent of foreign infiltration who incited stone throwers and should not interfere in the education of the next generation. Soon after, Traba resigned as director of mambo.

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Underpainting for Underdeveloped Subjects González’s exhibition was caught in the political tempest of the military invasion. Underlying much of the discontent on the part of students, intellectuals, and guerrillas was the government’s failure to deliver on the promises of modernization. González’s work, as evidenced by the ambivalent reviewers, became situated within, and emblematic of, a paradigm shift between desarrollistas (cultural development, or those who sought to update Colombian culture) and dependentistas (those who resisted the threat of cultural dependence and imperialism). The desarrollista-­dependentista debate gave birth to new terminology used to construct cultural values and aims, such as “developed” and “underdeveloped,” “First World” and “Third World,” “center” and “periphery,” “metropolitan” and “satellite,” “universal” and “provincial,” “traditional” and “progressive,” “updated” and “resistant,” “hegemonic” and “marginal.”57 Somewhere between the enthusiasm for development and the emergence of dependency theories we can locate the reasons that many advocates of González’s Lacemaker series felt disillusioned when she turned to the local and the lowbrow for inspiration. González had made a pictorial promise of universal participation but turned instead to the provincial. Within the art world, the desarrollista-­dependista models found a parallel in the discourse concerning cultural universality and resistance.58 Refuting the isolationist tendency of the 1940s, postwar intellectuals enthusiastically embraced Latin American participation in universal culture, advocating primarily for the creation of international modern art. Likewise, there was a strong belief that Colombia could participate on an equal footing in cultural domains, even as it was denied competitive leverage in the economic sphere. By the 1960s, the revolutionary Cuban government began to invest heavily in cultural activities and exported them throughout Latin American networks. Through its cultural institute, Casa de las Américas, the Cuban government invited intellectuals to visit the island and witness what it claimed was the only liberated nation in the hemisphere. Avoiding the orthodoxy of the Soviet social realist model, cultural institutions in Cuba put forth an ambitious yet ambiguous cultural model based on political commitment and technical experimentation.59 Casa de las Americas organized many symposia and honored Latin American intellectuals with a prestigious prize, including Traba for her novel Las ceremonias del verano (Summer Ceremonies) in 1966.60 These symposia served to create a sense of a united Latin American intellectual community, in opposition to North American imperialism, effectively dismantling the guise of universal culture. In 1964 – 1965, the New York Times published a series of articles that exposed involvement in Latin American cultural affairs by the cia as a form of intellectual espionage.61 The articles, in large part the fruit of research by John William Wright Patman, uncovered the problematic financing of many Latin American



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research institutions by the cia.62 Soon after, the weekly magazine Marcha of Montevideo, Uruguay, published a translation of the articles and disseminated them throughout Latin America.63 The Uruguayan intellectual Angel Rama, who would soon meet Traba and become her life partner, published four articles in Marcha that explained the relationship between the cia and the Congress for Cultural Freedom.64 The intense intellectual and personal correspondence between Traba and Rama reveals that Traba was undoubtedly familiar with these publications. In early 1966, Colombians were scandalized by the news that the cia-­affiliated Counterinsurgency Information Analysis Center had been conducting sociological espionage in the northern departments of Colombia under the code name Plan Simpático.65 As part of a larger plan channeled through the American University in Washington, DC, the sociologists Norman Smith and Howard Kaufman set out to accumulate strategic political information about the Colombian population. Colombian social scientists, however, who knew about Plan Camelot, which had recently been uncovered in Chile, denied their request for cooperation.66 Smith and Kaufman had better luck with the Colombian National Research Center, with which they aimed to gather information about the political climate among the Colombian population. Soon after the investigation began, it became clear to the Colombian sociologists that the nature of their questionnaire was problematic, since it included a detailed interrogation of the subjects’ political dispositions.67 Alongside revelations of cia involvement in Latin American cultural and research institutions, many intellectuals were concerned about the U.S. interests hidden behind the goodwill of the Alliance for Progress, as well as the proximity of U.S. interests to those of powerful economic and political elites within Colombia who were exerting enormous pressure on all aspects of national life.68 The National Front government was closely connected to the Asociación Nacional de Industriales (National Association of Industrialists; andi). In fact, both the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs were complicit in Plan Simpático, and once its intentions were disclosed, the government sided with the American team.69 As the relation between Lleras Camargo and John F. Kennedy demonstrated, the war against Cuba was of mutual concern for the elites of both countries.70 In Colombia, the Centro de Estudio y Acción Sociales (Center for Social Study and Action; ceas) had been making virulent attacks on the left since 1960, which, like the Marcha revelations in 1965, had a tremendous impact on Latin American intellectuals.71 Among the center’s primary objectives was to “awaken among the gente decente (decent people) of Colombia the realization of the imminent danger from the Jacobin left.”72 The secretive actions of the ceas earned it the nickname “La Mano Negra” (the Black Hand).73 Its mission was to contain the spread of

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any type of collectivism by infiltrating the press, universities, unions, and other spheres in which intellectuals operated.74 Among those most deeply affected was the magazine La Nueva Prensa, owned by Traba’s first husband, Alberto Zalamea. The magazine aimed to provide a venue for diverse political views that were excluded by the National Front establishment and its close association to the mainstream press (i.e., El Tiempo, El Espectador, and El Siglo).75 González recalled young intellectuals’ enthusiasm for the magazine, rushing every week to read the latest edition, which would give them an alternative view of national politics and greater exposure to international events.76 The magazine, which was largely dependent on corporate sponsorship, began to publish articles that were considered bothersome to its sponsors.77 For instance, in its first edition in April 1961, its cover used the term La Mano Negra and openly accused Colombian industrialists of manipulating the value of the dollar for personal gain.78 Zalamea attacked La Mano Negra as being at odds with the Colombian pueblo,79 and used the magazine to articulate his own political position, which he eventually called Nacionalismo Popular Revolucionario.80 One of the known strategies of the ceas was to withdraw financial support and advertising funds from publications that opposed their private enterprise objectives. The corporate sponsors that maintained La Nueva Prensa alive between 1961 – 1963 gradually withdrew until Zalamea was forced to close down partially in 1964 and definitively on 16 June 1966 — almost a year to the day before the military invaded the National University.81 Traba later lamented, “When the forces of regression liquidated La Nueva Prensa, that formidable magazine, I stopped writing art criticism. I am referring to a weekly criticism, persistent and obstinate . . . I left criticism because nothing could or did replace La Nueva Prensa.”82 While Traba soon overcame her critical silence, her husband and their marriage did not. They had invested all their assets, including their home, in order to purchase the printing machinery, which they believed would give them more intellectual autonomy. When the magazine closed the first time in 1964 the disappointment was so intense for Zalamea that, according to Traba’s biographer, it gave their marriage its final blow.83 By 1965 they had divorced. Naturally, the faith that Traba had placed in the private sector for the sponsorship of the mambo a couple of years earlier was also mortally wounded. It became increasingly apparent that the Cold War was being covertly fought in a collaboration of private and public, international and national forces. Intellectuals reassessed their belief in a universal culture and began to conceive universalism as a product of a Western hegemonic discourse, one in which the national elites were complicit. Traba’s theory of resistance emerged as a defensive cultural strategy against a perceived American cultural imperialism.84 New attitudes toward the role of art in Colombian society generated tensions in institutional practices regarding artistic sponsorship. By sustaining the impor-



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tance of Colombian participation in the international sphere, cultural “authenticity” took on greater value. During the mid-­1960s Traba’s philosophical position shifted dramatically from formalism to a theory of cultural resistance against North American cultural infiltration. For Traba, González’s work signaled a clear route to this goal. In “El color al ataque,” her review of the 1967 exhibition at mambo, she retrospectively analyzed González’s earlier work as a protest: “When Beatriz González . . . picked [Vermeer] as her model . . . it was, without confessing, a declaration of protest against the gratuitous turbulence of large sections of contemporary art.”85 It is notable that Traba nowhere characterizes González’s work as a protest against contemporary tendencies in art in 1964. Naturally, all critics exercise revisionist hindsight as an artist’s aesthetic and conceptual trajectory reveals new facets of earlier works. And certainly, the reference to the Pielroja calendar in the early works served as a connector with González’s later works. Nevertheless, Traba, along with González, was following a path of nonconformity. While Traba continued to analyze González’s work formally, her language revealed an ideological shift, a transformation that would be elaborated into her theory of resistance. The naiads now stood beside the lacemakers and the suicidal couple as a gesture of protest against international pressures, reconceived as emanating from a hegemonic North America. González’s works respond to and challenge claims of both cultural universality and resistance by satirizing the mechanisms in which universality and the provincial conflate, and by exposing the strategy of popular cultural formation that is more deliberate and active than the mere passive consumption of imperial products, as Traba’s theory of resistance would have it. Her works question claims of artistic authenticity and engage with the complex web that images navigate within dominant and popular discourses and cultures. Her work complicates the binaries set forth by Traba and her followers before 1966 and embraces the “contamination” of imagery as part of her generative and creative process of cultural recycling. Underdeveloped Love González materially entered the cultural debate over modernization, develop­ ment, and dependency with two images: El amor sub-­sagrado y el amor sub-­profano (Subsacred Love and Subprofane Love [1967]; figure 3.15) and Subdesarrollo 70 (Underdevelopment 70 [1967]; figure 3.16). Both paintings depart from another Gráficas Molinari print, Días Felices (Happy Days; figure 3.17), a classicizing maternal scene. In Subsacred Love and Subprofane Love, two classically dressed women — one holding a child, and the other facing the spectator while cradling a rose garland — rest on the base of a sphinx statue. In the background a cupid

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3.15  Beatriz González, El amor sub-­sagrado y el amor sub-­profano, 1967, oil on canvas 100 × 200 cm. 3.16  Beatriz González, Subdessarrollo 70, 1967, oil on canvas, 110 × 136 cm.



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3.17  Gráficas Molinari, Dias felices, chromolithograph.

figure contemplates a mother and child at play. White doves and lush vegetation surround the scene of female and maternal bliss. These figures of mother and child serve as models for three other paintings: Underdevelopment 70, Jardín de las Hespérides (Garden of the Hesperides; see figure 3.1), and La Madrepora.86 González couples the mother-­child pairing with two naiads and invests Subsacred Love and Subprofane Love with open and potentially subversive meanings by calling on a complex network of referents. The painting makes use of collage’s free appropriations from divergent sources to create a hybrid composition that sets up suggestive relations. More significant, González smears and smudges the paint to render the women’s facial features flat and indiscernible. The colors of the figures become garish and exaggerated, contrasting with bright primary tones and degrading the revered subject matter. Rather than surrounding the scene with white doves, González has awkwardly placed a gray pigeon at the bottom center of the composition — an urban rather than Arcadian reference. The title Subsacred Love and Subprofane Love suggests that love is another characteristic of the underdeveloped world, like poverty, illiteracy, and excessive fertility. It poses the question: Is love cursi? Yet the absurdity of this concept ridiculed the whole concept of underdevelopment assigned to Latin American nations by modernization and development discourses. The painting refracts in visible terms the constructive character of this discourse and implies an underdeveloped subjectivity through which the economic and cultural models of modernization could operate. After all, the notion of underdevelopment and the understanding of a so-­called Third World emerged as part of postcolonial realignments into neocolonial power relations.87 The work’s title, jarring colors, and violent flattening and effacement of figures serve as visual metaphors for the

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arbitrary system by which nations, cultures, and people are mapped onto an ideological spectrum of First World and Third World. Representing underdeveloped love equals what Arturo Escobar described as the discovery of backwardness in the Third World. Under this ideology, as certain as there is maternal love there is a Third World trying to catch up and emulate a First World. Underdevelopment 70, painted in 1967, is a prognosis: in three years — 1970 —  there will still be underdevelopment. In the ridiculousness of the title-­image relation is a critique of the self-­fulfilling dangers of modernization discourses. In Underdevelopment 70, the woman and child appear again, without referents to river nymphs but this time with two large black photo corners at the top left and bottom right, suggesting a tiny entry in a personal scrapbook or album. In this case, González used the economic term “underdevelopment” directly to title a painting of maternal or nurturing love. By pairing this term with a concept as universal as maternal love, and alongside phrases such as “subsacred love” and “subprofane love,” she exposes the arbitrariness of these categories. The Third World subject is associated with poverty and ignorance and is “in need of development.”88 The woman’s brown hair and skin stand in contrast to the blond hair and copper-­pink, sun-­kissed skin of the child she holds. As in Lineage, the colors suggest the figure’s racial difference and destabilize the relation between mother and child by calling into question the figure’s maternal identity. By altering the skin color of the porcelain white Molinari figures, Underdevelopment 70 demands that the spectator consider the racial and class connotations of the Western canon as the image navigates — as a mass-­produced, material object in the Molinari print — through the social spectrum of a largely mestizo society. Is underdevelopment an unequal relation between the races and classes to the point that caregiving becomes hired help? Is underdevelopment thus an extractive relation? Is a mestizo mother’s love or worth less than another mother’s? The juxtaposition of image and title exposes the discursive category that informs our reaction to cultures outside the so-­called developed world. In his study of González’s furniture pieces of the 1970s, Víctor Manuel Rodríguez interprets these objects as critical of neocolonial relations.89 He writes, “González seemed to localize the universal pretension of modernity through an examination of the construction of both Latin America and women as underdeveloped or, better, Latin America as an underdeveloped woman.”90 This is certainly applicable to Underdevelopment 70; development discourse required that people living in developing nations understand themselves as underdeveloped subjects. The mirror of modernity, as Rodríguez claims, is Western, white, and masculine. Underdevelopment 70 references a mass-­produced image of a Greco-­ Roman prototype that emanates from a long tradition of the masculine Western gaze at imagined women. The title is unsettling, given the tenderness of the image, even if the character of the depicted women and child could be seen as



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saccharine or cursi. The photo corners and the title implicate the viewer. The spectator of this “underdeveloped” painting, or world, is thus invoked by an implied exoticization of the subjects of underdevelopment. After all, looking at someone else’s private albums is in itself a type of voyeurism. The photo corners remind us of the complicity of the individual in this discursive formation — a subjective as well as a hegemonic construct, albeit fragmentary and semiotically open-­ended. Lo Nuestro and Lo Popular Two key terms in the criticism of González’s 1967 mambo exhibition would frequently appear in connection with her subsequent work: that which is ours (lo nuestro) and the popular (lo popular). Both concepts were connected to notions of authenticity and cultural resistance, thus becoming highly valued for Traba and other art critics, such as Burgos and Lucena, who began to target their critiques at U.S. cultural imperialism. González’s paintings invited critics to stretch their preconceptions about artistic universalism. The local associations suggested by González’s paintings found an enthusiastic audience ready to embrace regionalism, fueled by calls for cultural resistance related to dependency theories. Furthermore, the vernacular sources González cited seemed to echo calls for popular participation and representation in the increasingly repressive and exclusionary atmosphere of the National Front. Her paintings entered into a discourse of cultural participation, but on our terms, not terms dictated by the United States or the National Front government. González’s penchant for cultural borrowing allowed her to juxtapose references to universal and local culture. For instance, she took the naiad motif and paired it with the Colombian town names Rionegro, Santander, and Calarcá. Rather than focusing on how images serve as vessels for “universal” value, the codes of hegemonic culture, she instead emphasizes that images are multivalent, especially when she reappropriates them as local signifiers. By repeating the same figure in different configurations and giving those configurations titles that link them to rural Colombian geography, González makes explicit the semiotically unrestricted and fluid function of images and meanings — as she did with Simón Bolívar and Francisco de Paula Santander at the national salon later that same year. She unmoors the signifier from its conventional referent. These paintings Rionegro, Santander and Calarcá beg the question: Are the river nymphs local inhabitants of the Rionegro and Barragán rivers? Are the two red triangles at the top of Calarcá (1967; figure 3.18) a photo corner, a reference to the river confluence, or, perhaps, a reference to Marlboro cigarette boxes? González’s destabilizing juxtapositions eradicate the stable referent, unlocking an expanded

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3.18  Beatriz González, Calarcá, 1967, oil on canvas, 110 × 130 cm.

field of associations and questions for spectators to generate through their own relation to the image. González directs the viewer to the practice of scrapbooking by interjecting her own biographical annotations. In Rionegro, Santander (see figure 3.8) González sets the sentimentality of a river nymph print in the context of childhood nostalgia and nationalism. Rionegro, Santander, is the region where the González family owned El Cairo, their country estate. González remembered the carefree and idyllic time she spent with her father there, until La Violencia, which she characterized as “the end of paradise.”91 The four brown photo corners suggested on the painting, as well as a thin tricolor trim on the right hand side of the canvas, create the illusion of a Colombian flag stacked beneath a naiad collectible card — a piece of ephemera that might ornament a young girl’s nook. The painting thus serves as a partial and imperfect recovery of the artist’s own, irretrievable childhood memory. The image evokes memory and place: the implied scrapbook maker identifies with an idealized bather, a small town, and a larger country, thus emphasizing place as a locus of identity. González’s aesthetic, according to her critics in 1967 and after, was cursi and “ours.” Whereas participation in modernist currents served as a sign of the times in the previous decade, by the late 1960s critics held “full immersion in our reality” or a “real identification with our environment” as markers of Latin American authenticity. There was a conflation between the universal and the local, the collective and the personal, the popular and the erudite. Much of the language used to describe González’s works, including “lo nuestro”



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and “lo popular” resonated with the political climate of the 1966 elections in Colombia, in which Alberto Zalamea played an important role. He had articulated his anti – National Front agenda through La Nueva Prensa and eventually began to participate in political campaigns, first as the leader of the Movimiento Democrático Nacional (National Democratic Movement; mdn) and then in support of the Alianza Nacional Popular (National Popular Alliance; anapo).92 Through the pages of La Nueva Prensa and in his public oratory, Zalamea outlined the position of a new revolutionary national populism, the national and the popular, the very concepts that permeate reviews of González’s 1967 exhibition and Traba’s support of pop nacional as a form of cultural resistance.93 Arguably, Zalamea’s mdn was a prolongation of Gaitán’s political theories that sought to overcome the gap between the governing elites (país político) and the governed (país nacional). La Nueva Prensa never hid its political agenda. In its sixth issue it published a political manifesto that outlined its two-­pronged mission to combat foreign influence in national affairs and the exclusionary mechanism of the National Front.94 Zalamea, like Gaitán, targeted the traditional two-­ party system of liberals and conservatives and sought to create a class-­based opposition that could unite both liberals and conservatives as pawns in an oligarchic game, which Zalamea called the “dictatorship of the liberal bourgeoisie.”95 For Zalamea, the mdn, and anapo, the battle was to democratize the public sphere and “de-­eliticize public power.”96 I do not want to suggest that Traba’s political ideas matched her husband’s. In fact, Zalamea’s nationalism was far from the Latin American regionalism in the arts Traba advocated.97 While the post – World War II era witnessed increased efforts to foster hemispheric cooperation, by the 1960s there was a new sense of geopolitical realignment: Latin American resistance to an imperial United States, which accompanied the emergence of a revolutionary Bolivarianism, which I discuss in the next chapter. This opposition became central to Traba’s theory of resistance. Even before, Traba had formulated a framework through which to study the arts of Hispanic America.98 By the time she published her most influential book, Dos décadas vulnerables, in 1973, her definition of Latin American art was based on terms that stood in opposition to U.S. cultural infiltration. For Traba, opposing artistic trends emanating from New York constituted an act of aesthetic liberation. Traba associated the dematerialization of art with imperial surrender, which had the unfortunate consequence of dismissing much of the more politically engaged, even anti-­U.S. artistic production in Latin America, the arte no objetual, as the critic Juan Acha would describe a decade later.99 Yet for many critics who were ideologically invested in defining Latin American art, González’s works succeeded in conveying cultural authenticity. Since many intellectuals of the left perceived the elites (and the military elsewhere) as aligned with the United States, anti-­imperialism was deeply connected to class-­consciousness.

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Therefore, the close connection between lo nuestro and lo popular made perfect sense in Latin America of 1967. In Traba’s and others’ reviews of the mambo exhibition, the possessive pronoun “our” implied cultural ownership but was left largely undefined. Burgos used the concept of “lo nuestro” several times in his review of the mambo exhibition, titled “The Satire of the Naïve.” He claimed that González was “one of the most representative artists of our art.” While the group represented by “our” is unclear, Burgos went on to describe how González managed to transform what applied to a group of people into “her language”: “In order to capture more lucidly our reality, it is necessary that Beatriz González take an event, a momentary ‘flash,’ witnessed hundreds of times in the stadiums on Sundays or in the newspapers, and put them on canvas in her own language — where a proclaimed intention (rescuing all of its naïveté and denouncing its foolishness) and a truly moving artistic achievement oscillate evenly.”100 González’s success, according to Burgos, was in cultural translation, her ability to represent “our reality” and to be artistically authentic. Burgos juxtaposed universality with regional authenticity: Whether they are the Holy Souls or the Virgin del Carmen or the underdeveloped naiads, with their long, entangled hair, or the pretty girl with the ball, or “Lassie” — another of the heroes of our time — the treatment given to them by the artist has that universal tone — the tone that does not allow a sleeping woman in any “Eden Hotel” of Bogotá or Girardot to be confused with a sleeping lady from Stalingrad, Paris, or Santiago.101 How, the reader of this passage asks, can the representation of a sleeping woman be at once universal and specific to Bogotá or Girardot?102 This paradox is at the heart of the discursive contradictions of the demands for cultural universality and resistance in Colombia of the 1960s. While it was easy to accept resisting cultural imperialism, it was difficult to let go of the hope for universal participation. Echoing the modernization discourse, there was still an urge to position local culture onto a global map. Therefore, when Burgos wrote, “Beatriz González decided to . . . take newspaper photographs where one finds outlandish, tragicomic things that occur in our lovely country reverberating with black humor, and that make one vacillate between screaming and jumping for joy,” he paired the tragicomic with the beauty of Colombia; the comment is saturated with self-­ deprecating humor and passionate regionalism. González’s works, in Burgos’s estimation, possessed an artistic sensibility that corresponded to the specificity of the daily paper. He thus cast a role for González’s art that was at once opposed to an extrangerizante elitism and embedded in national construction. The reviews of the mambo exhibition probably would not have been so consistently positive if the audience had been more politically diverse. The location of mambo during this tense and politicized moment discouraged spectators who



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were not sympathetic to student politics. Eduardo Serrano later described the opening of González’s exhibition on May 30, just before the military invasion, as “practically deserted.”103 In fact, the museum closed when the invasion began and did not reopen until the following September, with a deliberately ironic exhibition of religious painting from the colonial period.104 Proof that González was not just a critical darling came when she exhibited Calarcá and Underdevelopment 70 at the Seventh Salon de Pintura y Escultura in Cali. One reviewer, writing under the pen name “Martina of Cali,” expressed her candid opinion by writing, “The ugliest works, without a doubt, are the grotesque esperpetos (scribbles) by Beatriz González. I hope she does not dare to send anything to the next festival, and if she does, she should send them to a salon for children’s art or for the mentally disabled.”105 Reviews of the mambo exhibition therefore do not provide a comprehensive picture of what the critical responses might have been had the university remained open; instead, they help us understand how González’s works served as vehicles for sympathetic critics to articulate a new role for contemporary art. There was, however, a conspicuous absence from the criticism: the discussion of the painting Lassie in the context of how González’s works represented lo nuestro. Conclusion: Lassie Come Home! González complicated her presentation with the inclusion of the painting Lassie (1967; figure 3.19) among her purgatorial souls, underdeveloped mothers, and naiads. What role did the American movie and television icon play in the exhibition? The only mention of Lassie by the critics refers to the celebrity dog not as a Hollywood icon but as a “hero of our time.”106 This seems like a profound contradiction in an exhibition that was perceived to embody lo nuestro, in opposition to imported U.S. models. González’s inclusion of Lassie is all the more perplexing, given that much of the students; discontent was fueled by the simmering anti-­U.S. sentiments that underscored protests against university reform. José Félix Patiño had spearheaded his reforms as integral to the efforts to modernize the university and change academic life in a fundamental way. To make the university more efficient and provide students with both the freedom and the space to pursue intellectual endeavors, the reforms also sought to establish the National University as an apolitical environment. This important and highly contested reform would have involved depoliticizing students and professors and taking away some of their administrative power. The National University lost 128 academic days to student strikes between 1966 and 1971, and experts believed that student and faculty activities were to blame for disrupting the institution’s operations and delaying graduation dates.107

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3.19  Beatriz González, Lassie, 1967, oil on canvas, 110 × 58 cm. Photograph: Ernesto Monsalve.

While no one disagreed that institutional reform was needed, Patiño did not see how ill-­timed they were. The university’s shift from a French-­inspired pedagogical system to an U.S. model a decade earlier had been met with enthusiasm for modernization rather than opposition to imperial infiltration.108 The problem was not the reforms but the reliance on funding from the United States and financing via corporate donations and bank loans. Amid the anti-­U.S. tension in 1967 students and professors were deeply disturbed by what they perceived as an attempt to curtail their influence. In fact, thanks to leaders such as Camilo Torres, the National University students believed firmly that they were the most efficient agents of social change. Since the final stages of the Rojas Pinilla dictatorship, students had been mobilizing to protest government excesses, and they perceived their role as decisive in the transition to democracy.109 Both students



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and professors protested to maintain a check on the collaboration between the National Front and U.S. government. So what did Lassie come to signify in an exhibition lauded for its evocation of that which is ours? While Lassie, an image associated with Hollywood, television, and the U.S. civilizing mission, may at first glance seem to be critical of imported foreign culture, González’s treatment of the subject was comparable to her use of local themes.110 Lassie was televised weekly in Colombia in 1967, and the dog was a virtual household pet for many people, especially in big cities such as Bogotá. González cropped the image of the hero dog dramatically and framed it asymmetrically in the chartreuse and emerald greens with which she had been identified since she was a student. Color thus served to connote appropriation and transformation of the figure from black-­and-­white television into a personal variation. Implicitly, González opened the notion of lo nuestro from an essentialist understanding of an authentic aesthetic of the people to a practice of appropriation and image recycling that was open to all cultural sources. With Lassie, González reflects on the process in which the private individual consumes yet also actively appropriates signals from the United States. The popularity of the Lassie character and its sympathetic incorporation into Colombian culture raise the question of the degree to which authenticity could indeed eradicate U.S. cultural influence. The presence of Lassie in the 1967 mambo exhibition served to block a facile reading of González’s works and challenge the notion of popular authenticity separate from U.S. cultural influence. The 1967 exhibition marked a turning point in which González’s critics subsequently responded to her works not only by associating her with the radicalism of the university environment, but also because her collapsing categories of the modern and traditional and high and low, as well the process by which imperial culture becomes local, crossed wires with opposition politics. The emphasis on practices and rituals associated with private uses of visual culture reference Colombia’s extensive history along with elements that traditionally have been excluded from official culture. González’s use of the cursi as a challenge to institutional constructs of legitimate culture constituted a defiance of the social order. Her reference points rendered the evolving terrain of cultural contestations in Colombia in the 1960s as a space where the legitimate and the illegitimate wrestled for hegemony. Following the mambo exhibition, González submitted a double portrait of the national fathers Simón Bolívar and Francisco de Paula Santander to the National Salon. Critics associated her interpretations of patrimonial national culture through the lens of radical politics. As I show in chapter 4, González’s treatment of the founding fathers as floating signifiers proved to be too much for conservative audiences to bear.

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4.1  Beatriz González, Apuntes para la historia extensa I, 1967, enamel paint on metal plate, 100 × 80 × 8 cm.

4.2  Beatriz González, Apuntes para la historia extensa II, 1967, enamel paint on metal plate, 100 × 80 × 8 cm.

chapter 4

Notes for an Exclusive History of Colombia “Plagiarism!” was the charge against Beatriz González splashed across the pages of the conservative newspaper El Siglo on Thursday, November 9, 1967. It was an indignant response by the editor, Arturo Abella, to the prize González won at the Nineteenth National Salon of Colombian Artists, held at the Luis Ángel Arango Library in Bogotá.1 She had submitted Apuntes para la historia extensa I and II (Notes for the Extensive History I and II [1967]; figures 4.1 and 4.2) — enamel-­on-­ metal medallions of Colombia’s founding fathers, Simón Bolívar and Francisco de Paula Santander. Bolívar and Santander are national heroes conventionally credited with laying the ideological groundwork for the two-­party system in Colombia; by placing their portraits side by side, González’s medallions fueled the fire of discontent with the regime of the National Front coalition. By 1967, the Bogotá art world understood artistic appropriation as a pervasive neo-­avant-­garde practice, and most snubbed the ultra-­right’s predilection for neoclassicism.2 Nonetheless, I take Abella’s accusation as an opportunity to unpack the rich web of references in González’s deceptively simple portraits and relate them to the anxiety concerning cultural patrimony, authenticity, and legitimacy that ran through critical press coverage of the salon. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the etymological root for “plagiary” is the classical Latin plagiārius: “a person who abducts the child or slave of another, kidnapper, seducer, plunderer, also a literary thief.”3 This definition helps us understand González’s provocation. Both condemnatory and panegyric reviews of the salon pivoted on the concept of authenticity, whether it was viewed as illegal appropriation or an astute response to cultural invasion. For conservative reviewers, authorial theft was not the only issue; they were also concerned about the hijacking of national institutions that controlled official history and culture, such as the National Salon and the National Academy of History. For reviewers supportive of González, especially Marta Traba, her work signified authentic resistance to U.S. cultural imperialism. As the pages ahead elaborate, the unease over the appro-

chapter 4

Notes for an Exclusive History of Colombia “Plagiarism!” was the charge against Beatriz González splashed across the pages of the conservative newspaper El Siglo on Thursday, November 9, 1967. It was an indignant response by the editor, Arturo Abella, to the prize González won at the Nineteenth National Salon of Colombian Artists, held at the Luis Ángel Arango Library in Bogotá.1 She had submitted Apuntes para la historia extensa I and II (Notes for the Extensive History I and II [1967]; figures 4.1 and 4.2) — enamel-­on-­ metal medallions of Colombia’s founding fathers, Simón Bolívar and Francisco de Paula Santander. Bolívar and Santander are national heroes conventionally credited with laying the ideological groundwork for the two-­party system in Colombia; by placing their portraits side by side, González’s medallions fueled the fire of discontent with the regime of the National Front coalition. By 1967, the Bogotá art world understood artistic appropriation as a pervasive neo-­avant-­garde practice, and most snubbed the ultra-­right’s predilection for neoclassicism.2 Nonetheless, I take Abella’s accusation as an opportunity to unpack the rich web of references in González’s deceptively simple portraits and relate them to the anxiety concerning cultural patrimony, authenticity, and legitimacy that ran through critical press coverage of the salon. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the etymological root for “plagiary” is the classical Latin plagiārius: “a person who abducts the child or slave of another, kidnapper, seducer, plunderer, also a literary thief.”3 This definition helps us understand González’s provocation. Both condemnatory and panegyric reviews of the salon pivoted on the concept of authenticity, whether it was viewed as illegal appropriation or an astute response to cultural invasion. For conservative reviewers, authorial theft was not the only issue; they were also concerned about the hijacking of national institutions that controlled official history and culture, such as the National Salon and the National Academy of History. For reviewers supportive of González, especially Marta Traba, her work signified authentic resistance to U.S. cultural imperialism. As the pages ahead elaborate, the unease over the appro-

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priation of national patrimony extended beyond the traditional ruling elites and included citizens who felt that their city had come under siege since the Bogotazo riots and as migrants invaded from the countryside, as well as intellectuals who felt threatened by the seductive pull of U.S. commodity fetishism. Abella’s accusation against González would have come as no surprise to regular readers of the ultra-­right El Siglo. The newspaper’s owner, Laureano Gómez, after all, had launched a vicious attack against liberals during La Violencia, and especially against the followers of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, who were characterized in racist terms as an unruly mob.4 Conspicuously, the work Abella was scrutinizing was not the Notes Volume II (Santander), which had won the prize, but its companion, Notes Volume I. This mix-­up hints at the charged Bolivarian symbolism during the Cold War at a time when the Colombian Conservative Party feared their icon, Bolívar, was held hostage by the left. Bolívar was no longer the fixed symbol of the Conservative Party of traditional Colombian historiography — nor was his legacy fastened to Gómez’s or Rojas Pinilla’s claims — but an unstable signifier. In fact, in 1973, six years after the scandal over González’s alleged plagiarism, the guerrilla group M-­19 stormed Bolívar’s estate in Bogotá and stole his sword while claiming it would resume the Liberator’s interrupted project of emancipation.5 This gesture symbolically materialized elites’ fear that el pueblo would rise up and take over of the nation. In this context, Notes for the Extensive History struck a nervous chord with citizens who felt their status and patrimonial culture were being threatened by rapidly changing social structures and Cold War revolutionary ideas. The work thus must be understood as a critical revision of historical and allegorical genres. Hijacking the National Salon and the National Academy of History In what seemed like a sharp departure from her previous engagements with lacemakers, the tabloid press, and popular prints, González turned her attention to Colombia’s national patriarchs. However, the Notes diptych was also a pictorial appropriation and a variation on mass-­media reproductions. Her sources were low-­grade reproductions from the Sunday supplement of El Tiempo printed on August, 6, 1967 (figure 4.3):6 a portrait of Simón Bolívar attributed to Pedro José Figueroa (figure 4.4) and a miniature of Francisco de Paula Santander by Francisco Evangelista González (figure 4.5). The newspaper printed the medallions side by side and rescaled them to equal in size, even though the nineteenth-­ century portrait of Bolívar measured 80 cm × 65 cm, while the miniature of Santander measured only 13.5 cm × 10 cm. In matching the two medallions, both the newspaper article and González’s oval portraits evoked the contemporary one peso banknote, which also juxtaposed medallions of Bolívar and Santander and circulated as a symbol of the National Front’s two-­party convivencia (figure 4.6).

4.3  Magazín Dominical, El Tiempo, August 7, 1967, front page. Image source: Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia. 4.4  (middle left) Pedro José Figueroa (attributed), Simón Bolívar, c. 1820, oil on canvas, 80 × 65 × 80 cm. Photograph: Museo de la Independencia Casa del Florero. 4.5  (middle right) Francisco Evangelista González, Francisco de Paula Santander, 1830, miniature, watercolor on ivory, 13.5 × 10 cm. Photograph: Museo de la Independencia Casa del Florero.

4.6  Banco de la República, Un Peso Oro, July 20, 1972.

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As we have seen, González astutely titled her works as dialectical text/ image provocations. In this case, Notes for the Extensive History activated the double portraits as a gesture of protest toward the Academia Colombiana de Historia (National Academy of History). The same year that González painted Notes, the academy launched the third printing of its encyclopedia, La historia extensa de Colombia (The Extensive History of Colombia).7 González deliberately ridiculed the academy’s claim to an extensive survey of Colombian history: “I conceived of these works, not as museum pieces, but as rebelliousness,” she said. “For me the important thing was to assault the heroes and above all the academy [and its] The Extensive History of Colombia, which purportedly holds ‘the last word.’ ”8 The works’ title discloses the connection: instead of suggesting the preliminary stages of a painting by using the term boceto (sketch), she chose apuntes (notes), alluding to a text in its unedited state. As González recalled, “My work deals with everything edited out of the twenty-­four volumes of The Extensive History of Colombia” — for instance, women and the popular classes.9 In 1967, the National Academy of History defined culture as high art made by men, omitting all female artists.10 This omission was all the more glaring at a time that women were dominating the Colombian cultural scene, including Traba in art criticism, Gloria Valencia de Castaño in radio and television, Sonia Osorio in dance, and Fanny Mikey in theater. In the visual arts, González, Feliza Bursztyn, Judith Márquez, Lucy Tejada, and Olga de Amaral, among many others, were leading figures of their generation. The encyclopedia barely covered popular culture aside from a brief mention of musical traditions.11 The National Academy of History was founded in the spirit of restoring social and political convivencia (coexistence) after the bitter partisan War of a Thousand Days (1899 – 1902). Its pages, according to the historian Jorge Orlando Melo, are saturated with artificial bipartisan politeness, skirting the bitter and bloody ideological conflicts that had plagued the nation since the rift between Bolívar and Santander opened in the early nineteenth century.12 Thus, the academy demonstrated that it was completely out of touch with heated historical debates; everyday Colombian life; and, in particular, women, dynamic youth, and the lower classes. Its purportedly comprehensive study of Colombian history served to emphasize the exclusionary process of national construction. Notes therefore, interrogates the validity of the academy’s metanarrative that Colombian history was based on the power struggle between the Liberal and Conservative parties, obscuring class, race, gender, generational, and all other forms of struggle.13 The title and subject of the medallion double-­portraits addresses official culture, but González’s aesthetic choices of materials and style guide the view toward unofficial uses of patrimony. Notes marked the first time that González painted with commercial enamel on metal plates, a technique that characterized her famous furniture assemblages of the 1970s. The enamel paint, which

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dried quickly and was difficult to manipulate, forced her to work quickly and graphically.14 The sheen of the enamel on the metallic surface pushed her works away from fine arts and toward commercial and applied arts. González evoked commercial imagery by simplifying the works’ contours, reducing the color palette, and flattening the figures. For Bolívar, she chose vibrant, even festive and patriotic, hues. For Santander, she chose somber and organic tones. Indeed, González’s initial idea for the medallions came from an oval tin sign in a parking lot that read, “Parqueadero el Libertador” (The Liberator’s Parking Lot).15 Inspired by the sign, González commissioned two metal ovals from the sign’s manufacturer. Interestingly, the parking lot’s owner was also playing on national Bolivarian iconography by advertising that his lot “liberated” people from having to search for parking in congested Bogotá. Notes draws on this semiotic twist to connect patriarchic heroes conceptually and materially to informal commerce. In Notes, Volume II (Santander), maroon and black paint dominate the picture plane. In the original watercolor-­on-­ivory miniature, Santander’s black cloak contrasts sharply with the teal blue background; in González’s rendition, the spectator needs to look closely to decipher the figure’s contours. The olive-­ivory tone of Santander’s pale complexion punctures the overall dark composition, while the matching angled lapels direct our gaze toward the only dash of bold color: the red book. Like the miniature where “the man of laws” stands before stacked books and holds a signed paper, here the book references Santander’s cultivated disposition, suggesting a more formal and aristocratic demeanor than the military commander Bolívar. Although red was the color associated with the Liberal Party, in the context of the Cold War a little red book held by a political leader likely set off alarms.16 Matching the simplified forms, coarse execution, and flat composition of Notes, Volume II, the Bolívar panel (Notes, Volume I) is cheeky in its carnivalesque colors and overall comic character. For an international audience, Notes, Volume I would appear to show a pop icon. González interpreted Figueroa’s Bolívar with bold blocks of brilliant hues, such as vibrant mint green for the background (i.e., the verdes maravillosos that Traba had praised in the past). The Liberator’s military uniform corresponds to Colombia’s yellow, red, and blue tricolor flag. Segments of pink and copper schematically depict Bolívar’s face, while three arched rectangles suggest eyebrows and a mustache. There is no shading or modulation; instead, the composition’s cut-­out quality recalls reconfigurable dress-­up paper dolls, tipping the hat toward the creative, irreverent, and humorous interventions of mass-­media consumers implied in collage and album making, as discussed in chapter 3. González learned from a young age that somber colors were associated with the city while vibrant colors were associated with the countryside:

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I always thought that color was something related to the provinces, like the sunsets in [the Department of] Santander that were almost in poor taste. They conjured up the colors [commercial paints] given to me by Carlos Meyer. . . . [T]he maroon came from my house, from the Cubist furniture and designer rugs of my mother. My love of color emerged with the taste from Bucaramanga, and it followed me from my earliest works. With enamel I used other Sapolin [paint] colors that reminded me of the furniture in the countryside —  that is, vibrant colors.17 The color scheme thus connects Santander to cities (and certainly provincial cities such as Bucaramanga, where the Liberal Party held great power) and Bolívar to the countryside (a Conservative Party stronghold via the Catholic Church). The urban-­rural divide would remerge in relation to class and taste. One anonymous author picked up on González’s satirical use of color geography in the article “Lo del Salón, 1967,” a title that implies a previous perhaps unmentionable conversation about the salon: “Beatriz González’s work contains the necessary dose of humor that is greatly lacking in criollo painters, sculptors, and writers who tend to be so solemn and stiff. (We say ‘humor,’ which is very different from the vulgar suburban ‘joke’.)”18 The author identifies González’s humor not as suburban vulgarity but, rather, as implying urban sophistication, the aesthetic of an initiated wink, and a welcome break from criollos’ and Euro-­American intellectuals’ traditional solemnity. This short remark is saturated with social, spatial, and even racial condescension of the urban elites toward the rural newcomers to the cities. It implies but does not overtly declare an association between the city center as criollo and refined and the periphery as non-­criollo and vulgar. Unlike in the United States, where the middle and upper-­middle classes were leaving the cities for the suburbs, in Colombia the cities were expanding because of illegal migration (“invasions”) from rural to urban areas. Yet González’s works referenced not suburban or geographically marginal slums but the socially marginal and centrally located squatters in the historic center of Bogotá, where her works were exhibited and where one would find the Liberator’s Parking Lot. Even though the article’s anonymous author applauded González’s erudite satire, the need to differentiate among social classes betrays an anxiety about the changing face of the city and the status of high art. This unveiling of social structure in terms of color relations informed another author who was less sympathetic to González’s humor: the newspaper El País published an indignant response by “Aurita de Cali” declaring the medallions unfit for the National Salon. In response to González’s color choices, Aurita de Cali titled her review of the Salon “Hepatitis y apoplegía”: When I learned that one of the [National Salon] prizes had been awarded to Beatriz González, I remembered the “malnourished” fat girl, flabby, wide-­

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legged, disarticulated, and atrocious with which the artist tormented us at the Art Festival in Cali. And even though I did not plan to go through the bother of coat and cold for the salon, I thought to myself: “I have to see this prize” — I intuited an improvement. While leaving the fabulous Luis Ángel Arango Library without finding the works that sparked my curiosity and motivated my visit, I came across two old men (viejorros), one in front of the other, in oval medallions: one was the image itself of an acute hepatitis attack. The whole green-­yellow gamut swarms throughout the brushstrokes. At its side, in competition, was another old-­timer putti-­sanguine and in the middle of an attack of fulminant apoplexy [a severe stroke].19 The composition should be titled, “Before and After Taking Scott’s Emulsion.” However, since Scott’s Emulsion is no longer used, I asked myself, “What is that?” When I found out that it was “the prize,” I considered that the “malnourished one from Cali” should have been declared disqualified.20 González frustrated Aurita de Cali’s expectation for portraiture to immortalize national heroes pictorially; instead, for her, the medallions achieved the opposite —  it depicted them in the midst of a fatal attack. She was also scandalized by Bursztyn’s kinetic sculptures and by Bernardo Salcedo’s white boxes. In her diagnosis of hepatitis or fulminant apoplexy, along with psychosis for the salon in general, the author rehearsed the metaphor of cultural pathology. Aurita de Cali found evidence of a decadent society and thus vowed never to return: “In any case, I will never again return to such a nightmarish swarm of monstrous beasts — a type of infernal vomit. . . . What this untranslatable art translates is a deformed psyche. Monstrous.”21 The association with mortal disease echoed Gómez’s fascist-­ inspired diagnosis of cultural degeneracy. Gómez had dabbled in art criticism and, inspired by a sojourn in 1930s Germany, repeated the National Socialist rhetoric of aesthetic modernism as a symptom of social sickness.22 For many fascists and fascist-­sympathizing statesmen, including Gómez in the previous decades, any deviation from a neoclassicism signified cultural degeneracy. Aurita de Cali denounced González’s Notes not only as an affront to the patriarchs but also on the basis of traditional aesthetic conventions by suggesting that the double-­portrait would better serve an advertising campaign for Scott’s codliver oil. To describe the brushwork in Notes, she chose the commercial painter’s term brocha instead of the artist’s pincel. Aurita de Cali was offended by the manner in which González associated national heroes with the untutored, the popular, and the commercial, which to her suggested a form of unhealthy degeneration.23 The threat of popularizing legitimate culture would reappear in many reviews of the National Salon. Notes thus traced the boundaries of the permissible; González’s creative offense and her spectators’ agitated responses defined a contested symbolic ter-

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rain. As one anonymous author wrote in an article titled “Pintura de Tiradera” (Hoax Painting): Art experts tell us that there are various artistic schools: Classicism, Impressionism, Surrealism, and Abstractionism. Formerly unknown, “hoax” painting has seemingly entered the new wave and merits all types of homage. . . . It was previously understood in good faith that one artist could be “inspired” by another. But no. It was a newspaper clip that [González] found at hand, and she immediately made a work of art. Seriously? No. As a prank. As a hoax. To pull the leg of The Extensive History of Colombia.24 For this author, Notes reached beyond the limits of a rapidly changing artistic landscape. She or he accused the artist not only of swindling an audience who took the National Salon seriously, but also, even worse, of ridiculing the National Academy of History. The author continued: “Wouldn’t it be better if, in order to make these types of ‘transformations,’ artists would consult the original? It is not certain whether this ‘leg pulling’ is being done against the illustrious men or against the lay public. When history is written that does not correspond to old or venerated versions, it rains criticism — and it should. However, when mocking the founding fathers is done in painting, there are applauses galore!”25 Thus, this author disparaged González’s professional negligence for basing her versions on multiply reproduced images — newspapers’ reproductions of photographs of paintings — rather than consulting the so-­called original source. His or her grievance discloses a belief that national icons should not be open for interpretation but should comply with officially sanctioned versions. This author also appeared to be offended by a double standard in evaluating artistic and historical works — that is, critics scrutinized academic historians if their accounts were not verifiable while critics allowed, and even praised, artists for their artistic license and freedom to transform. However, what this anonymous author condemned as the artist’s shortcoming can be understood instead as an unwitting endorsement of art as transformative, creatively heretical, and ideologically regenerative. The discursive space that the heretical work opens is a symbolic battleground for cultural hegemony. Unlike social scientists, artists have creative license, and the arts are endowed with the creativity, criticality, and freedom to take risks that are necessary for civic agency.26 By exhibiting Notes at the National Salon, González’s heretical turn rendered the parameters of official culture visible. What the article’s author failed to see was how Notes functioned as a meta-­picture, or a picture about picturing.27 Looking at art within the National Salon was a very different activity from looking at a commercial sign. Like private albums and sensational news, the clumsily executed tin medallions were out of place at the Luis Ángel Arango Library, challenging spectators’ preconceptions about what constitutes official culture. Notes asked

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reviewers to negotiate the role of art in Colombian society: whether it should preserve an old order, destabilize official icons, or propose new configurations. This destabilization of the icon was what prompted Abella not only to accuse González of plagiarism but also to prominently sign his article (figure 4.7).28 Abella argued that González illicitly copied Figueroa’s portrait: “This is why I dare pose the question to the art experts, so that they may clarify if Figueroa — dead in 1838 — plagiarized Beatriz González or Beatriz González plagiarized Figueroa. . . . [González] did not leave a thing out, not even the mapamundi [world map] that the Liberator holds in his hands.” In his haste to judge a misdeed, Abella overlooked that González had deliberately replaced the world map with a flat black semicircle; thus, in Notes, Volume I Bolívar is gesturing not toward the recently constituted nation of “columbia” but ominously pointing into a dark tunnel. Abella also missed that Figueroa, a known royalist, used the English spelling instead of “Colombia,” possibly as a critique of Bolívar’s adoration of the British aristocracy. Furthermore, the caption published in El Tiempo did not definitively attribute the painting to Figueroa. It could also be a copy. Copying images was a frequent and unproblematic practice in the colonial and early republican period. In fact, the more faithful the copy, the more it would be regarded as carrying the original’s power.29 In her appropriation, González tapped into the repetitive cycle of reproduction, in which images were not only repainted for distribution but reproduced in newspapers, on currency, in popular culture, and, indeed, on parking lot signs. Certainly, Notes points to the mutation that occurs as an iconic image passes from one socially codified space to another: from museum to treasury to newspaper, and from manual production to mechanical reproduction back to manual production. González’s “representation of a representation” calls attention to the process by which the periphery, in class, gender, and geographical terms, approaches legitimate culture.30 In this sense, Abella hit the mark elsewhere when he wrote, “Figueroa would be even more avant-­garde than artists today — since they need to be ‘inspired’ by his style. . . . Figueroa’s figures are as plump as those that appear in the paintings of [Fernando] Botero and other followers.” Despite the snarky context, Abella’s assertion that Figueroa would be considered vanguard in modern terms was accurate. During the early nineteenth-­century military campaign for independence from Spain, political leaders sought to integrate elite criollos with the mixed-­ race lower classes.31 Thus, independence-­era leaders in Colombia commissioned guild artists working in nonacademic styles — most famously, José Gil de Castro and Pedro José Figueroa — to paint their portraits or represent key historical moments and symbols to help a socially and racially fragmented society identify as one corporate group of Americans. In finding affinities among Figueroa, González, and Botero, Abella unwittingly endorsed an art that strategically enlisted popular forms of expression.

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4.7  Arturo Abella, “Aquí Bogotá: ¿Quién plagió a quién?,” El Siglo, November 9, 1967, front page. Image source: Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia.

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4.8  Beatriz González, Apuntes para la historia extensa I and II, 1967, side view, 100 × 80 × 8 cm each.

Bolívar also commissioned portraits of himself during his military campaign to mark independence as both a rupture from Spain and a continuation of political legitimacy.32 He sent these portraits to designated cities to participate in spectacular festivals for the Liberator, pageants that previously had staged a viceroy or archbishop. Therefore, the use of patriotic icons in civic processions was designed to replace the colonial with republican order. González alluded to patriotic festivals by painting the Colombian tricolor bands — yellow, blue, and red — on the medallions’ circumference, resembling marching bands’ drums (figure 4.8). She later assembled a rendition of Édouard Manet’s The Fifer (1866) onto one of these wooden drums, which were sold at Pasaje Rivas, Monserrate, and other informal artisanal markets. In ¡Vive la France! (1975), González parodied the paradoxical mixture of nationalism and Francophilia characteristic of the

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founding elites.33 Notes thus transports our imagination away from the museums that house the Figueroa painting and the Santander miniature into the street pageantry of popular civic festivals. More precisely, González inserted these popular appropriations of national culture into the very institution that differentiated between the erudite and the popular. The National Salon served as the site for official consecration of art, where experts, through a system of prizes, set the parameters for high art. González brought into the salon an offensive tactic of parodic inversion. It is not so much that she collapsed the binary of high and low as that she infused the high with the low enough to irritate. The enamel-­on-­tin medallions still operated as high art, but they brought to the fore this dislocation, an out-­of-­place character, with their social space both tangible and tangled. Abella’s and Aurita de Cali’s outrage over the vulgarization of national icons and their desire to define artistic parameters joined a choir bemoaning the popularization of the National Salon. In restructuring the salon, its director, Mireya Zawadsky, sought to avoid dominance by consecrated artists and traditional media by blurring categorical lines and eliminating conventional media-­based awards. Instead, the jury would grant three awards regardless of medium, which disrupted the traditional fine arts hierarchy.34 Critic and poet Mario Rivero lamented the inclusion of two photographers in the admissions and prize juries: “At the pace we are going in Cultural Extension [Oficina de Extensión Cultural y Bellas Artes], someone told me, one fine day we will stumble tranquilly upon two tailors.”35 Rivero’s concern over the future infiltration of tradesmen into the salon reveals a crisis of artistic categories. As means to combat this perceived banalization of the salon, critics replicated a vertical classification system based on gender and class expressed through the lens of taste. For instance, throughout his reviews of the 1967 National Salon, the critic Germán Rubiano Caballero evaluated the works of female artists on the basis of their good taste and refinement. He wrote about works by painter Sonia Guttierrez at the salon as very amiable and in good taste. He repeated the same sentiment when he described Beatriz Daza’s work as embodying refined and excellent taste and characterized Teresa Cuéllar’s sepia-­colored fruit as “very refined.”36 He did not use the term “taste” — good or bad — when referring to any of the male artists, thus reiterating normative expectations for “ladies who paint,” the very stigma González not only repudiated but led to her decision to aggravate and break the rules of decorum.37 She reminisced about submitting Notes to the salon, “I conceived of these works not as museum pieces, but as rebelliousness. I was a transgressor, and people used to think, and tell me, that I was crazy. They saw at first that I was refined, then they saw my change in direction. I was no longer refined. Then it was the search for the unrefined that distanced me from the institutions. I wanted to offend.”38 As we saw in chapter 1, reviewers responded enthusiastically to González’s Lacemakers exhibition because her abstract varia-

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4.9  Bernardo Salcedo, Vivo recuerdo de la visita de Nuestra Señora de Bojacá en el día de mi primera curación, 1967, mixed media assemblage, 85 × 86 × 56 cm. Courtesy of the Bernardo Salcedo Estate.

tions on a Western masterpiece met their desire for an erudite, refined abstraction that could conform to Colombia’s specific form of conservative modernization. González quickly turned on this recognition, understanding her artistic role as antagonistic. Rubiano Caballero picked up on González’s charge, describing Notes as “the most stinging and courageous painting in the competition.”39 He was sympathetic to creative transgressions and considered Notes and Salcedo’s Vivo recuerdo de la visita de Nuestra Señora de Bojacá en el día de mi primera curación (Vivid Memory of Our Lady of Bojacá’s Visit on the Day of My First Healing [1967]; figure 4.9) the best works at the salon.40 Salcedo’s title refers ambivalently to a person’s first healing as the result of a visit from (apparition) or to (pilgrimage) Our Lady of Bojacá. Like Notes, Salcedo’s reconfiguration of found objects suggests the ways in which individuals appropriate official — in this case, Catholic — rituals for their own purposes. Rubiano Caballero applauded González’s courage to present “the effigy of two of our most distinguished independence heroes” using a “deliberately clumsy technique.”41 The technique that he called clumsy includes colores chillones y sucios (loud and dirty colors). These terms carry the social-­behavioral connotations of unruliness and lack of hygiene that were prevalent in elite dis-

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courses about the illiterate masses.42 This was a stark contrast to the refined sepia colors of Daza’s paintings, which Rubiano Caballero admired elsewhere. He continued, “At the margins of the inert academy, very close to ‘popular’ and cursi [tacky] painting, full of desaforado spontaneity, the portraits of the heroes have an exceptional grace and irony.”43 The term desaforado (unmeasured, exuberant, excessive) term derives from des and aforar or fuero — that is, against or outside the law, the illegitimate, unruly, out of control, or even riotous.44 Therefore, Rubiano Caballero’s “popular” relates more to the elites’ tense perception of the unruly masses than González’ notions of unbridled or copious creativity. In conjoining the gracious and the riotous, Rubiano Caballero recognized the irony or embedded contradiction in Notes. Both González’s medallions and Salcedo’s assemblage snip from the margins and reach across the interstitial border between the popular and cursi and official culture. Bolívar Hostage Definitions of taste played an important role in the critical evaluation of Notes. As with the term “cursi,” which conspicuously reappears in the critical literature of the 1967 National Salon, the accusations of plagiarism served as euphemisms that point to the limits of representation and speech. González’s appropriation of, and variations on, existing images and allusions to popular provincial civic holidays were not the only aspect of her works that offended Abella and conservative reviewers; they also reacted to the mocking tone of the subject matter. As González admitted, “I do everything possible to shock . . . to attack los próceres [heroes, illustrious men].”45 Their impassioned responses reveal a profound unease concerning who and how to represent patrimonial icons. They were undoubtedly reacting to the medallions’ implied political critique. González’s double-­portrait of Bolívar and Santander, echoing the commemorative banknote and El Tiempo article, referenced the bipartisan National Front coalition government. Since the nineteenth century, and with varying degrees of emphasis, Colombian politicians and historians have credited Bolívar with planting the ideological seeds of the Conservative Party; Santander, Bolívar’s first vice-­president and later political foe, is credited with launching the Liberal Party. Even though scholars have convincingly refuted this foundational myth, it has served as a poignant political mobilizer during times of partisan civil war, such as the War of a Thousand Days and La Violencia.46 The National Front’s convivencia put an end to the escalating partisan violence but in effect canceled out all other political alternatives and thus defied the very basis of democracy. González’s medallions, with their untutored style and reference to informal commerce, challenged the discourse of refined and gentlemanly stewardship that buttressed the National Front’s legitimacy.

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Abella’s accusation of plagiarism had less to do with artistic originality than with deep-­seated anxiety concerning the changing social order manifest in the historiographical dispute over Bolívar’s legacy. He focused on González’s portrait of Bolívar (not Santander), after all, suggesting that what stung was the offense he perceived as having been committed against an icon. In the conservatives’ eyes, not only was Bolívar the founder of their party, but his Constitution provided ideological justification for their authoritarianism and general distrust of the anarchic masses, as well as a defense of a traditional patriarchic structure. As president from 1950 to 1953, Gómez in fact refashioned Bolívar as the symbolic leader of his reconquest during the years leading up to La Violencia, breaking with the general convivencia agreement that the nation had been formed jointly by Bolívar the Liberator’s military prowess and Santander’s administrative and legislative talents. As president of the proclaimed “Bolivarian Nation” and during the most vicious years of La Violencia, Gómez stoked partisan retaliation by enlisting Bolívar as the antiliberal and anticommunist protector of Colombian Catholicism, patrimony, and national order. He cast Santander as his opportunistic negative: a traitor to both Bolívar and the nation.47 Gómez changed the name of the Ministry of Education’s publication from Revista de las Américas to Bolívar and refocused it to discuss the Liberator’s political ideas.48 When the bloodshed in the rural areas of Colombia spiraled out of control, elites supported the short-­lived dictatorship of Gustavo Rojas Pinilla (1953 – 1957). General Rojas-­Pinilla pledged to continue to lead the nation inspired by Bolívar. However, his Estado Cristiano y Bolivarano (Christian and Bolivarian State) interpreted the Liberator’s legacy as a military-­pueblo coalition against the oligarchy.49 Toward the end of his regime, Rojas Pinilla began to position himself as a social liberator by appealing to the authoritative populism of the mythic Bolívar. At that point, the political elites understood that their survival depended on the cordial coexistence, or convivencia, of the leaders of the two parties that were heirs to Bolívar and Santander.50 Meanwhile, the Colombian left had been challenging the conservatives’ hold on Bolívar’s legacy since the 1930s, emphasizing instead the Liberator’s anti-­ imperialist, anticolonial, and revolutionary ideas. Bolívar’s unfulfilled wishes to unite Spanish America against imperial aggression, his multiracial army, and the emancipation of his slaves lent themselves to a revalorization of his revolutionary role in liberal, and even Marxist, terms.51 Picking up this reevaluation, which was begun by the Cuban independence hero José Martí, Soviet scholars became interested after the successful Cuban Revolution of 1959 in exploring the revolutionary legacy of Latin American wars of independence. Several Soviet historians associated with the Latin American Institute, which was founded in 1961, and Revista América Latina/Latinskaia Amerika, interpreted the wars of independence from Spain as a populist liberation movement and characterized Bolívar’s po-

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litical ideas as a form of utopian socialism.52 The Colombian Communist Party’s magazine republished texts by the Soviet historians Andrey Schelchkov, Anatoli Shulkovski, and Iosif Remuladivich Lavretsky that characterized Bolívar’s struggle as one of popular mobilization, emancipation of slaves, and redistribution of indigenous lands.53 In emphasizing Bolívar’s revolutionary character, these authors interpreted his exclusion of the United States from the Panama Congress as a warning against neoimperialism emanating from the northern neighbor. Bolívar’s authoritarianism was reinterpreted as realism, a position of strength necessary to challenge the oligarchic privilege concealed behind formalist legalism. These revisionist texts became the basis for the radicalization of the Bolivarian icon within the Communist Party and the guerrilla movements of the 1970s and 1980s. Notes did not show clear support for any specific interpretation of Bolívar —  leftist or rightist. Instead, it served as a critique of the official and ossified narrative of history; González in effect was tossing her unstable and multivalent rendition of Bolívar into this symbolic vortex. Nonetheless, Bolívar interpreted as populist and revolutionary would be antithetical to the conservatives. At the heart of Gómez’s and the Conservative Party’s endorsement of a central and authoritarian power inspired by Bolívar was the perception of the pueblo as an unruly and irrational mob. Abella’s indignation toward popular representation of Bolívar demonstrated a crisis of confidence in Bolivarian signification for the Conservative Party. City under Siege: El Bogotazo and La Chusma Understanding an unhinged Bolívar icon does much to explain the indignation of Abella and other Gómez collaborators. However, even sympathetic critics such as Rubiano Caballero enlisted a language of class and gender condescension, pivoting on the terms “cursi” and “desaforado,” that were in conversation with a long and persistent history of representing the pueblo as a riotous and uncontrollable mass.54 In contrast to the American, French, Mexican, and Russian revolutions, no attempt in Colombia to aggrandize or mythologize “the people” has ever succeeded. Even in countries that did not endure a social revolution in the strictest sense — for example, Brazil and Argentina — populist caudillos such as Getúlio Vargas and Juan Domingo Perón capitalized on the discourse of heroic masses. In Colombia, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán came close and left an enduring desire for a symbolically victorious pueblo. However, the National Front resisted, and no such triumphant mythology of social inversion ever gained traction in official national narratives. On the contrary, state legitimacy continued to rely on characterizing the masses as dangerously irrational, excessively violent, and in need of control.

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4.10  Manuel H. Rodríguez, Techos de las casas (Rooftops), Bogotá, April 9, 1948. © Los Herederos del Maestro Manuel H. Rodríguez C.

Nothing could have provided more confirmation of the elites’ worst fears about threatening masses than the riots known as the Bogotazo, which began on April 9, 1948, following Gaitán’s assassination (figure 4.10).55 According to Fred Soper, then the director of the Pan American Sanitary Bureau, “Bogotá looked like one of the European cities bombed during World War II.”56 The liberal journalist Luis Eduardo Nieto Caballero, who wrote under the nom de plume Calibán, lamented, “The cyclone of the beast, the shame of humanity, hurled itself against Bogotá — oh, poor, beloved Bogotá — and razed the best that she had.”57 The elites looked down on the nueveabrileños, as the rioters were known, as vulgar opportunists rather than as agents of political and social change who were confronting the institutions that barred them physically and symbolically from political life. While this destruction and looting have been conventionally characterized as the unleashing of the masses’ barbaric forces, the historian Herbert Braun has demonstrated that the rioters directed their destructive rage at institutions and establishments that were perceived to have been complicit in Gaitán’s assassination or that kept the masses from social participation.58 The only building left standing on the Calle Real, which led to the Plaza Bolívar, was the Museo de la Independencia – Casa del Florero, which commemorates the site of the criollo’s

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4.11  Ruins of the destroyed store “Almacén Estrella” with words “Buen Gusto” visible on second floor. Bogotá, April 9, 1948.

“cry for independence” on July 20, 1810. The rioters took out their rage on known conservative establishments. One main target was the building of El Siglo, Gómez’s newspaper, where Abella served as editor-­in-­chief. Thus, Abella’s reaction to Notes may have been informed by the destruction of his workplace. The Bogotazo riots were in part an attack on notions of social distinction. The systematic destruction made explicit the connection between economic disparities and the social exclusion that mediated good and bad taste. Gaitán represented the urban poor’s chances to gain political and economic participation; his death was met with despair and sense of vengeance, a need to destroy all to start anew.59 Looting was an expression of revenge against those perceived as responsible for lack of access to a lifestyle that only a few could enjoy. The rioters ransacked luxury clothing stores and jewelry shops on the Calle Real, as well as on the Calle Inglesa, which was known for selling cloth imported from England.60 A photograph showing the ruins of a burned-­out clothing store after the fire was put down shows the just visible words “Buen Gusto” (good taste) at the upper left (figure 4.11).

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After the Bogotazo riots, the elites abandoned the historic center of Bogotá, leaving its Candelaria neighborhood open to immigrant squatters. Many of the buildings destroyed during the Bogotazo riots were never rebuilt, and open spaces were later converted into parking lots like the Liberator’s Parking Lot. Indeed, the informal enterprises that sprang up, with their ubiquitous tin signs, forever changed Bogotá’s city center. In this context, Notes irritated (if not frightened) and certainly challenged those who claimed there was a natural distinction between the cultivated leaders of society and the uncultivated who needed to be ruled and contained. Just like all of Colombia’s governments of convivencia, the National Front instrumentalized a narrative of moral and spiritual elegance to legitimize a precarious state. Indeed, during the Bogotazo riots, and protected by the military, the Conservative Party government of Mariano Ospina Pérez met in the National Palace with Liberal Party leaders to discuss a course of action. According to Braun, “Once they were together again, the traditional leaders of the Liberal and Conservative parties staged the most celebrated conversation in Colombian history. As the city burned around them, they talked slowly, calmly, with all the respect and deference that the codes of public life imposed upon them.”61 The outcome of this exchange was another victory for political convivencia. Ospina Pérez named six liberal ministers and six conservatives to his cabinet, with one military officer as minister of defense. For the first time, the cabinet was split evenly between the two traditional parties. None of Gaitán’s followers was nominated. Likewise, the National Front used the Bogotazo riots, La Violencia, and the threat of a Cuban-­inspired revolution as evidence of a violent and unruly populace and as a justification for exclusionary governance. As its intellectual architect, Alberto Lleras Camargo came to personify the discourse of state legitimacy. The U.S. press called him the “great conciliator,” “the leading statesman of Latin American democracy,” and the “most important man in Latin America.”62 His national supporters invoked his measured demeanor, elegant erudition, and austere civil service as testimony to a natural ability to govern.63 For many Colombians, John F. Kennedy’s visit to Colombia in December 1961 and the promises of the Alliance for Progress confirmed that the nation was under the protection of an enlightened coalition. The justification for a political elite depended on the belief that there was a strict natural hierarchy that placed the educated, refined, and enlightened few above the illiterate and vulgar masses. Braun writes of jefes naturales (natural leaders of society) for whom “public life was a means toward a better society but only because in their behavior, in their manners and tastes and in the examples they set for their followers, public figures were the very expression of good society.”64 The convivialistas conceived of themselves as the moral carriers of civilization whose example would lead the people to a better future, a highly stratified social structure that did not allow for the democracy from

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below that Gaitán preached.65 Notes posed a challenge to the ideology of natural leaders by injecting patriarchic subjects and national institutions, the National Salon and the National Academy of History, with carnivalesque inversions of that social order. Notes generated language in the critical press that gives us insights into the underlying connections between class condescension and political unease. There is a revealing similitude between the terms critics used to discuss González’s works and those used by the press to describe Gaitán’s public style. Embedded in this language is the elite perception of the pueblo: Gaitán was one of “them,” and González was creating art about “them.” Like González’s The Sisga Suicides paintings and the Liberator’s Parking Lot, Gaitán embodied the cursilería of the pueblo. Gaitán’s critics, especially conservatives publishing in El Siglo, represented him as vulgar and part of la chusma (the rabble).66 Much of the criticism of Gaitán from both liberals and conservatives was about form, style, and class. The liberal leader Juan Lozano y Lozano wrote, “The city forgave Gaitán his talent, his ambition, and his victories. But it will be a long time before it forgives him his autographs, the italics of his language, his deep-­ marine-­blue shirts.”67 When Gaitán was appointed mayor of Bogotá, Calibán wrote for the Liberal El Tiempo: “[Gaitán] exaggerates and lets himself be carried away by his excessively impetuous temperament. A figure as important as the mayor of Bogotá would do well to remain calmer.”68 According to Semana magazine, founded by Lleras Camargo in 1946, “Gentlemen do not show their teeth.”69 The same magazine ridiculed Gaitán on the front cover with a caricature of his prominent teeth as columns holding up two halves of a dark, puppet-­like head; the caption read, “Gaitán: Demagogía, desconfianza y prudencia” (Gaitán: Demagoguery, Distrust and Prudence; figure 4.12).70 This image and other press coverage focused on Gaitán’s lack of decorum for his official post, his visible teeth and sweat, his flailing arms and unruly hair, his informal language, his emotional style during public orations that inspired frenzy in the crowd rather than deference and awe.71 The press perceived these unmeasured displays of private life as cursi excesses and beneath the station of public figures. Gaitán’s political career was indicative of broader and more profound political awakening of the masses that challenged this illusion of elite governance.72 However, Gaitán molded his political image on the image of the people. He was not only from the pueblo, but he spoke of himself as the pueblo.73 According to Braun, Gaitán had “the nation’s unforgettable indigenous past written across his face.”74 His dark skin tone, straight black hair, and striking facial features made him stand out racially in a country where the white criollo elite had held political power since independence.75 His oratorical style was passionate, excessive, and unmeasured. Gaitán fashioned his speeches on ballads of love and yearning for the unattainable and even commissioned original songs for his campaign. He

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4.12  “Gaitán: Demagogía, desconfianza y prudencia,” Semana, November 4, 1946, front cover. Image source: Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia.

spoke the pueblo’s language rather than citing the formal economic and political treatises used by the educated elite to confirm their ability to lead and intimidate those who did not possess their lexical knowhow. He used the mass media, especially radio, to reach the illiterate masses. In general, Gaitán channeled his public persona through his proximity to the pueblo. As Gaitán’s popularity among the urban masses became a clear threat to the convivialistas and the hegemonic social order, their formal condescension turned into overt racism and classism. When Gaitán launched his presidential campaign at the Circo de Santamaría, Bogotá’s central bullfighting ring, the newspaper La Razón noted that “the Circo de Santamaría has always been used for barbaric spectacles such as bullfighting and boxing. No place is more appropriate to launch the candidacy of Dr. Gaitán.”76 El Siglo printed racially charged caricatures, including one that represented Gaitán’s followers as an African tribe stabbing an elegantly dressed white man (figure 4.13).77 In another image, a fortuneteller is telling Gaitán that his future is as black as his skin.78 Critics of Gómez characterized his excessive political style as rabid fanaticism and mental illness, but they did not use the class-­based rhetoric to which Gaitán was subjected.79 Put differently, Gómez’s foes cast him as an aberration within his social class, while Gaitán was portrayed as an example of the cursi masses. Notes

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4.13  “La tribú Gaitanista,” El Siglo, January 17, 1948. Image source: Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia.

catalyzed its critics’ class condescension as the state’s legitimacy was at its most fragile: during La Violencia and again during the National Front government. By 1967, the threat of a rebellious populace was being reframed as the threat of guerrilla insurgency. This zealous effort to distinguish among social-­aesthetic categories demonstrates the extent to which the governing elites relied on the constitutive and imaginary binary between measured, rational elite culture and unruly, irrational populace. As noted earlier, the Nineteenth National Salon of Colombian Artists took place in the relatively new Luis Ángel Arango Library, which had been constructed over rubble of the Bogotazo riots. The building increased the official prestige of the National Salon, not only because of its state-­of-­the-­art exhibition space, but also because it symbolized a restoration of order. It was a clever and highly provocative gesture for González to exhibit Notes, with all of its references to popular appropriations of patrimonial cultural, in this symbolically charged building. Located in the Candelaria neighborhood at the city’s colonial center, the elegant modern construction was surrounded by reminders of the riots. The library is only a few blocks from the Museo de la Independencia, which owns the Bolívar and Santander paintings. Between the two buildings one finds the

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kinds of parking lots, informal commerce, and small shops selling religious and patriotic chromolithographs that González cites in her work. At the Luis Ángel Arango Library, Notes aggravated Abella’s and the traditional elite’s open wounds and fear of the urban newcomers. Bolívar a Go-­Go The material and stylistic antagonism and, above all, the pictorial ambiguity of Notes proved to be a semiotic lodestone. The work capitalized on the anxiety produced by unstable Bolivarian signification, the political awakening of the masses, and rural-­to-­urban immigration that had dislocated elites from the historical center of Bogotá. While Bolívar as a floating signifier sent chills up conservatives’ spines, a refashioned revolutionary and anti-­imperialist Bolívar actually resonated with many intellectuals on the left. During the National Front government, many left-­of-­center intellectuals felt betrayed by their Liberal Party leaders who had prioritized the spirit of polite convivencia over urgent social and economic reforms and who were concerned with the close collaboration of the regime with the Alliance for Progress. In their case, they feared less the massive invasion from rural areas than U.S. imperialism. Rivero, who was known mostly for his “Poemas urbanos” — poetic tributes to Ché Guevara, the Beatles, and the urban proletariat” — titled his review of the salon “the other face of the medallions,” suggesting hypocrisy. Rivero wrote that “the threat came from González’s importation of go-­go, or ‘camp,’ culture” and charged her with following U.S. trends.80 Instead of accusing González of hijacking patrimonial culture, Rivero denounced her for importing a foreign model, lacking a profound social critique, and more dangerous, mocking popular culture. He saw in Notes a shallow art that echoed youth culture that was easily seduced by American commercialism. Tellingly, hipsters in Colombia were conventionally called “Coca-­Colos.” Traba would later describe Bolívar in Notes, Volume I as “pop drummer,” a reference to the emerging global youth culture.81 In fact, the Beatles released their album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band earlier that same year on June 1, 1967. Young audience members at the salon would have noted a resemblance between the brightly colored uniforms in González’s rendition of Bolívar and the rock band Edwardianesque outfits. Notes formally embodied both national patrimony and global youth culture, thus revealing another potent dimension to its political effect. Historically, the discursive category “youth” has played a politicized role throughout the Americas, asserting the New World as regenerative and redemptive alternative to a spiritually decadent Old World. This was even more the case after World War II. As discussed in chapter 1, youth was also a valuable category in Colombia in the launching Los Nuevos, the triumphal group of modernists who displaced

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both academicists and indigenists from cultural hegemony. In her writings, Traba grouped artists in terms of generations, suggesting that youthful impulses blazed trails. However, in the climate of student agitation and demographic explosion, the appeal of revolutionary guerrillas, and the prevalence of a seductive mass media that came with expansive U.S. markets, “youth” was further charged as a politicized concept.82 Reviewers of the Nineteenth National Salon implemented this politicized understanding of youth. A young Rubiano Caballero, who had recently returned from his training in London, titled his review of the salon “Los Jóvenes” (The Young Ones) and wrote, “The most outstanding fact about this competition is the predominance of youth values. When the ‘sacred cows’ of twenty years ago have definitively passed on to history and the great ones of ten years ago, for one reason or another, have distanced themselves from the intrigue, the generation of artists around age thirty are establishing themselves with their work and talent within the vanguard of national art that battles each day courageously to be less provincial.”83 The idea of a triumphal new generation had deeper connotations, considering the tensions felt between the traditional ruling class and the politicized university students. The fact that a student artist, Juan Manuel Lugo, who was in only his fourth year at the National University’s School of Fine Arts, would share second prize with González endorsed the notion that students played a prominent role in cultural developments. González was identified as one of the Young Ones as a generational clash was under way that identified youth as potentially dangerous and associated with the left. Men were growing out their beards like the so-­called barbudos from the Cuban Sierra Maestra, and young women were wearing short skirts that challenged Catholic notions of feminine propriety. The endorsement of the younger generation at the salon was an endorsement of a counterculture position and a generational clash. While Rivero interpreted González’s medallions as imitation of U.S. youth culture, Traba, conversely, understood Notes as profoundly immersed in local reality and as a clear case of cultural authenticity. Since her publication of Pintura nueva en Latinoamérica in 1961, and increasingly throughout the decade, Traba relied on the concept of artistic authenticity as an antidote to cultural “surrender” to the United States. Therefore, Traba’s defense of González against Abella’s accusation of plagiarism went beyond discrediting the conservative editor. Rather, the concept of authenticity was central to her theory of cultural resistance, which she was actively formulating during these climactic years, especially after the Bogotá Museum of Modern Art’s relocation to the National University, her trip to Cuba in 1966, her Casa de las Américas prize for Las ceremonias del verano, the military invasion of the university, and her dramatic expulsion from Colombia just a few months before the salon opened.84 On November 23, Traba wrote an extensive article for El Tiempo that not only

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vindicated González but also delineated what she believed was a broader, more alarming trend: Those who like to confuse and the ignorant have satisfied themselves by having found a motive for scandal: the plagiarism that Beatriz González is said to have committed in executing her portrait of Bolívar. It is useless for her to explain that, like almost all of her work, she derived it from a photograph in the newspaper or that she cited the innumerable modern versions of works made in the previous centuries by artists ranging from Picasso to Fernando Botero. Abella shows on television the two photographs — the Bolívar by Figueroa and the Bolívar by Beatriz González — and from that moment forward, in front of two images whose motives and solutions are totally different, Beatriz González is condemned as a plagiarist.85 Traba was aware of the seriousness of these accusations and, because of Abella’s broad sphere of influence, the effect they could have on González’s career. It is remarkable that Traba, while notoriously quick to respond in the press, did not publish her rebuttal until two weeks later. She most likely deliberated on the most effective way to dispel what she characterized as a dangerous tendency and not just an equivocation on Abella’s part. It was a time not for Traba’s reactionary dismissal but, rather, for a calculated analysis of the artistic panorama at the salon where fundamental issues concerning cultural production were in the process of being negotiated. Abella’s attack followed what Traba considered the discrediting of the best in Colombian art. She wrote: The past few months it has been said publicly that Feliza Bursztyn plagiarized a monument to López, Beatriz González plagiarized a Figueroa, and the architect Rogelio Salmona plagiarized a Frank Lloyd Wright. The accusations are grave in that they are an offense against the real values of Colombian culture — in other words, against people who have authenticity. I would like to say that no one should bother, not even the likes of Carlos Rojas or Santiago Cárdenas, to deny the literal similarity between the works exhibited at the salon and those of [the U.S. artists] Tony Smith and [Tom] Wesselman, respectively. . . . But when people like Bursztyn, Beatriz González, and Salmona are questioned, then we must ask the public respectfully to separate them from the mass of able imposters/phonies and give them the preferential treatment that their works deserve. Their works have certain paths that they generate, expressed in a personal language and a conceptual structure that endows them with solidity, plastic unity, and authenticity and in this way they are significant.86 Traba thus distinguished between artists who achieved authenticity by adopting a language conversant with others’ expression and “second-­rate copyists” who

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imported meaningless signs beyond emulating artistic trends from cultural centers such as New York.87 Traba discussed the op artist Omar Rayo as an illustrative contrast to explain her shifting value system: Inauthentic art, on the contrary, defends itself in many ways in its details, but does not resist a thorough analysis of its totality. Rayo, for example, has an impeccable finish; his optic effects are ingenious. But how can he defend the totality of his work? What profound values do they respect and communicate? In which aesthetic and geographic reality do they insert themselves? What necessity do they address? What problems do they reveal? What do they attempt to resolve in a specific manner? Nothing, absolutely nothing!88 For Traba, an artist like Rayo operated outside his own reality, disconnected from a local audience and incapable of addressing necessities or revealing particular problems. In other words, they did not function within a regional society in any significant manner. The appeal of U.S. consumer culture, and a modernizing discourse of advancement, had depoliticized artists and intellectuals by disconnecting them from their local reality and their commitment to social struggles. Through Traba’s defense of González against plagiarism we can trace the emerging theory of cultural resistance that she would articulate more fully in in her most influential book, Dos décadas vulnerables en las artes plásticas latinoamericanas, 1950–1970 (1973). Traba characterized Latin American artists who uncritically adopted international trends as surrendering to U.S. neocolonialism. Traba would nourish her position with the theories of Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Henri Lefebvre to indict the culture of highly industrialized societies as fragmented, alienated, and impotent. Capitalizing on Cold War metaphors, she condemned the “contamination and radiation” of this alienated culture, which divorced intellectuals from their own social reality. The estética del deterioro (aesthetic of deterioration), which privileged being up to date at all costs, had the lamentable side effect of also losing its audience. Thus, cultural imperialists could disarm the most engaged, enlightened, and potentially dangerous sector of society. Traba’s charge for cultural resistance was through authenticity — that is, artists’ profound understanding and engagement with their environment. It may seem paradoxical that Traba championed González’s pop colombiano as aesthetic resistance when she regarded pop as an alienated art that emerged from a kind of consumer fetishism that was irrelevant to the Colombian context. However, she used the term “pop colombiano” to reference González’s dialogue with local culture because the colonial past continued through the margins of culture. “How can one distinguish between an authentic work and an inauthentic other?” she asked. “The authentic work can be questioned for its parts, but not for its totality or for its structure. Is it possible to say . . . that Beatriz González has been

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exploring the pop colombiano streak that begins in the colony and ends with beauty pageants in Cartagena, with an inquiry into the profound and whose base becomes more and more solid each time.”89 Later in Dos décadas Traba elaborated on pop nacional as one of the three artistic avenues of resistance, along with drawing and eroticism.90 This aesthetic path resonated with the Nacionalismo Popular Revolucionario party of her ex-­husband, Alberto Zalamea, as articulated through his magazine, La Nueva Prensa. Thus, González joined the first generation that Traba endorsed, which also included José Luis Cuevas, Alejandro Obregón, Fernando de Szyzslo. (The second generation Traba endorsed included Feliza Bursztyn and Rogelio Salmona.) Deeply influenced by the literary boom under way, especially the writings of Alejo Carpentier and Gabriel García Márquez, Traba considered Latin America a bastion for unalienated mythical subjectivity, and artists carried the responsibility for capturing that regional “totality.” Her defense against plagiarism was not about originality, even though she did defend González’s innovations, but about her relationship to Latin American culture. González humorously refashioned patrimonial culture in the language of informal commerce and rock-­and-­roll. This dislocation of mass media and popular culture into the alien habitat of the erudite and official proved unsettling to audiences who were threatened both by the politicization of the masses and the increased presence of American influence. It prompted spectators, many of them outside art criticism, to articulate the social and aesthetic categories that buttress vertical symbolic systems. In doing so, it revealed the ideology of charismatic leadership instrumentalized by the traditional party elites to legitimate the National Front regime during an increasingly volatile historical moment. The Nineteenth National Salon of Colombian Artists opened to the public a few months after the military invaded the National University and only one month after Ché Guevara was executed in Bolivia. Bolívar as youthful “pop drummer” or revolutionary populist clearly alarmed those who witnessed the crescendo of Cold War tensions. A material, stylistic, and thematic inversion of the social order forecast other forms of overthrow. While I have argued that The Sisga Suicides should be considered a new form of history painting, Notes demonstrates a concerted and deliberate effort to revive the historical genre, revisited here with a sharp critical edge. Traba considered it imperative for cultural producers to build on history and tradition and then to respond, either as affirmation (orthodoxy) or as transgression (heresy). Through historical engagement, Notes played that transgressive role and destabilized not only the official narratives of Liberal and Conservative party struggles, but also the emerging official discourse of cultural modernization and advancement promoted through international art competitions, a network to which I turn in the next chapter, which discusses González’s participation in 1970 in the Second International Coltejer Biennial in Medellín.

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5.1  Beatriz González, Naturaleza casi muerta, 1970, enamel on tin plate, assembled on metal bed, 125 × 125 × 95 cm.

chapter 5

Modernist Obstruction at the Second Medellín Biennial Beatriz González’s rehearsed her intention to agredir (assault) when she submitted her most decisively local work to the Second International Coltejer Biennial in Medellín, in 1970. Naturaleza casi muerta (Almost Still Life [1970]; figure 5.1) is a multimedia assemblage in which González placed a version of Our Fallen Lord of Monserrate that she painted onto a faux wood bedframe she had purchased at a popular market. This chapter looks at González’s strategic provincialism in exhibiting this bed assemblage — saturated in idiosyncratic references and class-­marked materials — at an international competition. Even though by 1970 González was a nationally acclaimed artist, the Medellín biennial, an event at which the latest works by European, Asian, U.S., and Latin American artists were exhibited, presented the first major opportunity for her to test her art on a global stage. When González feigned irrelevance in this context — saying, “I feel I am a precursor of Colombian art [and], what is more, of a provincial art that cannot circulate universally except maybe as a curiosity”1 — she was calculating against the dictates of the biennial’s internationalism and forecasting the demise of mythic universalism. Nevertheless, international biennials were not monolithic institutions. Instead, they provided a forum for aesthetic agonism among different, and perhaps antagonistic, cultural agents. Indeed, the responses to the 1970 Medellín Biennial submissions brought into relief the numerous and arguably provincial agendas negotiated within this international competition. For instance, the organizers sought to update Colombian culture and showcase an advanced national culture to an international audience. European jurors exposed their own geopolitical biases when they dismissed González’s Almost Still Life as a derivative and belated example of U.S. pop art while commending Latin American geometric abstraction as an organic continuation of European constructivism. Many artists conformed to these objectives, but many others dissented, as did González,

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who trafficked in cultural marginality and parodied the aesthetic demands of the competition. Almost Still Life obstructed the hegemonic narrative of cultural modernization that had been fostered by international art competitions throughout Latin America since 1951. Biennial competitions such as those in São Paulo and Córdoba helped to chart cultural progress on an evolutionary grid, thus serving as companions to desarrollismo and modernization ideology. With Almost Still Life, González astutely collapsed the categorical dichotomies that buttressed this narrative, such as traditional and modern, religious and secular, functional and autonomous, and public and private, as well as local and global. Thus, the bed assemblage disrupted an illusion of standardized universal and modern culture and helped expose the heterogeneous and paradoxical agendas within a globalizing art world, modernization ideology, and the letrados’ conceptualization of lo nuestro (that which is ours) as a regional Latin American art in 1970. González likened the elaborate furniture frames to colonial altarpieces, thus calling into question the discursive framing devices through which art and culture would be presented and interpreted.2 By invoking the way in which critics, jurors, and art institutions guide spectators toward proper and improper forms of viewing, González betrayed the interested dimension of the disinterested gaze and the provincial character of universalizing ideology. González played with the new aesthetic tropes expected from participants of international biennials and, as I show, parodied advanced art trends by satirically calling into question their radicality. Embedded in this complex and comical assemblage, as the pun allows, Almost Still Life is an interrogation of vision as a metaphor for power and the critics or jurors, who, like the clergy, guided viewers in the proper direction. Our Art Sequestered in Monserrate: González’s Strategic Provincialism By 1967, González had secured her reputation as a polemical artist through her participation in the 1967 National Salon, the ensuing scandal started by Arturo Abella, and her defense by critics such as Marta Traba. However, it was the next stage of her oeuvre, her furniture assemblages of the 1970s — known, and hereafter referred to, as her mobiliario — that have commanded the most attention from art historians. During the decade, González was invited frequently to participate in biennials, salons, and international museum exhibitions. In fact, her first exhibitions outside Colombia consisted primarily of her mobiliario.3 In 1971, the Instituto de Cultura Colombiana (Colcultura) sent several furniture pieces as representative of contemporary Colombian art to Buenos Aires for the exhibition “Colombia 71” and to the Tenth São Paulo Biennial.4 In 1977, Traba’s Los muebles de Beatriz González (The Furniture of Beatriz González) was published as one of only three monographs Traba wrote during her prolific career.5 Even though González

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stopped working on her mobiliario in the late 1970s, they are considered milestones of Latin American art today and have entered the collections of major institutions, including the Tate Modern in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Houston Museum of Fine Art. They have also appeared in landmark exhibitions of Latin American art. Although González claimed that her work could circulate outside of Colombia only as a curiosity, it continues to command a great deal of interest in artistic centers worldwide. This is no coincidence: González’s art resonates as an art of regional authenticity, which has helped debunk the universalism of High Modernist theory and played a significant role in the turn toward multiculturalism. Almost Still Life was González’s first furniture assemblage. In what has become a legendary origin story for her mobiliario, González recounted: I was working on a painting of the Christ of Monserrate [devotional sculpture in Bogotá]. Then one day I accompanied my husband to Los Mártires [an area within Bogotá], where there were many building supply stores. Then I saw the bed and said, “Let’s buy one of these beds.” He asked, “For what?” And I said, “To have it.” We purchased only the ends, the headboard and footboard, and I was mesmerized. I loved it. I loved how it was painted, its imagination. This type of beds was called a radio bed because it often had a place to put a radio, as well as built-­in lamps, small engravings, and so on. They were marvelous. . . . Then — this is when chance came into play — we arrived at the studio. I already had the painting of Our Lord of Monserrate, and when I put it on the bed, it was the same width! Wham! It became a short bed.6 Even though González described the first assemblage as a chance event, the actual purchase of the bed can be understood as an extension of her collecting of newspaper clippings and popular prints that captured what she saw as the desmedido, or uninhibited, creativity of Colombian society. Assembling the Christ painting onto the metal bed continued the appropriations and juxtapositions already present at the 1967 exhibition at the Bogotá Museum of Modern Art (mambo) in paintings such as Holy Souls (see figure 3.2) and Double Portrait of Naiad (see figure 3.12). As in Notes, Volume I and Volume II, González painted with commercial enamel on a metal sheet the iconographic trope of Our Fallen Lord of Monserrate: Christ wearing the crown of thorns fallen over a rose-­covered cross. Art historians have discussed the Christ image within González’s broader practice of inserting images considered universal masterpieces into her mobiliario, as she did with Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper (1498) in La útima mesa (The Last Table [1971]; figure 5.2) and Raphael’s Madonna della Seggiola (1513 – 1514) in Peinador Gratia Plena (Dressing Table Full of Grace [1973]; figure 5.3), among many others. A Colombian audience would have understood the Christ of Monserrate as a Bogotano trope.

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5.2  Beatriz González, La última mesa, 1970, enamel on metal plate assembled on painted metal table, 105 × 205 × 75 cm.

5.3  Beatriz González, Peinador Gratia Plena, 1971, enamel paint and metal plate assembled onto wood vanity, 150 × 150 × 38 cm.

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The Fallen Christ is one of the three most venerated images in Bogotá, along with Our Lady of Bojacá and the Divine Child in the Barrio 20 de Julio; it is also the oldest of the three. Therefore, the Christ image would signify differently contingent on the spectator’s point of reference — that is, whether she or he associated it with the New Testament narrative of the Via Crucis (Stations of the Cross), the Baroque representation of the Passion, or the site-­specific Monserrate cult of the icon. In this sense, the Christ of Monserrate straddles the ambiguous relation of Catholic images to the local and universal. Located on the city’s highest mountain peak, the Monserrate Basilica is Bogotá’s most recognizable landmark and visited tourist attraction. Thus, it is a religious and civic reference to Bogotá. González based her painting on a popular print published by Gráficas Molinari (figure 5.4) and sold throughout the many religious shops in Bogotá, including, of course, at the Monserrate Sanctuary (figure 5.5). Hence, the painting is a version of a print that is already a “representation of a representation” — that is, of the miraculous sculpture. The multimedia sculpture Our Fallen Lord of Monserrate was made around 1650 by the workshop of Don Pedro de Lugo y Albarracín, which specialized in religious statuary (figure 5.6).7 Lugo was a self-­taught Santafereño artisan (as the inhabitants of Santa Fe de Bogotá were called during the colonial period) who became best known for the trope of the Fallen Christ of the Via Crucis.8 Since the colonial era the sculpture has commanded one of the most important pilgrimages in Colombia, and certainly in Bogotá. Even today, pilgrims undergo unimaginable hardships, such as climbing the sierra on their bare knees, to seek divine intervention for both private and collective needs. Common lore accredits Lugo’s sculpture with many miraculous events, including the sanctuary’s inexplicable withstanding of five different earthquakes that devastated the adjacent peak of Guadalupe and the city of Bogotá.9 González’s version is several times removed from the original image source; it is a re-­representation of the Gráficas Molinari print, which is a representation of the Monserrate sculpture, which is a depiction of Bible’s Via Crucis (or, perhaps, of another pictorial source). Many devotional paintings were, and continue to be, representations of devotional sculptures or of other paintings, including the Cristo de los Milagros in Cuzco and the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico. As discussed in chapter 4, the power of the copy relies on its physical and aesthetic proximity to the miraculous “original” work, which is cast as representing, but not embodying, divinity according to Catholic dogma. The title Almost Still Life plays on these ambiguities. It is a double entendre that uses the Spanish words naturaleza muerta, which can be translated as either “dead nature” or “still life.” The title flippantly alludes to the agonizing body of Christ as “almost dead,” as well as to the painting that represents an object or “still life” — a sculpture so illusionistic that it seems to be alive or a miraculous

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5.4  Gráficas Molinari, Nuestro Señor Caído de Monserrate, chromolithograph. 5.5  Souvenirs sold at Monserrate market. 5.6  Don Pedro de Lugo y Albarracín, Nuestro Señor Caído de Monserrate, c. 1650, mixed media.

icon that cannot be considered entirely inanimate. By mobilizing these ambiguities, González resists allowing her reproductions to function devotionally. Instead, her title evokes the uncanny nature of religious images within Catholicism and the long tradition of trompe l’oeil in Western art. During the colonial period, the Spanish Crown and the Catholic Church tightly controlled vision: apparitions as well as the production of visual materials and their interpretations. Spanish fears of idolatry and the Counter-­Reformation’s iconophilia made images battlegrounds for negotiating power relations. Religious images played a crucial role in the evangelization and extirpation campaigns of the Americas. Moreover, apparitions served as legitimating occurrences that brokered power higher than the king or the colonial administration. Consequently,

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false images or deceptive viewing could be the source of violent repression. Sacred images, both religious and High Modernist (op art), pivot on notions of truth, illusion, and misrepresentation. Under neocolonial aesthetic discourses, Almost Still Life confronts the iconophobia of High Modernist abstraction with the iconophilia of Catholicism and consumer culture. The iconic excess of Christ taunts the heated debates around figuration and abstraction that dominated the previous decades and continued throughout the 1960s with the dominance of geometric abstraction. Andy Warhol’s fervent return to the icon is symptomatic of new kind of relation to iconicity in the age of consumer culture.10 Paradoxically, and contemporaneous to Warhol’s and González’s interest in the icon, is the revalorization Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.11 While Benjamin considered cinema and mechanically reproducible arts the potential demise of auratic sacred objects, Warhol and González demonstrate that the aura rests not on the uniqueness of the object alone but on the rituals broadcast and multiplied through mechanically reproduced icons. Yet Almost Still Life’s reflections on the aura are nuanced. The painting captures its own distance from its source, referencing the distortions of serial reproductions in prints, lamps, and small figurines, all sold at similar religious and souvenir shops. Verging on the sacrilegious, González flattens and stiffens Christ’s corporeality to resemble a paint-­by-­number kit. The reference to warping comes through in the gray tone of the bottom lip that looks like a tongue sticking out and the maroon lines resembling stitching. She chose acerbic colors such as turquoise to paint Christ’s flesh, which had associations with flashy cars and household appliances — that is, verde nevera and thus commercially coded.12 Whether the color evoked a refrigerator to every spectator mattered less than its distance from the dark skin of the Monserrate sculpture, the dark Christ with whom people of mixed race identify. In this case, the painting summons both the erosion of the image in its mechanically reproduced version and the extension of its devotion beyond the basilica and into the private bedroom. Since her interview with Traba in 1965 concerning The Sisga Suicides, González had located her works in a long history of painting, conspicuously denying the international art market’s demand for technical innovation. All of her previous faux collages served as nagging reminders that the appearance of Colombian modernity was deception. In contrast, Colombian society remained deeply provincial and traditional. When she began to exhibit her multimedia mobiliario, González reaffirmed they should be considered paintings and the furniture, their frames: “The furniture pieces I make are paintings tied in every way to traditional art. For instance, I made them with color pigments and paintbrushes, and I represent something that, even if it was already given through photographs or reproduction of artworks, is, after all, a representation — a representation of a

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representation. I place a great frame around the paintings, with sensible allusions to the works they frame. [They are l]arge frames, like the altar frames of the colonial period.”13 González thus connects her multimedia assemblages to the collaborative work on Catholic Church altarpieces. In Los muebles, from which this passage is taken, Traba persistently separated González’s art from popular craft. In reference to the furniture as altar frame, Traba clarifies that there was a distinction between the frame and the painting in colonial times, as well: “In the colony, such works verify the hybridity of the two cultural strata: the frame is a popular work, made by an artisan who imitates the decorative values of an imported baroque, [while] the painting is, for the most part, a cultivated work that takes European sacred art for a model.”14 Traba’s distinction between the cultivated artist of the image and the uncultivated retablo maker was not an accurate description of the status of these artisans during the colonial period, and it certainly was not the case in the Luso-­Iberian world. According to Catherine Wilkinson Zerner, the retablo interior architect was “like the gifted preacher who could move the viewer by giving form to spiritual reality and encourage devotion.”15 Church retablos were conceived as elaborate architectural spaces that served to frame sculptures and paintings of revered figures, creating a “liminal space between reality and the imaginary world of belief.”16 The large colonial frames are not subservient to painting. They are equal partners in a theatrical representation of otherworldliness. González’s furniture pieces, by contrast, blur the lines between intellectual and artisanal activity. González reinforced her admiration for radio-­bed craftsmen when she commissioned the same factory to make a table for The Last Table (see figure 5.2), a table assemblage in which she placed a flattened, boldly colored, and abstracted rendition of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper (1495 – 1498) atop a metal dining table made to look like wood. González marveled at the skill with which varnished paint was applied to metal and combed over to create the illusion of wood grain and then scratched out in places to imitate the effects of ivory inlays. She said, We went back to the shop [that sold the radio bed]. . . . [T]hey only had beds, cribs, nightstands — bedroom furniture. So we went to the manufacturer, in front of the El Espectador building. My husband was helping me with the design . . . to take elements from the bedroom furniture . . . and insert them into the table. We created the design for The Last Table and took it to the factory — a big factory that belonged to a man from Pereira. . . . It was a fascinating world. . . . At the factory, which no longer exists, I saw them work. It was incredible! They worked with great speed and had a manual deftness that left me speechless. They had rags, wool cloths, soaked in paint thinner. A fur-

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niture piece painted in pink was covered in brown paint and passed over to simulate the textured wood grain. Each stop of the hand brought out the grain. I’ve tried to do this myself, but it is a devilishly difficult art. . . . They have these combs made out of rubber tires that they use to make the lines. It’s marvelous!17 González not only imitated da Vinci’s Last Supper on the tabletop; she also replicated the art of faux wood in the table’s design. What attracted González to the radio bed in the first place was not only its combination of industrial material and artisanal skill, but also the idea of trompe l’oeil (deceptive viewing) and the virtuoso hands that could create convincing faux finishes. By departing from preexisting images, such as the Christ of Monserrate, González compared her artistic practice to that of the factory workers who also departed from preexisting wood templates to interpret wood grain with paint. González thus called attention to the very nature of artistic representation as visual interpretation and a tricking of the eye. González’s mobiliario doubtless stood out on the international biennial circuit as irregular or charmingly different from the dominant language of geometric abstraction. In fact, González herself chuckled when she talked about how her mobiliario stuck out like colorful macaws amid a sea of black and white at the 1971 São Paulo Biennial.18 Nevertheless, it would also be misleading to think of her mobiliario as functioning exclusively as colorful irregularity in a standardized art world. If beds and paintings are to be thought of as equivalents to an altar with a devotional image, then notions of a private subject and the role of Catholic ideology in identity formation cannot be overlooked. Colonial frames for devotional pictures often have inscriptions with biblical or moralizing themes and serve to illustrate didactic sermons. In this light, we can think of González’s carefully crafted titles as operating similarly to the text-­image relationship of inscribed frames to didactic religious paintings that help priests illustrate their sermons. What González achieves in effect is to expose the discourse as the frame through which the image is to be interpreted. This discourse penetrates the privacy of the home and the most intimate of acts: the constitution of the subject. González may have admired the skill of the artisans who produced the faux wood bed, but she also understood that the furniture piece itself was not regarded as in good taste. After she purchased the first bed with her husband, she said, “[I] endured much embarrassment carrying [it] on the elevator to our apartment. We were newlyweds, and people would comment [sarcastically], ‘What a beautiful bed.’ We were dying of embarrassment.”19 González understood that the bed would be a provocation within elite institutions that dictated what was to be considered legitimate culture and good taste. If we look at the spaces ref-

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erenced in Almost Still Life, it becomes clear that they are saturated with not only religious, geographic, and gender but also class connotations. Traba described González’s assemblage as a maid’s bed, a description that is perhaps more revealing of the critic’s own distance from consumers of lowbrow radio beds than it is accurate.20 Almost Still Life does not reference the traditionally plain beds provided by upper-­and middle-­class families for their domestic servants. The bedframes that González purchased at the Pasaje Rivas for Exit Stage Rear (see figure I.3) or Cameo (see figure I.2) probably prompted Traba to make this assertion. The radio bed is indeed steeped in class markers, yet it suggests a particular emergent urban culture of the rural-­to-­urban or provincial-­ to-­metropolitan migrants who brought with them their expectations of what it meant to live in the capital city. While the reference to the Los Mártires market may be somewhat obscure to an uninformed spectator, the painting and the bed connoted urban popular spaces and consumers who sought to display their social mobility. Rural-­to-­urban immigrants had a tremendous impact on the demographics, economy, physical appearance, and culture of Bogotá. Consider the fact that Bogotá’s population increased from a half-­million in 1950 to three-­and-­a-­half million by 1975.21 Most newcomers to the city migrated in search of higher standards of living, if they were not fleeing from violence in the countryside. Sociological studies have shown that the ideals of urban civility and imagined opportunity were much greater stimuli for migration than the realities of urban life. High aspirations for the next generation’s education; the desire for home ownership and stable employment; and their consequent social mobility were the main factors that motivated this migration.22 However, the reality migrants found in the city was quite different. Particularly in squatter settlements, education was less available than it was, on average, elsewhere in Colombia, and extralegal settlements did not provide the opportunity for home ownership.23 Yet most Bogotá newcomers had also made progressive moves toward the capital from small to larger towns and from veredas (municipal districts) to cabeceras (main city of a province), or they had made intracity moves from makeshift squatter to more permanent “pirate” settlements, to Bogotá’s center, with the expectation that their opportunities would increase as they moved toward the geographic center. Migrants, we can speculate, imagined that the city would offer a life of civility. This was an image cultivated by Colombian industrialists throughout the twentieth century. Entrepreneurs saw themselves as social engineers and industrialization as part of a socio-­Catholic teleological goal to establish civilization and spur national development.24 In fact, in 1947 the Asociación Nacional de Industriales (National Association of Industrialists; andi) launched a publicity campaign to lure rural peasants to cities to obtain the labor force they needed to staff fac-

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5.7  “Industry as Civilizing Agent,” andi advertisement, Semana, September 6, 1947. Image source: Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia.

tories.25 The association created a comic strip titled “Juan” (figure 5.7) about an illiterate rural peasant who had been restricted to the harsh conditions of agricultural labor in the countryside. Finding a factory job in the city transformed Juan’s life: he spent his evenings in school rather than getting drunk; he learned good hygiene habits, such as brushing his teeth, using soap, wearing shoes, and going to the company doctor. “When he went home to his village on vacation,” the comic strip says, “he was a different person. Everyone admired the progress he had made. . . . He explained to them that if it were not for national industry, there would be no good jobs in Colombia. . . . Colombia would be condemned to the life of a primitive people.”26 Rather than representing the lived experience of migrants, “Juan” reflected elites’ notions of their own civilizing roles. “Progress” meant progression toward the city and toward industrial, economic, and hygienic modernity. Even though the real percentage of urban workers who en-

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joyed economic stability and benefits was small, the perception that city life and labor improved one’s social status prevailed.27 This perception was not exclusive to the peasantry or the working lower classes. Studies of recent and not-­so-­recent immigrants to Bogotá demonstrate that they desired “middle-­class respectability.”28 There was a socio-­aesthetic understanding of metropolitan living that filled a collective imaginary. The residents of Los Mártires — who would have been the target clients for the radio beds — would not have worked as maids who slept in modest rooms provided by their employers; nor would they have been the very poor recent arrivals living in squatter settlements.29 They were the working-­class Bogotá residents who likely had migrated from other regions with an expectation of what their life and domicile would look like in the capital city as they tried to secure their social position there. The radio bed therefore served as a type of affordable wish fulfillment and status projection for people struggling to turn their fantasies of urban life into reality. The bed itself was a product of the demographic shifts in Bogotá that changed both the social and the aesthetic landscape of the city. The faux wood bed was also a low-­or middle-­brow appropriation of a luxury furniture piece most likely intended to reflect the owner’s upward mobility. Following Pierre Bourdieu, the imitation wood of Almost Still Life is a form of cultural allodoxia — an aesthetic misrecognition in which one object (in this case, the metal bed) is desired precisely because it “looks like” something else (e.g., a real wooden bed or Art Deco bed).30 Newcomers found themselves, in Bourdieu’s words, in “vain striving for integration into a culture to which [they were] essentially alien.”31 This is an issue of social and geographic mobility. The bed, through a mode of cultural appropriation, exposes the reverence for elite legitimate culture that helped to sustain cultural hierarchy yet transformed this high culture into something new, according to González: “Within all this state of fascinating irregularity, everything is possible.”32 Critics insistently used the word “cursi” to describe González’s furniture assemblages precisely because her materials and subject matter evoked for spectators this ersatz culture, which demonstrated that her works tapped into latent anxieties about the demographic changes.33 The radio bed is an interpretation of the luxurious Art Deco style, as exemplified by the French designer Émile-­Jacques Ruhlmann (1879 – 1933), who typically built multifunctional furniture ensembles (see figure 5.8). To give the appearance of Ruhlmann’s distinctive harlequin pattern, which consisted of ivory inlays on amaranth, Almost Still Life’s block-­like metal bed was glazed with enamel and resin paint so that the geometric diamond pattern played off the simulated wood background. The artisans painted a scallop on the upper edges of the headboard and footboard to evoke something between an ivory inlay and an abstract version of a doily. The bed is a marriage between industrial production and artisanal

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5.8  Émile-­Jacques Ruhlmann, Bed, model AR537/NR999, c. 1928, amarynth and ivory, 94 × 286 × 225 cm. Photograph: Sotheby’s Inc. © 2012. Property from a private collection in Manhattan.

practice. The manufacturers took great care to make the bed an aesthetic and a functional object: the headboard serves as a shelf with a built-­in lamp, allowing the bed to efficiently take the place of a nightstand. As a radio bed it also has a small niche into which one can insert a small radio. In this case the appropriation is bidirectional: the bed is a form of popularizing legitimate culture, and González’s appropriation of the bed into the art world can be seen as a legitimization of the popular object itself. Almost Still Life references four specific sites: Monserrate through the image of Our Fallen Lord of Monserrate; the popular marketplace in San Victorino, Los Mártires, where González purchased the bed; the bedroom and site of private devotion; and, finally, the international biennial whose audience the artist planned to assault. The assemblage forces spectators to activate local historical, geographic, social, and devotional knowledge. By making viewers self-­conscious about their position within these categories, the work challenges any single correct interpretation. How an individual relates to this work, the viewer is made aware, depends largely on her or his relationships to these spaces. By referencing a body of local knowledge that alters the perception of the work, González blurs the lines between the cultivated and uncultivated viewer and calls attention to different types of erudition. A devotee of Our Lord of Monserrate and a biennial juror would understand this piece in completely different manners. González makes explicit the fact that a local pious observer may actually have a greater degree of

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the cultural capital needed to decode this piece than someone informed on the latest trends in international art. Our Lord Sequestered at the Second International Coltejer Biennial Given the idiosyncratic local references of Almost Still Life, we must understand its first exhibition at the Second International Coltejer Biennial, held April 30 – June 25, 1970, and its next exhibition, at the Tenth São Paulo Biennial in 1971, as deliberate irony. The Second Coltejer Biennial was held at the Archeology Museum of the University of Antioquía in Medellín and inaugurated by Rodrigo Uribe Echavarría, president of the biennial’s sponsor, the textile firm Compañía Colombiana de Tejidos (Coltejer). The first exhibition, the Bienal Iberoamericana de Pintura Coltejer, held in 1968, had focused exclusively on Latin American painting, connecting the textile industry to the medium via the canvas, similar to the paper industry’s sponsorship of the graphic art biennial in Cali. The president of Coltejer and the press saw Medellín as carrying the torch for the largely boycotted biennial in São Paulo and the suspended biennial in Córdoba while Brazil and Argentina, respectively, were enduring repressive military regimes.34 The majority of the press coverage following the exhibition’s opening focused primarily on its success in focusing the international spotlight on Medellín.35 Darío Ruiz Gómez, the art critic and member of the selection committee, declared, “[This] artistic competition will, as of today, convert the mountain capital [Medellín] into the new cultural center of the continent.”36 Leonel Estrada, the biennial’s founder and organizer, may have rejoiced about this international attention, although it was not his primary objective. His mission instead was a pedagogical one to nurture creativity and innovation as a means of building peace in a country that was still grappling with an armed conflict. His department, Antioquia, had been the hardest hit by partisan violence during La Violencia.37 Estrada firmly believed that war and violence were consequences of a society’s failure to promote the imagination necessary for peaceful conflict resolution. His vast library, which holds many volumes by the theorists J. P. Guilford, Jerome Kagan, and Alain Beadot, is a testament to his interest in the psychology of creativity. Estrada envisioned hosting the first Colombian Encounter on Creative Thinking to accompany a future iteration of the Medellín Biennial.38 Channeling Friedrich Schiller and citing Guilford, Estrada declared before the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization in 1984 that the biennial art competition could play a critical role in fighting against violence.39 Estrada was interested in biennials as laboratories that created the conditions for cultural rapprochement among individuals, societies, and nations. “In the midst of this complex and pregnant epoch,” Estrada wrote in the exhibition catalogue, “the 1970 Biennial serves a humanizing mission.”40 The biennial would

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catalyze a process by which different peoples and societies learned about and from one another. This objective was much more inclined toward heterodoxy and multicultural understanding than allowed by the homogenizing discourse of international modernism and the universal rationalism of modernization theory. Estrada’s interest in heterogeneity was reflected in his own vastly diverse artistic practice. In addition to serving as director of the biennial, Estrada was a practicing orthodontist and an accomplished artist in his own right (see figure 2.5) who understood the importance of multidisciplinary exchange for innovation to flourish in scientific, technological, industrial, and cultural fields. He conceived of the biennials as forums for cultural cross-­pollination that would potentiate new ideas and artistic expression and not dictate any one aesthetic. The Coltejer administration envisioned the Medellín Biennial’s role as updating national arts and advancing them on a modernizing evolutionary scale (as had the industrialist Ciccilo Mattarrazzo Sobrinho in São Paulo and Kaiser Industries in Córdoba). At the exhibitions opening on April 30, Uribe Echavarría reaffirmed his company’s commitment to and belief in its progressive role by bonding art, technology, and industry, saying, “We understand that the twentieth century has created a new type of citizen and a new type of family. That there is a new type of enterprise [sic]. We have acquired a clearer sense of our responsibility before the nation and mankind. Our industry provides a service, and so, in the same way that we have progressed in mechanics and technology, we also head toward a more effective evolution, toward a broader development of individual, social, and cosmic conscience.”41 The biennial was thus conceived as part of industry’s civilizing mission. In fact, the industrialists of the Medellín textile industry were largely responsible for the creation of andi and the “Juan” comic-­strip campaign. Uribe Echavarría’s belief that the biennial conjoined cultural and technological progress reiterated the language of modernization fostered by the industrial bourgeoisie, the National Front, the Organization of American States (oas), and the Alliance for Progress. This connection was evident to González. In her characteristic ironic manner, and despite her participation in several biennials during this period, including those in Medellín, São Paulo, and Venice, she stated that she thought very little of the format in general and declared, “Biennials are obsolete institutions like the oas.”42 By making a connection between the oas and international biennials, González disclosed the discursive kinship between the two.43 She ironically collapsed notions of advancement and obsolescence within the political and cultural organizations that promoted hemispheric modernization. Under this logic, modernizing agents regarded art as playing a strategic role in engineering a developed nation, and a developed Latin American region at large. Echoing Lleras Camargo’s diagnosis that Colombia was ready for “takeoff,” following Walt Rostow’s metaphor, the Spanish art critic and biennial juror

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Vicente Aguilera Cerni expressed optimism for Colombia’s stage of development in an interview with the journalist Miguel Ayuso.44 In particular, Aguilera Cerni valorized constructivist art tendencies in Latin American art as an “especially positive sign of a clearly rational order, given that [Colombia] is a country in the midst of full development and headed necessarily toward an inevitable technological stage, it is necessary to create, even in form, the perspective of artistic culture, the basic mental, cultural, and sociological conditions, that make this progress possible — a progress we all desire and will inevitably be produced.”45 In order to facilitate the potential for art to create these conditions, the biennial would showcase “the most advanced artistic developments.”46 In the case of the 1970 Medellín Biennial, the organizers based their idea of advancement on new media, dematerialized practices, and, specifically, their distance from painting. Uribe Echavarría made this point in no uncertain terms: “More than ever [the artist] uses new media and elements: space, time, distance, luminous, and energetic phenomena. He plays with quantity and with size, with aggregations and even with omission. He has created a conceptual art. Pure painting has been reduced in possibilities and runs the risk of remaining in the obvious. For some, painting is dead.”47 Even though the biennial exhibited mostly paintings, the organizer’s discursive rhetoric, communicated through a vast educational program and supplementary exhibitions, privileged experimentation with unconventional materials and dematerialized practices. This type of constructed narrative had its antecedents in the first São Paulo Biennial in 1951, where most of the works submitted consisted of abstract figurations and all of the prizes were awarded to nonobjective works that tended toward geometric abstraction, suggesting that the roads of artistic progress led to nonobjectivity.48 Estrada and Samuel Vásquez, the biennial’s coordinator, used several terms interchangeably — “idea art,” “systems art,” and “conceptual art” — to convey how international avant-­ garde practices had replaced traditional modes of art production.49 In order to foster an art that was commensurate with the rapid technological changes of the era, Estrada invited Jorge Glusberg, the Argentine director of the Centro de Arte y Comunicación (Center of Art and Communication; cayc), to install his cutting-­edge exhibition “Arte y Cibernética” (Art and Cybernetics), which previously had been mounted in Buenos Aires, at the Medellín Biennial. The show consisted of computer-­generated images by the Japanese art collective Computer Technique Group (ctg).50 Glusberg and the biennial’s organizers sought to showcase the collective’s works as examples of arts integration at the forefront of scientific innovation. Only one year after the first human landing on the moon, many, not surprisingly, felt a great deal of enthusiasm for the cultural potential of science and technology. Glusberg and Uribe Echavarría objected to the criticism that technology dehumanized the arts, a position that Traba stated

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publicly; they considered the computer a key evolutionary move in terms of expanding art’s audiences. To determine the “most advanced expressions in art,” or so the organizers believed, Coltejer invited three leading European art experts to serve as jurors: the Italian critic Giulo Carlo Argan; the British, U.S.-­based critic Lawrence Alloway; and Aguilera Cerni. Instead of awarding prizes to cutting-­edge works — such as the computer-­generated images by the ctg; the participatory installations by Bernardo Salcedo and Lea Lublin; or the conceptual proposals of Luis Fernando Benedit, Luis Diaz, and Luis Arias Vera — the jurors granted all three international prizes to established artists working in geometric abstraction or op art, among them first international prize to the Argentine artist Luis Tomasello for Atmosphere chromoplastique (1970; figure 5.9); second prize to the Venezuelan artist Francisco Salazar for Positivo/negativo (1971; figure 5.10); and third prize to the Argentine artist Ary Brizzi for Gran tensión no. 1 (1970; figure 5.11). Latin American kinetic, op, and neo-­concrete artists without doubt had made important contributions to international constructivism; many were even considered its main exponents. However, the jurors did not choose their most consecrated exponents, such as Jesús Raphael Soto, Carlos Cruz Diez, Lygia Clark, or Julio Le Parc, all of whom were participating in Medellín. Instead, they endorsed practitioners who were less well known at the time and thus pointed toward constructivism’s future, not its past. Tomasello’s Atmosphere chromoplastique is an early example of the white relief compositions that soon became his signature style. These elegant and deceptively simple reliefs consist of small cubes rhythmically attached at their edge to a large white planar surface. Tomasello painted the cubes white in front and the sides with yellow-­orange and blue so that viewers would perceive subtle color vibrations depending on the atmospheric light or their own movement. Even though Atmosphere chromoplastique is a predominantly white composition, the shadows projected onto the planar surface reveal blue diamonds framed within a large yellow square that comes into view when the spectator stands directly in front of or perpendicular to the surface. When viewed from the side, the pattern changes to large nestled squares produced by the shifting orientations of the cubes. As sophisticated as this composition may be, it would not have been considered the “most advanced” following the evolutionary logic promoted by the biennial’s organizers. Tomasello was not an emerging artist. Born in 1915, he was a foundational figure in the development of geometric abstraction in Argentina during the late 1940s. In Buenos Aires, he co­founded the Asociación Arte Nuevo (New Art Association) in 1955 with the Uruguayan artist Carmelo Arden Quin. After he permanently relocated to Paris in 1957, he joined many other European and Latin American kinetic and op artists and associated with the Gallerie Denise Renée. Tomasello’s work was selected by kinetic art’s

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5.9  Luis Tomasello, Atmosphere chromoplastique, 1970, wood relief, 170 cm × 170 cm. Photograph: Museo de Antioquia. 5.10  Francisco Salazar, Postivo/negativo, 1971, wood, carton, and acrylic, 180 × 180 cm. Courtesy of EspaceMeyerZafra. Photograph: Museo de Antioquia.

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5.11  Ary Brizzi, Gran tensión no. 1, 1970, acrylic on canvas, 150 × 150 cm. Courtesy of the Ary Brizzi Estate.

apologist Franck Popper for the historic 1967 exhibition “Lumière et Mouvement” at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris. The kinetic and op artists in the exhibition were heirs to color and light theories that had emerged since the Impressionists a century earlier and the early constructivists such as Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian, and the developing field of phenomenology. Tomasello, along with Salazar and Brizzi, were also descendants of the Venezuelan artist Armando Reverón, whose almost monochromatic landscape paintings of the early twentieth century capture the vibrations of Caribbean light, and the indigenist abstraction of the Uruguayan Spanish artist Joaquín Torres García. Certainly, they elaborated on phenomenological theories and experimented with perceptual responses to light, color, and form but were not radically new propositions. They all followed a long artistic tradition and worked with traditional materials such as paint on canvas or low-­relief sculptures. Put differently, the three artists awarded by the guest jury engaged with theoretical but not material advances, a far cry from the new media and death of painting announced by Uribe Echavarría. By 1970, geometric abstraction and constructivism constituted a conventional, not a vanguard, aesthetic in Latin America. In defending their selection, the three jurors revealed their geopolitical agendas, asserting European aesthetic hegemony, coded as universal, over North

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American “temporary fads.” Argan said, “I insisted . . . with the support of both Aguilera and Alloway, that we point toward constructivist currents, which unlike pop have European rather than North American origins.”51 The irony here, of course, is that the term “pop art” was coined by Alloway himself in reference to British, not U.S., artists. Argan did not try to conceal his attempt to organize a cultural hierarchy in which Latin Americans learned from European experts while circumventing North American cultural imperialism. They were also rehearsing another form of appropriation — that is, Argan appropriated geometric abstraction as a distinctly European contribution, ignoring the rich and extensive geometric abstraction of Judeo-­Islamic and indigenous American visual cultures that were decisive in the development of geometric abstraction in Latin America. Nonetheless, the staggering success that Latin American geometric abstract, concrete and neo-­concrete, op, and kinetic artists achieved in Europe attests to the dual function that international constructivism played. For Europeans, Latin American constructivist works served as evidence of their own cultural universality and hegemony. For Latin Americans, it served as proof of their own rational modernization, which countered stereotypes of underdevelopment.52 It was a process of self-­legitimization, albeit under colonial terms. At a time that North American culture exerted tremendous power, these three jurors used the biennial prize as an opportunity to strengthen European-­Latin American cultural relations. Underlying this competition between European and U.S. cultural influence over Latin America were assumptions about the relationship between the developed North versus the underdeveloped South. Put differently, they rehearsed modernization theorists’ conception that the Third World needed the First World to elevate it to a level playing field.53 Argan admitted that jurors needed to bypass rules of equal competition to give South Americans a chance, thus suggesting a level playing field was fictitious: “I asked both Alloway and Aguilera, who accepted . . . , ‘Listen, this is a biennial in South America. The grand prizes, the three principal awards, let’s give them to South Americans; let’s give Spain, the United States, and Canada honorary mentions. But the prizes should stay here.’ ”54 While postwar Europe could not match the United States for economic and military might, it held on to its claim to cultural superiority. Shortly after the biennial, Argan held a conference at the Instituto Colombo-­Italiano in Bogotá where he spoke to a group of artists who were upset about the biennial prizes and the perceived snub of González and others they saw as deeply engaged with Latin American reality. They demanded that he explain how constructivist art could relate to their context. Argan responded by saying, “These investigations [have] very precise didactic aims . . . and in a world where the irrational predominates, reason, I would say, has an ideological value.”55 Thus, he revealed that while constructiv-

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ism can be considered a shared tradition between Europe and Latin America, it should be understood as a gift of enlightenment and order from the Old World to the New World. Many critics and students denounced the jury’s awards for diverse reasons, which included the detrimental effect of promoting one aesthetic tendency, the consideration that constructivism disavowed Latin American reality, and the accusation of neoimperialism. The jurors’ conspicuous bias led Vásquez to recommend eliminating a jury for future biennials. While Argan and Aguilera Cerni were quick to celebrate the dominance of constructivist trends, which accounted for 30 percent of the artworks in the biennial, they did not mention the “charm of diversity” or “fascinating irregularity” that González esteemed. Of the 120 artists who participated in the biennial, about half submitted figurative works that related to tendencies that went beyond constructivism, such as neo-­figuration, pop, conceptual, and vernacular art, which did not fit easily into any category. Twenty-­one artists submitted lyrical abstract paintings (known as art informel), many of which were close aesthetic cousins to the neo-­figurative works. And twenty-­eight artists submitted new media installations or conceptual experimentations, of which only two approximated dematerialized practices.56 Not surprisingly, this last group captured the most attention from the biennial’s organizers and the national press. The Colombian government, complying with the mandate for new media, conferred awards accordingly. Colcultura granted its international prize to the Peruvian artist José Carlos Ramos Gálvez for his large installation Andes-­Andenes (1969 – 1970; figure 5.12), an outdoor installation consisting of bright red blocks that echoed the mountain range in its background, thus evoking the effects of dawn on the Andes. This site-­specific — and, arguably, time-­sensitive — work paid tribute to Medellín as the “capital of the mountains.” Colcultura granted its national prize to Bernardo Salcedo for his large participatory installation Hectárea de heno (Hectare of Hay [1970]; figure 5.13), in which he invited spectators to rearrange a large pile of illogically numbered polyurethane sacks filled with hay.57 The smell of hay extended beyond the gallery and the heaviness of the sacks made visitors aware of the backbreaking nature of farm labor. Moreover, the idiom pura paja (pure hay) in Colombia means “bullshit.” Thus, Salcedo’s installation parodied the absurdity of rationalized yet failed agrarian reform, a main component of the modernization programs pursued by the National Front and Alliance for Progress.58 Interestingly, critics focused their discussion of Salcedo’s installation on its unconventional materials and their resonance with current conceptual and participatory trends and overlooked Salcedo’s critique of the Colombian agrarian reform altogether, a theme he had been developing for some time in his work. The installation did, however, mark a turning point for Salcedo: a few months later, Colcultura hosted a solo exhibition of his works in Bogotá and advertised it as the first conceptual

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5.12  José Carlos Ramos Gálvez, Andes-­Andenes, 1969 – 1970, duco paint on wood, 500 × 160 × 80 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

show in Colombia.59 The biennial also put Salcedo in contact with Glusberg, who recruited him for several itinerant cayc exhibitions. Despite a decontextualizing formal analysis that obscured Salcedo’s thematic charge, as had happened six years earlier with González’s Lacemakers series, the biennial engendered productive dialectical relations among the works themselves that potentiated their critical dimension. Such was the case between Salcedo’s Hectare of Hay and a second work that González submitted, Naturalismo muerto (Dead Naturalism [1970]; figure 5.14), based on The Gleaners (1857) by the French painter Jean-­François Millet. In Dead Naturalism, González again uses commercial enamel paint on metal to create a graphic rendition of three women bent over to collect the last remains of the wheat harvest. In the nineteenth century, Parisian elites considered Millet’s homage to the lowest sectors of French society offensive. González simplified the forms and reduced the palette, imitating the effects of the famous image’s myriad reproductions. Resembling

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5.13  Bernardo Salcedo, Héctarea de heno, 1970, polyurethane bags, vinyl numbers, and hay, as installed at the Second International Coltejer Biennial, Medellín, 1970. Courtesy of the Bernardo Salcedo Estate.

a graphic ad or billboard, the scene of intense agricultural labor suggests the advertising of poverty as justification for social-­engineering programs or foreign intervention. Nonetheless, the dialogue between Hectare of Hay and Dead Naturalism called attention to the backbreaking and archaic labor structures on which economic development relied. No doubt, the smell of hay from Hectare of Hay would have set off a process of mutual referencing with Dead Naturalism. Perhaps this cross-­pollination prompted the Medellín newspaper El Colombiano to print an equally evocative front page on May Day, the first day the biennial was open to the public (figure 5.15). The layout juxtaposed a photograph of the opening the night before with that of a worker performing backbreaking labor alongside the caption “El Día del Trabajo” (Labor Day). The dialectical logic inherent in newspaper juxtapositions made visible the relation between Labor Day and the biennial. In the pages that followed, the cartoonist Henry joked that “something very laborious” had been scheduled on May 1 so spectators could attend the exhibition on their day off and “labor over understanding the works.”60 The reporter who covered the opening, Gabriel Villa V., expressed his irritation by lamenting the he could not hear the inaugural speeches over the deafening murmuring of distracted socialites. The caption below the photograph dryly points out “the high functionaries to the left.”61 Stated differently, the front-­page layout creates an image-­text relation that illuminates the distance, even apathy, between the elites who organized the biennial and the laboring masses they pur-

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5.14  Beatriz González, Naturalismo muerto, 1970, enamel paint on metal plate, 100 × 200 cm.

portedly addressed or considered its beneficiaries. The press coverage brings to light the racial difference between leaders and laborers, a racial politics that is conspicuously absent from the biennial, as well as from Salcedo’s and González’s works. The connection between the biennial and the laboring classes was not a coincidence. In his inaugural speech, Uribe Echavarría called the event the “Biennial de mayo,” perhaps alluding to the Paris May or the boycotted biennials of the preceding years, but certainly in gratitude for the workers who had made its realization possible. The working classes, he implied, would benefit most through technological development.62 By representing agrarian and arduous labor within or alongside the biennial, El Colombiano, Salcedo, and González connected and problematized the coexistence of archaic extractive labor practices and an “advanced” international culture, thus making visible the dependence of developed nations on labor and resources from underdeveloped nations. Aside from El Colombiano’s May Day front page, the press largely ignored this powerful dialectic, and the critics for the most part reduced their discussion to formal analysis. Perhaps this neglect prompted González to submit a more literal protest to the 1981 Medellín Biennial with her banner, Esta bienal es un lujo que un país subdesarrollado no se debe dar (This Biennial Is a Luxury in Which an Underdeveloped Country Should Not Indulge [1981]; figure 5.16). As we have come to see, González’s titles are neither coincidental nor innocent. The title Dead Naturalism parodies the “death of painting” superseded by a discourse of new media, as Uribe Echavarría announced in his inaugural speech. “Naturalism” in Spanish is a synonym for artistic mimesis, realism, and figuration. The ironic conjoining of contemporary material and style with figurative painting and a century-­old subject collapses the modern and the traditional in evocative ways. Dead Naturalism self-­proclaims the figurative painting’s own

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5.15  El Colombiano, May 1, 1971, front page. © El Colombiano. Image source: Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia.

obsolescence while referencing the archaic labor that still existed in a nation deemed ready for industrial takeoff. When González remarked, “If I make traditional painting at this moment, it is because I think that within all this state of fascinating irregularity, everything is possible,” she was sarcastically pointing out that while contemporary artists expanded the possibilities of their materials, traditional modes of art were not considered an option for experimental avant-­gardes.63 If “everything is possible” within art, why would traditional painting not also be relevant? Almost Still Life joins Dead Naturalism in parodying this condition, although the “almost still life” or “almost dead nature” does not fully sentence the medium. That is, the title’s ambiguity allows spectators to ponder its relation to the almost dead Christ, the almost animate miraculous sculpture, and the almost but not yet dead naturalism or painting. As Salcedo managed to do successfully, González’s multivalent works addressed art experts trained in an international discourse that permitted them to locate works within a spectrum of aesthetic advancement and local audiences with the cul-

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5.16  Beatriz González, Esta bienal es un lujo que un país subdesarrollado no se debe dar, 1981, serigraph, 10 × 50 cm. Colección Banco de la República.

tural capital to get the inside joke, including picking up on the reference to the National Front’s “bullshit” agrarian reform or the Christ of Monserrate’s strategic provincialism. In reducing aesthetic debates to measuring technical innovation, the biennial afforded artists an opportunity to encode obscure critical messages loaded with idiosyncratic references and understood only by those who had the necessary contextual or political capital. Given the repression that many intellectuals experienced during the Cold War, artists developed a type of double-­speak — that is, strategies of subterfuge coded in a way to signify differently to diverse audiences. Artists from countries enduring military regimes submitted works to the Medellín Biennial that made subtle allusions to human-­rights violations, such as the Brazilian Rubens Gerchman’s word sculpture sos (1970), which could be read in Portuguese as Sós (Alone) or as the international Morse code stress signal S.O.S.64 The Chilean art critic Nelly Richards suggested a strategy of “ellipses” that she diagnosed in the Escena de Avanzada (Advanced Art Scene) — that is, the implied ways to convey what cannot be fully spoken or evoking those who could not be fully repressed.65 Biennials thus provided artists with the place and time to reconstitute avant-­garde collectivities that had been disbanded, criminalized, and persecuted under military dictatorships and other neocolonial regimes. This role would be magnified following the Medellín Biennials in 1973 and 1981. Lo Falso and Deceptive Viewing I opened this chapter with an elaboration of the strategic provincialism that made Almost Still Life appear as a categorical objection to the biennial’s internationalist aims. However, the bed assemblage operated in nuanced ways that

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cannot be reduced to simply negating the dictates of technical innovation or the homogenizing effects of High Modernism. Rather, its radical reconfiguration of heterodox referents satirically engages with contemporary aesthetic practices. González’s fascination with lo falso, or deceptive viewing, points us in the direction of subterfuge. Like Hectare of Hay, the bed assemblage’s double-­entendre or multivalence was a particularly effective strategy for art to remain locally relevant while straddling the demands of an intensifying international art world.66 As Dead Naturalism mocked the presumed death of painting, Almost Still Life cleverly parodied the demands of new media, or what Traba called an emerging “biennial aesthetic.”67 As we have seen, the sculpture’s multimedia, the Christ’s local reference, the print’s apt placement on the bed, and González’s reproduction of a reproduction remind us that artistic practices considered most advanced, such as site-­specificity, multimedia assemblage, and strategies of appropriation, were common practices in Latin America well before the advent of postmodern new media. Put differently, in addressing categories of art viewed as radical departures from conventional practices, such as neo-­Dada ready-­mades, site-­specific installations or assemblage, pop or op art, González pointed out the artifice of the avant-­garde’s newness or radicality. In the context of neocolonial asymmetrical relations, González continued a Latin American tradition of multimedia baroque spectacles that relied on artistic duplicity and subterfuge that addressed and signified differently to diverse audiences. Even if González insisted that her works be considered within traditional multimedia artistic collaborations such as retablos, the biennial audience would have considered Almost Still Life in the biennial context with other new media assemblages and installations. The bed assemblage not only parodies the iconophobia of abstraction and the iconophilia of pop art. It also manipulates in its favor the tension around Marcel Duchamp’s ready-­made legacy on the handmade art object or the ready-­made aidée. According to John Roberts, the ready-­made did not replace the hand of the artist; rather, “Art’s emancipatory possibilities lie in how the hand is put to work within, and by, general social technique (and therefore in relation to the techniques of copying and reproducibility).”68 Almost Still Life places into productive tension the coexistence of both handmade and mass-­ produced objects. From González’s use of commercial materials and techniques to the bed’s industrially manufactured and artisanal finish, multiple hands and industries cohabitate in the assemblage. Therefore, it is neither fully hand-­made nor fully ready-­made but a hybrid. It therefore calls attention to the mutual dependence of industrial, artisanal, and, alongside Dead Naturalism, agrarian labor. Before this point, González’s works conformed to wall paintings. Thus, the bed assemblage was a departure that liberated her works from their verticality. In all her bed assemblages González inserts the painted picture horizontally into the space that is usually occupied by a mattress. She thus disrupts the tradi-

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tional line of visual contemplation where spectators stand upright while beholding freestanding sculptures or pictures mounted on walls. The art historian and critic Leo Steinberg located this tendency in the mid-­t wentieth century, using Robert Rauschenberg’s work as a definitive moment: “I tend to regard the tilt of the picture plane from vertical to horizontal as expressive of the most radical shift in subject matter, the shift from nature to culture.”69 For González, this shift from natura to cultura was neither radical nor new, but it was perhaps getting close, as Almost Still Life implies. We can locate this shift in González’s oeuvre from her days at the University of Los Andes when she abandoned the task of simplifying the visible world to its essences, per Carlos Rojas’s instruction, to reproduce reproductions. It was almost a radical break but not quite. With Almost Still Life, spectators no longer looked at the picture upright. Instead, they were forced to adapt their bodies to the horizontal plane.70 For Steinberg, spectators were increasingly implicated in the work of art, perpetually readjusting to changing modes of vision. In the case of González’s mobiliario, the spectators’ corporal relation to her paintings are contingent on the configuration of the furniture, whether it is a vanity, where the upright picture plane is lower than eye level or at eye level if the spectator sits on the chair, or a bed or table that requires the viewer to bend over and hover. Spectators are made self-­conscious about their posture and their relation to the subject matter. Placing an agonizing Christ on a bed prompts viewers to imagine their own bodies lying on top, thus violating more than one rule of decorum. Nonetheless, it all would have seemed uncannily familiar to devout Catholics who customarily placed venerated images on the bed or nightstand for private devotion. The works implicate both the body and the cultural beliefs and practices of the viewer.71 In a biennial where op art constituted a significant percentage of the works displayed, and received all of the biggest prizes, the artisan’s master emulation of wood, with its diagonal grid evoking ivory inlay, would satirically echo op art’s illusionism. References to faulty vision and visual deception permeate González’s mobiliario. The mirrors in the vanities, such as Dressing Table Full of Grace (see figure 5.3) reference mirrors but are not mirrors: they do not reflect the spectator’s image. Paintings of women associated with ideal femininity constructed over centuries of Catholic cultural dominance block viewers’ reflections. Deceptive viewing had fascinated González since her youth in Bucaramanga, when she admired the faux marble interior of the Sagrada Familia Cathedral. She recalled: [Father Trillos] commissioned the artist Agelbiz — a Venezuelan landscape painter who claimed to be a Colombian from Cúcuta — to paint the interior of the church. That was definitive for me. . . . He decorated the whole interior with faux marble. The columns were enormous and completely covered with

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orange-­colored [faux] marble; the pews were covered in varnish simulating marble. . . . When Peter Townsend, Princess Margaret’s ex-­fiancé, visited, he said that what he liked best about Bucaramanga were the splendid cathedral marbles — and they were all painted by Agelbiz! So those images marked me my whole life. When I began to make many works using lo falso, I was thinking about Agelbiz and the cathedral marbles.72 González laughed in delight when she noted that Townsend, a discerning viewer, was fooled by Agelbiz. The illusionism that Agelbiz achieved in the cathedral corresponds to the penchant for imitating luxurious materials but also resonates with the Counter-­Reformation’s dictate to appeal to the senses with theatricality and emotionalism. González then lamented that the interior had been painted over with white paint and the pews had been sanded down to the wood. For González, this followed the modernizing juggernaut that systematically eliminated the encanto de la variedad (charm of diversity) in the name of homogeneity. González no doubt admired the skill of both Agelbiz and the furniture factory painters. However, she developed the concept of visual deception in her works beyond the concept of tricking the eye. Such is the case in a later pair of bed assemblages — La muerte del justo (The Death of the Just [1973]; figure 5.17) and La muerte del pecador (The Death of the Sinner [1973]; figure 5.18) — in which she assembled her enamel-­on-­metal paintings onto beds she had purchased from the same furniture factory.73 González inserted into these faux wood beds paintings of a moralistic Christian trope that elaborates on the theme of faulty vision: the spiritual dangers of visual deception or temptation. This theological genre, based on the Ars Moriendi (The Art of Dying Well) describes a series of demonic temptations at the time of death that can distract the agonizing person from her or his correct spiritual focus. The visions or temptations are deeply connected to the notion of sight — sinful or spiritual blindness.74 González’s source prints, based on the Ars Moriendi, reference Christian conceptions of virtuous and vicious forms of viewing.75 In a plate titled Temptation of Lack of Faith by Master E. S., demons distract an agonized man’s vision away from the divine threesome standing behind the headboard and guide him toward a crowned sculpture on a pedestal, alluding to false worship or neglect of the true vision.76 At the lower right-­hand side of González’s painting in Death of a Sinner is a night table with an oval portrait of a woman, which is called to the spectator’s attention by the sinner’s extended arm and fixed gaze. A demonic shadow holds up the image, emulating González’s own vanity assemblages. González creates tension between the sinner and framed image held by the demon. The sinner neglects proper sight, as in acedia (spiritual neglect) and instead gazes toward the earthly picture in the oval frame. The sin under consideration here is false or illegitimate viewing, neglecting to look in the

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5.17  Beatriz González, La muerte del justo, 1973, enamel paint and metal plate assembled onto metal bed, 120 × 180 × 90 cm. 5.18  Beatriz González, La muerte del pecador, 1973, enamel paint and metal plate assembled onto metal bed, 120 × 180 × 90 cm.

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direction of the priest, giving in to the seductive pull of the demon via an image. It is unclear whether the sinner is tempted by the painting itself (as in owning a commodity; thus, envy or avarice); by the person represented (lust); or by a mirror image (vanity or pride). The composition cleverly implicates the exhibition spectators as admirers — perhaps even worshipers — of pictures, since there is no clear divide between physical desire and the pleasure of viewing. Note the phallic placement of the two medallions penetrating the red-­lined box. González emphasized the constructed nature of viewing in the culturally contextual realm of vision, whether according to Catholic dogma or the increasingly overtheorized art world. The low bed assemblages again prompted spectators to bend their bodies and cast their gazes downward. “Lo cursi y lo erótico” (figure 5.19), a photograph by Robayo published in the newspaper La República in 1973, captured a group of women looking and pointing at González’s bed assemblages.77 The position of the elderly woman echoes the angel whose body tilts slightly over the agonizing man in Death of the Just, but her gesture mirrors the reach of the agonizing sinner. In other words, spectators’ bodies performed the postures depicted in the painting. The bed assemblage connected spectators’ corporeal positioning, circumambulation of the bed, and embodied perception to the theological, social, historical, and gendered environment they inhabit. Furthermore, the priest guides the agonizing subject away from the traditional figurative portrait toward the cross, which is both a reference to the martyrdom of Christ and an abstract geometric grid. In the context of the international art competitions, these bed assemblages not only confronted the evolutionary narrative of advanced art by pointing toward other (i.e., theological) forms of perceptual erudition, but they also comically resonated with the expert jurors, who, like the clergy, tried to guide viewers in the proper direction. Leonel Estrada understood the challenge of addressing a deeply Catholic, relatively isolated, and conservative Medellín audience. As part of the broader pedagogical aims of the biennial, his daughter María Isabel Estrada composed a dictionary of art terms, or “isms,” a section of which was published in the newspaper.78 As a distant cousin to the Christian conduct manuals, the dictionary guided visual reception in the proper direction.79 It gave viewers a conceptual framework and lingua franca to make sense of and discuss the deluge of new artistic tendencies experienced during the biennial. While the new terminology helped to show that artistic practices emerged simultaneously around the world, it limited the parameters of interpretation, decontextualized the works, and stacked them within a lexical hierarchy. José Carlos Ramos ridiculed discriminating uses of artistic categories to differentiate works that engaged with popular culture, noting the distinction between pop used for art in developed countries and naïf art from underdeveloped countries.80 Seen and discussed through this

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5.19  Robayo, “Lo cursí y lo erótico,” La República, February 26, 1973. Image source: Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia.

lens, Almost Still Life was labeled belated and derivative of U.S. pop art, thus obscuring its dialectical sensibility and sterilizing its strategic provincialism. The Last Frame There could be no greater gap between the indifference toward, if not dismissal of, González’s furniture pieces by the jurors at the 1970 biennial and the sustained enthusiasm that Colombian critics demonstrated toward her mobiliario and their reappraisal by art historians as important contributions to the articulation of a Latin American avant-­garde. For those critics who insisted on the value of authenticity, the jurors at the Medellín Biennial had committed an injustice to González. According to Ruiz Gómez, González was one of a group of Latin American artists working in neo-­figuration who were discredited by the need to erase all types of “messages or folklorism” or misunderstood as “North American cultural colonialism.”81 He accused the biennial of presenting the audience with a “false dilemma”: an opposition between figuration and “the most advanced tendencies in art,” a juncture that dismissed the many avant-­garde artists from Argentina, Cuba, and, in Colombia’s case, the works of Carlos Granada and González. While Ruiz Gómez conceded that some Latin American artists imitated U.S. pop artists, such as James Rosenquist and Tom Wesselman, he commended González for elaborating an authentic and autonomous art by drawing

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from urban popular culture, which was not to be confused with folklorism.82 He elaborated, “The process of discovering authentic values has invigorated [González’s] work, moving it beyond reflection to an autonomous style. Without snobbery or false glitter, [she] has moved forward, incorporating in her work the colors, gestures, of a popular art that is ours.”83 The critic emphasized the authentic and dynamic character of urban popular culture as distinct from folkloric crafts refashioned as national authenticity by intellectuals of the Liberal Republic or packaged for an export industry that catered to the exoticized desires of collectors.84 An authentic avant-­garde negated the discourse of modernization and denied the industrial North its role as leader of cultural progress on behalf of the agrarian South. Ruiz Gómez shifted the discourse of advancement from temporal evolution to spatial repositioning — that is, González thrust lo nuestro, or Latin American culture, forward from marginality toward centrality. Reiterating this sentiment, students challenged Argan in Bogotá to explain the relevance of geometric abstraction in the Latin American context. Even though Argan considered its didactic rationalism a corrective for the chaotic reality of Latin America, the students had been prepared by Traba, who consistently denounced geometric abstraction as a form of technolatry from highly industrialized nations or as vacuous mimicry in the underdeveloped nations. Alongside kinetic, op art, minimalism, and other constructivist tendencies, Traba considered all of the counterculture neo-­avant-­gardes as aesthetics of deterioration.85 As discussed in chapter 4, when she defended González against the accusation of plagiarism at the 1967 National Salon, Traba compared the authenticity of González’s Notes to Omar Rayo’s op art, calling it cultural dependency. The Colombian Argentine critic made clear that innovation and skill alone did not suffice to discern aesthetic quality. Instead, art had to develop a language to engage fully with its own geographic reality. For Traba, at this point influenced by the literary boom, “totality” was the expression of a mythic-­minded preindustrial or semi-­industrial society, not of a fully alienated mentality that could serve as the antipode to the fragmented signals emanated by the alienated industrial United States.86 Traba’s response to the jurors’ snubbing of González was even more ambitious than at the 1967 Salon. It entailed sending González’s mobiliario and enamel-­on-­ metal paintings to represent Colombian art at the Tenth São Paulo Biennial, in 1971.87 In the catalogue, Traba clarifies that her objective was to defend the artist from the experience she suffered at the Medellín Biennial, where “the great international art personalities did not see her, thought of her work as insignificant, or feigned bewildered smiles.”88 The critic blamed the biennial format as the frame that cropped out González’s artworks, making a reference to the allegorical character of the furniture frames. She argued that international art competitions created a fraudulent environment whereby art was evaluated through a reduced ideological lens that limited artistic comparisons to universalist formalism or

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sensationalistic novelty. Biennials followed the logic of consumer culture; promoted temporary art fads, with their built-­in obsolescence; and distracted artists with an award system that generated an impotent “biennial aesthetic.” The biennial was just one mechanism by which the United States staged its cultural invasion with the intent to expand consumer markets and, more seriously, sterilize the critical capacity of the Latin American intelligentsia. Traba’s endorsement of González was also a protest gesture against the São Paulo Biennial itself. Since the exhibition’s previous iteration in 1969, many artists worldwide had boycotted it to condemn the censorship and repression of artists and intellectuals accused of being subversives by the Brazilian military regime.89 Traba inverted the belligerent language by calling the ephemeral, dematerialized, and scandalous artistic practices the “terrorism of the avant-­gardes.” Here lies a great irony: Traba’s disavowal of conceptual, dematerialized, and ephemeral practices, or what Juan Acha called arte no objetual, blinded her from seeing their political charge.90 In other words, Traba’s own ideological framework cropped out some of the most powerful works coming from Latin America that challenged military regimes and their U.S. allies, as well as the fetishization of art objects and the seduction of consumer culture. González’s art afforded Traba an opportunity to articulate and broadcast her theory of resistance to U.S. imperial aggression. Traba considered González “the most serious and consequential exponent of [the Colombian] avant-­garde.” For Traba, “closed societies” such as Colombia isolated artists from the demands of the international art world so they could continue to work with painting, sculpture, prints, and drawing. As Theodor Adorno sought refuge for Western culture in high art, Traba saw the continuation of artistic materiality as safeguarding art from technolatry, consumerism, and its consequent fragmentation. Yet Traba had been shifting her emphasis from aesthetic autonomy to regional autonomy. Thrusting Latin American art into competition with art production from wealthy nations inevitably confirmed its marginal position, Traba argued. Hence, Latin American artists were confronted with two choices: “to gesticulate efficiently behind one of the inhabitants [of hegemonic centers], faithfully imitating each of his or her movements that he or she is allowed to serve as chambermaid, or perhaps even to be confused as one of them. Or . . . to understand well his or her condition as marginal, accepting it with good humor, [and to be] cheerfully guided by the popular saying, every day more true in America, that ‘there is no small enemy.’ ”91 Resistance could be enacted with daily life choices. Marginality, under this logic, was a privileged position that afforded artists freedom and political purchase. González’s refusal to play the internationalist game and fall into the trap of mimesis or dependence by fully embracing her marginality allowed her artworks to engage a meaningful language.

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Even though she did not receive an institutional prize at the São Paulo Biennial, González made quite a splash among young spectators. A group of University of São Paulo students were intrigued, among them the now well-­known critic and curator Ivo Mesquita. The students invited her for a cup of coffee and asked her whether she considered herself a conceptual artist. She jestingly responded, “If I were a conceptual artist, I would just have given you my hairdresser’s business card and told you to go to her salon,” contrasting the materiality of her works with dematerialized conceptual practices.92 Nonetheless, the Brazilian public’s enthusiasm for González’s works was not a coincidence. The immense popularity of artists who had been engaging urban popular culture since the early 1960s, including Antonio Dias, Nelson Leirner, Rubens Gerchman, Ana María Maiolino, Claudio Tossi, Teresinha Soares, and Hélio Oiticica, alongside the Brazilian Tropicália movement (which was named after one of Oiticica’s installations), had prepared the Brazilian audience to respond positively to González’s works, putting her on the radar of an emerging pan – Latin Americanist consciousness. Tropicália also trafficked in bad taste as a form of rebelliousness. Traba republished her essay for the São Paulo Biennial catalogue under the title, “Beatriz González: Cursilería as Art,” in the Sunday supplements of El Siglo and El Tiempo. In the text, Traba clarified (as she had done numerous times before) that González’s works were “almost” like, but significantly were not, kitsch. This “almost,” hinting at Almost Still Life, made all the difference. According to Traba, González takes local “cursilerías and submits them to an arduous and premeditated transformation that goes beyond just bad taste. In doing so, she is able to create works, that staying within regional culture, express broad and complex human concepts.” Traba made no attempt to disguise her disdain for urban popular culture, especially the “horrendous” and “repulsive” color prints and metal furniture sold at Bogotá’s popular markets and specifically the Tenth Street shops of San Victorino, in Los Mártires, where González bought the radio bed. For Traba, González’s works transcend their local referents, and the artist stands above the popular classes that consume cursilerías. By shifting the frame from the local to the global, Traba takes González’s sharp critique of cultural-­elitism and instrumentalizes it as an expression of resistance against North American cultural imperialism. To denounce one set of prejudices, Traba enacts another. Just as Traba scorns the Latin American artist for futilely seeking acceptance in the international arena, she condescends to the lower classes that, in her estimation, also commit aesthetic infractions. Traba in fact underscores her own and González’s position as letradas. Traba warned in São Paulo that González’s art must be understood as high art and not confused with consumer culture, a position that she developed fully in 1977 when she revisited González mobiliario as a whole. However, the jurors,

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Traba, and Colcultura could not control how González’s works would be interpreted. The heterogeneous referents of the mobiliario allow multiple discourses to coexist. They engage in dialogue simultaneously with the new media discourse of the biennial modernity and secularism in Colombian culture and expose different kinds of religious, local, and even private erudition that are not limited to being up to date in worldwide artistic trends. At the São Paulo Biennial, González exhibited The Last Table for the first time. Again, González maneuvers paradoxical modes of signification, drawing from disparate visual traditions, such as those considered universal and tasteful (Leonardo da Vinci); those considered sacred (The Last Supper); those considered profane and functional (the table); and those considered cursi, low, and inappropriate in the context of high art (e.g., enamel paint on metal plate and faux wood metal). The work, in this case, demands that the spectator renegotiate those categories. González admitted that her inspiration for this assemblage came from the prevalent Colombian tradition of hanging a Last Supper scene in the dining room to create the appearance of people gathered around a table to guard against thieves’ entering the home.93 The references to deceptive viewing in The Last Table are multiple: the tablecloth in the pictorial scene looks like the table runner; the materiality of the furniture looks like wood but is metal; the “last supper” looks like a Leonardo but is a Beatriz; the painting fools the potential invader into thinking a dinner gathering is taking place. The “representation of the representation” thus becomes a treatise on visual and conceptual artifice. González’s recirculation of da Vinci’s fresco in an enamel-­on-­metal plate assembled onto a dining room table points to the multivalence of all works, including da Vinci’s unlikely site-­specific mural. Undoubtedly, The Last Supper operated differently for Duke Ludovico Sforza in Quattrocento Milan and for the twentieth-­century Bogotano who could recycle the mechanically reproduced image for devotional and security concerns. The Last Table embodies the symbolic tensions created by an industrializing and modernizing nation in the context of a highly traditional and religious society. González practices strategies of appropriation that conflate popular culture with modern, traditional, and mass culture.94 González’s oeuvre points emphatically to the afterlives of images and their perpetual recontextualizations or recycling. Much of the material culture designated “popular” or “Western” masterpieces in fact overlaps with reproductions, therefore blurring the stereotypes of class-­based consumer practices. While González’s style and subject matter were perceived as pop or conceptual in the context of the biennial, it was also interpreted as lo cursi, lo popular, lo nuestro, and even subversive in the context of the National University. Let us return to Almost Still Life to confront a fundamental challenge for avant-­ gardism: whether art should defend its autonomy or play a social or political

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function. As we have seen throughout this book, this question was central to Traba’s shift from a theory of an aesthetic autonomy to one of regional autonomy resistant to U.S. imperialism. Almost Still Life creates a productive tension between artistic autonomy and contingency. By replacing the mattress with a metal painting, González blocks the bed’s utilitarian function, yet the painting represents the central religious image of Catholicism, Christ’s passion, and thus functions with religious and ideological purpose. Likewise, the manufacturers took great care to make the bed both an aesthetic and a functional object: the headboard serves as a shelf with a built-­in lamp and niche for a radio, allowing the bed efficiently to take the place of a nightstand, while the artisanal varnish offers the visual pleasure of luxurious wood. Almost Still Life thus embodies intellectual, manual, and mechanical labor. Alongside Dead Naturalism, the work calls attention to the coexistence and codependence of preindustrial and industrial labor, the extractive underbelly of modernization. What Almost Still Life brings to the fore is the ideological artificiality of all of the oppositional myths on which bipolarized discourses of the Cold War were mounted, including secular and religious, modern and traditional, advanced and belated, and developed and underdeveloped, by demonstrating the process by which these categories mutually constitute each other. The bed assemblage prompted Traba and others to rehearse their own class condescension in the name of Latin American resistance and thus challenged both aesthetic and geopolitical autonomy. Just as industrial production conceals manual labor, “authenticity” conceals other forms of internal colonialism, or what Anibal Quijano calls coloniality. Therefore, I consider it appropriate to conclude with another “Trabism”: “Beatriz González gives back to the social group what that group has given her, deeply altered by her analytical and critical vision. She puts this time bomb back again in the group and does not wait for immediate results.”95 In this, Traba hit the mark without realizing that even her own aesthetic discourse eventually would be blasted by González’s critique of conceptual frameworks.

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Underdeveloped Art for Underdeveloped People During the 1970s Beatriz González claimed, “Mi pintura es una subpintura para países subdesarrollados con historia extensa” (My painting is an under­painting for underdeveloped countries with extensive history).1 With this provocation she reiterated a pressing question circulating among cultural producers throughout Latin America: “What role does the avant-­garde play in underdeveloped societies?” Given González’s penchant for irony, it is surprising that no one, including Marta Traba, who quotes this phrase in her book Los muebles de Beatriz González, chose to evaluate the latent sarcasm of this statement. No critic who applauded González’s “underdeveloped art” ever scrutinized the idea that, in the peak decades of the Cold War, Latin America was “underdeveloped” from the vantage point of the Euro-­American “First World.” This term embodied neocolonial relations that justified military dictatorships, forceful repression of dissent, and massive social-­engineering projects at the heart of political radicalization. If we return to González’s painting Subdesarrollo 70 (Underdevelopment 70; see figure 3.16), exhibited at her second solo show at the Bogotá Museum of Modern Art, in 1967, the artist forecast “underdevelopment” for the following three years —  parodying the arbitrary nature of the term and its self-­fulfilling predictions. As I discussed in chapter 3, the painting did not illustrate underdevelopment per se. Rather, it exposed the symbolic violence of ideologies that sought to map these values onto people and cultures. By the mid-­1960s, modernization programs had been discredited throughout Latin America; the authoritarian force used to accelerate industrialization and to combat the threat of revolution proved too high a cost to pay. In light of this shift, many intellectuals reformulated their views on their own culture. It evolved from accepting the notion of Third World backwardness in need of correction through updating to a recognition that a position of marginality could bring about certain freedom and advantages. In 1972, Nicolás Buenaventura described González’s subject matter as the result of “the floods of towns or entire provinces, whose iconography is represented here . . . , all of [which] constitutes a large part of the

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‘joy of underdevelopment.’ ”2 In this book, I have argued that González’s strategic provincialism must be understood within an important paradigm shift in Latin American cultural history in which intellectuals revalorized the concept of marginality from a problem to be solved by emulating the industrial North to a virtue that safeguarded culture from the alienation of consumer societies.3 In this light, González served as a key player in the rise of Latin American regionalism as a form of anti-­U.S. imperialism during the Cold War. No doubt, the shift in the cultural standpoint in Colombia refracted broader historical changes, such as the revelations of cia involvement in cultural affairs, the rise of military dictatorships, and counterinsurgency operations, amid other repercussions stemming from Cold War policies and actions in the global context. The International Biennials in Medellín allowed for Colombian artists to exchange with other Latin American artists and participate in the crafting of a larger regional identity. By shaping a community of counterculture artists who lived under a constant state of siege or whose nations were enduring military dictatorships, these biennials allowed artists to visualize their national problems as shared struggles. Regional identity and Latin American culture were, therefore, categories constructed in dialectical opposition to U.S. cultural, political, economic, and military intervention on the continent. Still, González’s interventions during the first decade of her career did more than simply allow Latin Americans to reformulate regional identity. The chapters in this book attempt to map how González’s artistic choices help us understand the dynamics of internal coloniality during the fraught 1960s. González’s works forge a new, contextual aesthetics of “underdevelopment” by calling attention to urban consumerism and processes of appropriation, recycling, and reproducing reproductions. This turn to the urban popular was not exclusive to González and can be considered a defining characteristic of artistic production in the 1960s and 1970s in Latin America, including some of its most famous cases: Cildo Meireles’s Insertions into Ideological Circuits in Brazil, the mass-­media art of Tucumán Arde, the urban interventions of Colectivo de Acciones de Arte (Collective Art Actions; cada) in Chile or Los Grupos in Mexico. In his now famous manifesto on New Objectivity, Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica declared, “On adversity we thrive!” a phrase that curator Mari Carmen Ramírez referenced in her description of Latin American conceptual practices as “tactics for thriving in adversity.”4 For Latin American intellectuals, underdevelopment provided an opportunity to reinvigorate the arts through the aesthetics of urban popular culture, impoverished materials, recycling strategies, ephemeral interventions, movable graffiti, and practices of dematerialization. González’s art practice fits uneasily among these ephemeral, dematerialized gestures: her works of the 1960s and 1970s foreground traditional artistic techniques, as well as material and decorative excess. According to reviewers of her exhibitions, they embody the notion of “lo cursi.” It is precisely because of this

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baroque sensibility — lo desmedido, as González characterized her works during the first years of her career — that we are able to trace in the critical responses some of the blind spots of the era. While commentators summoned González’s aesthetic as embodying regionally authentic qualities they called lo nuestro, in contradistinction to imported northern models, they also instrumentalized their own conceptions of taste (lo cursi) as countercultural aggression. By considering González’s works — the form she gave them and the historical and social context that informed her decisions — together with historically and socially conditioned reactions that the works elicited, one can recognize works of art as historical agents that join other images, voices, and events in shaping society. The responses she sparked reveal the social anxieties engendered by modernization, the threat of communism, demographic “explosion,” and, above all, internal coloniality. González placed works of art that trafficked in urban iconography and commercial materials into the very institutions that differentiated high culture from what the letrados conceived as popular — that is, generalized anonymous masses regarded as dangerously manipulated by dominant classes. Critics who invoked the cursi as a cultural weapon rehearsed elite stereotyping of the masses as unruly and melodramatic, as well as prone to violence, corporeal appetites, and excessive reproduction — not unlike the grievances that former President Alberto Lleras Camargo listed as causes of overpopulation and its catastrophic results. In other words, even as letrados were radicalizing against the National Front government and denouncing U.S. imperialism, they were unable to move beyond their own classist distinctions and distrust of the masses. In his assessment of González’s iconographic sources, Buenaventura continued to describe urban mass culture, this “joy of underdevelopment,” as an anodyne that permitted the impoverished masses to tolerate their own “underdevelopment in a fantastical and magical way[,] thus making the real means of its resolution unnecessary: revolution.”5 In doing so, Buenaventura disparaged the carnivalesque character of the urban masses as an expression of alienation, and therefore they could not be entrusted with the radical social changes necessary to overcome their own underdevelopment. Buenaventura echoed a common diagnostic among intellectuals who became frustrated with the art world’s impotence to bring about necessary change. Writing in 1969, when Brazil’s military regime turned brutally repressive, the poet and critic Ferreira Gullar stated in the introduction to his book Vanguardia e subdesenvolvimento that “the question of the avant-­garde is the new. . . . [T]he new is, for us, contradictorily freedom and submission. That is why the struggle for the new, in the underdeveloped world, is an anti-­imperial struggle.”6 Whereas for the Peruvian critic Juan Acha, the avant-­garde — with its know-­how and capacity to invent the new — was imperative for underdeveloped contexts to overcome their “magical-­feudal” structures through a cultural revolution that would foster dy-

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namic minds liberated from cultural dependence and mass consumption.7 Acha was hesitant to celebrate what he considered a retrograde search for regional authenticity; instead, he considered this trend a dangerous distraction for the avant-­garde’s revolutionary project. Acha did endorse the idea of a regional avant-­ garde that could participate globally in artistic innovation and propose radical social transformation in Latin America.8 Although Traba diverged from Acha on this point and denounced the “terrorism of the avant-­gardes” as a neoimperial strategy of divide and conquer, she diagnosed the subversive potential in González’s work in opposition to popular culture: a dominated culture that manifests an “official lie.” Even though Traba praised González’s pop nacional, she never relinquished her distrust of the masses. Having lived under the regime of Juan Domingo Perón in Argentina and studied in postwar Europe, she considered the popular classes vulnerable to the manipulation inherent in nationalism and populism; later in her career she attacked mass consumerism as a form of fragmentation in highly industrialized societies. Latin American artists needed to resist that disempowering fragmentation because, Traba believed, intellectuals could be the only viable agents of social change. Traba characterized Latin American nations as inherently underdeveloped and in need of catching up with the West. The critic enlisted González’s works in combating these perceived inadequacies. She wrote in 1977, “Her works are as subversive as the discovery of a vaccine that ends a preceding ignorance and the pseudoscientific mumbo-­jumbo surrounding the particular problem: as much as a theorem that opens up a new mathematical field within previously existing methods.”9 Like all of the other fields of expertise engaged with the problems of the newly conceptualized Third World, González’s art would also help eradicate superstition and backwardness. The mere act of critical introspection was, for Traba, subversive in the context of underdevelopment.10 She uncritically accepted González’s works as corrosive reflections on underdevelopment — that is, on societies that passively consume their own exploitation — rather than viewing her works as critiquing the discourse itself. González’s works do not reveal her position in any facile way. Instead, their strength lies in González’s deadpan and ambiguous presentation of highly charged iconographies, styles, and compositions, which allow spectators to map onto them their own belief systems and prejudices. This book focuses on a specific historical moment, a time when Colombians became disillusioned with modernization’s promise of social transformation fostered by the National Front. During the 1950s and into the mid-­1960s, the prominence of international High Modernism at the National Salons matched the general enthusiasm for modernization, the government’s restoration of democracy, and the belief that a difficult period of armed conflict and authoritarianism had

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come to an end. In this decade, the National Front pledged to expand political participation and grow the economy in order to improve living standards for all. Yet by the mid-­1960s, it became apparent that Colombia’s modernization was a conservative one. The governing elites, in cooperation with the United States, sought to preserve a hierarchical structure and impede radical transformations or revolution. The idea was to meet the basic needs of the poor, yet never to unsettle the distribution of resources. However, the obstacles to democratic expansion were not only economic and political but, as this book argues, also social and cultural. Artists and intellectuals manifested their discontent by turning aggressive, disruptive, and potentially subversive using various strategies, only a few of which are mentioned in this study. The limited democracy of the National Front had made Colombian politics a farce. With the election of President Julio César Turbay Ayala in 1978, González turned away from popular culture and instead focused on images of the president as cursilerías. In these works, González parodied the way in which this very unpopular and often ridiculed president entered the domestic interior through newspapers and televisions by silk-­screening disparaging press images onto curtains, as Decoración de interiores (Interior Decoration [1981); figure E.1), or colorfully painting his head into a television set, in as in Televisor en color (Color Television [1980]; figure E.2), equating his presidential spectacle pictorially to a circus.11 After the tragedy at the Palace of Justice in 1985, in which M-­19 guerrillas took the Supreme Court hostage and the military invaded, killing hundreds, including a large number of Supreme Court justices, González admitted that she could no longer find Colombian society humorous. The nation entered another nefarious period of history, and while she had been laughing at the culture of underdevelopment, after 1985, she noted, she could only mourn its tragedy.12 To date, González continues to paint images of pain, loss, and suffering inspired by images that she collects from the mass media in her genre of critical history. For a brief moment, González interrupted her pictorial dirges when she was commissioned by the government to paint the Constitutional Assembly in 1991 (figure E.3). The painting’s vibrant colors capture this moment of collective enthusiasm for a new constitution. The century-­old, conservative version of 1886 had overstayed its welcome, and Colombian citizens were asked to select the Constitutional Assembly (La Constituyente) by popular vote. The result was a new, “modern” constitution that claimed a state that was “democratic, participatory, pluralistic, and based on respect for human dignity.” The state granted regions greater autonomy and equal rights for women; abolished the state of siege; and declared that all citizens have rights to a clean environment, education, health, and social security. The leadership of the Constitutional Assembly served as a powerful symbol of peace and national unity: its three copresidents included a

E.1  Beatriz González, Decoración de interiores, 1981, serigraph on textile, 2.7 × 70 m. Colección Banco de la República.

E.2  Beatriz González, Televisor en color, 1980, enamel paint on television, 45 × 64 × 40 cm.

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E.3  Beatriz González, La Constituyente, 1991, oil on canvas, 150 × 450 cm. Photograph: Presidencia de la República.

former M-­19 guerrilla leader, Antonio Navarro Wolff; a leader of the Conservative Party and son of Laureano Gómez, Alvaro Gómez Hurtado, whom the M-­19 had kidnapped in 1988; and a member of the Liberal Party, Horacio Serpa, who had mediated with M-­19 for Gómez’s liberation.13 All three of these figures crown González’s painting in the top-­center and are shown working together and deliberating. The governing elites modernized the legal framework with the goal of building a peaceful, inclusive, and prosperous nation. González felt conflicted about her precarious position of serving as a “court painter,” referencing Goya as an antecedent and example of simultaneous complicity and resistance.14 Nonetheless, the opportunity could not have been more suitable, as the 1991 Constitution was the first time the state recognized Colombia as a multiethnic and multicultural society. The new Constitution defended the cultural “charm of diversity” or “fascinating irregularity” of Colombian culture that González had been capturing in her works for decades.15 González’s La Constituyente (The Constitutional Assembly [1991]) today hangs in the Nariño Presidential Palace across from Alejandro Obregón’s Cóndor (see figure I.5) and

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represents all of the members of the assembly in bright, bold, festive colors —  provincial colors, as she calls them. Indeed, González’s protagonist colors once again appear in chorus: the bright colors of the countryside (yellow, orange, turquoise) with the more somber and elegant colors of the city (burgundy, terra cotta, gray). Prominently displayed in the bottom left foreground is one of the very few women depicted in the scene, the poet María Mercedes Carranza, González’s former University of Los Andes classmate and a member of the assembly. She leans back to observe the delivery of the new Constitution by President César Gaviria and Minister of Government Humberto de la Calle.16 González chose to paint Carranza’s skin in lime green, one of her verdes maravillosos. The woman conspicuously resembles the painter herself, with her cropped dark hair; she is, in fact, positioned as the court painter and witness to the historical event. Through this painting, the Pasaje Rivas entered the Presidential Palace; the pueblo was officially welcomed into the lettered city; and a letrada captured the city’s desmedido “temperature.” Sadly, the decades following 1991 marked yet another dark period in Colombian history. Joining the existing war between the state and guerrilla groups, other armed actors aggravated the conflict, including narco-­terrorists, death

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squads, and paramilitary groups. New methods of brutality not seen since La Violencia traumatized Colombian citizens, including widespread assassinations, massacres, sexual violence, kidnappings, and displacements, leaving mass destruction in their wake. According to the High Commissioner for Peace, the toll as this book was going to press was close to 220,000 dead, 45,000 disappeared, and 6.7 million displaced, along with unmeasurable ecological damage. Regrettably, what resulted was hardly the delivery of human rights protection and political participation promised in 1991. González’s most ambitious project of these terrible decades, the work of mourning Auras anónimas (Anonymous Auras [2009]; figures E.4 and E.5), is also her most ambitious public gesture: a monumental installation for collective grieving at Lots B and C of the Central Cemetery in Bogotá. In Anonymous Auras, González occupied the 8,957 niches of the cemetery’s temple-­like mausoleums (columbaria) with panels of what she calls cargueros (carriers), paintings based on press photographs of found corpses being carried by two figures holding them in bags, hammocks, and other makeshift materials. The mass-­media specters evoked for González their nineteenth-­century counterparts: the cargueros who carried people through the treacherous Andean terrain captured by Alexander von Humboldt’s pen (figure E.6). The seemingly endless march of somber black-­ and-­white carriers delivering lifeless bodies to the Central Cemetery serves as a stark contrast to the works by González analyzed in this book in terms not only of the colors that critics called “cursi” and “joy of underdevelopment,” an exuberant sensibility they revealed in the 1960s and 1970s, but also in terms of their political satire in the 1980s and early 1990s. Among all of González post-­1985 paintings of loss and bereavement, no other work compares to this installation in terms of solemnity. Her intervention resulted from a campaign to preserve the columbaria led by the artist Doris Salcedo, with support from Mayor Antanas Mockus: the complex was destined for destruction to make way for a public park. Poignantly, these were the mausoleums that entombed thousands of anonymous corpses after the Bogotazo riots of 1948. Aside from some monuments to Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, the columbaria continue to be the only locus of memory for this tragic episode in Colombian history. If González’s colorful cursilerías stood in opposition to the homogenizing standardization of international modernism, then the opposite can be claimed here: the solemn and monochromatic funeral procession stands as testimony to the limits of multiculturalism.17 As I write this epilogue, Colombia faces yet another crossroads. The peace agreement between the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia-­Ejército del Pueblo (Revolutionary Armed Forces-­People’s Army; farc-­ep) and the Colombian government of Juan Manuel Santos has renewed some optimism about a peaceful and democratic future. However, when Santos asked the Colombian people to vote on the agreement in a national referendum in October 2016, the

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E.4  Beatriz González, Auras anónimas, 2009, installation, serigraphs on polypropylene plates, Central Cemetery, Bogotá. E.5  Beatriz González, Auras anónimas, 2009, installation, serigraphs on polypropylene plates, Central Cemetery, Bogotá.

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E.6  Alexander von Humboldt, “Passage du Quindiu in the Andes,” from Vistas de las cordilleras y monumentos de los pueblos indígenas de América, 1811. Colección Banco de la República.

“no” vote won. The extensive campaigning for the no vote led by former President Álvaro Uribe, and his Centro Democrático (Democratic Center) party relentlessly warned the Colombian people that voting yes would sentence the nation to terrorism, atheist communism, “Castro-­Chavismo,” and an “ideology of gender.”18 Uribe thus deployed the mass media and social media to propagate fear of the peace agreement and persuade his audience about its affinities with the Cuban government and its Venezuelan ally. He went as far as calling the agreement “narcochavismo de la paz,” a message he broadcast over the radio.19 His allies, including religious leaders, also warned that a yes vote would introduce an ideology of gender into schools and the Constitution, which in turn would jeopardize family values and other traditional values of Colombian society.20 Catholic priests forbade their parishioners from voting in favor of the agreement on moral grounds.21 According to Andrei Gómez-­Suárez, the great Colombian tragedy is an inheritance from the Colombia’s republican foundation — that is, “the negation of the other through narratives that simplify reality and justify violence in order to reach a goal.”22 Evidently, Colombian society has still not overcome age-­old anxieties about religion, class, and gender and a stigmatized pueblo perceived to be inherently violent. The passionate responses that González’s works catalyzed

U nder dev el oped A rt

in the 1960s betrayed ongoing fears of women and the masses as excessive and unruly — t wo concepts veiled by the concept of lo cursi. These anxieties have not fully diminished. While Colombians pride themselves on their democratic history, persistent discriminatory attitudes regularly obstruct the country’s possibilities, barring democracy’s full “takeoff.” The continuing assassinations of social movements’ leaders since the peace agreement was signed in Havana in 2016 stands as a testament to Colombia’s tragic flaw. As the previous chapters show, González’s critique was subtle but acerbic. Whether she intended to celebrate or denounce the “joy of underdevelopment” matters less than the reactions her works inspired in the public’s imagination. Their responses demonstrate, in no uncertain terms, that for Colombia to achieve the promise of multicultural and inclusive democracy, citizens must confront not only important structural problems but also the powerfully and institutionally conditioned cultural and social norms that support violence and sociopolitical hierarchies.

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notes

Introduction 1 The show was directed by Rodrigo Castaño Valencia, whose parents, Gloria Valencia and Alvaro Castaño Castillo, were key figures in the development of cultural programming in both radio (hjck) and television (since its earliest broadcasting in Colombia): Gloria Valencia de Castaño, interview with Beatriz González Aranda, Correo Especial, dir. Rodrigo Castaño Valencia, June 7, 1978, accessed June 14, 2010, http://produccionesrodaryrodar.com/products/75. 2 Walt Whitman Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-­Communist Manifesto, 3d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1960] 1990). 3 For a discussion of González’s art “in situ,” the furniture pieces, and the irony of placement, see Carolina Ponce de León, “Beatriz González in situ,” in Beatriz González: Una pintora de provincia, ed. Marta Calderón (Bogotá: Carlos Valencia, 1988), 12 – 29. 4 Marta Traba, “Beatriz González: La cursilería como arte,” in São Paulo Bienal, exhibition catalogue (Bogotá: Colcultura, 1971), n.p. 5 Interview with Germán Rubiano Caballero on the occasion of the Bogotá Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition “Luis Caballero — Beatriz González” in February 1973, reprinted in Jaime Ardila, Beatriz González: Apuntes para la historia extensa (Bogotá: Tercer Mundo, 1974), 17 – 20. For a discussion of Exit Stage Rear, see Ana María Reyes, “In Bed with Dead Bolívar: Beatriz González’s Case for Critical History Painting,” in Simón Bolívar: Travels and Transformations of a Cultural Icon, ed. Ana María Reyes and Maureen G. Shanahan (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2016), 148 – 68. 6 Marta Traba, Los muebles de Beatriz González (Bogotá: Museo de Arte Moderno, 1977), 65. 7 Other important publications, including exhibition catalogues, on Beatriz González’s works include: Beatriz González Aranda and Instituto Colombiano de Cultura, Beatriz González: Colombia 1971 Bienal de São Paulo (Bogotá: Instituto Colombiano de Cultura, 1971); Museo de Arte Moderno, Luis Caballero, Beatriz González, exhibition catalogue (Bogotá: Museo de Arte Moderno, 1973); Museo de Arte Moderno La Tertulia, Beatriz González, exhibition catalogue (Cali: Museo de Arte Moderno La Tertulia, 1976); Beatriz González Aranda, Eduardo Serrano, and Museo de Arte Moderno, Beatriz González: Colombia 1978, Biennale di Venezia (Bogotá: Museum of Modern Art of Bogotá, 1978); Beatriz González Aranda, Eduardo Serrano, and Museo de Arte Moderno, Beatriz González: Exposición retrospectiva, 1962 – 1984 (Bogotá: Museo de Arte Moderno, 1984); Marta Calderón, ed., Beatriz González: Una pintora de provincia (Bogotá: Carlos Valencia, 1988); Museo de Bellas Artes, Venezuela, Beatriz González, retrospectiva, Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas,

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8

9 10

11

June 12 – August 21, 1994 (Caracas: El Museo, 1994); Beatriz González Aranda, Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango, and Banco de la República, Treinta años en la obra gráfica de Beatriz González (Bogotá: Banco de la República, 1996); Carolina Ponce de León, Beatriz González: What an Honor to Be with You at This Historic Moment —Works 1965 – 1997 (New York City: El Museo del Barrio, 1998); Carmen María Jaramillo, Beatriz González: Verónica (Bogotá: Alonso Garcés Galería, 2003); Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, República de Colombia, Otras miradas: Débora Arango, Beatriz González, Patricia Bravo (Bogotá: Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, República de Colombia, 2005); Benjamín Villegas Jiménez, Holland Cotter, Carmen María Jaramillo, María Margarita Malagón, and Oscar Monsalve, Beatriz González (Bogotá: Villegas, 2005); Mari Carmen Ramírez, Héctor Olea, and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Heterotopías: Medio siglo sin-­lugar, 1918 – 1968: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 12/XII/00 – 27/II/01 (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2000); Mari Carmen Ramírez, Héctor Olea, and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Inverted Utopias: Avant-­Garde Art in Latin America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004); Malagón-­Kurka, María Margarita, Arte como presencia indéxica: La obra de tres artistas colombianos en tiempos de violencia: Beatriz González, Oscar Muñoz y Doris Salcedo en la década de los noventa (Bogotá: Universidad de los Andes, 2010); Alberto Sierra Maya, Julián Posada C., Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Beatriz González et al., Beatriz González: La comedia y la tragedia, 1948 – 2010, exhibition catalogue (Medellín: Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín, 2011); Beatriz González, María Inés Rodríguez, Beatriz González 1965-­2017, exhibition catalogue (Bordeaux: capc, 2017). Because La Violencia was an undeclared civil war, scholars debate over its dates. The consensus marks 1946 as the beginning, with the return of Conservative Party hegemony and repression against liberals. However, neither the coup d’état by General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla nor the National Front fully contained partisan violence, which after 1964 took on a more international Cold War character. The year 1966 is the most widely accepted as the end date among scholars. For discussion of La Violencia, see Charles W. Bergquist, Ricardo Peñaranda, and Gonzalo Sánchez G., Violence in Colombia: The Contemporary Crisis in Historical Perspective (Wilmington, DE: sr Books, 1992); Mary Roldán, Blood and Fire: La Violencia in Antioquia, Colombia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). Robert Karl, Forgotten Peace: Reform, Violence, and the Making of Contemporary Colombia (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017). Ana María Ochoa Gautier, Entre los deseos y los derechos: Un ensayo crítico sobre políticas culturales (Bogotá: Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia, 2003); Jorge Eliécer Ruiz and Valentina Marulanda, Cultural Policy in Colombia (Paris: United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, 1977); and Renán Silva, República liberal, intelectuales y cultura popular (Medellín: La Carreta, 2012). For a discussion of urban popular culture and the Tropicália movement in Brazil, see Carlos Bassualdo, ed., Tropicália: A Revolution in Brazilian Culture, 1967 – 1972 (São Paulo: Cosac Naify 2005); Christopher Dunn, Brutality Garden: Tropicália and the Emergence of a Brazilian Counterculture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).

No tes to introduction 12 Herbert Braun, Our Guerrillas, Our Sidewalks: A Journey into the Violence of Colombia (Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1994). 13 Carlos Caballero Argáez, Mónica Pachón Buitriago, Eduardo Posada Carbó, eds., Cincuenta años de regreso a la democracia: Nuevas miradas a la relevancia histórica del Frente Nacional (Bogotá: Universidad de los Andes, 2012). 14 Karl, Forgotten Peace. 15 Mary Roldán, “Popular Cultural Activism, Catholic Transnationalism, and Development in Colombia before Vatican II,” in Local Church, Global Church: Catholic Activism in Latin America from Rerum Novarum to Vatican II, ed. Stephen Andes and Julia Young (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2016), 245 – 74. 16 Roldán “Popular Cultural Activism, Catholic Transnationalism, and Development in Colombia before Vatican II.” 17 An important factor in the constitution of farc was the failure to deliver on the promises of land and loans because the conservative elites in Bogotá accused the government of favoring liberal peasants: Karl, Forgotten Peace. 18 See Bradley Lynn Coleman, “The Partnership Transformed, 1958 – 1960,” in Colombia and the United States: The Making of an Inter-­American Alliance, 1939 – 1960, New Studies in U.S. Foreign Relations (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2008), 171 – 98; Leopoldo Villar Borda, Alberto Lleras: El último republicano (Bogotá: Planeta, 1997). 19 Coleman, Colombia and the United States, 171 – 98; Dana Adams Schmidt, “Colombia Urges Rise in Latin Aid,” New York Times, April 7, 1960. 20 Florencia Bazzano-­Nelson, “Cold War Pan-­American Operations: Oil, Coffee, and ‘3,500 Years of Colombian Art,’ ” Hispanic Research Journal 12, no. 5 (October 2011): 438-­66; Claire Fox, Making Art Panamerican: Cultural Policy and the Cold War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013); Carlos Caballero Argáez, Patricia Pinzón de Lewin, Eduardo Escallón Largacha, and Maria Natalia Marian Suárez, Alberto Llleras Camargo y John F. Kennedy: Amistad y política internacional: Recuento de episodios de la Guerra Fria, la Alianza para el Progreso y el problema de Cuba (Bogotá: Universidad de los Andes, 2013). 21 Carlos Caballero Argáez, “La relación personal entre John F. Kennedy y Alberto Lleras Camargo,” in Argáez et al., Alberto Lleras Camargo y John F. Kennedy, 7 – 18; David Bushnell, The Making of Modern Colombia: A Nation in Spite of Itself (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 225; Alberto Lleras Camargo, “The Alliance for Progress: Aims, Distortions, Obstacles,” Foreign Affairs 42, no. 1 (October 1963): 25 – 37. 22 Michael Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation Building” in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, [2003] 2007). 23 Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); Raúl Prebisch, J. Samuel Valenzuela, and Arturo Valenzuela, “Modernization and Dependency: Alternative Perspectives in the Study of Latin American Underdevelopment,” Comparative Politics 10, no. 4 (July 1978): 535 – 57; Daniel Immerwahr, Thinking Small: The United

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27 28

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States and the Lure of Community Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). Mary Roldán, “Acción Cultural Popular, Responsible Procreation, and the Roots of Social Activism in Rural Colombia,” Latin American Research Review 49 (2014): 27 – 4 4; Roldán, “Popular Cultural Activism, Catholic Transnationalism, and Development in Colombia before Vatican II”; Immerwahr, Thinking Small. According to Karl, the definition of “communism” implemented by Manuel Marulanda and other guerrillas who became the leaders of farc had more to do with an understanding of communal land tenure and farming than any allegiance to the Communist International: Karl, Forgotten Peace. Álvaro Medina, Procesos del arte en Colombia (Bogotá: Instituto Colombiano de Cultura, 1978); Carmen María Jaramillo, Arte política y crítica: Una aproximación a la consolidación del arte moderno en Colombia (Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2005); Cristina Lleras, Arte, política y crítica: Politización de la mirada estética Colombia, 1940 – 1952 (Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia), 2005. For a discussion of this trend throughout Latin America, see Patrick Iber, Neither Peace nor Freedom: The Cultural Cold War in Latin America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). The tradition of characterizing Latin American spiritual superiority (as Ariel) over United States materialism (as Caliban) is broadly known as Arielismo, following José Enrique Rodó’s interpretation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest; see José Enrique Rodó and Belén Castro, Ariel (Madrid: Cátedra, 2000). See Beverly E. Adams, “Locating the International: Art of Brazil and Argentina in the 1950s and 1960s” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas, Austin, 2000); Eva Cockcroft, “Abstract Expressionism: A Weapon of the Cold War,” Art Forum, no. 12 (June 1974): 39 – 42; Andrea Giunta, Avant-­Garde, Internationalism, and Politics: Argentine Art in the Sixties (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); Shifra Goldman, Contemporary Mexican Painting in a Time of Change (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995); Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); Max Kozloff, “Abstract Expressionism and the Cold War,” in Pollock and After: The Critical Debate, ed. Francis Frascina (London: Routledge, 2000), 107 – 23; Iber, Neither Peace nor Freedom; Nadia Moreno Moya, Arte y Juventud, El Salón Esso de Artistas Jóvenes en Colombia (Bogotá: Instituto Distrital de las Artes and La Silueta, 2013); Maria Eugenia Mudrovic, Mundo nuevo, cultura y guerra fría en la década del 60 (Rosario, Argentina: B. Viterbo, 1997); Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The cia and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: New Press, 2000). It is noteworthy that all of these institutions were related in some way to Alberto Lleras Camargo’s friend Nelson Rockefeller and his family interests: see Cockcroft “Abstract Expressionism”; Saunders, The Cultural Cold War; Iber, Neither Peace nor Freedom; Bazzano-­Nelson, “Cold War Pan-­American Operations”; Fox, Making Art Panamerican. The name “Esso” is a phonetic rendering of the letters “S” and “O,” which stand for Standard Oil of New Jersey, the company founded by John D. Rockefeller in 1870.

No tes to introduction 31 Charles Murphy, “The Church and Culture since Vatican II: On the Analogy of Faith and Art,” Theological Studies 48, no. 2 (1987): 317 – 31; Laura Barragán, Sergio Méndez, Nicolás Velásquez, and Ricardo Arias, Iglesia Católica, arte y secularización en Colombia en las décadas 1960 y 1970 (Bogotá: Universidad de los Andes, 2004). 32 See Gina McDaniel Tarver, The New Iconoclasts: From Art of a New Reality to Conceptual Art in Colombia, 1961 – 1975 (Bogotá: Universidad de los Andes, 2016). In this ambitious study, McDaniel Tarver shows how Colombian artists addressed both local issues and artistic demands, arguing that Colombian avant-­gardes were resistant to internationalizing impulses. For the close relation between Colombia and the United States, see Stephen J. Randall, Colombia and the United States: Hegemony and Interdependence (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992). 33 For a discussion on Traba’s shift from aesthetic autonomy to cultural resistance, see Florencia Bazzano-­Nelson, “Cambios de margen: Las teorías estéticas de Marta Traba,” in Marta Traba, Dos décadas vulnerables de las artes plásticas latinoamericanas, 1950 – 1970 (Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno, 2005), 9 – 32; Florencia Bazzano-­Nelson, “Marta Traba: Internationalism or Regional Resistance?” Art Journal 64, no. 4 (Winter 2005): 87 – 89. For an analysis of the broader intellectual turn in Latin America, see Jean Franco, “From Modernization to Resistance: Latin American Literature, 1959 – 1976,” Latin American Perspectives 5, no. 1 (Winter 1978): 77 – 97. 34 Traba, Los muebles de Beatriz González, 40. 35 For a thorough discussion of the intellectual construction of popular culture during the Liberal Republic as a means to unify a fragmented society whose collective identity primarily rested on its Hispanic language and Catholic religion, see Silva, República liberal, intelectuales y cultura popular. 36 Barragán et al., Iglesia Católica, arte y secularizacion en Colombia en las décadas 1960 y 1970; Bushnell, The Making of Modern Colombia; Aline Helg, La educación en Colombia, 1918 – 1957: Una historia social, económica y política (Bogotá: Fondo Editorial Cerec, 1987); Frank Safford and Marco Palacios, Colombia: Fragmented Land, Divided Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 37 Renán Silva, “Reflecciones sobre la cultura popular: A propósito de la Encuesta Folclórica Nacional de 1942,” in Silva, República liberal, intelectuales y cultura popular, 193 – 226. 38 Fernando Coronil, The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 39 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991). According to Marco Palacios, the National Front further eroded the state’s already weak legitimacy: Marco Palacios, Entre la legitimidad y la violencia: Colombia 1875 – 1994 (Bogotá: Grupo Editorial Norma, 1995). 40 “Este termómetro infalible del salón nacional es la base para todas las autocríticas, y nuestras formas nacionales de expresión deben no sólo practicar, sino vivir en la autocrítica para no caer en los fáciles inflacionismos y mixtificaciones culturales”: Marta Traba, “Presentación Catálogo XVII Salón Nacional de Artistas Nacionales,” El Espacio, August 21, 1965. 41 Beatriz González Aranda, “El termómetro infalible,” in 50 años, Salón Nacional de

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43 44 45

46

47 48 49

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Artistas, ed. Camilo Calderón Schrader (Bogotá: Instituto Colombiano de Cultura, 1990), xxvii – x xxii. Traba was an unapologetic modernist who defended the autonomy of art. In her book Los muebles de Beatriz González (1977), Traba enters into productive contradiction. In defense of high art, Traba grapples with González’s engagements with popular visual culture by deploying an Adornian analysis, which understands popular culture as a manifestation of alienated consumers and as characteristic of manipulated and dominated masses. At the same time, Traba locates resistance and authenticity within González’s appropriation practices, which are themselves reiterating popular appropriations. For Theodor Adorno’s views on high culture, see Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-­Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Theodor Adorno, “Commitment,” reprinted in Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Frederic Jameson (London: Verso, 1986), 177 – 96; for the way in which high art operates within a logic of cultural capital with relative autonomy to the currency market, see Pierre Bourdieu and Randal Johnson, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). Marta Traba, Dos décadas vulnerables. See Escobar, Encountering Development; Gilman, Mandarins of the Future; Diana Marcela Rojas, “La Alianza para el Progreso en Colombia,” Análisis Político, no. 70 (September – December 2010): 91 – 124. Silva, República liberal, intelectuales y cultura popular; María Elena Bravo de Hermelin, “Aproximación histórica a las políticas culturales de Colombia,” Gaceta 48 (2002): 164 – 232; Michael Birenbaum Quintero, “Race, Region, Representativity, and the Folklore Paradigm,” in Rites, Rights, and Rhythms: A Genealogy of Musical Meaning in Colombia’s Black Pacific (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 161 – 211. Karl Buchholz, who had relocated to Bogotá during World War II, opened the Buchholz bookstore. The gallery exhibited modernist art and the bookstore published Buchholz’s influential magazine, Eco: Revista de la Cultura de Occidente, which in 1968 printed a Spanish translation of Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in two volumes. Birenbaum Quintero, Rites, Rights, and Rhythms. Casimiro Eiger and Mario Jursich Durán, Crónicas de arte colombiano, 1946 – 1963 (Bogotá: Banco de la República, 1995). Victoria Verlichak, Marta Traba: Una terquedad furibunda (Buenos Aires: Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero and Fundación Proa, 2001), 128; Nicolás Gómez Echeverri, En blanco y negro, Marta Traba en la televisión colombiana, 1954 – 1958 (Bogotá: Universidad de los Andes, 2008). Gómez Echeverri, En blanco y negro, 128 – 32. Beatriz González, discussion with the author, Bogotá, August 17, 2005. Television sets were very expensive and restricted to the elites, as well as to members of the military who could acquire them with heavy subsidies under Rojas Pinilla’s regime. Therefore, television’s potential to reach the masses was more theoretical than practical. I am indebted to Mary Roldán for alerting me to this

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documentation: United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, “Statistics on Radio and Television, 1950 – 1960,” report, 1963, accessed May 25, 2018, ahttp://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0003/000337/033739eo.pdf. Originally founded in 1881, the Museo Zea (now the Museo de Antioquia) opened its current modern building in 1955. Imelda Ramírez González, Debates críticos en los umbrales del arte contemporáneo: El arte de los años sesenta y la fundación del Museo de Arte de Medellín (Medellín: Fondo Editorial Universidad Eafit, 2012), 82 – 83. Eduardo Mendoza Varela, “Intercol y la cultural nacional,” in Mesa redonda: La empresa privada del petróleo y el interés público, Empresa Privada en Colombia, no. 2 (Bogotá: Asociación de Acción Interamericana de Colombia, 1964). The essay was originally published in Economía (Bogotá) 1, no. 1 (1964). See also Jorge Eche­ verri Herrera and Asociación de Acción Interamericana de Colombia, La empresa privada del petróleo y el interés público (Bogotá: Continente, 1964). Mendoza Varela, “Intercol y la cultural nacional,” 19. The Esso prize for literature consisted of $25,000 and publication of the manuscript. Gabriel García Márquez won the first Esso prize in 1961 with his work La Mala Hora (The Evil Hour). When the work was published in Spain the next year, and cleansed of its jargon, García Márquez repudiated it and entered a writing block that, thankfully, ended in 1965 when he began to write Cien años de soledad [One Hundred Years of Solitude] (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1967).  “This is how International Petroleum has understood [its role], and such is the admirable case of the fine arts exhibitions, stupendous traveling shows of Colombian art, that on two occasions have circulated United States and European cities, with the sole and direct sponsorship of Intercol. The visual experience of our [Colombian] cultural endeavors . . . are more valid, more persuasive as a form of dissemination, than so many enormous diplomatic missions, which at the end of the day are futile because they barely leave the trace of a feeble and unconvincing assignment”: Mendoza Varela, “Intercol y la cultural nacional,” 20. Traba worked on one of these exhibitions only six months after she arrived in Colombia. She also helped with the selection of works and wrote the text for the “3,500 Years of Colombian Art” in 1960 at the Lowe Museum in Coral Gables, Florida. Bazzano-­Nelson, “Cold War Pan-­American Operations”; Verlichak, Marta Traba, 142. Bazzano-­Nelson “Cold War Pan-­American Operations”; Coleman, Colombia and the United States. Tropical Oil and Esso had partially financed Revista de Indias, the magazine of the Liberal Republic’s Ministry of Education, since the 1940s. According to Roldán, there was an increase of U.S. corporate sponsorship of Colombian cultural initiatives during the presidency of Eduardo Santos (1938 – 1942) as a form of hemispheric collaboration against fascism led by Nelson Rockefeller and the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-­American Affairs: Mary Roldán, correspondence with the author, April 13, 2018. Although the mambo was founded on paper in 1955, it was declared an “autonomous corporation” in 1958, and on November 20, 1962, a relaunching act was signed at the Colón Theater in Bogotá. Finally, the museum, located on the Car-

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rera 7a, nos. 23–­61, opened to the public on October 31, 1963, with the exhibition Tumbas by Antonio Roda: Verlichak Marta Traba, 173 – 74. Beatriz González, discussion with the author, Bogotá, August 17, 2005; Florencia Bazzano-­Nelson, “Theory in Context: Marta Traba’s Art-­Critical Writings and Colombia, 1945 – 1959” (Ph.D. diss., University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, 2000), 383 – 84. Among the list of early sponsors were national corporations such as Bavaria, Cementos Diamante, Colombates, Colmotores, Coltejer, Federación Nacional de Cafeteros, Flota Mercantile Grancolombiana, rti, Vanitex, Avianca Airlines, Zulueta Holguín y Cía, Panauto, Petroquímica del Atlántico, Alphatex, Comapán, Arturo García Salazar e Hijos, Seguros La Libertad, y Cabarria y Cía, and multinational corporations such as Xerox, Leo-­Burnett-­Novas, Diners Club, bvd, Braniff Airlines, Shell, and Phillips Petroleum Company: see Eduardo Serrano and Museo de Arte Moderno, El Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá: Recuento de un esfuerzo conjunto (Bogotá: Museo de Arte Moderno, 1979). According to Shifra Goldman, Intercol began sponsoring the visual arts in Bogotá in 1959 as a “goodwill” gesture. She writes, “Public Relations and press coverage snowballed, and the exhibit was brought to the Pan American Union, Washington D.C. in 1960. Intercol, which had $100 million invested in Colombia, insisted that the art shown was not tied in any way to its investment, a statement that appears less than candid. In 1963, Intercol was a major supporter, along with business interests . . . to the foundation of mam”; furthermore, the Visual Art Unit of the Pan American Union (pau) and, as of 1948, the Organization of American States(oas) were also allied with Esso, a Rockefeller-­dominated affiliate of Standard Oil, which organized the Esso Salon for Young Artists throughout Latin America: Goldman, Contemporary Mexican Painting in a Time of Change, 31, 34. For a discussion of the role of transnational corporations in reordering the international cultural and symbolic market, see Néstor García Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 56 – 64. Multinationals included Phillips and Shell, along with national corporations such as La Nacional de Seguros, Leda-­Schreder, Panauto, Compañia Colombiana de Seguros, and the Banco Cafetero: Bazzano-­Nelson, “Theory in Context,” 383 – 84. Marta Traba, Art in Latin America Today: Colombia (Washington, DC: Pan American Union, 1959); Fox, Making Art Panamerican. As of 1974, Gloria Zea acted as director of both the mambo and the Instituto Colombiano de Cultura (Colcultura), which was part of the Ministry of Education and the precursor to the Ministry of Culture. Zea was appointed in large part due to her experience working for the International Council for the Museum of Modern Art in New York, an organization closely related to the Rockefeller family. According to the mambo’s curator Eduardo Serrano, there never appeared to be a conflict of interests in Zea’s joint appointment since the institutions had similar visions. What this demonstrates is the close alignment among the activities of Washington, New York, and Bogotá institutions: Serrano and Museo de Arte Moderno, El Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá, 117.

No tes to introduction 66 Marta Traba, “Obregón y la pintura colombiana,” El Tiempo (Bogotá), March 15, 1959. 67 Héctor Osuna, “La remodelación del Consejo de Ministros: Requisitos y especificaciones,” Magazín Dominical, El Espectador, June 6, 1971. See also Héctor Osuna, Osuna de frente (Bogotá: Biblioteca de El Espectador, El Ancora, 1983). 68 Ardila, Beatriz González, 86. 69 Beatriz González, television interview, Plástica arte contemporáneo en Colombia, 2 videos, Ministerio de Cultura, Bogotá, 2005. 70 When asking for directions to the Pasaje Rivas, most people, astonished by my interest, immediately warned me about the potential dangers of taking anything valuable to the area. 71 Lars Schoultz, “Urbanization and Changing Voting Patterns: Colombia, 1946 – 1970,” Political Science Quarterly 87 (March 1972): 22 – 45. See also Alejandro Angulo Novoa, El movimiento de la población colombiana (Bogotá: Centro de Investigación y Acción Social, 1969). Ann Farnsworth-­A lvear describes the dramatic account of urbanization in Colombia: “In 1875, 95 percent of Colombians lived in the countryside, a percentage that dropped rapidly in the 1910s and 1920s. Between 1938 and 1985, however, the relative weights of the rural and urban populations reversed themselves: Colombia was 69 percent rural in 1938 but 69 percent urban by 1985, with the population increasingly concentrated in the largest cities”: Ann Farnsworth-­A lvear, Dulcinea in the Factory: Myths, Morals, Men, and Women in Colombia’s Industrial Experiment, 1905 – 1960 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 45. The statistics are from José Olinto Rueda, “Historia de la población de Colombia: 1880 – 2000,” in Nueva historia de Colombia, vol. 5, ed. Jaime Jaramillo Uribe, Alvaro Tirado Mejía, Jorge Orlando Melo, and Jesús Antonio Bejarano (Bogotá: Editorial Planeta, 1998), 357 – 96. 72 Since the Spanish conquest of the Americas, the traza (design) was used in the foundation of new towns. Its grid embodied the European ideal of an ordered and hierarchical social structure, not the lived experiences of those who inhabited it: see Ángel Rama, The Lettered City (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996); Valerie Frazer, The Architecture of Conquest: Building in the Viceroyalty of Peru, 1535 – 1635 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 73 Paul B. Niell and Stacie G. Widdifield, eds., Buen Gusto and Classicism in the Visual Cultures of Latin America, 1780 – 1910 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2013); Paul Niell, “Founding the Academy of San Alejandro and the Politics of Taste in Late Colonial Havana, Cuba,” Colonial Latin American Review 21, no. 2 (2012): 293 – 318. 74 Ministerio de Educación Nacional, La obra educativa del gobierno, vol. 3 (Bogotá: Imprenta Nacional, 1940), cited in Silva, República liberal, intelectuales y cultura popular, 242. 75 Birenbaum Quintero, Rites, Rights, and Rhythms. 76 Lleras, Arte, política y crítica, 25; Niell and Widdifield, Buen Gusto and Classicism in the Visual Cultures of Latin America; Barragán et al., Iglesia Católica, arte y secularizacion en Colombia en las décadas 1960 y 1970. 77 Ana María Reyes, “Building Abstraction in Brazil: The São Paulo Bienal of 1951,” Chicago Art Journal 8, no. 1 (1998): 31 – 42.

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No tes to introduction 78 In the statement, Valencia is using the term “formally” in the sense of “conformity to rules, propriety,” as defined in the Oxford English Dictionary, not to suggest formalism in the modernist sense. 79 Beatriz González, discussion with the author, Bogotá, January 10, 2010. 80 Karl, Forgotten Peace. For an interesting account of the letrado intellectual class, see Jean Franco, The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). 81 Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” in Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate, ed. Mabel Moraña, Enrique Dussel, and Carlos A. Juáregui (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 181 – 224. 82 Most famously, Clement Greenberg theorizes kitsch as Fascism’s dangerous seduction and manipulation of the masses. See Clement Greenberg, “Avant-­Garde and Kitsch,” Partisan Review (July – August 1940): 296 – 310. 83 Traba, Dos décadas vulnerables. 84 Traba, Los muebles de Beatriz González, 46. 85 For a revalorization of camp and melodrama in cultural and political theory, see Bonnie Honig, Antigone, Interrupted (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 86 Latham, Modernization as Ideology, 99. 87 “Fresh Breeze from the South” (editorial), Life Magazine, August 25, 1961, 46; “Yanquis Open a New World Series against the Reds,” Life Magazine, August 25, 1961, 40. Latham, Modernization as Ideology, 99. 88 My understanding of culture as a terrain of power negotiations and struggle is deeply influenced by the “Gramscian turn” in cultural studies, especially the work of Stuart Hall. See, e.g., Antonio Gramsci, Quintin Hoare, and Geoffrey Nowell-­ Smith, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (New York: International Publishers, 1972); Stuart Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing the ‘Popular,’ ” in People’s History and Socialist Theory, ed. Raphael Samuel (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 227 – 40; Tony Bennett, “Popular Culture and ‘The Turn to Gramsci’: The Politics of ‘Popular Culture,’ ” in Popular Culture and Social Relations (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1986). 89 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). 90 Bourdieu, Distinction, 11. 91 The mambo was inaugurated on October 31, 1963, in retail space on Seventh Avenue, the city’s main transportation artery: Serrano and Museo de Arte Moderno, El Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá. Chapter 1. Vermeer in Bucaramanga, Beatriz in Bogotá 1 Camilo Calderón Schrader, ed., 50 Años, Salón Nacional de Artistas (Bogotá: Instituto Colombiano de Cultura, 1990), 187. 2 Marta Traba, “Primer Salón de Artistas Jóvenes: Un éxito,” Revista La Nueva Prensa, no. 122, September 1, 1964; Marta Traba, “¡Claro que hay jóvenes con talento!” Nueva Prensa, April 18 – 24, 1964.

No tes to Ch a p ter 1 3 The terms for neocolonial aid and tutelage began with the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference in July 1944, held in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, which created the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the International Monetary Fund. U.S. modernization theory and the Economic Commission for Latin America’s desarrollismo claimed that the distinction between the First World and Third World was one of degree within the spectrum of industrialization: Raúl Prebisch, La cooperación internacional en la política de desarrollo latinoamericano (Santiago de Chile: United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America, 1973); Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, [2003] 2007); Michael Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation Building” in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995). 4 Gloria Valencia Diago, “Hoy martes, en el mam, Beatriz González y ‘La Encajera’ de Vermeer,” El Tiempo, April 14, 1964. 5 In discussing Vermeer’s illusionistic methods, scholars focus on his use of the camera obscura. Vermeer was fascinated by its effects and even exaggerated some of the blurring of the foreground to create further sharpness in the central figure: see Daniel Arasse, Vermeer, Faith in Painting (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 7-­8, 60, and 70-­73. 6 For a discussion of modernist love for Vermeer, see Georges Didi-­Huberman, “The Art of Not Describing: Vermeer — The Detail and the Patch,” History of the Human Sciences 2, no. 2 (1989): 135 – 69. 7 Vermeer is a favorite Dutch master among modernists; many art critics in the twentieth century discussed his work in exclusively formal terms as “pure painting”: see, e.g., Jean-­Louis Vaudoyer’s review of the Dutch art show at the Jeu de Paume in the Tuileries, Paris, in the April 30, 1921, issue of L’Opinion, as cited in Arasse, Vermeer, Faith in Painting, 3. See also Didi-­Huberman, “The Art of Not Describing.” I am indebted to Michael Zell for pointing out this modernist fascination with Vermeer and The Lacemaker in particular for the drip-­like quality of the threads in the foreground. 8 Walter Engel, “Dos exposiciones notables,” Magazine Dominical, El Espectador, May 26, 1964. 9 See also Encajera Monte Onda, in Catálogo razonado Beatriz González, Universidad de los Andes, http://bga.uniandes.edu.co/catalogo/items/show/50. 10 See also Encajera animal, in Catálogo razonado Beatriz González, Universidad de los Andes, http://bga.uniandes.edu.co/catalogo/items/show/59; Un busto a la encajera del imperio, in Catálogo razonado Beatriz González, Universidad de los Andes, http:// bga.uniandes.edu.co/catalogo/items/show/72. 11 There are two postwar hegemonic narratives about the evolution of European avant-­garde practices, one based on anti-­institutional critique and one based on a progression toward self-­referential criticality: for a brief analysis, see Charles Harrison, Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). The foundation of museums of modern art throughout the hemisphere, as well as of international art competitions, played a key role in fostering a sense of inevitability of abstract

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18 19 20 21 22 23

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art as a sign of progress: Michele Greet and Gina McDaniel Tarver, Art Museums of Latin America: Structuring Representation (New York: Routledge, 2018); Adams, “Locating the International”; Shifra M. Goldman, Contemporary Mexican Painting in a Time of Change (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995); Mario Pedrosa, Política das artes (São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 1970); Ana María Reyes, “Building Abstraction in Brazil: The São Paulo Bienal of 1951,” Chicago Art Journal 8, no. 1 (1998): 31 – 42. See El abominable mundo de la fístula (X) [The Abominable World of the Fistula], in Catálogo razonado Beatriz González, Universidad de los Andes, http://bga.uniandes .edu.co/catalogo/items/show/38. Anticipating World War II, Walter Franz Engel emigrated from Austria to Colombia in 1938. Other influential Colombian intellectuals who supported artistic autonomy were Jorge Gaitán Durán and Luís Vidales, along with other European immigrants such as Casimiro Eiger Silberstein, who arrived as a refugee of World War II in 1943, and Clemente Airó, who started the influential magazine Espiral. Calderón Schrader, 50 años, Salón Nacional de Artistas, 125. Carmen María Jaramillo, Arte política y crítica: Una aproximación a la consolidación del arte modern en Colombia (Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2005). Álvaro Medina, Procesos del arte en Colombia (Bogotá: Instituto Colombiano de Cultura, 1978), 342. The term was first used to describe a group of writers and intellectuals in the 1920s, including the young Alberto Lleras Camargo. For public battles between Marta Traba and the established americanistas, see Florencia Bazzano-­Nelson, “Theory in Context: Marta Traba’s Art-­Critical Writings and Colombia, 1945 – 1959” (Ph.D. diss., University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, 2000). Encajera ave, in Catálogo razonado Beatriz González, Universidad de los Andes, http://bga.uniandes.edu.co/catalogo/items/show/60. Engel, “Dos exposiciones notables.” Beatriz González Aranda, “Variaciones sobre la Encajera de Vermeer,” Revista Nova (1964): 31 – 34. Press clip from Beatriz González’s personal archive, Bogotá. Engel, “Dos exposiciones notables.” Clarie Fox, Making Art Panamerican: Cultural Policy and the Cold War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). Reyes, “Building Abstraction in Brazil”; Ana M. López, “Are All Latinos from Manhattan? Hollywood, Ethnography, and Cultural Imperialism,” in Unspeakable Images: Ethnicity and the American Cinema, ed. Lester Friedman (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 404 – 24. For Traba’s review of the exhibition, see Marta Traba, “Pintoras colombianas.” El Tiempo: Lecturas Dominicales, September 22, 1957: 3. Traba, “¡Claro que hay jóvenes con talento!” For a discussion of Romero Brest’s ideas, see Andrea Giunta, “Jorge Romero Brest and the Coordinates of Aesthetic Modernism in Latin America,” Art Journal 64, no. 4 (2005): 89 – 91. Marta Traba, “Crítica de arte: El génio anti-­servil,” Intermedio (Bogotá), June 26, 1956, 5.

No tes to Ch a p ter 1 28 Traba, “¡Claro que hay jóvenes con talento!” 29 Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon, 1961); Clement Greenberg, Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” first published in Voice of America Forum Lectures (Washington, DC: U.S. Information Agency, 1960), then reprinted in Art and Literature, 4 (Spring 1965): 193 – 201; Francis Frascina, Deidre Paul, and Charles Harrison, eds., Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology (New York: Harper and Row, 1982); Gregory Battcock, ed., The New Art: A Critical Anthology (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1966). 30 Marta Traba, La pintura nueva en Latinoamérica (Bogotá: Librería Central, 1961). 31 Victoria Verlichak, Marta Traba: Una terquedad furibunda (Buenos Aires: untref and Fundación Proa, 2001). 32 Nancy Jachec, “Modernism, Enlightenment Values, and Clement Greenberg,” Oxford Art Journal 21, no. 2 (1998): 121 – 32. For Alberto Lleras Camargo and the group of intellectuals known as Los Nuevos during the 1920s publishing in the magazine Universidad, edited by Germán Arciniegas during the 1920s, see Leopoldo Villar Borda, Alberto Lleras, el último republicano (Bogotá: Planeta, 1997), 73 – 108. 33 Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). 34 Greenberg was also part of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom: see Jachec, “Modernism, Enlightenment Values, and Clement Greenberg.” 35 See Claire Fox, “El arte que progresa,” in Fox, Making Art Panamerican, 89 – 128. Lleras Camargo cites Walt Rostow’s concept of a society ready for “takeoff” in Cali 1965: Alberto Lleras Camargo, “La Asamblea Demográfica de Cali: Alberto Lleras Camargo propone control de la natalidad,” El Tiempo, August 12, 1965, 1, 22. 36 Bazzano-­Nelson, “Cold War Pan-­American Operations.” 37 Gilman, Mandarins of the Future. 38 Patrick Iber, Neither Peace nor Freedom: The Cultural Cold War in Latin America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). 39 For a discussion of geometric abstraction in Colombia, see Ana Maria Franco, “Edgar Negret and Eduardo Ramírez-­Villamizar: Transnational Encounters and the Rise of Modernism in Colombian Art, 1944 – 1964” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 2012). 40 Gilman demonstrates that U.S. social scientists borrowed the language of artistic modernism to represent themselves as revolutionary social transformers: Gilman, Mandarins of the Future. 41 For images by Carlos Rojas in the 1960s, see Eduardo Serrano, ed., and Museo de Arte Moderno, Carlos Rojas: Telas de la Serie América — Museo de Arte Moderno, Bogotá, Colombia, mayo 1977, exhibition catalogue (Bogotá: Museo de Arte Moderno, 1977). For the works of Antonio Roda, see Eduardo Serrano, Roda: Los objetos del culto [Paintings] (Bogotá: Museo de Arte Moderno, 1979). 42 Engel, “Dos exposiciones notables.” The term brindar el espaldarazo is related to knighting ceremonies. It is the salutation that marks the bestowal of knighthood; hence, in the modern sense it connotes sanctioning rather than accolades.

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No tes to Ch a p ter 1 43 “The most severe critics claim that we must be strict with [the young artists] in order for them not to believe that they have won heaven for achieving a fairly effective color combination on canvas or shape that is heavily sustained in space. . . . Indeed, I align myself with this criterion, and the art students who have been my alumni during the past five years agree with this as a criterion even if it might be a sacrifice for them. That is why I have insisted that the work must be supported by a truth; I have taught them to loathe false inflation, provincial adulation, bad faith, and neutrality of judgment. It is for them to assume with inner strength the possibility of being themselves, even if they are punished for these principles”: Traba, “¡Claro que hay jóvenes con talento!” 44 For a history of the Museum of Modern Art in Bogotá, see Gloria Zea de Uribe, Eduardo Serrano, Carmen María Jaramillo, and Museo de Arte Moderno, El Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá: Una experiencia singular (Bogotá: Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá, El Sello, 1994). 45 Traba, “¡Claro que hay jóvenes con talento!” Traba’s idea of expediting an artist’s ability to “catch up” resonated with modernization ideology of the Alliance for Progress and the National Front that assumed key programs could accelerate a nation’s development and achieve in a short period of time what took the West centuries to accomplish and therefore become capable of open competition within free-­market capitalism. 46 Nadia Moreno Moya, Arte y juventud: El Salón Esso de Artistas Jóvenes en Colombia (Bogotá: Instituto Distrital de las Artes and La Silueta, 2013); José Enrique Rodó and Belén Castro, Ariel (Madrid: Cátedra, 2000). 47 Marta Traba, “Museo de Arte Moderno,” Lámpara 10, no. 47 (May 1964), 11. Traba also saw a dynamic role for the middle class that was influenced by the university as the great social leveler, a position that became more emphatic in her later writings. 48 Marta Traba, “Los héroes están fatigados (Crónica de México),” Eco: Revista de la Cultura de Occidente, no. 57 (January 1965), reprinted in Emma Araujo and Museo de Arte Moderno, Marta Traba (Bogotá: Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá, Planeta, 1984), 303 – 8; Marta Traba, Dos décadas vulnerables en las artes plásticas latinoamericanas, 1950 – 1970 (Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno, 2005). 49 Gloria Valencia Castaño, quoted in Verlichak, Marta Traba, 135. 50 Beatriz González, discussion with the author, Bogotá, August 8, 2005. 51 Bourdieu considers the pure gaze as a form of social distinction from its reverse — that is, the popular or functional gaze: Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). 52 Santiago Martínez Delgado’s Interludio won first prize at the II Salón Anual de Artistas Colombianos in 1941: Calderón Schrader, 50 años, Salón Nacional de Artistas, 15. 53 The Guía de Bogotá was a cultural guide that addressed the visiting delegates to the IX International American Conference in Bogotá in April 1948. 54 Beatriz González, discussion with the author, Bogotá, August 8, 2005. 55 Beatriz González, “Yo no soy una pintora Pop,” unpublished lecture delivered at the Library Gabriel Turbay, Bucaramanga, Colombia, November 17, 1997, personal

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58 59 60 61 62

63

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archive of Gina McDaniel Tarver, Buda, TX; Jaime Ardila, Beatriz González: Apuntes para la historia extensa (Bogotá: Tercer Mundo, 1974), 104. For Manzana (III), see Catálogo razonado Beatriz González, Universidad de los Andes, http://bga.uniandes .edu.co/catalogo/items/show/55. Marta Traba, “Las habitaciones de Vermeer,” El Tiempo, January 11, 1959. According to the artist, it was when she and her colleagues established a painting studio that she knew she wanted to be an artist. The university would later provide them with a studio on campus, with Eliza Gómez, Gloria Martínez, Julia Acuña, Camila Loboguerrero, and Ana Murillo, in the basement of the Buen Pastor building: Ardila, Beatriz González, 105. Cited in Ardila, Beatriz González, 104. Walter Engel, “Exposición de Arte en la Sociedad Económica de los Amigos del País,” Magazín Dominical, El Espectador, December 3, 1961. Beatriz González, discussion with the author, Bogotá, August 8, 2005. Walter Engel, untitled review of art exhibition at the Sociedad Económica de los Amigos del País, Magazín Dominical, El Espectador, November 25, 1962. Museo del Prado, Velázquez y lo Velazqueño: Catálogo de la exposicion homenaje a Diego de Silva Velázquez en el III centenario de su muerte 1660 – 1960 (Madrid: Ministerio de Educación Nacional, 1960). Enrique Lafuente Ferrari, José Camón Aznar, Diego Angulo Iñiguez, and Instituto de España, III centenario de la muerte de Velázquez: Conmemorado por el instituto de España en el Salón de actos de la Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando el día 9 de diciembre de 1960 — Discursos de los excelentísimos señores D. Enrique Lafuente Ferrari, D. José Camón Aznar, D. Diego Angulo Iñiguez (Madrid: Magisterio Español, 1961). While the exhibition of the Felipe IV series was in 1965 mambo, Engel mentions Roda’s Velazquian paintings in his article “Pintoresco y pintura” in 1964 as a comparison with González’s Vermeerian paintings: Walter Engel, “Pintoresco y pintura” Magazine Dominical, El Espectador, 1964. Press clip from Beatriz González’s personal archive, Bogotá. Cited in Ardila, Beatriz González, 103. For contextualizing González’s works within a tendency toward recontextualization, see Carmen María Jaramillo, María S. Barón, and María M. Sánchez, Fisuras del arte moderno en Colombia (Bogotá: Fundación Gilberto Alzáte Avendaño and Alcaldía Mayor de Bogotá, 2012); Carmen María Jaramillo, “La imágenes de los otros: Una aproximación a la obra de Beatriz González en las décadas del sesenta, setenta y la mitad del ochenta,” in Beatriz González, ed. Benjamin Villegas Jiménez, Holland Cotter, Carmen María Jaramillo, María Margarita Malagón, and Oscar Monsalve (Bogotá: Villegas, 2005), 15 – 21; Lester Friedman, ed., Unspeakable Images: Ethnicity and the American Cinema. For Versión de la rendición de Breda III (1962), see Catálogo razonado Beatriz González, Universidad de los Andes, http://bga.uniandes.edu.co/catalogo/items/show/34. Marta Traba, “Diego Velázquez (1599 – 1660): Recuerdo de Velázquez,” El Tiempo, August 15, 1957. Beatriz González Aranda, “Pedagogía artística,” La Nueva Prensa, no. 83 (December 1962): 73.

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No tes to Ch a p ter 1 69 Aranda, “Pedagogía artística.” 70 “Gusto culto, con muy buen gusto”: Engel, untitled review. 71 For Sombrero de la rendición de Breda (1963), see Catálogo razonado Beatriz González, Universidad de los Andes, http://bga.uniandes.edu.co/catalogo/items/show/47. 72 Verlichak, Marta Traba. 73 González, quoted in Valencia Diago, “Hoy martes, en el mam, Beatriz González.” 74 González Aranda, “Variaciones sobre la Encajera de Vermeer.” 75 W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); W. J. Thomas Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 76 Ana María Reyes, “Incorporated Vision and the Critique of Desarrollismo: Marta Minujín, Beatriz González, and Lygia Clark,” Revista Letral, no. 13 (2014): 100 – 112, http://revistaseug.ugr.es/index.php/letral/issue/view/246. 77 Mercedes Trelles-­Hernández, “The Contested Object: Pop Art in Latin America, 1964 – 1974” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 2002), 92 – 93. 78 González described, “At home, my mother had not original paintings but framed pictures from the history of universal art — for instance, a small girl by [Joshua] Reynolds. In my mother’s [family] home in the San Gil neighborhood [of Bucaramanga] they had a magazine with great French illustrations. . . . It was an Argentine magazine titled Para Tí. Mother had a framed Van Dyck and a girl, I think it was by Reynolds, because she looked a lot like Lucila [the artist’s sister]. Grand­father Aranda . . . had lithographs of [William Adolphe] Bouguereau, many French lithographs: a Sermon on the Mount, Afternoon Vespers, and a Sacred Heart. All of them passed to my mother. . . . We also had some oval frames with pictures by Raphael: The Transfiguration and The Assumption. . . . In the countryside [their country estate, El Cairo, in Rio Negro] we had two large, colorful lithographs, one of a French forest with fir trees and flowers, and another of a lake with swans in the style of [Jean-­François] Millet. They were reproductions faithful to the original”: Beatriz González, conversation with the author, Bogotá, August 8, 2008. 79 Francisco Stastny, “La presencia de Rubens en la pintura colonial,” Revista Peruana de Cultura, no. 4 (January 1965): 5 – 33; Francisco Stastny, “Una crucifixion de Zurbarán en Lima,” Archivo Español de Arte (1970): 83 – 86. In relation to miraculous images, the closer a painting reproduced the relic, the stronger the transfer of mystical power, as in the case of the Virgin of Guadalupe: Jeanette Favrot Peterson, Visualizing Guadalupe: From Black Madonna to Queen of the Americas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014). This also carried over into republican times as independence-­era leaders tapped into devotional practices through portraiture: Emily Engel, “Simón Bolívar Itinerant Portraits: Visual Conquest and the Production of an Icon,” in Simón Bolívar: Travels and Transformations of a Cultural Icon, ed. Ana María Reyes and Maureen G. Shanahan (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2016), 27 – 47. 80 Vermeer’s work had its share of copyists, the most famous of whom was Hans van Meegerenen. He was so precise in his craft that he was exposed as a forger only when charged by Allied prosecutors after World War II with trafficking national treasures for the Nazis.

No tes to Ch a p ter 1 81 See for instance Carolina Ponce de León, Beatriz González: What an Honor to Be with You at This Historic Moment — Works 1965 – 1997 (New York: El Museo del Barrio, 1998), 13 – 65. One exception is Víctor Manuel Rodríguez: see Víctor Manuel Rodríguez, “Los espejos de Beatriz González: Modernismo, postcolonialidad e identificación,” Historia Crítica, no. 13 (July – December 1996): 21 – 31; Víctor Manuel Rodríguez, “Cold War Legacies Otherwise: Latin America Art and Art History in Colonial Times” (Ph.D. diss., University of Rochester, 2009). 82 Between 1956 and 1966 there were several retrospective exhibitions of De Staël’s work held in Rotterdam, Zurich, Boston, Chicago, and New York: see, e.g., Museum of Fine Art, Nicolas de Staël, 1914 – 1955: A Retrospective Exhibition (Boston: Museum of Fine Art, 1965); Douglas Cooper, Nicolas de Staël, Masters and Movements (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1961); Musée National d’Art Moderne, Nicolas de Staël, 1914 – 1955: 22 février – 8 avril (Paris: Éditions des Musées Nationaux, 1956); Turin Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Turino and Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna, Nicolas de Staël, exhibition catalogue (Turin: Museo Civico, Turin, and Kestner-­ Gesellschaft, Hannover, 1960); André Chastel, Nicolas de Staël: L’artiste et l’oeuvre (Paris: Maeght, 1972). 83 Alan Bowness, Nicolas de Staël (London: Tate Gallery, 1981), 5. 84 Juan Acha, “¿Está aún vigente la pintura figurativa?,” Eco: Revista de la Cultura de Occidente, no. 10, 1960, 341. 85 For Juan Acha’s theories of Arte No-­Objetual and the role of the avant-­garde in Latin America, see Juan Acha, “Teoría y práctica no-­objetualista en América Latina,” in Memorias del primer colloquio sobre arte no-­objetual y arte urbano realizado por Museo de Arte Moderno Medellín en mayo 1981 (Medellín, Colombia: Fondo Editorial Museo de Antioquia, 2010), 75 – 88; Juan Acha, Aproximaciones a la identidad latinoamericana (Mexico City: Facultad de Arquitectura y Diseño, Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México, and Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1996); Juan Acha, Arte y sociedad latinoamérica: El producto artístico y su estructura (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1981); Juan Acha, Crítica del arte: Teoría y práctica (Mexico City: Trillas, 1992); Juan Acha, Las culturas estéticas de América Latina (Reflexiones) (Mexico City: Coordinación de Humanidad, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1993); Juan Acha, Ensayos y ponencias latinoamericanistas (Caracas: Gan, 1984); Juan Acha, Universidad Nacional Autónoma De México, Museo Universitario Contemporáneo De Arte (Mexico), Aracy Amaral, Joaquín Barriendos Rodríguez, and Centro Cultural Universitario (Tlatelolco), Juan Acha: Despertar Revolucionario = Revolutionary Awakening, trans. Christopher Michael Fraga and Nuria Rodríguez Ortega, Folio muac 050 (México: muac Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, unam, 2017). 86 That year, González participated in the Primer Salón de Pintura y Escultura at the Museo de Arte Moderno La Tertulia in Cali; the Primer Salón de Pintoras at the Museo de Arte Moderno La Tertulia in Cali; the Salón Intercol de Pintura Joven at theMuseo de Arte Moderno in Bogotá; and the 16 Salón Nacional de Artistas Colombianos at the Museo Nacional de Colombia in Bogotá. 87 According to Jonathan Brown, “The most salient characteristic [of Las Lanzas] was the victor’s recognition of the quality of their vanquished enemies, which

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88 89 90

91 92 93 94 95 96 97

was made apparent by arranging terms of surrender without humiliation. In a touching ceremony, whose nobility and humanity Velázquez unerringly captured, enemies became, if for a moment, comrades-­in-­arms under a banner of mutual esteem and regard”: Jonathan Brown, Collected Writings on Velázquez (Madrid: Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica, 2008), 31 – 37. According to the art historian Daniel Arasse, Thoré Bürger’s 1866 article in the Gazette des Beaux Arts was the first important historical reevaluation of Vermeer: Arasse, Vermeer, Faith in Painting, 3. Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987). There was much press surrounding this image, given that its identification as the Myth of Arachne was retrieved only in 1948. In the painting, Velázquez depicts two scenes from the myth of Minerva (Athena) and Arachne. Arachne was a Lydian master weaver whose craft was perfect and whose confidence was so high that she challenged the gods in a contest. Minerva, in the Ovid version, accepted her challenge and chose as a theme her victory over Neptune (Poseidon) in the naming of the city of Athens. Arachne wove twenty-­one tapestries depicting the folly and adultery of the gods, including Zeus’s affairs with Leda, Europa, and Danaë. Minerva, both recognizing Arachne’s superior skills and outraged by her arrogance, spared her life but punished her by turning her into a spider. Velázquez depicts two moments in the story: in the foreground, the mortal and divine weavers are in the midst of their craft. In the background, Arachne stands before a tapestry modeled after Titian’s Rape of Europa: see Jonathan Brown, Velázquez: Painter and Courtier (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 252 – 53; Jonathan Brown, “Minerva, Arachne, and Marcel,” in Brown, Collected Writings on Velázquez, 405 – 8. Engel, “Dos exposiciones notables.” Running through the pages of the many Lleras Camargo biographies is a ubiquitous admiration for his style and demeanor characterized as his invaluable asset for diplomacy and statesmanship. Caballero Argaez et al., Alberto Llleras Camargo y John F. Kennedy. Engel, “Pintoresco y pintura.” Engel, “Pintoresco y pintura.” Engel, “Pintoresco y pintura.” For discussion on dependency theory, see James D. Cockcroft, Andre Gunder Frank, and Dale L. Johnson, Dependence and Underdevelopment: Latin America’s Political Economy (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1972); Marc Edelman and Angelique Haugerud, The Anthropology of Development and Globalization: From Classical Political Economy to Contemporary Neoliberalism (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005); Andre Gunder Frank, Crisis in the Third World (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1981); Ramón Grosfoguel, “Developmentalism, Modernity, and Dependency Theory in Latin America,” in Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate, ed. Mabel Moraña, Enrique Dussel, and Carlos A. Juáregui (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 307 – 31; Ruy Mauro Marini, Subdesarrollo y revolución (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 1969); Ruy Mauro Marini and Carlos Eduardo Martins, América Latina, dependencia y globalización (Buenos Aires: Prometeo, 2007); Raúl Prebisch,

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Problemas teóricos y prácticos del crecimiento económico, Serie Conmemorativa del XXV (Santiago de Chile: Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe, 1973); Raúl Prebisch, Raúl Prebisch escritos 1919 – 1986 (Santiago de Chile: Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe, 2006); Raúl Prebisch, J. Samuel Valenzuela, and Arturo Valenzuela, “Modernization and Dependency: Alternative Perspectives in the Study of Latin American Underdevelopment,” Comparative Politics 10, no. 4 (July 1978): 535 – 57; Mitchell A. Seligson and John T. Passé-­Smith, Development and Underdevelopment: The Political Economy of Inequality (Boulder, CO: Lynn Rienner, 1993). “Beatriz González Aranda: Nuevo valor en la pintura,” Vanguardia Liberal, June 30, 1964. Bucaramanga is the capital city of the department (state) of Santander: “Santander en Cali,” Vanguardia Liberal, June 30, 1964. Beatriz González, discussion with the author, Bogotá, August 8, 2005. Beatriz González, discussion with the author, Bogotá, August 8, 2005. See, e.g., Pedro Gómez Valderrama, La otra raya del tigre (Bogotá: Siglo Veintiuno, 1977). “The other stripe of the tiger” is a metaphor for the central road that opened an era of “progress” for the department of Santander. Although Tropical Oil (as Standard Oil was called in Colombia when Ecopetrol was created in 1951) had lost its wells and refineries in Barrancabermeja, it continued its commercial distribution: Bazzano-­Nelson, “Cold War Pan-­American Operations,” 458. Gómez Valderrama, La otra raya. Luis Van Isschot, The Social Origins of Human Rights: Protesting Political Violence in Colombia’s Oil Capital, 1919 – 2010 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015), 9. For the political context of Barrancabermeja, see also Mauricio Archila, Aquí nadie es forastero: Testimonios sobre la formación de una cultura radical: Barrancabermeja 1920 – 1950 (Bogotá: Centro de Investigación y Educación Popular, 1986); Apolinar Díaz Callejas, Diez días de poder popular: El 9 de Abril 1948 en Barrancabermeja (Bogotá: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung Colombia and El Labrador, 1988). Rodolfo Low Maus, Rodolfo Low Maus: Memorias (Bucaramanga: Universidad Industrial de Santander, 2002); Aída Martínez, Universidad Industrial de Santander: 50 años, trans. David C. Johnson (Bucaramanga, Colombia: Universidad Industrial de Santander, 1998). In its efforts to diversify its curriculum, the Universidad Industrial de Santander (uis) brought in many humanities professors. Carlos José Reyes Posada was the first humanities professor for the uis, where he taught theater. I am greatly indebted to him for his account of all the tension in Bucaramanga during this period. He resigned after the “Great Strike” of 1963, when the university’s president, Rodolfo Low Maus, was expelled for importing dangerous “foreign” ideas: see also Álvaro Acevedo Tarazona, Un ideal traicionado: Vida y muerte de los movimientos estudiantiles en el eln (Bogotá: Intermedio, 2006). Alvaro Acevedo Tarazona and Diana Crucelly González Rey, “Protesta y movilización estudiantil, 1964: Memoria de una marcha en la Universidad Industrial de Santander,” Anuario de Historia Social y de la Cultura 38, no. 2 (2011): 255 – 76. Jaime Arenas Reyes narrated his account of the unforeseen brutality he and his

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colleagues encountered in the jungle region of San Vicente de Chucurí, between Bucaramanga and Barrancabermaja. His close friend, the famous guerrilla-­priest Camilo Torres Restrepo, would die just a few months after joining the eln. He also witnessed the execution of his close friends due to rivalries between the rural and urban guerrilleros. Arenas himself was assassinated in Bogotá at the hands of eln directives in 1972 for publishing this indicting account: Jaime Arena Reyes, La guerrilla por dentro: Análisis del eln colombiano (Bogotá: Tercer Mundo, 1971). See also Álvaro Acevedo Tarazona and Juliana Villabona Ardila, “Juventudes universiarias de izquierda: De la lucha ideological a la violencia política,” Hallazgos 13, no. 25 (2016): 199 – 216. In the case of the textile industry, by the late 1960s the industrial model had failed to provide women with the economic liberation they sought. In fact, imported machinery and technical attitudes shifted the mills from being feminine to masculine spaces. Women who had given up much of their private lives and personal fulfillment in the name of economic independence were now replaced by men. Ann Farnsworth-­A lvear, Dulcinea in the Factory: Myths, Morals, Men, and Women in Colombia’s Industrial Experiment, 1905 – 1960 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). Traba “¡Claro que hay jóvenes con talento!,” emphasis added. For Encajera en la playa I and Encajera en la playa II (1964), see Catálogo razonado Beatriz González, Universidad de los Andes, http://bga.uniandes.edu.co/catalogo /items/show/63 http://bga.uniandes.edu.co/catalogo/items/show/64. By 1977, Traba’s aesthetic discourse had undergone a significant paradigm shift when she focused on Latin American resistance to cultural imperialism. To understand how reviewers perceived the Lacemaker series, it is important to note that in 1964 critics did not discuss them in relation to kitsch: Marta Traba, Los muebles de Beatriz González (Bogotá: Museo de Arte Moderno, 1977). Eventually Pielroja was acquired by Philip Morris, when the multinational bought Coltabaco. Beatriz González, discussion with the author, Bogotá, August 17, 2005. Beatriz González, discussion with the author, Bogotá, August 17, 2005. We can infer daytime in Vermeer’s The Lacemaker because the scene is illuminated by sunlight from a presumed window on the upper-­right-­hand side of the canvas. For a discussion of women and lacemaking in the arts, see Nichola Anne Haxell, “Woman as Lacemaker: The Development of a Literary Stereotype in Texts by Charlotte Brontë, Nerval, Lainé, and Chawaf,” Modern Language Review 89, no. 3 (July 1994): 545 – 60; and for representations of feminine virtue, see Marta Moffitt Peacock, “Paragons of Virtue: Women and Domesticity in Seventeenth-­Century Dutch Art by Wayne Franits,” Women’s Art Journal 18, no. 2 (Autumn 1997 – Winter 1998): 44 – 47. Even today as the Peace Process in Colombia unfolds, conservative sectors of society denounce the threat of social reform to the traditional family: see Andrei Gómez-­Suárez, El triunfo del no: La paradoja emocional detrás del plebiscito (Bogotá: Icono, 2016). In the United States, according to Cara Mertes, “The cult of domesticity also functioned as part of the middle class struggle to define and concretize the absolute differences between working class and the middle class lifestyles”:

No tes to Ch a p ter 2 Cara Mertes, “There’s No Place Like Home: Women in Domestic Labor,” in Dirt and Domesticity: Construction of the Feminine, exhibition catalogue (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1992), 66. 119 González later embraced her provincial status, reflected in the title of Marta Calderón’s monograph Beatriz González: Una pintora de provincia (Bogotá: Carlos Valencia, 1988). 120 Traba, “¡Claro que hay jóvenes con talento!” Chapter 2. A Leap from the Domestic Sphere into the Sisga Reservoir 1 “Doble suicidio de ‘El Sisga’: El día de su Santo, escogido por Martínez para la tragedia,” El Tiempo, June 29, 1965, 3; “La tragedia de la represa de ‘El Sisga’: Los enamorados suicidas dejaron su ultima foto,” El Vespertino, June 28, 1965, 1. In May 1964, El Especator launched El Vespertino, a yellow press newspaper that lasted until 1968. 2 Beatriz González said, “It was not the story, the subject matter, or the anecdotes that motivated me, but the newspaper graphic: the images that appear flat, almost without shading. The sense of space is reduced to the deformations and displacement of the small facial features. These images adapt to and strengthen the idea that I had been developing in my painting: that space could be achieved with flat and cut-­out planes. On the faces I used the grayscale of the photograph and the discontinuous lines characteristic of that type of photographic printing”: transcript of television interview with Marta Traba in 1965 published in Jaime Ardila, Beatriz González: Apuntes para la historia extensa (Bogotá: Tercer Mundo, 1974), 83. 3 According to El Tiempo, Antonio Martínez Bonza, a peasant gardener, left a note declaring that God had revealed his destiny to save his girlfriend, Tulia Vargas, from sin (salvar del pecado a su compañera): “Doble suicidio de ‘El Sisga.’ ” Their bodies had been found floating in the Sisga reservoir a month earlier: Corchuelo, “Hallados dos cadáveres en la represa del Sisga,” El Tiempo, July 22, 1965, 25. 4 González interview in Ardila, Beatriz González, 83, emphasis added. 5 “The World Goes Pop,” Tate Modern, London, September 17, 2015 – January 24, 2016: see Jessica Morgan, Flavia Frigeri, and Elsa Coustou, eds., The World Goes Pop (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015); “Los suicidas del sisga’ cumplen 50 años,” August 29, 2015, Semana, accessed January 8, 2016, https://www.semana .com/cultura/articulo/los-­suicidas-­del-­asista-­por-­beatriz-­gonzalez/440364-­3; Daniel Reina Romero, “ ‘Los suicidas del Sisga’ cumplen 50 años: La obra icónica de Beatriz González celebra sus bodas de oro con una exposición en el Tate Modern de londres — Esta es la historia de uno de los símbolos del arte nacional,” Semana, August 29, 2015; Alejandra Toro Vesga, “ ‘Los suicidas del Sisga,’ obra de Beatriz González, llega a Londres,” El Tiempo, September 17, 2015, accessed September 18, 2015, http://www.eltiempo.com/entretenimiento/arte-­y-­teatro /la-­obra-­los-­suicidas-­del-­sisga-­cumple-­50-­anos/16376124; “ ‘Los suicidas del Sisga III’ se exhibe en el Tate Museum de Londres,” El Espectador, September 18, 2015, accessed September 18, 2015, http://www.elespectador.com/noticias/cultura /los-­suicidas-­del-­sisga-­iii-­se-­exhibe-­el-­tate-­museum-­de-­articulo-­587072.

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No tes to Ch a p ter 2 6 Marta Traba, “El alegato de la defensa, dos mentiras: La ‘crisis’ y la ‘estafa’ del Salón Nacional,” El Tiempo, September 26, 1965. 7 William McGreevey, “Population Policy under the National Front,” in Politics of Compromise: Coalition Government in Colombia, ed. R. Albert Berry, Ronald G. Hellman, and Mauricio Solaún (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1980), 413 – 34. 8 Alberto Lleras Camargo, “La Asamblea Demográfica de Cali: Alberto Lleras Camargo propone control de la natalidad,” El Tiempo, August 12, 1965, 1, 22. 9 Joseph Mayone Stycos and Jorge Arias, eds., Population Dilemma in Latin America (Washington, DC: Potomac, 1966). 10 Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” in Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, ed. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 51 – 79. 11 Nicolás Buenaventura, “El arte de Beatriz González,” El Crisol, May 7, 1972, 9. 12 “Doble suicidio de ‘El Sisga,’ ” 3. 13 For a discussion of this series and other “disasters” in the works of Andy Warhol, see Thomas Crow, Modern Art in the Common Culture” (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 49 – 65. For Andy Warhol’s A Woman’s Suicide (1962), see http://www.kunstsammlung.de/en/discover/collections/emuseum-­sammlung .html?frameUrl=%2FeMuseumPlus. 14 Today this painting hangs in the Museo Dolores Olmedo. Dolores Olmedo was a friend of the Riveras who was chastised for trespassing into the male-­dominated construction business. 15 Margaret Lindauer, Devouring Frida: The Art History and Popular Celebrity of Frida Kahlo (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999), 33. 16 Evelyn Stevens, “Marianismo: The Other Face of Machismo in Latin America,” in Female and Male in Latin America, ed. Ann Pescatello (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973), 90 – 101. 17 “Doble suicidio de ‘El Sisga,’ ” 3. 18 The Sisga reservoir/dam was built between 1949 and 1951 to regulate rainwater and the Sisga River and feed the Tibitoc water-­treatment plant that supplies 40 percent of Bogotá’s population. It was also built to control the winter flooding in the Bogotá savanna. 19 Walt Whitman Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-­Communist Manifesto, 3d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1960] 1990). 20 Lleras Camargo, “La Asamblea Demográfica de Cali.” 21 González interview in Ardila, Beatriz González, 83, emphasis added. 22 Carmen María Jaramillo, María S. Barón, and María M. Sánchez, Fisuras del arte moderno en Colombia (Bogotá: Alcaldía Mayor de Bogotá and Fundación Gilberto Alzáte Avendaño, 2012), 43 – 132. 23 Beatriz González Aranda, “El termómetro infalible,” in 50 años, Salón Nacional de Artistas, ed. Camilo Calderón Schrader (Bogotá: Instituto Colombiano de Cultura, 1990), xvii – x xxii. 24 There have been only two main interruptions of the annual competition: first in 1948 – 1950 due to the conservative violence unleashed after riots sparked by the assassination of Gaitán on April 9; and second in 1953 – 1957 due to the military

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27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

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dictatorship of Gustavo Rojas Pinilla. In 1948 – 1949 two exhibitions took place in lieu of the Salon: the Exposición de Pintura Contemporánea and the Salón Nacional de Arte Moderno: Calderón Schrader, 50 años, Salón Nacional de Artistas, xx – x xi. Shortly after the publication, Urdaneta was incarcerated and exiled. He returned to Colombia in 1880. Beatriz González Aranda, Manual de arte del siglo XIX (Bogotá: Universidad de los Andes, 2013), 223. For more information on Alberto Urdaneta, El Mochuelo, and El Papel Periódico Ilustrado, see Pilar Moreno de Ángel, Alberto Urdaneta (Bogotá: Instituto Colombiano de Cultura, 1972); Beatriz González and Biblioteca Luis-Ángel Arango, La Caricatura en Colombia a partir de la Independencia (Bogotá: Banco de la República, 2009). On Alberto Urdaneta and his role in developing academic arts in Colombia, see three short articles by Eugenio Barney Cabrera: “Los grabadores del ‘Papel Periódico Ilustrado,’ ” “La Escuela de Bellas Artes,” and “El Primer Salón Nacional de Artes,” in Historia del arte colombiano, vol. 9, ed. Ricardo Martin (Bogotá: Salvat Colombiana, 1983), 1278 – 88; María Girón Lizarazo, El museo-­taller de Alberto Urdaneta (Bogotá: Hermanos Zalamea, 1988); González and Biblioteca Luis-Ángel Arango, La Caricatura en Colombia; Moreno de Ángel, Alberto Urdaneta; Carmen Ortega Ricuarte, Dibujantes y grabadores del Papel Periódico Ilustrado y Colombia Ilustrada (Bogotá: Instituto Colombiano de Cultura, 1973); José Ortega Torres, Indíce del Papel Periódico Ilustrado y de Colombia Ilustrada (Bogotá: Instituto Caro y Cuervo, 1961); María Fernanda Urdaneta, Alberto Urdaneta (Bogotá: Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango, 1992). Renán Silva, República liberal, intelectuales y cultura popular (Medellín: La Carreta, 2012); Maria Elena Bravo de Hermelin, “Aproximación histórica a las políticas culturales de Colombia,” Gaceta 48 (2002): 164 – 232. Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, “Discurso de inauguración, Primer Salón de Artistas Colombianos, palabras del doctor Jorge Eliécer Gaitán,” El Tiempo, November 17, 1940. Michael Birenbaum Quintero, Rites, Rights, and Rhythms: A Genealogy of Musical Meaning in Colombia’s Black Pacific (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). Silva, República liberal, 227 – 72. Gaitán, “Discurso de inauguración.” Marta Traba, “Vida Cultural: XVI Salón Nacional = XVI Panteón Nacional,” El Tiempo, October 25, 1964, in Calderón Schrader, 50 años, Salón Nacional de Artistas, 130. González, “El termómetro infalible”; Cristina Lleras, Politización de la mirada estética Colombia, 1940 – 1952 (Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2005). Traba’s group included Botero, Obregón, Grau, Wiedemann, and Ramírez Villamizar. According to Beatriz González, the characteristics of the second stage of the Salon that differentiated this period from its antecedents were professional criticism, awareness of modernism, absence of the church and sanctimonious pronunciations, and the dominance of Traba’s critical spirit: González, “El termómetro infalible,” xxvii – x xxii. Traba, “El alegato de la defensa dos mentiras”; and Gina McDaniel Tarver, “Intrepid Iconoclasts and Ambitious Institutions: Early Colombian Conceptual Art and Its Antecedents” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2008).

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No tes to Ch a p ter 2 36 Marta Traba, “ ‘Violencia’: Una obra comprometida . . . con Obregón,” Nueva Prensa, no. 65, July 28, 1962. 37 Germán Guzmán Campos, Orlando Fals-­Borda, and Eduardo Umaña Luna, La violencia en Colombia: Estudio de un proceso social (Bogotá: Tercer Mundo, 1962). 38 For a more thorough analysis of political art during the National Front, see Jaramillo et al., Fisuras del arte moderno en Colombia, esp. 180 – 230; Gloria Zea de Uribe, Álvaro Medina, and Museo de Arte Moderno, Arte y violencia en Colombia desde 1948: Mayo – junio de 1999, Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá (Bogotá: Grupo Editorial Norma, 1999); David Gutiérrez Castañeda, Red Conceptualismos del Sur, and Taller Historia Crítica del Arte, Arte y disidencia política: Memorias del Taller 4 Rojo (Bogotá: La Bachué, 2016); María Sol Irene Barón Pino, Rojo y más rojo: Taller 4 Rojo, producción gráfica y acción directa (Bogotá: Fundación Gilberto Alzate Avedaño, 2014). 39 Alicia Baraibar de Cote Lamus’s husband was Eduardo Cote Lamus, the renowned poet and co­founder of Revista Mito. Jorge Zalamea was one of the writers and intellectuals who were known as “Los Nuevos” in the 1920s (along with Alberto Lleras Camargo), well before Traba’s group of painters and sculptors were given the same name in the 1950s. In 1965, Zalamea also won the Premio Casa de las Americas from Cuba for his work Poesía ignorada y olvidada. His son Alberto Zalamea founded Nueva Prensa and was married to Marta Traba until 1966: see Victoria Verlichak, Marta Traba: Una terquedad furibunda (Buenos Aires: intref and Fundación Proa, 2001), 170. 40 Arbeláez was also associated with the Revista Mito. 41 Calderón Schrader, 50 años, Salón Nacional de Artistas, 132. 42 Calderón Schrader, 50 años, Salón Nacional de Artistas, 132. 43 Jorge Zalamea, “Nota sobre el Salón,” Nueva Prensa, no. 138, September 25, 1965. 44 Traba, “El alegato de la defensa dos mentiras.” 45 The garrote vil was an instrument of public execution by means of mechanical strangulation — a tourniquet of the neck — that was used in Spain until the new Constitution of 1978: Diccionario de la lengua española, accessed January 8, 2016, http://dle.rae.es/?id=IxGvvDX. 46 Carlos Medellín, “En el XVII Salón, un espectáculo de fraude,” El Tiempo, September 5, 1965. 47 Cited in Ardila, Beatriz González, 84. 48 Marta Traba “La batalla no. 17,” Nueva Prensa, no. 138, September 25, 1965. This “incomprehensible alliance” includes three of Traba’s foes who she frequently villainized in her critical writings: the “offended ladies” refer to the conservatives who upheld deeply traditional Catholic values and who were scandalized by avant-­garde art; the “Calibanists” allude to materialist and alienated consumers that passively follow U.S. trends and were contrasted with the “Arielistas” per Rodó; and the “philo-­Marxists” refer to those who consider art as a political weapon and who follow the “political pamphleteering” tradition of the Mexican muralists. 49 Traba, “El alegato de la defensa dos mentiras.” 50 Productora de Papeles (propal) was a paper company based in Cauca, Colombia,

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56

57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69

that manufactures paper products from sugar cane: Calderón Schrader, 50 años, Salón Nacional de Artistas, 132; Paula Arenas, personal conversation with the author, Tabio, Colombia, January 2010. Cited in Calderón Schrader, 50 años, Salón Nacional de Artistas, 132. Traba already showed a preferential support for the young Mejía when he held his first solo exhibition at the mambo in early 1965 while she was the director. Traba, “La batalla no. 17.” Michael Taussig’s study of the connections among physical beauty, plastic surgery, and violence in Colombia is illustrative in this respect: see Michael Taussig, Beauty and the Beast (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). For the reception of Debora Arango’s work and its later revaluation, see Débora Arango Pérez and Santiago Londoño Vélez, eds., Débora Arango: Cuaderno De Notas conmemorativa, 100 años de nacimiento (Medellín, Colombia: Tragaluz, 2007); Beatriz González Aranda, “Reacondicionamiento crítico de Débora Arango,” in Débora Arango Exposición Retrospectiva (Bogotá: Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango, 1996), 47 – 74; Santiago Londoño Vélez and Débora Arango Pérez, Débora Arango: Vida de pintora (Bogotá: Ministerio de Cultura, República de Colombia, 1997); Maria Suescun Pozas, “Modern Femininity, Shattered Masculinity: The Scandal of the Female Nude during Political Crisis in Colombia, 1930 – 1948” (Ph.D. diss., McGill University, Montreal, 2005). I have not found the dimensions for Gazing North, but the photograph reproduced as figure 2.10 shows that it is double the size of the gas tanks the artist used for welding, which suggests that the piece is roughly the size of the artist and slightly larger than Flexidra (1964), a similar work made by Bursztyn in 1963. Flexidra, which is in the collection of the National Museum, was also made with rusted metal and measures 130 × 130 × 58 cm. Velezefe, “Escultura moderna,” El Espacio, August 24, 1965. Velezefe was a pseudonum for Luis Fernando Vélez Ferrer (1939 – 1986), who was born in Medellín. Velezefe, “Escultura moderna.” Medellín, “En el XVII Salón.” Medellín, “En el XVII Salón.” Fernando Arbeláez, “Jurado en el Salón de Arte,” Revista Diners, October 1965. Arbeláez, “Jurado en el Salón de Arte.” Marta Traba, “Presentación Catálogo XVII Salón Nacional de Artistas Nacionales,” El Espacio, August 21, 1965, reprinted in Calderón Schrader, 50 años, Salón Nacional de Artistas, 133. It is plausible that this new generation of young artists had an effect on her. One year later she traveled to revolutionary Cuba and wrote El son se quedó en Cuba: Cuatro artículos y una conferencia (Bogotá: Reflexión, 1966). Robert Karl, Forgotten Peace: Reform, Violence, and the Making of Contemporary Colombia (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017). Traba, “La batalla no. 17.” Traba, “La batalla no. 17,” emphasis added. Traba, “La batalla no. 17.” Traba, “El alegato de la defensa dos mentiras.”

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No tes to Ch a p ter 2 70 Marta Traba, “Beatriz González: La cursilería como arte,” in São Paulo Bienal, exhibition catalogue (Bogotá: Colcultura, 1971), n.p. 71 Hernando Giraldo, “Columna libre,” El Espectador, December 1965. Undated press clipping from folder “1965” in Beatriz González’s personal archive, Bogotá. 72 Santiago de Tolú, known as Tolú, is a resort town on the Caribbean coast of Colombia. 73 Mary Luz Vallejo Mejía, La crónica en Colombia: Medio siglo de oro (Bogotá: Presidencia de la República, 1997); Alfonso Bonilla Aragón Bonar, “Birlibirloque” (review of Beatriz González exhibition at the Museo de la Tertulia in Cali), El País, 1965. Untitled press clipping from folder “1965” in Beatriz González’s personal archive, Bogotá. 74 Bonar, “Birlibirloque.” 75 Unless noted otherwise, all information pertaining to Beatriz González’s upbringing comes from a series of interviews I conducted with her between August 8 and August 19, 2005. 76 For a description about González’s aunt Esther Aranda and her important contributions to pedagogy in Colombia, see Aline Helg, La educación en Colombia, 1918 – 1957: Una historia social, económica y política (Bogotá: Fondo Editorial Cerec, 1987). 77 There is a humorous description of the textile shops and their somber colors in Bogotá in Virginia Margaret Paxton, Penthouse in Bogotá (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1943). 78 A Cundo-­Boyacense is a person from the highland departments (states) of Cundinamarca and Boyacá. 79 Traba “La batalla no. 17.” 80 Bonar, “Birlibirloque.” 81 Beatriz González, discussion with the author, Bogotá, August 8, 2005. 82 Jerald Bailey, Carol Measham, and Maria Umana, “Fertility and Contraceptive Practice: Bogotá, 1964 – 1974,” Studies in Family Planning 7, no. 9 (September 1976): 249 – 60. 83 Mary Roldán, “Acción Cultural Popular, Responsible Procreation, and the Roots of Social Activism in Rural Colombia,” Latin American Research Review 49 (2014): 34; Fernando Tamayo, “Successful Family Planning: Profamilia in Colombia,” in Population and Family Planning in Latin America, ed. Phyllis T. Piotrow (Washington, DC: Victor-­Bostrom Fund, 1973), 23 – 25; Gonzálo Echeverry, Contra viento y marea, 25 años de planificación familiar en Colombia (Bogotá: Profamilia and Asociación Colombiana para el Estudio de la Población, 1991); Lariza Pizano, “15 de septiembre de 1965 llega el control natal: Sin miedo a decir,” in Cincuenta días que cambiaron la historia de Colombia, ed. Carl Henrik Langebaek (Bogotá: Planeta, Semana, 2004), 253 – 57. 84 Bailey et al., “Fertility and Contraceptive Practice”; McGreevey, “Population Policy under the National Front,” 419. 85 Sponsored by the Latin American Demographic Center, the Community and Family Study Center of the University of Chicago, the Center for Development Studies of the Universidad de los Andes, findings cited in Bailey et al., “Fertility and Con-

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88

89 90

91 92

traceptive Practice,” in comparison with the 1974 survey conducted by the Colombian Association for Population Studies. The study concluded that women across class lines in Bogotá were increasingly receptive to artificial and natural modes of contraception. See Steven Brzezinski, “Church versus State: Family Planning in Colombia, 1966 – 1972,” Journal of Church and State 18, no. 3 (Autumn 1976): 494. After Humanae Vitae, the church hierarchy demanded that the state eliminate support for the Asociasión Colombiana de Facultades de Medicina (Colombian Association of Medical Schools; ascofame) in 1968 and later in 1969 included in their attack Profamilia and the Pro-­Bienestar de la Familia of the Ministry of Health and all other programs related to family planning. Local priests denounced use of artificial birth control as immoral from their parishes; both of these strategies ended with little success given the increased use of contraceptives in both urban and rural areas by the mid-­1970s as well as continued international funding for family planning programs: see Brzezinski, “Church versus State,” 494 – 96. On Vatican II and Paul Paul VI’s Populorum progressio (1967), see Roldán “Acción Cultural Popular, Responsible Procreation, and the Roots of Social Activism in Rural Colombia,” 30. And on Humanae vitae (1968), see Roldán “Acción Cultural Popular, Responsible Procreation, and the Roots of Social Activism in Rural Colombia,” 34. On family planning financing, see Judith Setzer and Fernando Gómez, Family Planning and Population Programs in Colombia, 1965 to 1997 (Arlington, VA: Population Technical Assistance Project, 1998); Judith Nagelberg, “Promoting Population Policy: The Activities of the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Population Council, 1959 – 1966” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1985). Rural birthrates dropped from 9.6 percent in 1969 to 5.4 percent in 1978 and had more to do with education than access to artificial birth control: Roldán, “Acción Cultural Popular, Responsible Procreation, and the Roots of Social Activism in Rural Colombia,” 39. Also, for the battle between the Catholic Church hierarchy and the National Front government for funding ascofame to conduct medical studies that included abortion and family planning, see Brzezinski, “Church versus State.” Roldán, “Acción Cultural Popular, Responsible Procreation, and the Roots of Social Activism in Rural Colombia,” 29, 32. Bailey et al., “Fertility and Contraceptive Practice,” 254, 259. According to Henry Elkins, declines in fertility in the early 1960s before many women had access to contraceptives was related to the increase in illegal abortions: Henry Elkins, “Cambio de fecundidad en Colombia,” in La fecundidad en Colombia: Encuesta nacional de fecundidad, ed. Rodolfo Heredia B. and Helena Prada Salas (Bogotá: ascofame, 1973), 29 – 42. However, population growth remained very high, jumping from 3 percent to 4 percent between 1964 and 1973, which continued to trouble state and ecclesiastical authorities: Roldán “Acción Cultural Popular, Responsible Procreation, and the Roots of Social Activism in Rural Colombia,” 33. Bonar, “Birlibirloque.” Lleras Camargo, “La Asamblea Demográfica de Cali.”

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No tes to Ch a p ter 2 93 Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); Álvaro Tirado Mejía, Los años sesenta: Una revolución en la cultura (Bogotá: Penguin Random House, 2014), 143. 94 Lleras Camargo, “La Asamblea Demográfica de Cali”; Nagelberg, “Promoting Population Policy.” 95 United Nations Conferences on Population, accessed November 21, 2015, http:// www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/events/conference/index.shtml. 96 Tirado Mejía, Los años sesenta, 144. 97 Lleras Camargo, “La Asamblea Demográfica de Cali.” 98 ascofame had been conducting research on population growth and elaborating on the need for medical intervention since 1959. In 1964, ascofame held its first National Seminar on Population, out of which emerged the Division of Population Studies. The following year it began to provide family-­planning services along with Profamilia: Setzer and Gómez, Family Planning and Population Programs in Colombia, 8. 99 Setzer and Gómez, Family Planning and Population Programs in Colombia, xi. 100 Roldán, “Acción Cultural Popular, Responsible Procreation, and the Roots of Social Activism in Rural Colombia,” 41. 101 McGreevey, “Population Policy under the National Front,” 419; Brzezinski, “Church versus State.” 102 Alexander Wilde, “The Contemporary Church: The Political and the Pastoral,” in Politics of Compromise: Coalition Government in Colombia, ed. R. Albert Berry, Ronald G. Hellman, and Mauricio Solaún (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1980), 211 – 15. 103 Wilde, “The Contemporary Church.” 104 The Pastoral Message of Mexican Bishops in 1972 stated that population explosion was the result of both irresponsible childbearing and socioeconomic injustice, especially since cramped living conditions fostered promiscuity. The message is reprinted in Piotrow, Population and Family Planning, 19. See also Stycos and Arias, Population Dilemma in Latin America, 74. 105 Roldán, “Acción Cultural Popular, Responsible Procreation, and the Roots of Social Activism in Rural Colombia”; Brzezinski, “Church versus State.” 106 Adriana Suárez Mayorga, La ciudad de los elegidos: Crecimiento urbano, jerarquización social y poder político, Bogotá (1910 – 1950) (Bogotá: Guadalupe, 2006). 107 William Flinn, “Family Life of Latin American Urban Migrants: Three Case Studies in Bogotá,” Journal for Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 16, no. 3 (August 1974): 326 – 49; Orlando Fals-­Borda, Peasant Society in the Colombian Andes: A Sociological Study of Saucío (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1955); T. Paul Schultz, “Rural-­Urban Migration in Colombia,” Review of Economics and Statistics 53, no. 2 (May 1971): 157 – 63; Michael Whiteford, “Women, Migration and Social Change: A Colombian Case Study,” International Migration Review 12, no. 2 (Summer 1978): 236 – 47; Shirley J. Harkess, “The Pursuit of an Ideal: Migration, Social Class, and Women’s Roles in Bogotá, Colombia,” in Female and Male in Latin America, ed. Ann Pescatello (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1975), 231 – 54.

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No tes to Ch a p ter 2 1 08 Lleras Camargo, “La Asamblea Demográfica de Cali.” 109 Schultz, “Rural-­Urban Migration in Colombia,” 158. Also, according to Aline Helg’s study of the Annuals of the Ministry of Education, young girls sent to the cities for their education found it difficult to return to the restrictive life in the countryside and thus account partially for the irreversible trends of urban migration: Helg, La educación en Colombia, 158. 110 Whiteford, “Women, Migration and Social Change,” 236. 111 Fals-­Borda, Peasant Society in the Colombian Andes. 112 Whiteford, “Women, Migration and Social Change,” 241. 113 See Whiteford, “Women, Migration and Social Change,” 246; Stevens, “Marianismo,” 91. 114 On the right to manage property, see Law 28 of 1932 (the Law of Marital Power, passed in November). It granted women the right to administer and dispossess property that either belonged to them at the moment of marriage or was acquired during marriage. Formerly all property belonging to a woman passed to her husband by law. Not until 1974 were men and women granted legal equality: see Decreto 2820. Decreto 1487 and Decreto 227 of 1933, passed under the presidency of Enrique Olaya Herrera, gave women the right to a higher education: see Helg, La educación en Colombia, 141; Magdalena Velásquez Toro and Catalina Reyes Cárdenas, “Proceso histórico de las mujeres años 50 y 60,” in Las mujeres en la historia de Colombia, tomo I: Mujeres historia y política, ed. Presidencia de la República, Consejería Presidencial para la Política Social (Bogotá: Grupo Editorial Norma, 1995), 230 – 60; Carl Henrik Langebaek, Cincuenta días que cambiaron la historia de Colombia (Bogotá: Planeta, Semana, 2004). 115 According to Velásquez Toro, these legal rights did not change the everyday experience of women until much later, and the traditional attitudes toward women’s subjugation held: Velásquez Toro and Reyes Cárdenas, “Proceso histórico de las mujeres años 50 y 60.” 116 Rín Rín, no. 5, May 1936. Rín Rín was a children’s magazine published by the Ministry of Education beginning 1933 and named for the children’s poem “Rín Rín Renacuajo” (Rin Rin the Tadpole), by Rafael Pombo: Helg, La educación en Colombia, 170. 117 Written by the conservative senators Augusto Ramírez Moreno, Juan de Dios Arellano, Joaquín Estrada Monsalve, and Antonio Álvarez Restrepo for the Consitutional assembly: Helg, La educación en Colombia, 199 – 206. 118 For a discussion of the controversy Salcedo’s work sparked and its relation to avant-­garde practices in Colombia during the 1960s and 1970s, see Gina McDaniel Tarver, The New Iconoclasts: From Art of a New Reality to Conceptual Art in Colombia, 1961 – 1975 (Bogotá: Universidad de los Andes, 2016), 54 – 57. 119 Likewise, the critical paintings of prostitution by Arango were not fully valued for their artistic and political merit until the 1980s: see Santiago Londoño Vélez and Débora Arango Pérez, Débora Arango: Vida de pintora (Bogotá: Ministerio de Cultura, República de Colombia, 1997). 120 Medellín, “En el XVII Salón.” 121 For a discussion on the gendered reactions to Feliza Bursztyn’s work, see Gina

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No tes to Ch a p ter 2 McDaniel Tarver, “Intrepid Iconoclasts and Ambitious Institutions: Early Colombian Conceptual Art and Its Antecedents” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas, Austin, 2008); McDaniel Tarver, The New Iconoclasts. 122 Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985). Chapter 3. “Cut It Out” 1 Marta Calderón, Beatriz González: Una pintora de provincia (Bogotá: Carlos Valencia, 1988), 187; Alberto Sierra Maya, Julián Posada C., Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Beatriz González et al., Beatriz González: La comedia y la tragedia, 1948 – 2010, exhibition catalogue (Medellín: Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín, 2011), 249. 2 For biographic information on Camilo Torres, see Mario Aguilera Peña, ed., Camilo Torres y la Universidad Nacional de Colombia (Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2002); Joe Broderick, Camilo Torres: A Biography of the Priest-­Guerrillero (New York: Doubleday, 1975); Walter Broderick, Camilo Torres, el cura guerrillero (Bogotá: Círculo de Lectores, 1975); Germán Guzmán Campos, Camilo: Presencia y destino (Bogotá: Servicios Especiales de Prensa, 1967); Germán Guzmán Campos, El Padre Camilo Torres: El hombre y sus obras (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 1968). 3 Luis Fernando Lucena, “Dos exposiciones,” El Tiempo, June 12, 1967, emphasis added. 4 Extrangerizante is a term used to describe the upper classes’s love for all things foreign, primarily European and Anglo-­American, by Alfonso López Michelsen in his book Los elegidos. He portrays the small clique of economically and politically privileged people as disconnected from the masses and having their gaze fixed on foreign influences and personal gain: Alfonso López Michelsen, Los elegidos: El manuscrito de B. K. (Mexico City: Guarania, 1953). 5 Marta Traba, Dos décadas vulnerables en las artes plásticas latinoamericanas, 1950 – 1970 (Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno, 2005). 6 Marta Traba, “El color al ataque,” Encuentro Liberal, June 10, 1967, 29. 7 David Craven, “The Latin American Origins of ‘Alternative Modernism,’ ” Third Text 10, no. 36 (September 1996): 29 – 44. 8 Artists in Dada and Constructivist circles in Germany, Switzerland, and Russia as well as David Alfaro Siqueiros in Mexico and Grete Stern and Antonio Berni in Argentina, among others, further radicalized collage through the politically expedient photomontage. In this way, they not only instrumentalized modern forms of technological reproduction and weaponized them against pictorial conventions but also invested them with subversive social and political content. 9 According to Craig Owens, High Modernist theory suppressed the allegorical character of collage and photomontage since allegory was associated with academic art and malignantly considered “extravagant, an expenditure of surplus value, always in excess.” Owens then asks, “Does not collage, or the manipulation of highly significant fragments also exploit the atomizing, disjunctive principle which lies at the heart of allegory?” He not only recovered the allegorical character of modernism that had been obscured by art criticism through discourses of autonomy and creative intuition but also diagnosed a deliberately allegorical turn in

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postmodern art. In its site-­specificity, impermanence, accumulation, discursivity, and hybridity, postmodern art conspicuously recuperates allegory from this occlusion: Craig Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism,” October, no. 12 (Spring 1980): 67 – 86; Craig Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism, Part 2,” October, no. 13 (Summer 1980): 59 – 80. William Lee Magnumsson, La Reforma Patiño UN 1964 – 1966: Una experiencia de construcción institucional (Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2006), 100. Álvaro Tirado Mejía, Los años sesenta: Una revolución en la cultura (Bogotá: Penguin Random House, 2014), 329. During the 1960s, only 25 percent of the student body at the National University was from Bogotá: Tirado Mejía, Los años sesenta, 330. For a more comprehensive history of this period at the National University, see Aguilera Peña, Camilo Torres y la Universidad Nacional de Colombia. See La Marsellesa, in Catálogo Razonado Beatriz González, Universidad de Los Andes, http://bga.uniandes.edu.co/catalogo/items/show/137. Traba, “El color al ataque.” Colombia was part of the Viceroyalty of El Nuevo Reino de Granada under the Spanish Bourbons. While this pastime was associated with aristocratic women, Patrizia di Bello argues that it served to reinstate exclusivity to album making when commercial photography was becoming accessible to the masses by mixing the medium with visual allegory and puns and other forms of erudite games that would illustrate the album makers’ superior social standing. It was also a form of acceptable flirtation, in which a young lady could expose herself intimately within the boundaries of decorum: see Patrizia di Bello, “Photocollage, Fun, and Flirtations,” in Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage, ed. Elizabeth Siegel (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2009), 49 – 62. Di Bello, “Photocollage, Fun, and Flirtations.” Matthew Biro, The Dada Cyborg: Visions of the New Human in Weimar Berlin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009); Maud Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife: The Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Höch (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993). Berni won the grand prize for printmaking at the 1962 Venice Biennial. Walt Whitman Rostow, Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-­Communist Manifesto, 3d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1960] 1990); Michael Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation Building” in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, [2003] 2007). For the Gráficas Molinari print “Ánima sola,” see http://graficasmolinari.com/wp -­content/uploads/2017/12/GM22075.jpg. Stuart Hall’s understanding of popular culture as inherently dialectical provides a model for understanding its hybrid and contradictory character: Stuart Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing the ‘Popular,’ ” in People’s History and Socialist Theory, ed. Raphael Samuel (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 228.

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No tes to Ch a p ter 3 23 Beatriz González Aranda, “Letter to the Reader,” in XVIII Venice Biennale, exhibition catalogue (Bogotá: Instituto Colombiano de Cultura, 1978), n.p. 24 Carmen María Jaramillo, “La imágenes de los otros: Una aproximación a la obra de Beatriz González en las décadas del sesenta, setenta y la mitad del ochenta,” in Beatriz González, ed. Benjamin Villegas Jiménez, Holland Cotter, Carmen María Jaramillo, María Margarita Malagón, and Oscar Monsalve (Bogotá: Villegas, 2005), 15 – 21. See also Carmen María Jaramillo, María S. Barón, and María M. Sánchez, Fisuras del arte moderno en Colombia (Bogotá: Alcaldía Mayor de Bogotá and Fundación Gilberto Alzáte Avendaño, 2012). 25 Herbert Braun, The Assassination of Gaitán: Public Life and Urban Violence in Colombia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985). 26 For habitus, see Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge Studies in Social Anthropology 16 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). 27 Gaitán used the term “el pueblo” vaguely: the masses in the 1930s and 1940s in Colombia were predominantly rural peasants, but his following was primarily the urban working class. Nonetheless, he conceptualized the pueblo in opposition to the governing elite and envisioned a future Colombian society led by a strong property-­owning middle class: see Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, “Las ideas socialistas en Colombia,” reprinted in Gaitán: Antología de su pensamiento económico y social, ed. Luis Emiro Valencia (Bogotá: Sudamericana, 1968), 49 – 213. 28 “Beatriz González en el Museo de Arte Moderno,” Revista Ilusión, July 1967. 29 Traba, “El color al ataque,” 29. 30 This would be the basis of Traba’s defense in her book Los muebles de Beatriz González (Bogotá: Museo de Arte Moderno, 1977). 31 As discussed later, the modernization and development discourse fostered an onslaught of experts, including art critics acting as jurors who studied, dissected, and prescribed solutions for the backwardness of Latin American subjects and culture: see Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995). 32 Traba, “El color al ataque.” 33 Álvaro Burgos, “Beatriz González: La sátira de lo ingenuo,” El Siglo, June 11, 1967. 34 Burgos, “Beatriz González.” 35 See Robert Karl, Forgotten Peace: Reform, Violence, and the Making of Contemporary Colombia (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017). 36 Gabriel García Márquez, Cien años de soledad (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1967). 37 Burgos, “Beatriz González.” 38 The class spectrum in Latin America is dramatic. Burgos was referencing mass culture of the urban working classes but not that of most destitute sectors of Colombian society, the lumpenproletariat or the precariat. 39 The section title is from “Hoy calma en el país: Los violentos no fueron el ejército,” El Tiempo, June 15, 1967. Traba would soon get into trouble at the National University when she started to defend the Cuban Revolution, Camilo Torres, and students’ radical activities: Victoria Verlichak, Marta Traba: Una terquedad furibunda (Buenos Aires: untref and Fundación Proa, 2001). 40 Traba’s full title was “Directora de Extensión Cultural de la Universidad Nacional de Colombia”: Verlichak, Marta Traba, 173.

No tes to Ch a p ter 3 41 Verlichak, Marta Traba, 176. 42 “El gobierno mantendrá el orden, dice el presidente,” El Siglo, June 16, 1967, 1. Beards came to signify support for the Sierra Maestra revolutionary guerrillas in Cuba. 43 “Hoy calma en el país.” 44 Karl, Forgotten Peace. 45 Camilo Andrade, “El Rector analiza los sucesos de la Universidad,” El Tiempo, June 17, 1967; Luis de Castro, “Desórdenes en la universidad: Numerosos estudiantes y policías lesionados — Ocupada por el ejército Ciudad Blanca,” El Espectador, June 16, 1967. 46 Many left-­leaning journalists found greater freedom to express their dissent in El Siglo during the administration of Lleras Restrepo. There they could be critical of the liberal president, even if their point of view was ultra-­leftist rather than ultra-­ rightist, the paper’s perspective. 47 The Professors and Teachers Unions and the Federation of Educators denounced the aggravation and retrograde use of force and the violations against students and professors who were rightfully protesting in the name of “all the pueblo” against the rise in transportation costs. They claimed that the violence distracted from the government’s economic and social failures and voiced support for movements that defended the right to a sustainable family budget. The Association of University Doctors demanded the withdrawal of soldiers and police from the hospital, San Juan de Dios. They protested the indefinite closure of the university, which would affect all Colombian students. They condemned the “grotesque display of military force” and demanded that the public be alerted that the university had been once more used for political gain by a “reactionary government”: “Los médicos piden retiro de la policia del Hospital: Profesores protestan por Hechos de la Nacional,” El Siglo, June 16, 1967. 48 “Herido de gravedad un estudiante y 577 retenidos: 40 tanques en Ciudad Blanca 1500 soldados la rodearon e invadieron,” El Siglo, June 15, 1967. 49 “El gobierno mantendrá el orden, dice el presidente.” 50 Braun describes how elites characterized the Bogotazo riots as devoid of legitimate politics and a manifestation of the pueblo’s irrational barbarity: Braun, The Assassination of Gaitán. In Colombia, there was universal suffrage and 50 percent illiteracy by 1967. This posed a difficult situation for the governing elite, who were used to maintaining political power within a small group of families. The idea of the pueblo being unruly was very much an ideological justification for the concentration of power in a few hands. For the history of popular awakening during La Violencia, see Mary Roldán, Blood and Fire: La Violencia in Antioquia, Colombia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). See also a compelling sketch of the political situation in 1965 in Norman Bailey, “The Colombian ‘Black Hand’: A Case Study of Neoliberalism in Latin America,” Review of Politics 27, no. 4 (October 1965): 445 – 64; Darío Acevedo Carmona, La mentalidad de las élites sobre La Violencia en Colombia, 1936 – 1949 (Bogotá: Instituto de Estudios Políticos y Relaciones Internacionales y El Áncora, 1995). 51 “El gobierno mantendrá el orden, dice el presidente.” 52 See Marta Traba, “La cultura de la resistencia,” in Literatura y praxis en América Latina, ed. Fernando Alegría (Caracas: Monte Ávila, 1974), 56.

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No tes to Ch a p ter 3 53 Verlichak, Marta Traba, 179. 54 According to Nicolás Gómez Echeverri, Inravision, the national television station, no longer holds any of Traba’s television shows because the 16 mm film on which they were recorded was damaged, discarded, or recorded over. Others say that the shows were transmitted live, with no recording ever made. Traba’s televised trips to poor neighborhoods await release, pending their transfer to the Patrimonio Fílmico Colombiano: Nicolás Gómez Echeverri, En blanco y negro: Marta Traba en la televisión colombiana, 1954 – 1958 (Bogotá: Universidad de Los Andes, 2008), 32. 55 Cited in Verlichak, Marta Traba, 178. 56 Verlichak, Marta Traba, 178. 57 Latham, Modernization as Ideology; Gilman, Mandarins of the Future; Escobar, Encountering Development; Raúl Prebisch, J. Samuel Valenzuela, and Arturo Valenzuela, “Modernization and Dependency: Alternative Perspectives in the Study of Latin American Underdevelopment,” Comparative Politics 10, no. 4 (July 1978): 535 – 57. 58 For a discussion of culture and dependency, see Alfredo Chacón, Cultura y dependencia: Ocho ensayos latinoamericanos (Caracas: Monte Avila, 1975); Jean Franco, Cultura y dependencia (Guadalajara, Mexico: Departamento de Bellas Artes, Gobierno de Jalisco, 1976); Juan José Llach, Dependencia cultural y creación de cultura en América Latina, Enfoques Latinoamericanos (Buenos Aires: Bonum, 1974); Eduardo Romano, Cultura y dependencia en América Latina (Buenos Aires: Centro Educativo de América Latina, 1972); Salvador Valero, Cultura, universidad y dependencia (Caracas: Cabimas, 1972); and Leopoldo Zea, Dependencia y liberación en la cultura latinoamericana (Mexico City: Joaquín Mortíz, 1974). 59 Fidel Castro’s cultural policies were ambiguous, as encapsulated in his 1961 statement, “Within the revolution, everything; outside the revolution, nothing”: Discurso a los intellectuals, accessed May 29, 2018, http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno /discursos/1961/esp/f300661e.html; Luis Camnitzer, New Art of Cuba (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), 108. For interesting discussions of Cuba’s revolutionary cultural policy, see David Craven, “The Cuban Revolution,” in Art and Revolution in Latin America, 1910 – 1990, by David Craven (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 74 – 116. 60 Marta Traba, Las ceremonias del verano (Barcelona: Montesinos, 1981). 61 John William Wright Patman, “Misusing cia Money,”New York Times, September 4, 1964: 28. See also Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The cia and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta, 1999); Maria Eugenia Mudrovic, Mundo nuevo, cultura y guerra fría en la década del 60 (Rosario, Argentina: B. Viterbo, 1997), 28 – 33; Andrea Giunta, Avant-­Garde, Internationalism, and Politics: Argentine Art in the Sixties (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); Patrick Iber, Neither Peace nor Freedom: The Cultural Cold War in Latin America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). 62 At that time, John William Wright Patman was the chair of the Committee on Banking and Currency in the U.S. House of Representatives. He argued that cia covert funding would give communists powerful ammunition and would discredit scientific, cultural, and academic institutions as well as erode confidence in private foundations. Wright Patman, “Misusing cia Money,” 28.

No tes to Ch a p ter 3 63 Mudrovic, Mundo nuevo, cultura y guerra fría en la década del 60; Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?; Patrick Iber, Neither Peace nor Freedom. 64 It is not clear when Traba met Rama. Verlichak thinks they may have met in Cuba during her trip in 1966. However, Traba is more likely to have met him through her brother Germán Rama, whom she frequently visited and who was working for the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean in Bogotá. Angel Rama reviewed Traba’s novel Ceremonias del verano in Marcha, March 6, 1966. Traba wrote him a letter on September 10, 1966 (as director of cultural affairs for the National University), inviting him to participate in the university’s Primera Semana Cultural (First Cultural Week) to join other prominent Latin American intellectuals in a discussion about the Latin American novel. By 1967, when Traba found herself under the threat of extradition from the Lleras Restrepo government, Rama publicly announced that Uruguay would receive Traba and her family. The period between their meeting and the dramatic moment of 1967 is characterized by intense and intimate correspondence between the two: see Verlichak, Marta Traba, 191 – 92; “Creen que será revocada la expulsión de Marta Traba,” La Razón (Buenos Aires), June 26, 1967. 65 In July 1964, the Counterinsurgency Information Analysis Center was founded with funds allocated to the U.S. Army’s Research Office, which set up the Operations Research Center at American University in Washington, DC: Congressional Record (August 1965): 20905; cited in Vladimir Zhukov, “Espionage under the Cover of Sociological Research,” International Affairs (Moscow), no. 5 (May 1969): 88 – 91. As part of the U.S. organization Action International, many American experts traveled to Latin America on the pretext of collecting sociological information, yet they were on a covert mission to gather information about social and political groups and the political “moods” and dispositions of the population. Their task was to “identify trouble spots abroad and to prepare counter-­insurgency plans for quick action, if necessary”: Ernesto Vidal, El “Plan Simpático” en Colombia (Bogotá: Ediciones mrb, 1966). 66 In 1965, Eduardo Amuy, a professor at the University of Chile, exposed the center’s Plan Camelot (coordinated by American University) to conduct sociological espionage in Chile. It called for studying the Chilean population’s engagement in “subversive” activities and “assess[ing] the possibilities of an internal war.” This exposure spread waves of scandal throughout Latin America. Similar programs were implemented in Paraguay, Mexico, Uruguay, Peru (codenamed Coloni), and Argentina (codenamed Job 430): Zhukov, “Espionage under the Cover of Sociological Research,” 90. See also Vidal, El “Plan Simpático” en Colombia; Johan Galtung, “Después del Proyecto Camelot,” Revista Mexicana de Sociología 30, no. 1 (1968): 115 – 41. 67 For instance, people were asked to give their opinions on a wide range of issues, including military service, the current Colombian government, the dictatorship of Rojas Pinilla, and what they thought about guerrilla movements or civil war: Vidal, El “Plan Simpático” en Colombia. 68 Bailey, “The Colombian ‘Black Hand.’ ” 69 Zhukov, “Espionage under the Cover of Sociological Research.” 70 Carlos Caballero Argáez, Patricia Pinzón de Lewin, Eduardo Escallón Largacha,

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and Maria Natalia Marian Suárez, Alberto Lleras Camargo y John F. Kennedy: Amistad y política internacional: Recuento de episodios de la Guerra Fria, la Alianza para el Progreso y el problema de Cuba (Bogotá: Aguilar, Altea, Taurus, Alfaguara, 2008). For an interesting analysis of the effects of revelations in the New York Times and Marcha on Argentinian artistic production, see Giunta, Avant-­Garde, Internationalism, and Politics, 333 – 74. Bailey, “The Colombian ‘Black Hand,’ ” 455. Gente decente is a euphemism for the elite. Bailey, “The Colombian ‘Black Hand,’ ” 448. In Spanish, mano negra references powerful, secret, even illegal forces that underlie historical processes. In Colombia, Marco Tulio Anzola Samper used this term to describe the conspiracy among conservative elites and the church to assassinate the liberal leader General Rafael Uribe Uribe on October 15, 1914: Marco Tulio Anzola Samper, Asesinato del general Uribe Uribe: ¿Quiénes son? (Bogotá: Tipográfica Gómez, 1917). “Mano Negra” references a nineteenth-­century conservative guerrilla group in Antioquia but is also inspired by the Italian mafia: see Bailey, “The Colombian ‘Black Hand.’ ” In addition to forewarning Colombia’s elites about their precarious position, the ceas was to “develop and undertake an extensive anticommunist and anti-­ Castro campaign, and a less extensive campaign in favor of free enterprise. . . . [T]he third was a program of direct anticommunist and anti-­modern Left activities, especially through the infiltration in the labor unions, universities and corporations, through pressure, blacklisting and support of anticommunist elements; and through the withdrawal of advertising in Modern Left organs. Finally, the ceas was to attempt to alter the mentality of capitalists toward a greater realization of their social responsibilities.” The ceas even went as far as to create its own paramilitary guard, which accompanied President Kennedy during his visit to Colombia in 1961: Bailey, “The Colombian ‘Black Hand,’ ” 457. Zalamea had been invited to direct Lleras Camargo’s magazine Semana in 1958, but soon after he found himself at odds with the corporate board and left to create La Nueva Prensa: see César Augusto Ayala Diago, “La Nueva Prensa y su influencia en la política colombiana de los años sesenta,” Boletín Cultural y Bibliográfico 37, no. 55 (2000): 61 – 72. Beatriz González, discussion with the author, Bogotá, August 2005. It also had the irritating habit of publishing the political death toll each week: Verlichak, Marta Traba, 166 – 67. Bailey, “The Colombian ‘Black Hand,’ ” 456. In April 1961, La Nueva Prensa began calling the conglomerate of industrialists “La Mano Negra”: see Bailey, “The Colombian ‘Black Hand’ ”; Ayala Diago, “La Nueva Prensa,” 61 – 72. This was the name Zalamea used for his political alliance with anapo in the 1966 election: Ayala Diago, “La Nueva Prensa.” Ayala Diago, “La Nueva Prensa,” 72. Marta Traba, “Autocrítica y crujir de dientes,” Magazine Dominical, El Espectador, December 1, 1968. Verlichak, Marta Traba, 166 – 67. Traba, Dos décadas vulnerables.

No tes to Ch a p ter 3 85 Traba, “El color al ataque.” 86 See La Madrépora, in Catálogo Razonado Beatriz González, Universidad de los Andes, http://bga.uniandes.edu.co/catalogo/items/show/136. 87 Escobar, Encountering Development, 5. 88 Escobar, Encountering Development, 5. 89 Víctor Manuel Rodríguez, “Cold War Legacies Otherwise: Latin America Art and Art History in Colonial Times” (Ph.D. diss., University of Rochester, 2009), 24 – 77. 90 Rodríguez, “Cold War Legacies Otherwise,” 43. 91 Beatriz González, discussion with the author, Bogotá, August 9, 2005. 92 The candidate for anapo supported by Zalamea was José Jaramillo Giraldo: see Alberto Zalamea, Colombia bloqueada y otros textos (Bogotá: Tercer Mundo, 1987). 93 Traba, “El color al ataque”; Traba, Dos décadas vulnerables. 94 Alberto Zalamea, “Manifesto,” La Nueva Prensa, no. 7, May 30, 1961, 14 – 15. 95 Alberto Zalamea, La Nueva Prensa: 25 años después, 1961 – 1986 (Bogotá: Procultura, 1986); Alberto Zalamea, “Una solución nacional,” La Nueva Prensa, no. 100, June 15, 1963, 50. 96 Ayala Diago, “La Nueva Prensa,” 67. 97 Even though Zalamea’s political discourse was mainly nationalistic, he did believe firmly that an economic alliance among Latin American nations was the only way to challenge and overcome North American imperialism. However, each nation first had to integrate all of its social classes into a national economy and politics: Ayala Diago, “La Nueva Prensa,” 66. 98 Marta Traba, La pintura nueva en Latinoamérica (Bogotá: Librería Central, 1961). 99 Juan Acha, “Teoría y práctica no-­objetualista en América Latina,” in Memorias del primer colloquio sobre arte no-­objetual y arte urbano realizado por Museo de Arte Moderno Medellín en mayo 1981 (Medellín, Colombia: Fondo Editorial Museo de Antioquia, 2010): 75 – 88. 100 Burgos, “Beatriz González,” emphasis added. 101 Burgos, “Beatriz González.” 102 Girardot is a vacation destination and port on the Magdalena River. It connected Bogotá to the Atlantic before air travel. 103 “Cuando el 30 de mayo se inauguró (prácticamente desierta ante los acontecimientos) una muestra de Beatriz González en la cual se exhibían cuadros religiosos como ‘Las Ánimas del Purgatorio’ que hacían más comprensible la dirección irónica y nacionalista que había tornado su pintura, ya el gobierno había ordenado que el ejército se tomara la Universidad.” Serrano refers to Holy Souls and Double Portrait of a Naiad as “The Souls of Purgatory,” because González appropriated the popular trope of the Souls of Purgatory in these two paintings. Even though the government did not order the invasion of the university until June 13, Serrano recalls the events of the time — most likely, the student protests — as having adversely affected attendance at the exhibition’s opening: Eduardo Serrano and Museo de Arte Moderno, El Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá: Recuento de un esfuerzo conjunto (Bogotá: Museo de Arte Moderno, 1979), 92. 104 In October, mambo opened its last exhibition of the year, featuring Amelia Peláez and her Cubist paintings inspired by Cuban colonial interiors. The trio of González, colonial religious painting, and Amelia Peláez seems to have been a de-

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liberately caustic curatorial statement on the role of modernity in Colombia. For a discussion of Amelia Peláez, domesticity, and “the Colonial Renaissance,” see Ingrid Williams Elliott, “Domestic Arts: Amelia Peláez and the Cuban Vanguard, 1935 – 1945” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2010). Cited in Jaime Ardila, Beatriz González: Apuntes para la historia extensa (Bogotá: Tercer Mundo, 1974), 27. Burgos, “Beatriz González.” See Gilbert G. González, “Educational Reform and the University of Colombia,” Comparative Education 17, no. 2 (June 1981): 229 – 46; Daniel Levy, “Student Politics in Contemporary Latin America,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 14, no. 2 (June 1981): 353 – 76; Robert E. Scott, “Student Political Activism in Latin America,” Daedalus 97, no. 1 (Winter 1968): 70 – 98; Richard S. Pelczar, “University Reform in Latin America: The Case of Colombia,” Comparative Education Review 16, no. 2 (June 1972): 230 – 50. Jaime Hernández, interview by the author, March 2010. Hernandez was a medical student at the National University in 1954 – 1959 and a soldier during the overthrow of Rojas Pinilla. Hernández, interview. Local, or “nationalistic,” in Serrano’s later formulation: Serrano and Museo de Arte Moderno, El Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá, 93.

Chapter 4. Notes for an Exclusive History of Colombia 1 The salon was on view from November 10 to December 10, 1967. Abella thus responded to the announcement of the jury’s prizes before it opened. The Luis Ángel Arango Library belongs to the Banco de la República. The Eighteenth National Salon, held in 1966, was the first to be held in the new library’s exhibition hall. The Banco de la República, a semipublic-­semiprivate institution, inherited Colombia’s national mint and treasury; nationalizing it was one of the main political objectives named by Alberto Zalamea, the National Democratic Movement, and the National Popular Alliance. They claimed that keeping the national bank in private hands was one of the ways the Colombian elite could work closely with foreign institutions at the expense of most Colombian citizens: see César Augusto Ayala Diago, “La Nueva Prensa y su influencia en la política colombiana de los años sesenta,” Boletín Cultural y Bibliográfico 37, no. 55 (2000): 70 – 72. 2 For instance, see González’s response to Abella in Amparo Hurtado de Paz, “La ganadora responde a Abella: En polémica sobre XIX Salón — ‘La misma rosca,’ ” El Espectador, November 10, 1967. 3 “Plagiary, adj. and n.,” Oxford English Dictionary Online, Oxford University Press, June 2017, accessed October 23, 2017, http://www.oed.com.ezproxy.bu.edu/view /Entry/144942. 4 Darío Acevedo Carmona, La mentalidad de las élites sobre la Violencia en Colombia 1936 – 1949 (Bogotá: Instituto de Estudios Políticos y Relaciones Internacionales, 1995). 5 Alejandro Gómez Pernia, “The Liberator’s Sword: The Most Precious Relic of the Bolivarian Revolution,” in Simón Bolívar: Travels and Transformations of a Cultural

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Icon, ed. Ana María Reyes and Maureen G. Shanahan (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2016), 199 – 214. Eduardo Caballero Calderón, “Agosto, 1819: Con medio cuerpo hundido en el pantano, veía llegar la muerte,” El Tiempo, Sunday supp., August 6, 1967. This supplement, published to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Boyacá, on August 7, 1819, which marked the military triumph over royalist troops in Colombia, was dedicated entirely to literature, history, and art related to the independence wars. Academia Colombiana de Historia, La historia extensa de Colombia, 24 vols. (Bogotá: Lerner, 1967). Beatriz González, discussion with the author, Bogotá, August 19, 2005. Beatriz González, discussion with the author, Bogotá, August 19, 2005. All of the encyclopedia’s contributors except one, were male members of the academy. The only woman, Kathleen Romoli, was a North American author who specialized in Colombian history during the period of Spanish conquest. Romoli had published a highly sympathetic account of Colombian society for a North American audience that made the case for Colombia’s strong democratic values in an era of fascist and communist threats: Kathleen Romoli, Colombia, Gateway to South America (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1941). Her ideas thus helped to export a sophisticated account of Colombian culture. Nonetheless, The Extensive History was primarily written by cultivated elite Colombian men about cultivated elite Colombian men. The Extensive History of Colombia was reprinted and reconceived several times between 1964 and 1986. In the frontispiece of each volume, the academy printed its coat of arms with the dictum “veritas ante omnia” (Truth before All). The coat of arms includes a Native American, a Spanish conquistador, and an allegorical female Republic wearing a Phrygian hat adorned with ostrich feathers. The academy therefore made explicit claims of inclusiveness, truth, and “extensiveness.” As Beatriz González would say, it was meant to be “la última palabra” (the last word). Interestingly, the figure with the fairest complexion on the coat of arms is the allegorical woman, not the Spanish conquistador, suggesting that the Republic of Colombia is criollo more than mixed-­race or mestizo. The volume Arts in Colombia covered only a few subjects: Colonial Painting and Architecture, Nineteenth-­Century Painting and Architecture, Twentieth-­Century Architecture, and Musical Culture. Luis Alberto Acuña’s section on twentieth-­ century sculpture is devoted entirely to two artists: Romulo Rozo, an indigenist sculptor trained in Mexico and associated with the Bachués in the 1930s and 1940s; and Edgar Negret, standing as the sole artist of the modernist current. The 1986 edition was the first to include regional folklore in a new volume titled Colombian Culture. Jorge Orlando Melo, “Bolívar en Colombia: Las transformaciones de su imagén,” in Entre el olvido y el recuerdo: Íconos, lugares de memoria y cánones de la historia y la literatura en Colombia, ed. Carlos Rincón, Sarah de Mojica, and Liliana Gómez (Bogotá: Universidad Javeriana, 2010), 103 – 38. The government did not recognize officially that Colombia is a multicultural and multiethnic nation until the 1991 Constitution. “I painted with enamel paint on metal and was very relieved when I stopped using

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enamels because they dry very fast, and I am a slow painter”: Beatriz González, discussion with the author, Bogotá, August 19, 2005. Beatriz González, discussion with the author, Bogotá, August 19, 2005. The reference is to Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book circulated by guerrillas. Pinturas Sapolín is a commercial brand of paint from Envigado, Colombia. Carlos Meyer, a friend of the González Aranda family who worked in advertising, gifted them to the young artist: Beatriz González, discussion with the author, Bogotá, August 19, 2005. “Lo del Salón 67,” unidentified press clipping dated 1972 in Beatriz González’s personal archive, Bogotá. “Putti-­sanguine” refers to the cherubs depicted with sanguine technique, a blood-­ red drawing chalk used by many artists such as Peter Paul Rubens, Francois Boucher, and Antoine Watteau. Aurita de Cali, “Hepatitis y apoplegía,” El País, November 19, 1967. Aurita de Cali, “Hepatitis y apoplegía.” On Laureano Gómez, see Cristina Lleras, Arte, política y crítica: Politización de la mirada estética Colombia, 1940 – 1952 (Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2005). For a discussion of Laureano Gómez’s trip to Germany in the 1930s and the formulation of his fascist aesthetics, see Halim Badawi, “Laureano Gómez: El gran inquisidor del arte,” Revista Arcadia, June 28, 2016, accessed July 26, 2016, http:// www.revistaarcadia.com/impresa/arte/articulo/el-­gran-­inquisidor-­del-­arte -­laureano-­gomez-­alemania-­fascismo/49453. On the Argentine case, see Andrea Giunta, Avant-­Garde, Internationalism, and Politics: Argentine Art in the Sixties (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). Allusions to degeneration abounded in Colombia during the period of La Violencia, where both conservatives and liberals used language and images to transform a discourse of violence to one of self-­defense: see Acevedo Carmona, La mentalidad de las élites sobre La Violencia en Colombia. “Pintura de tiradera,” El Siglo, November 11, 1967. “Pintura de tiradera.” Doris Sommer, The Work of Art in the World: Civic Agency and Public Humanities (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). W. J. Thomas Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); W. J. Thomas Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Arturo Abella, “Aquí Bogotá: ¿Quién plagió a quién?” El Siglo, November 9, 1967. Jeanette Favrot Peterson, Visualizing Guadalupe: From Black Madonna to Queen of the Americas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014); Emily Engel, “Simón Bolívar’s Itinerant Portraits: Visual Conquest and the Production of an Icon,” in Reyes and Shanahan, Simón Bolivar, 27 – 47. An anonymous author imputes González’s distancing her work from the “original” Figueroa as negligent or torpescent: “Pintura de Tiradera.” Marta Calderón, Beatriz González: Una pintora de provincia (Bogotá: Carlos Valencia, 1988). Natalia Majluf, “The Creation of the Image of the Indian in 19th-­Century Peru:

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The Paintings of Francisco Laso (1823 – 1869)” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas, Austin, 1995). 32 Engel, “Itinerant Portraits.” 33 See ¡Vive la France! in Catálogo Razonado Beatriz González, accessed May 30, 2018, http://bga.uniandes.edu.co/catalogo/items/show/669. 34 The award jury extended this by further dividing the second and third prizes between two recipients each. First prize was awarded to Edgar Negret for his sculpture Cabo Kennedy. Second prize was divided between Juan Manuel Lugo for his diptych Visita and González for Apuntes para la historia extensa II. Third prize was also shared between Bursztyn and Alcántara Herrán. Thus, the Nineteenth National Salon was both novel and business as usual. There were efforts to adapt the structure of the competition to a changing panorama, especially the emergence of new media as contenders; however, the main award was to a previously consecrated sculptor. Rivero, while admiring Negret’s Cabo Kennedy, warned against the dangers of giving Negret first prize three years in a row, saying, “Awards of this type institutionalize a cultural hegemony, an almost heroic push by certain static elites, who, of course, would never betray their own demystification.” Rivero stumbles on an interesting tension not between the classes, as he suggests, but between the new and the old generations: Mario Rivero, “El XIX Salón de Artistas Colombianos: La otra cara de las medallas,” El Tiempo, November 23, 1967. See also Germán Rubiano Caballero, “El XIX Salón de Artistas Nacionales,” Magazín Dominical, El Espectador, November 12, 1967. 35 La Oficina de Extensión Cultural y Bellas Artes (Office of Cultural and Fine Arts Extension) within the Ministry of Education was the precursor to Colcultura and, later, the Ministry of Culture. Rivero, “El XIX Salón de Artistas Colombianos.” 36 “A refined tonal integration confirms for us that Beatriz Daza is an artist with excellent taste. . . . Teresa Cuéllar’s sepia fruits are very refined”: Germán Rubiano Caballero, “Los jóvenes en el Salón Nacional,” Magazín Dominical, El Espectador, November 19, 1967. 37 Beatriz González, discussion with the author, Bogotá, August 19, 2005. 38 Beatriz González, discussion with the author, Bogotá, August 19, 2005. 39 Rubiano Caballero, “El XIX Salón de Artistas Nacionales.” 40 Salcedo’s assemblage references the practices of popular culture; the individual’s relation to broader cultural elements, such as the Virgin of Bojacá; the subject’s first healing experience, pilgrimage; and the role of visual culture outside legitimate institutions: Rubiano Caballero, “Los jóvenes en el Salón Nacional.” 41 Rubiano Caballero, “El XIX Salón de Artistas Nacionales.” 42 See Herbert Braun, The Assassination of Gaitán: Public Life and Urban Violence in Colombia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985); Acevedo Carmona, La mentalidad de las élites sobre La Violencia en Colombia. 43 Rubiano Caballero, “El XIX Salón de Artistas Nacionales.” 44 “Desforado,” Real Academia Española online, October 13, 2017, http://dle.rae.es/. 45 Pilar Tafur, “¡La Oferta del Siglo! Expone Beatriz González,” El Tiempo, October 10, 1974. 46 For a discussion of Simón Bolívar and the origins of nineteenth-­century political

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No tes to Ch a p ter 4 parties in Colombia, see David Bushnell, The Liberator Simón Bolívar: Man and Image (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970); David Bushnell, The Making of Modern Colombia: A Nation in Spite of Itself (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); David Bushnell and Lester D. Langley, eds., Simón Bolívar: Essays on the Life and Legacy of the Liberator (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008); Melo, “Bolívar en Colombia”; and Frank Safford and Marco Palacios, Colombia: Fragmented Land, Divided Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 47 Melo, “Bolívar en Colombia,” 118 – 19. 48 Lleras, Arte, política y crítica. 49 Melo, “Bolívar en Colombia,” 118 – 19; Gonzálo Canal Ramírez, El estado cristiano y bolivariano del 13 de junio (Bogotá: Antares, 1955). 50 Silvia Galvis and Alberto Donadío, El jefe supremo: Rojas Pinilla en La Violencia y en el poder (Bogotá: Planeta, 1988). 51 Indalecio Liévano Aguirre, Bolívar (Madrid: Ediciones Cultura Hispánica del Instituto de Cooperación Iberoamericana, 1983); Antonio García Nossa, “Bolívar, general revolucionario,” Sábado, February 16, 1952; Ignacio Torres Giraldo, Los inconformes, vol. 2 (Bogotá: Latina, 1978); Francisco Pividal, Bolívar: Pensamiento precursor del antiimperialismo (Havana: Casa de las Américas, 1977); Andrei Schelchkov, “Los estudios latinoamericanos en Rusia (y en la urss),” Revista European de Estudios Latinoamericanos y del Caribe 72 (2002): 205 – 20; Melo, “Bolívar en Colombia,” 118 – 19. 52 Schelchkov, “Los estudios latinoamericanos en Rusia,” 208. 53 Melo, “Bolívar en Colombia,” 122. 54 Melo, “Bolívar en Colombia,” 122. 55 For more information on the Bogotazo, see Arturo Abella Rodríguez, Así fue el 9 de abril (Bogotá: Aquí Bogotá, 1973); Arturo Alape, El Bogotazo: memorias del olvido (Bogotá: Pluma, 1983); Ricardo Arias Trujillo, 9 de Abril de 1948 (Bogotá: Panamericana, 1998); Braun, The Assassination of Gaitán; Fabio Puyo Vasco, ed., Historia de Bogotá, Tomo III: Siglo XX (Bogotá: Villegas, 1988). 56 Fred Soper, quoted in Braun, The Assassination of Gaitán, 171. 57 Braun, The Assassination of Gaitán, 173. 58 Braun, The Assassination of Gaitán, 173. 59 Braun, The Assassination of Gaitán, 158, fn9. 60 Rioters spared some high-­end stores because they hung pictures of Gaitán or his newspaper La Jornada in their vitrines: Braun, The Assassination of Gaitán, 164. 61 Braun, The Assassination of Gaitán, 179. 62 Cited in Carlos Caballero Argáez, Mónica Pachón Buitriago, Eduardo Posada Carbó, eds., Cincuenta años de regreso a la democracia: Nuevas miradas a la relevancia histórica del Frente Nacional (Bogotá: Universidad de Los Andes, 2012). 63 Leopoldo Villar Borda, Alberto Lleras, el último republicano (Bogotá: Planeta, 1997), 17 – 18. 64 Braun, The Assassination of Gaitán. 65 Gaitán envisioned a public realm led by the middle sector of society, as outlined in his “Ideas Socialistas en Colombia.” While he still believed in the value and centrality of private property, he wanted to extend the advantages of capitalism to a

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66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89

much broader number of participants. His “socialist” ideas do not resemble the Marxist notion of abolishing private property. Instead, he was interested in the democratization of the capitalist property-­owning system to include the pueblo: Braun, The Assassination of Gaitán, 36, 51. See also Luis Carlos Pérez, El pensamiento filosófico de Gaitán (Bogotá: Editorial de los Andes, 1954); Luis Emiro Valencia, ed., Gaitán: Antología de supensamiento económico y social (Bogotá: Sudamericana, 1968); Alberto Zalamea, Gaitán: Autobiografía de un pueblo (Bogotá: Zalamea Fajardo, 1999). Arturo Abella was the chief editor of El Siglo during the Bogotazo riots of April 9, 1948: Arturo Alape, El Bogotazo, memorias del olvido (Bogotá: Pluma, 1983). Juan Lozano y Lozano, “Jorge Eliécer Gaitán,” in Ensayos Críticos (1936), reprinted as Ensayos críticos: Mis contemporáneous (Bogotá: Biblioteca Colombiana de Cultura, 1978), 87. El Tiempo, 1936, cited in Braun, The Assassination of Gaitán, 85. Semana, August 16, 1947: 6. Cited in Braun, The Assassination of Gaitán, 121. “Gaitán: Demagogía, Desconfianza y Prudencia,” Semana, November 4, 1946, cover. Braun, The Assassination of Gaitán, 85. Mary Roldán, Blood and Fire: La Violencia in Antioquia, Colombia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. Gaitán would say during his presidential campaign, “Yo no soy un hombre, soy un pueblo” (I am not a man, I am a people): Braun, The Assassination of Gaitán, 102. Braun, The Assassination of Gaitán, 32. Although President Marco Fidel Suarez came from a humble background and was of mestizo status, his political career was exercised entirely from within the framework of the traditional political parties without the populist tenor of Gaitán. La Razón, September 24, 1945, 6, cited in Braun, The Assassination of Gaitán, 98. “La tribú Gaitanista” [The Gaitanist tribe], El Siglo, January 17, 1948. El Siglo, August 4, 1947, cited in Braun, The Assassination of Gaitán, 124. José Francisco Socarrás, Laureano Gómez: Psicoanálisis de un resentido (Bogotá: Librería Siglo Veinte, 1942); Horacio Gómez Aristizábal, El tormentoso Laureano Gómez: Análisis de una época huracanada (Bogotá: Kimpres, 2001). Rivero, “El XIX Salón de Artistas Colombianos.” Marta Traba, “Una clave artística para comprender a Colombia: Beatriz González y la investigación de lo ridículo,” Forum World Features, September 7, 1974. See Nadia Moreno Moya, Arte y juventud: El Salón Esso de Artistas Jóvenes en Colombia (Bogotá: Instituto Distrital de las Artes and La Silueta, 2013), and her discussion of the youth as subjects of control as it played out through the Esso salons. Rubiano Caballero, “Los jóvenes en el Salón Nacional.” Jonier Marín, “Marta Traba expulsada del país,” El Tiempo, June 23, 1967. Marta Traba, “El XIX Salón de Artistas Colombianos.” El Tiempo, November 23, 1967. Traba, “El XIX Salón de Artistas Colombianos.” Traba, “El XIX Salón de Artistas Colombianos.” Traba, “El XIX Salón de Artistas Colombianos.” Traba, “El XIX Salón de Artistas Colombianos.”

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No tes to Ch a p ter 4 90 Marta Traba, Dos décadas vulnerables en las artes plásticas latinoamericanas, 1950 – 1970 (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 1973). Chapter 5. Modernist Obstruction at the Second Medellín Biennial 1 Quoted in Jaime Ardila, Beatriz González: Apuntes para la historia extensa (Bogotá: Tercer Mundo, 1974), 17. 2 Cited in Marta Traba, Los muebles de Beatriz González (Bogotá: Museo de Arte Moderno, 1977). Carmen María Jaramillo interprets González’s mobiliario or pinturas del marco (frame paintings) as metaphors for discursive frameworks. According to Jaramillo, the mobiliario elaborate on the provincial reception of a Western canon; she argues that they achieve aesthetic autonomy from hegemonic centers by criticizing originality and reformulating artistic practice as a discipline of thought rather than technique: Carmen María Jaramillo, “Las imágenes de los otros: Una aproximación a la obra de Beatriz González en las décadas del sesenta, setenta y la mitad del ochenta,” in Beatriz González, ed. Benjamin Villegas Jiménez, Holland Cotter, Carmen María Jaramillo, María Margarita Malagón, and Oscar Monsalve (Bogotá: Villegas, 2005), 20. 3 The exceptions are two prints, Happy Birthday and Boceto de Camafeo, with which she participated in the Exhibición de Arte Contemporáneo de Colombia at the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico in 1971. In her correspondence with the curator Julián Rodríguez, González apologized for not sending her furniture pieces as they were traveling to Buenos Aires and São Paulo: Ardila, Beatriz González, 41. 4 The Ministry of Education created Colcultura in 1968, anticipating the Ministry of Culture. 5 Traba wrote only three artist monographs: Camas, Feliza Bursztyn (Cali: Museo de Arte Moderno La Tertulia, 1974), Los grabados de Roda (Bogotá: Museo de Arte Moderno La Tertulia, 1977), and Los muebles de Beatriz González. This honor was not shared even by her two champions, José Luis Cuevas and Alejandro Obregón. 6 Beatriz González, discussion with the author, Bogotá, August 19, 2005. 7 R. P. Juan Bonilla, Historia del Señor de Monserrate (Bogotá: Apostolado Bíblico Católico, Impresión Centro Don Bosco, 2009). 8 Two other sculptures of Our Fallen Lord made by Lugo are found in the Church of Veracruz and the Church of Las Nieves, both in Bogotá: Bonilla, Historia del Señor de Monserrate, 99. 9 In 1743, 1785, and 1827, and again in 1917: Bonilla, Historia del Señor de Monserrate, 106. 10 Blake Stimson, Citizen Warhol (London: Reaktion, 2014). For a discussion of Warhol’s relation to the iconostasis of Byzantine or Eastern Rite Catholicism, see “Jesus Christ,” in Stimson, Citizen Warhol, 46 – 68. 11 Traba was a regular contributor to the journal. Karl Buchholz’s journal Eco: Revista de la Cultura de Occidente translated and published Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction in two volumes in March (XVI/5) and April (XVI/6), 1968. 12 I am indebted to Ana Maria Cano Posada for this word-­color association. 13 Quoted in Traba, Los muebles de Beatriz González, 65.

No tes to Ch a p ter 5 14 Traba, Los muebles de Beatriz González, 69. 15 Catherine Wilkinson Zerner, “The Visionary Spatial World of the Ibero-­American Retablo Altarpiece,” paper presented at the session “Architecture, Space, Power in the Early Modern Ibero-­American World,” 99th Annual Conference of the College Art Association of America, New York, February 9, 2011. 16 Zerner, “The Visionary Spatial World of the Ibero-­American Retablo Altarpiece.” 17 Beatriz González, discussion with the author, Bogotá, August 19, 2005. 18 Beatriz González, discussion with the author, Bogotá, January 10, 2010. 19 Beatriz González, discussion with the author, Bogotá, August 19, 2005. 20 Marta Traba, “Beatriz González: La cursilería como arte,” El Tiempo, September 5, 1971. Traba differentiates the classes that consume the metal beds (popular) and the wood vanities (middle class): Traba, Los muebles de Beatriz González, 36 – 39, 65 – 68. 21 José Olinto Rueda, “Historia de la población de Colombia: 1880 – 2000,” in Nueva Historia de Colombia, vol. 5, ed. Jaramillo Uribe Alvaro Tirado Mejía, Jorge Orlando Melo, and Jesús Antonio Bejarano (Bogotá: Planeta, 1998), 357 – 96. 22 “ ‘Pirate’ or ‘clandestine’ settlements are subdivisions which are illegal with regard to public service and housing codes. Invasion settlements are illegal occupations of private or public lands. . . . The value ordination just discussed put education as the most important value at both national and personal-­community levels. . . . [Thirty] percent of those [high] schools were located in the Bogotá area, and a very high percentage of the rest are located in state capitals”: William Flinn, “Family Life of Latin American Urban Migrants: Three Case Studies in Bogotá,” Journal for Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 16, no. 3 (August 1974): 327. 23 Flinn, “Family Life of Latin American Urban Migrants,” 345. 24 Flinn, “Family Life of Latin American Urban Migrants,” 345. 25 Ann Farnsworth-­A lvear, Dulcinea in the Factory: Myths, Morals, Men, and Women in Colombia’s Industrial Experiment, 1905 – 1960 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 18 – 22; Eduardo Sáenz Rovner, La ofensiva empresarial: Industriales, políticos y violencia en los años 40 en Colombia (Bogotá: Tercer Mundo, 1992), 85 – 86. 26 Asociación Nacional de Industriales, “La industria como agente civilizador,” Semana, September 6, 1947. 27 Flinn, “Family Life of Latin American Urban Migrants,” 326 – 49. Also, Juan José Echavarría found that, on average, urban laborers in the 1940s earned 65 percent more than rural laborers: Juan José Echavarría, “External Shocks and Industrialization: Colombia, 1920 – 1950” (Ph.D. diss., Oxford University, 1989). 28 Shirley J. Harkess, “The Pursuit of the Idea: Migration, Social Class and Women’s Roles in Bogotá, Colombia,” in Female and Male in Latin America: Essays, ed. Ann Pescatello (Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press, 1975), 232. 29 For further elaboration of the social history of Los Mártires change from an elite center in the nineteenth century to a working-­class, bohemian, and indigent area in the twentieth century, see Ana María Reyes, “Art at the Limits of Modernization: The Artistic Production of Beatriz González during the National Front in Colombia” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2011), 356 – 434. 30 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 321 – 23.

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No tes to Ch a p ter 5 31 Bourdieu, Distinction, 321. 32 Quoted in Traba, Los muebles de Beatriz González, 65. 33 “Beatriz González: La sublimación de lo cursi,” El Tiempo, April 1972; Marta Traba, “Beatriz González: La cursilería como arte,” in São Paulo Bienal, exhibition catalogue (Bogotá: Colcultura, 1971), n.p.; Gloria Valencia Diago, “Dice Beatriz González: ‘Mi modo ne es cursi ni me burlo de nada,’ ” El Tiempo, February 25, 1973; Beatriz de Barcha, “La sublimación de lo cursi,” Nosotras, February 25, 1973, Robayo, “Lo cursí y lo erótico,” La República, February 26, 1973; “Otra ‘patada’ en busca del arte de los cursi y lo feo,” El Espacio, October 7, 1974. 34 “In the present conditions, with the important Bienal de Córdoba extinguished four years ago and the São Paulo [Biennial] sabotaged for the past two years for political reasons, the Medellín Biennial has a good prospect for becoming, among events of its class, one of the most important on the continent”: Beatriz de Vieco, “Balance de la II Bienal de Coltejer,” Cromos, June 22, 1970, 34. 35 A few examples include Amparo Pérez Camargo, “Medellín: Epicentro de las Artes,” República Revista Dominical, May 3, 1970; “La Bienal de Arte de ‘Coltejer’ repertute internacionalmente,” El Siglo, April 30, 1970; “Repercusión internacional adquiere el certámen artístico de ‘Coltejer,’ ” El Crisol de Cali, May 1, 1970. 36 Darío Ruiz Gómez, “Fallo jurado dado a conocer en la apertura esta noche,” El Espacio, April 30, 1970. 37 Mary Roldán, Blood and Fire: La Violencia in Antioquia, Colombia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). 38 Leonel Estrada, personal archive, Medellín, Colombia. 39 Estrada, personal archive. 40 Leonel Estrada, “Introduction,” in Coltejer, II Bienal de Arte Coltejer, Medellín, Colombia, mayo, 1970 (Medellín: Coltejer, 1970), n.p. 41 Rodrigo Uribe Echavarría, “Inaugural Speech,” in Coltejer, II Bienal de Arte Coltejer, n.p. This outreach seemed to function better to entice foreign art experts than local audience members, who largely expressed their bewilderment in handwritten commentaries left at the exhibition. Many in the local art milieu expressed their grievances against “fashion trends in art” that were obscuring “true pictorial values”: Coltejer, II Bienal de Arte Coltejer. 42 “Las Bieniales son instituciones obsoletes como la oea, por ejemplo,” cited in Gilma Jiménez de Niño, “Beatriz González o la subversión en el arte,” El País, August 19, 1972. 43 The cultural program of the Organization of American States under the direction of Gómez Sicre organized approximately 370 Latin American art exhibitions between 1947 and 1968: Andrea Giunta, Avant-­Garde, Internationalism, and Politics: Argentine Art in the Sixties (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 239n6. 44 Walt Whitman Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-­Communist Manifesto, 3d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1960] 1990); Alberto Lleras Camargo, “La Asamblea Demográfica de Cali: Alberto Lleras Camargo propone control de la natalidad,” El Tiempo, August 12, 1965, 1, 22. 45 Miguel Ayuso, “Los premios de la Bienal: Hablan dos jurados,” El Tiempo, May 5, 1970.

No tes to Ch a p ter 5 46 Leonel Estrada, “Introduction,” in Coltejer, II Bienal de Arte Coltejer, n.p. 47 Uribe Echavarría, “Inaugural Speech,” in Coltejer, II Bienal de Arte Coltejer, 207. 48 Ana María Reyes, “Building Abstraction in Brazil: The São Paulo Bienal of 1951.” Chicago Art Journal 8, no. 1 (1998): 31 – 42. 49 Gina McDaniel Tarver, The New Iconoclasts: From Art of a New Reality to Conceptual Art in Colombia, 1961 – 1975 (Bogotá: Universidad de los Andes, 2016). 50 The Japanese group ctg consisted of Koji Fujino, Takesha Hasejawa, Junich Kakizaki, Masao Komura, Fujio Niwa, Makoto Ohtake, Haruki Tsuchiya, and Junio Yamanaka. They presented twenty-­five computer-­generated works. 51 Cited in Uribe Echavarría, “Inaugural Speech.” 52 Reyes, “Building Abstraction in Brazil.” 53 Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, [2003] 2007); Michael Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation Building” in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). 54 Argan, quoted in Ardila, Beatriz González, 53. 55 Argan, quoted in Ardila, Beatriz González, 53. 56 Coltejer, II Bienal de Arte Coltejer, 158. 57 Traba supported both Bernardo Salcedo and José Carlos Ramos. This demonstrates that while Colcultura prized artists who conformed to the biennial’s dictum, Traba still exerted great influence. 58 McDaniel Tarver elaborates on Salcedo’s works in relation to landscape and labor in Colombian art history and its critique of agrarian policies, as well as the Glusberg and Salcedo collaboration: McDaniel Tarver, The New Iconoclasts. 59 Álvaro Barrios, Orígenes del arte conceptual en Colombia (Bogotá: Alcaldía Mayor de Bogotá, 2000). 60 Henry, “Algo muy trabajoso,” El Colombiano, May 1, 1970, 5. 61 Gabriel Villa, “Desde hoy abierta la II Bienal de Arte Coltejer: Muy solemne la inauguración del certamen ayer,” El Colombiano, May 1, 1970, 1. 62 Coltejer, II Bienal de Arte Coltejer. 63 Quoted in Traba, Los muebles de Beatriz González, 65. 64 Along with Gerchman, Spanish artists, including Josep Monjalés and Juan Genovés, denounced Franco’s repression. 65 Nelly Richard, “Margins and Institutions: Art in Chile since 1973,” Art and Text 21, Special Issue (1986). 66 McDaniel Tarver makes this general point about most avant-­garde practices in Colombia during the 1960s and 1970s: McDaniel Tarver, The New Iconoclasts. 67 Traba, “Beatriz González: La cursilería como arte.” 68 John Roberts, The Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art after the Readymade (London: Verso, 2007), 4. 69 Leo Steinberg, “Other Criteria,” in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth Century Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 55 – 91. 70 One year earlier, Carlos Rojas won the National Salon prize for his floor paintings titled Ingeniería de la vision (1969): see Camilo Calderón Schrader, 50 años, Salón Nacional de Artistas (Bogotá: Instituto Colombiano de Cultura, 1990).

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No tes to Ch a p ter 5 71 Ana María Reyes, “Incorporated Vision and the Critique of Desarrollismo: Marta Minujín, Beatriz González, and Lygia Clark,” Revista Letral, no. 13 (2014): 100 – 112, http://revistaseug.ugr.es/index.php/letral/issue/view/246. 72 Beatriz González, discussion with the author, Bogotá, August 19, 2005. 73 For the source prints of the Ars Moriendi, see Gráficas Molinari, accessed May 31, 2018, http://graficasmolinari.com/wp-­content/uploads/2017/12/GM22082.jpg, http://graficasmolinari.com/wp-­content/uploads/2017/12/GM22083.jpg. 74 The sins include luxuria (lust), avaricia (avarice), acedia (neglect), invidia (envy), superbia (pride), and vanagloria (vanity). 75 Carlos M. N. Eire, From Madrid to Purgatory: The Art and Craft of Dying in Sixteenth-­ Century Spain (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Mary Catherine O’Connor, The Art of Dying Well: The Development of the Ars Moriendi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942). 76 Master E. S., “Temptation of Faith” (L.175), Ars Moriendi, c. 1450, engraving, 91 × 69 mm. Asmolean Museum, Oxford University. Also consulted: Ars Moriendi [Germany, 1475?], pdf, Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress, accessed May 31, 2018, https://www.loc.gov/item/49039592. 77 Robayo, “Lo cursí y lo erótico.” The illustration accompanied a review of Luis Caballero and Beatriz González’s exhibition at the mambo. See Museo de Arte Moderno, Luis Caballero, Beatriz González: Museo de Arte Moderno, Bogotá, Colombia, febrero 1973, exhibition catalogue (Bogotá: Museo de Arte Moderno, 1973). 78 Maria Isabel Estrada, “Breve diccionario de arte contemporáneo,” El Colombiano, May 10, 1970. 79 For a discussion of the Miroir des bonnes femmes conduct manuals for women and their relation to González’s vanities, see Ana María Reyes, “Better Homes and Subjects: Critical Domesticity in Claes Oldenburg’s and Beatriz González’s Assemblages,” in A Tale of Two Worlds: Experimental Latin American Art in Dialogue with the mmk Collection, 1944 – 1989, exhibition catalogue, ed. Victoria Noorthoorn, Peter Gorschlüter, Klaus Görner, and Javier Villa et al. (Frankfurt: Museum für Moderne Kunst and Museu de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, 2018), 278 – 94. 80 Jose Carlos Ramos, “Cronología del arte popular,” accessed November 5, 2017, http://www.artistajosecarlosramos.com/cronologia_del_arte_popular/cronologia _arte_popular_historia.html. 81 Darío Ruiz Gómez, “La II Bienal de Arte, la figuración derrotada,” El Espectador, May 1970. 82 Ruiz Gómez probably had the work of Santiago Cárdenas in mind. Ruiz Gómez wrote, “We accept as our own and valuable tradition that of a popular art with proper urban character, and which belongs to that vast world of cultural values that have remained at the margin of the schematic conception of the West — that other Latin American culture which was to be necessarily found beyond the picturesque detail or the folkloric reference”: Ruiz Gómez, “La II Bienal de Arte, la figuración derrotada.” 83 Ruiz Gómez, “La II Bienal de Arte, la figuración derrotada,” emphasis added. 84 Renán Silva, República liberal, intelectuales y cultura popular (Medellín: La Carreta,

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88 89 90

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2012); Néstor García Canclini, Arte popular y sociedad en América Latina: Teorías estéticas y ensayos de transformación (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 1977). Although “deterioration” is close to “degeneration,” Traba avoided the organic metaphor of the latter term that had been instrumentalized by fascists in Europe, Laureanistas in Colombia, and Peronistas in her native Argentina. It also references the dematerialization of the art object, which she considered a dangerous manifestation of an alienated and fragmented consumer culture. Traba’s elaborates most fully the mythical mentality in Latin America in Dos décadas vulnerables en las artes plásticas latinoamericanas, 1950 – 1970 (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 1973). Although Traba no longer lived in Colombia, she was nonetheless instrumental in making the selection and writing the catalogue. After she married Ángel Rama in 1969, the couple relocated to his hometown of Montevideo. Traba also served as a visiting professor at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras: Emma Araujo and Museo de Arte Moderno, Marta Traba (Bogotá: Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá, Planeta, 1984), 370. Marta Traba, Catalogue São Paulo Bienal 1971 (Bogotá: Colcultura, 1971), reprinted as Marta Traba, “Beatriz González: La cursilería como arte,” El Tiempo, September 5, 1971. Claudia Calirman, Brazilian Art under Dictatorship: Antonio Manuel, Artur Barrio, and Cildo Meireles (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). Juan Acha, Arte y sociedad Latinoamérica: El producto artístico y su estructura (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1981); Imelda Ramírez González, Debates críticos en los umbrales del arte contemporáneo: El arte de los años sesenta y la fundación del Museo de Arte de Medellín (Medellín: Fondo Editorial Universidad Eafit, 2012). Traba, “Beatriz González: La cursilería como arte.” Beatriz González, discussion with the author, Bogotá, January 10, 2010. Beatriz González, discussion with the author, Bogotá, August 19, 2005. Rosa María Alfaro Moreno, Néstor García Canclini, and Rafael Roncagliolo, Cultura transnacional y culturas populares (Lima, Peru: Instituto para América Latina, 1988), 37. Traba, Los muebles de Beatriz González.

Epilogue 1 Marta Traba, Los muebles de Beatriz González (Bogotá: Museo de Arte Moderno, 1977), 40. 2 Nicolás Buenaventura, “El arte de Beatriz González,” El Crisol, May 7, 1972. 3 Eduardo Serrano, “The Nature of Underdevelopment,” Re-­Vista 1, no. 1 (April – June 1978): 26 – 27. 4 Mari Carmen Ramírez, “Tactics for Thriving on Adversity: Conceptualism in Latin America, 1960 – 1980,” in Global Conceptualism, Points of Origin, 1950s – 1980s, ed. Luis Camnitzer, Jane Farver, Rachel Weiss, László Beke, and Mari Carmen Ramírez (New York: Queens Museum of Art, 1999), 53 – 69; Hélio Oiticica, “General

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5 6 7 8 9

10 11

12 13 14 15 16 17

18

Scheme of New Subjectivity,” Hélio Oiticica, “Postion and Program,” and Cildo Meireles, “Insertions in Ideological Circuits,” in Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1999), 232 – 35. Buenaventura, “El arte de Beatriz González.” Ferreira Gullar, Vanguardia e subdesenvolvimento, 2d ed. (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, [1969] 1978). Juan Acha, “Vanguardia y subdesarrollo,” Mundo Nuevo 21 (March 1968): 14 – 16. Acha was the driving force behind the Bienal Latinoamericana, São Paulo, 1978, and a key figure in the development of the Havana Biennials of the 1980s. “Su obra es tan subversiva como puede serlo el descubrimiento de una vacuna que acaba con la ignorancia precedente y con las supercherías seudocientíficas alrededor el problema: tanto como un teorema, que abre un nuevo campo matemático a las operaciones precedentes”: Traba, Los muebles de Beatriz González, 46. “En la incapacidad reflexiva general que domina el subdesarrollo, la reflexión es un acto subversivo”: Traba, Los muebles de Beatriz González, 47. For discussion of these two works, see Ana María Reyes, “Better Homes and Subjects: Critical Domesticity in Claes Oldenburg’s and Beatriz González’s Assemblages,” in A Tale of Two Worlds: Experimental Latin American Art in Dialogue with the mmk Collection, 1944 – 1989, exhibition catalogue, ed. Victoria Noorthoorn, Peter Gorschlüter, Klaus Görner, and Javier Villa et al. (Frankfurt: Museum für Moderne Kunst and Museu de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, 2018), 278 – 94. Diego García Moreno, ¿Por qué llora si ya reí?, dvd, Lamaraca Producciones, Bogotá, 2011. Jayni Edelstein, Iván Marulanda, and Alejandro Garro, for the International Commission of Jurists, “Human Rights in the World: Colombia: The Impact of the New Constitution,” The Review, no. 47 (1991): 1 – 10. García Moreno, ¿Por qué llora si ya reí? Quoted in Traba, Los muebles de Beatriz González, 65. Alberto Sierra Maya, Julián Posada C., Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Beatriz González et al., Beatriz González: La comedia y la tragedia, 1948 – 2010, exhibition catalogue (Medellín: Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín, 2011), 120 – 21. Ana María Reyes “Antigonismos: Metaphoric Burial as Political Interventions in Contemporary Colombian Art,” in A Companion to Modern and Contemporary Latin American and Latino Art, ed. Alejandro Anreus, Robin Greeley, and Megan Sullivan (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2019), 452–63. The campaign was conducted over the five years (2011 – 2016) that negotiations between the Colombian government and the farc-­ep took place in Havana and most intensely during the months after the referendum passed. The campaign against integration of the farc-­ep into political participation continues to this day. For a discussion of the “ideology of gender” that the Uribistas warned would become part of school curriculums, see Andrei Gómez-­Suárez, El triunfo del no: La paradoja emocional detrás del plebiscito (Bogotá: Icono, 2016), 61 – 67. Religious and socially conservative groups denounced the threat to the traditional

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family and social structures posed by “an ideology of gender” that defines gender and sexual identity as social constructs instead of biologically determined. “Ideología de género: El caballo de batalla del No al plebiscito,” Semana, September 9, 2016, accessed January 21, 2018, http://www.semana.com/nacion/articulo /ideologia-­de-­genero-­el-­caballo-­de-­batalla-­del-­no-­al-­plebiscito/493093. Gómez-­Suárez, El triunfo del no, 39, n43, 125. Gómez-­Suárez, El triunfo del no, 66. “Ideología de género.” Gómez-­Suárez, El triunfo del no, 36.

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Bibliogr a ph y 287 Calderón Schrader, Camilo, ed. 50 años, Salón Nacional de Artistas. Bogotá: Instituto Colombiano de Cultura, 1990. Calderón, Marta. Beatriz González: Una pintora de provincia. Bogotá: Carlos Valencia, 1988. Calirman, Claudia. Brazilian Art under Dictatorship: Antonio Manuel, Artur Barrio, and Cildo Meireles. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. Camnitzer, Luis. New Art of Cuba. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003. Camnitzer, Luis, Jane Farver, Rachel Weiss, László Beke, and Mari Carmen Ramírez, eds. Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s – 1980s. New York: Queens Museum of Art, 1999. Canal Ramírez, Gonzálo. El estado cristiano y bolivariano del 13 de junio. Bogotá: Antares, 1955. Cardoso, Fernando Henrique, Enzo Faletto, and Marjory Mattingly Urquidi. Dependency and Development in Latin America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. Castro, Luis de. “Desórdenes en la universidad: Numerosos estudiantes y policías lesionados. Ocupada por el ejército Ciudad Blanca.” El Espectador, June 16, 1967. Chacón, Alfredo. Cultura y dependencia: Ocho ensayos latinoamericanos. Caracas: Monte Avila, 1975. Chastel, André. Nicolas de Staël: L’artiste et l’oeuvre. Paris: Maeght, 1972. Cockcroft, Eva. “Abstract Expressionsim: A Weapon of the Cold War.” Art Forum, no. 12 (June 1974): 39 – 42. Cockcroft, James D., Andre Gunder Frank, and Dale L. Johnson. Dependence and Underdevelopment: Latin America’s Political Economy. Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1972. Coleman, Bradley Lynn. Colombia and the United States: The Making of an Inter-­American Alliance, 1939 – 1960. New Studies in U.S. Foreign Relations. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2008. Coltejer. II Bienal de Arte Coltejer, Medellín, Colombia, mayo, 1970. Medellín: Coltejer, 1970. Cooper, Douglas. Nicolas de Staël. Masters and Movements. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1961. Corchuelo. “Hallados dos cadáveres en la represa del Sisga.” El Tiempo, July 22, 1965, 25. Coronil, Fernando. The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1997. Craven, David. Art and Revolution in Latin America, 1910 – 1990. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002. Craven, David. “The Latin American Origins of ‘Alternative Modernism.’ ” Third Text 10, no. 36 (September 1996): 29 – 4 4. Crow, Thomas. Modern Art in the Common Culture. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996. Díaz Callejas, Apolinar. Diez días de poder popular: El 9 de Abril 1948 en Barrancabermeja. Bogotá: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung Colombia and El Labrador, 1988. Didi-­Huberman, Georges. “The Art of Not Describing: Vermeer — The Detail and the Patch.” History of the Human Sciences 2, no. 2 (1989): 135 – 69. Dunn, Christopher. Brutality Garden: Tropicália and the Emergence of a Brazilian Counterculture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.

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index

Italicized page numbers indicate illustrations. Abella, Arturo, 29, 153 – 54, 161, 162, 164 – 68, 170, 176 – 77 El abominable mundo de la fístula series, 40, 242n12 abstract expressionism, 44 – 45, 50 Acción Cultural Popular (acpo), 6, 7 Acha, Juan, 58, 147, 214, 221, 247n85 Action International, 265n65 Acuña, Luis Alberto, 41, 269n10 Adorno, Theodor, 24 – 25, 43, 178, 236n42 aesthetics, 43 – 45; of decay, 47; of deterioration, 178; of scrapbook collages, 116 – 17, 121, 125 – 26 Aguilera Cerni, Vicente, 196, 197, 200, 201 Airó, Clemente, 242n13 Alcántara Herrán, Pedro: Traba on, 88; De esta tumba, de estas benditas cenizas no nacerán violetas, 90 – 92, 92, 109 – 10; Insecto, 79, 80 Alcántara Quijano, Pedro, 1 – 3 Alianza Nacional Popular (anapo), 147, 268n1 Alliance for Progress, 6 – 7, 64, 79, 136, 139; Kennedy and, 171; modernizing rhetoric of, 93, 195, 201 allodoxia, 192 Alloway, Lawrence, 197, 200 El amor sub-­sagrado y el amor sub-­profano, 141 – 4 4, 142 Amuy, Eduardo, 265n66 Anderson, Benedict, 10 Ánimas benditas, 115 – 16, 116, 129, 148, 183 Anzola Samper, Marco Tulio, 266n73 Apuntes para la historia extensa, 29, 30, 152, 153 – 68, 163, 171 – 79 Aranda, Ester, 54, 99, 256n76 Aranda de González, Clementina, 99 – 100, 246n78

Arango, Débora, 84, 93, 255n55, 259n119 Arbeláez, Fernando, 85, 93 Arden Quin, Carmelo, 197 Arenas Reyes, Jaime, 67, 249n109 Argan, Giulo Carlo, 197, 200, 201 Arias Vera, Luis, 197 Arielismo, 47, 234n28 Ars Moriendi, 209 “art of resistance,” 93 arte no objetual, 58, 147, 214, 247n85 Asociación Arte Nuevo, 197 Asociación Colombiana de Facultades de Medicina (ascofame), 257nn87 – 88, 258n98 Asociación de Profesores de Enseñanza Secudaria, 136 Asociación Nacional de Industrialistas (andi), 6, 139, 190 – 92, 191 Asociación Universitaria de Santander (audesa), 66 – 67 Auras anónimas, 226, 227 avant-­garde art, 42, 216 – 17, 241n11; “artifice” of, 207; “terrorism” of, 11, 115, 214, 221; in “underdeveloped” societies, 218 – 22 Ayuso, Miguel, 196 Baby Johnson in situ, 1 – 3, 2, 18 Bacon, Francis, 52 Bailey, Norman, 263n50 Banco Cafetero, 16 Baraibar de Cote Lamus, Alicia, 85, 88, 254n39 Barrancabermeja, 66 Barrios, Álvaro, 131; Comedia, 79, 80 Baxandall, Michael, 110 Bazzano Nelson, Florencia, 15 Beadot, Alain, 194 Beatles (music group), 175 Benedit, Luis Fernando, 197

304

Index Benjamin, Walter, 13, 25, 187 Berni, Antonio, 260n8; La gran ilusión o la gran tentación, 126, 127; Juanito Laguna, 79 birth control, 101 – 8, 119 – 20, 257n87 – 88 Bogotazo riots (April 9, 1948), 20, 30, 135, 169, 169 – 71, 170, 226, 263n50 Bolívar, Simón, 1, 2, 153 – 58; Figueroa’s portrait of, 154, 155, 157, 161, 177; legacy of, 29 – 30, 166 – 68. See also Apuntes para la historia extensa Bonilla Aragón, Alfonso [pen name: Bonar], 97, 100 – 102 Botero, Fernando, 48 – 50, 52, 84; Abella on, 161; Calderón Schrader on, 85; Engel on, 63; González on, 52; Medellín on, 87 Bourdieu, Pierre: on allodoxia, 192; on habitus, 26 – 27; on “pure gaze,” 46, 48, 244n51 Bowles, Alain, 58 Boyacá, Battle of (1819), 269n6 Braque, Georges, 54, 117 Braun, Herbert, 131, 169, 171, 172, 263n50 Brecht, Bertolt, 25 Bretton Woods Conference (1944), 241n3 Briceño, Manuel, 82 Brizzi, Ary: Gran tensión no. 1, 198, 199 Brown, Jonathan, 247n87 Bucaramanga, 65 – 67, 158, 208 – 9 Buchholz, Karl, 236n46, 274n11 Buenaventura, Nicolás, 218 – 19, 220 Bürger, W. [Théophile Thoré], 62, 248n88 Burgos, Álvaro, 133 – 35, 145, 148 Bursztyn, Feliza, 107, 110, 111, 131; Flexidra, 255n56; kinetic sculptures of, 159; Mirando al norte, 90, 91, 255n56; plagiarism charges against, 177; Traba on, 88 Un busto a la encajera del imperio, 39 Caballero, Luis, 52 Calarcá, 145 – 46, 146, 149 Calderón Schrader, Camilo, 40, 85 El Callejón (art gallery), 56 Camafeo (Cameo), 1 – 3, 2, 18, 190 camp sensibility, 24 – 25, 175 Canary, 50 Cárdenas, Santiago, 177, 278n82 Carpentier, Alejo, 179 Carranza, María Mercedes, 225 Casa de las Américas (Cuba), 137, 138, 176

Castaño Castillo, Álvaro, 13, 48, 231n1 Castro, Fidel, 137, 228, 264n59, 266n74. See also Cuban Revolution Catholic Church, 6, 75, 186, 188; on birth control, 101 – 5, 257n87 – 88; Liberal Republic and, 22; schools of, 99; Second Vatican Council of, 9; Vatican Concordat of 1887 and, 10 Central Intelligence Agency (cia), 8, 113 – 1 4, 138 – 39 Centro de Estudio y Acción Sociales (ceas), 139 – 40, 266n74 Clark, Lygia, 197 Coca-­Colos (hipsters), 175 Colcultura (Instituto de Cultura Colombiana), 182, 201 – 2, 238n65 Cold War, 6–8, 113 – 1 4, 217; aesthetics of, 4, 44 – 45; Cuban Missile Crisis, 64; gender issues during, 109; “internationalizing” culture of, 8 collages, 50, 118, 122, 125–26; definition of, 117; faux, 29, 112, 113, 118, 187; modernity and, 115 – 18 Colombian Communist Party, 168 Colombian constitutions, 10, 222 – 23 Colombian National Research Center, 139 Coltejer textile company, 62, 194. See also International Coltejer Biennial columbaria (mausoleum), 226, 227 Columbia University (New York), 48, 74 Comuneros Revolt, 66 Congress for Cultural Freedom, 139 La Constituyente, 16, 222, 224 – 25 Consuegra, David: La encajera de Vermeer de Beatriz González, 35, 36, 52 Correa, Carlos, 40, 84, 93 Cortés, Julio César, 67 Cote Lamus, Eduardo, 254n39 Counterinsurgency Information Analysis Center, 139, 265n65 Los cretinos de Pam Pam, 50 criollos, 6, 158, 172 Cruz Diez, Carlos, 197 Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), 64 Cuban Revolution (1959), 3, 7, 167, 228; Castro and, 137, 228, 264n59, 266n74; Guevara and, 26, 113 – 1 4, 120, 175; population growth and, 74

Index 305 Cubism, 117, 158, 267n104 Cuéllar, Teresa, 164 Cuevas, José Luis, 179 cultural imperialism, 137, 145, 153, 201, 213 cultural resistance theory, 9 – 12, 145, 153 – 54, 178 lo cursi, 18 – 27, 110 – 11, 219 – 20; Bonilla Aragón on, 97; camp versus, 24 – 25; González on, 96, 97; kitsch versus, 105; Robayo on, 211, 212; Rubiano Caballero on, 166, 168; Sisga Suicides and, 74, 75, 94 – 102, 105; Underdevelopment 70 and, 144 – 45. See also kitsch cursilería, 20, 24, 30, 94 – 102, 222; Lucena on, 114 – 15; Traba on, 68, 215 Dadaism, 117, 126, 207, 260n8 Darío, Rubén, 117 da Vinci, Leonardo, 50, 183, 188, 189, 216 Daza, Beatriz, 107, 131, 164, 166 de Amaral, Olga, 156 Decoración de interiores, 222, 223 de Kooning, Willem, 50 de la Calle, Humberto, 225 Delgado García, Ramiro, 74 dependency theories, 64, 137 – 38, 145, 213, 248n97 de Saint Phalle, Niki, 79 lo desmedido (unbridled creativity), 97 – 99, 132, 166, 168, 183, 220 de Staël, Nicolas: Figure by the Sea, 58, 59, 247n82 de Szyzslo, Fernando, 179 Dias, Antonio, 215 Diaz, Luis, 197 di Bello, Patrizia, 261n16 Dillon, C. Douglas, 26 “dis-­cursis” (politics of taste), 26 Disney Corporation, 42 Doble retrato de Náyade, 127, 128, 129, 141, 183 Drexler, Rosalyn, 79 Duchamp, Marcel, 207

Eiger, Casimiro, 13, 15, 40 Eisenhower, Dwight, 15 Ejército de Liberación Nacional (eln), 64, 93, 120 Elkins, Henry, 257n90 Empresa Colombiana de Petróleo, 45 Encajera, 32, 34 – 36 Encajera almanaque Pielroja, 37 – 39, 67 – 69, 68, 70, 95 Encajera animal, 39 Encajera ave, 41, 56, 57 Encajera dinámica, 37, 39, 41 – 42 Encajera en la noche de la rendición de Breda, 70, 70 – 71, 76 Encajera en la playa, 67 Encajera foto inversée, 56, 60 Encajera mona, 39, 40 Encajera Monte Onda, 37, 38 Encajera negativa, 36 – 37, 37, 56 Encajera Nicolas de Staël, 58, 59 Encajera roja detalle, 37, 38 Encajeras series, 18, 23, 28, 32, 33 – 45, 56; Engel on, 35, 40 – 42, 46, 55, 62 – 63; political implications of, 67 – 71; poster for, 35, 36, 52; success of, 60 – 65, 164 – 65; Traba on, 35, 40 – 43, 46 – 47, 55, 68 – 69, 141; Valencia Diago on, 35, 39 – 40 Engel, Walter Franz, 15, 63 – 64, 117, 242n13; on The Canary, 50; on Lacemaker series, 35, 40 – 42, 46, 55, 62 – 63; on Surrender of Breda series, 52, 55 Escobar, Arturo, 144 Esso Corporation, 8, 13, 14, 15, 234n30, 237n59 Esta bienal es un lujo que un país subdesarrollado no se debe dar, 204, 206 Estirpe, 121, 125–26, 135, 144 Estrada, Leonel, 45, 194 – 96, 211; Veneno: Murato de potasio, 79, 80 Estrada, María Isabel, 211 Exit Stage Rear (Mutis por el foro), 1 – 3, 2, 18, 190 extrangerizante elitism, 115, 148, 260n4

economic development, 8, 64, 138 – 41, 241n3; dependency theories of, 64, 137 – 38, 145, 248n97; Lleras Camargo on, 103; Rostow on, 12, 78 Ecopetrol Corporation, 66, 249n103

Fals Borda, Orlando, 24, 84, 134 lo falso (deceptive viewing), 189, 189, 206 – 12, 216 Farnsworth-­A lvear, Ann, 238n65 Federación de Educadores, 136

306

Index Federación Nacional de Cafeteros (fnc), 6 Figueroa, Pedro José: Bolívar portrait by, 154, 155, 157, 161, 177 folklorism, 9, 10, 13 Ford Foundation, 103, 104, 257n87 Foto estudio series, 120 – 21, 122, 123 Fragmento de la rendición de Breda, 52, 53 Franco, Francisco, 107 Frankfurt School, 24 – 25 Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (farc), 7, 64, 93, 226 – 28, 233n17 furniture assemblages. See mobiliario Gaitán, Jorge Eliécer, 22, 26, 63, 131, 147, 226; assassination of, 83, 169, 170, 252n24; caricatures of, 172 – 73, 173, 174; democracy of, 168; National Salon and, 81 – 83; supporters of, 154, 172 – 73, 262n27 García, Saúl, 63 García Márquez, Gabriel, 97, 115, 134, 179, 237n56 garrote vil, 86, 254n45 Gaudí, Antonio, 117 Gaviria, César, 225 gaze, “pure,” 46, 48, 244n51 gender issues, 63 – 64, 69 – 71, 102 – 3, 106, 228, 280n18; in Bursztyn’s work, 90, 110; during Cold War, 109; domesticity as, 250n118; exclusion of women artists as, 156; of honor killings, 76; of machismo-­ marianismo, 78, 106, 109, 127, 129; in Mejía’s work, 89 – 90; property rights as, 259n114; reproductive rights and, 101 – 8, 119 – 20, 257nn87 – 88; of Sisga Suicides, 94; in Vermeer, 76; voting rights and, 106 – 7 Gerchman, Rubens, 206, 215 Gilman, Nils, 45 Gironella, Alberto, 52 Glusberg, Jorge, 196 – 97, 202 Gómez, Laureano, 136, 154, 167, 173 – 74 Gómez Echeverri, Nicolás, 264n54 Gómez Hurtado, Álvaro, 224 Gómez Jaramillo, Ignacio, 41 Gómez Laureano, 63 Gómez Sicre, José, 15 – 16, 42, 44; Lleras Camargo and, 45; Traba and, 42 – 43 Gómez Suárez, Andrei, 228

González, Francisco Evangelista: Santander portrait by, 24, 29, 145, 151, 154, 155. González Rangel, Valentín, 99 Good Neighbor Policy, 42 Goya, Francisco de, 52, 63, 86, 224 Gráficas Molinari, 18, 132; Días felices, 141 – 43, 143; Nuestro Señor Caído de Monserrate, 185, 186; Sueños de ondinas, 127, 128; Virgen del Carmen, 129, 130, 148 Gramsci, Antonio, 240n88 Granada, Carlos, 95 – 96, 212 Greenberg, Clement, 24 – 25, 43, 44, 240n82 Gris, Juan, 117 Los Grupos, 219 Guevara, Ernesto “Che,” 26, 113 – 1 4, 120, 175. See also Cuban Revolution Guilbaut, Serge, 44 Guilford, J. P., 194 Gullar, Ferreira, 220 Guzmán Campos, Germán, 84 habitus, 26 – 27 Hall, Stuart, 240n88, 261n22 Helg, Aline, 259n109 Hernández, Jaime, 268n108 La historia extensa de Colombia, 156, 160 Höch, Hannah, 126 Holocaust, 44 Hotel Edén, 121, 124 Humboldt, Alexander von, 226, 228 Impressionism, 199 indigenism, 8, 22 – 23, 41, 47 Inravision (TV station), 264n54 Instituto Colombo-­Italiano, 196, 200 Instituto de Cultura Colombiana (Colcultura), 182, 201 – 2, 238n65 Intercol (International Petroleum Company), 14 – 16, 47, 238n62 International Coltejer Biennial (Medellín), 8, 14, 30, 62, 181, 194 – 208, 198, 199, 202 – 4, 211 – 1 4, 219 International Monetary Fund (imf), 241n3 Jaramillo, Carmen María, 131, 274n2 Jaramillo, Luciano, 87 El jardín de las Hespérides, 112, 143 Johns, Jasper, 79

Index 307 Kagan, Jerome, 194 Kahlo, Frida, 108 – 9; Unos cuantos piquetitos, 76 – 78, 77 Kaiser Industries, 195 Kant, Immanuel, 43 Karl, Robert, 23 – 24, 234n25 Kaufman, Howard, 139 Kennedy, Jacqueline, 63 Kennedy, John F., 6, 44, 139, 171 kitsch, 24 – 25, 132; cursi versus, 105; Greenberg on, 240n82; Traba on, 68. See also lo cursi Kruger, Barbara, 126 Kubitschek, Juscelino, 7 Lacemakers series. See Encajeras series Laserna Pinzón, Mario, 48 Lassie, 115, 121, 149 – 51, 150 Lavretsky, Iosif Remuladivich, 168 Le Parc, Julio, 197 Lefebvre, Henri, 25, 178 Leirner, Nelson, 215 Leonardo da Vinci, 50, 183, 188, 189, 216 letrados (governing elites), 21 – 24, 83, 111, 134, 182, 220 Lleras Camargo, Alberto, 6 – 7, 15, 28, 42; Kennedy and, 139; on modernism, 44 – 45, 195; as Los Nuevos member, 242n13, 243n32, 254n39; at Pan-­American Assembly on Population, 74; on population growth, 78, 90, 102 – 5, 119 – 20, 220; statesmanship of, 63, 171; as Uniandes founder, 47 – 48 Lleras Restrepo, Carlos, 135 – 37 Loboguerrero, Camila, 50 López Michelsen, Alfonso, 67, 260n4 López Pumarejo, Alfonso, 7, 107 Low Maus, Rodolfo, 66, 249n107 Lozano y Lozano, Juan, 172 Lublin, Lea, 197 Lucena, Clemencia, 114 Lucena, Luis Fernando, 114 – 15 Lugo, Juan Manuel, 176, 271n34 Lugo y Albarracín, Pedro de, 185, 186 machismo, 78, 106, 109, 127, 129. See also gender issues La Madrepora, 143

Maiolino, Anna María, 215 Malevich, Kazimir, 199 Malthus, Thomas, 103 Manet, Édouard, 163 Manifest Destiny, 47 La Mano Negra, 139 – 40 Marcuse, Herbert, 25, 178 Marianism, 78, 127, 129. See also gender issues Márquez, Judith, 42, 107, 156 La Marsellesa, 121, 127 Martí, José, 167 Martínez, Gloria, 50, 52, 63 – 64 Martínez Bonza, Antonio María, 76, 78, 251n3 Martínez Delgado, Santiago: Interludio, 48, 49 Marulanda, Manuel, 234n25 Matisse, Henri, 54, 100 McDaniel Tarver, Gina, 235n32, 259n118, 259n121, 277n58, 277n66 Medellín, Carlos, 86 – 88, 92 – 94, 109 Medellín Biennial. See International Coltejer Biennial Medina Morón, Víctor, 67 Meireles, Cildo, 219 Mejía, Norman, 255n52; La horrible mujer castigadora, 88 – 90, 89, 93, 109 Melo, Jorge Orlando, 156 Mesquita, Ivo, 215 Mikey, Fanny, 107, 156 Milibank Memorial Fund, 104 Millet, Jean-­François, 202, 246n78 Minujín, Marta, 79 Miranda, Carmen, 42 Mitchell, W. J. T., 56 M-­19 guerrillas, 30, 154, 222, 224 mobiliario (furniture assemblages), 81, 180, 181 – 94, 184, 206 – 17, 210, 212; enamel paint of, 156 – 58, 269n14; Rodríguez on, 144 Mockus, Antanas, 226 modernism, 8–10, 13; academic, 48; collage and, 115 – 18; Greenberg on, 43, 44; international, 42 – 45, 84; Lleras Camargo on, 44 – 45, 195; Owens on, 260n9; theories of, 43 – 4 4; Traba on, 42 – 43, 45; Vermeer and, 35

308

Index modernization, 62 – 67, 78, 119 – 20, 141 – 4 4, 220 – 22; Cold War and, 26 – 28, 64 – 65; lo cursi and, 19, 23 – 24, 75, 110 – 11; discourses of, 3 – 4, 71, 87 – 90, 113, 148, 213; Obregón on, 16; Patiño on, 149 – 50; political violence and, 4 – 6, 67, 109, 135 – 36, 218; population growth and, 103 – 8, 134, 220; rhetoric of, 33 – 34, 44 – 45, 93 – 94, 138; Rostow on, 1; theories of, 6 – 13, 64, 182, 195, 200 – 201, 217 – 18; youth culture and, 47 Mohanty, Chandra, 75 Mondrian, Piet, 54, 199 Monserrate Basilica, 185 Moreno Otero, Diego, 48 Movimiento Democrático Nacional (mdn), 147, 268n1 Movimiento Revolucionario Liberal (mrl), 67 La muerte del justo, 209 – 11, 210 La muerte del pecador, 209 – 11, 210 multiculturalism, 10 – 11, 31, 183, 195, 224, 226, 229 Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá (mambo), 4, 7 – 8, 11, 14 – 16, 113 – 15, 130 – 35, 183. See also Encajera series Mutis por el foro, 1 – 3, 2, 18, 190 Nacionalismo Popular Revolucionario, 140 National Academy of History, 156, 160 National Cathedral (Bogotá), 21 National Front (1958 – 74), 3, 4–8, 15; birth control programs of, 102, 104, 120, 257n88; democracy of, 166, 168, 175; modernizing rhetoric of, 13, 33, 93, 195, 201, 222; National Salon during, 81, 84; paramilitary forces against, 64; political limitations of, 9 – 11, 171; Presidential Collection of, 16 National Salon of Colombian Artists, 11 – 13, 81 – 94, 164, 221 – 22; First, 83, 84; Second, 84; Sixteenth, 83 – 84; Seventeenth, 28, 81, 84 – 93, 85, 89 – 92, 109 – 10; Eighteenth, 268n1; Nineteenth, 153, 174, 176, 179, 271n34 Naturaleza casi muerta, 24, 30, 180, 181 – 90, 192 – 94, 205 – 8, 211, 215 – 17 Naturalismo muerto, 202 – 5, 204, 207, 217 Navarro Wolff, Antonio, 224 Náyade y nenúfares, 129, 131 – 32, 141

Negret, Edgar, 45, 90, 269n10, 271n34 Nel Gómez, Pedro, 40 – 41 Nevelson, Louise, 50 New Objectivity, 219 Nieto Caballero, Luis Eduardo [pen name: Calibán], 169, 172 Notes for an Extensive History of Colombia. See Apuntes para la historia extensa Nouveau Réalisme, 79, 117 Nuestro Señor Caído de Monserrate, 18, 24, 30, 183 – 85, 186, 189, 193 – 94 Nueva Figuración, 79 Los Nuevos (artists’ circle), 41, 84, 87, 175 – 76, 243n32, 254n39 Obregón, Alejandro, 16, 18, 28, 33, 41, 87, 179 Obregón, Alejandro, works of: Cóndor, 16 – 18, 17, 224 – 25; Estudiante muerto, 84; Genocidio, 95; Ícaro y las avispas, 95; Mujer mirando un eclipse, 94 – 95, 95; Violencia, 84, 85, 95 Ochoa, Heliodoro, 67 Oiticica, Hélio, 4, 115, 215, 219 Olaya Herrera, Enrique, 81, 259n114 Olmedo, Dolores, 252n14 op art, 3, 8, 187, 197, 207, 208, 213 Operación Pan-­Americana, 6–7 Organization of American States (oas), 6, 44, 195, 238n62 Osorio, Sonia, 156 Ospina, Marco, 40 Ospina Pérez, Mariano, 171 Otra Figuración movement, 117 Owens, Craig, 260n9 Palacios, Inocencio, 85, 88 Pan-American Assembly on Population (1965), 74, 102 – 3 Pan American Union (pau), 6, 8, 16, 42 – 45, 238n62 Parqueadero el Libertador (Bogotá parking lot), 157, 158, 171 Pasaje Rivas marketplace, 1, 19, 19 – 21, 24, 26, 132, 163, 190, 225; González on, 11, 18 – 19 Patiño, José Félix, 119, 135, 149 Patman, John William Wright, 138–39, 264n62 Paul VI (pope), 102, 257n87

Index 309 Peace Corps, 7 Peinador Gratia Plena, 183, 184, 208 Peláez, Amelia, 267n104 Perón, Juan Domingo, 43 – 4 4, 168, 221, 279n85 Picasso, Pablo, 52, 54, 64, 84, 117 plagiarism, 29, 153 – 54, 161, 162, 166 – 67, 177 – 78, 213, 246n80 Plaza de Bolívar (Bogotá), 20 – 21, 21, 169 Pollock, Jackson, 50 pop art, 12, 56, 201, 207, 212; coining of, 200; collage and, 117; iconophilia of, 186 – 87, 207; mixed-­media works of, 79; Naturaleza casi muerta as, 30, 181 – 82; at Tate Modern Art Museum, 74 Popper, Franck, 199 Population Council, 74, 103, 104, 257n87 Porras, Cecilia, 42, 107 Pro-­Bienestar de la Familia, 257n87 Profamilia, 101 – 2, 257n87, 258n98 propal paper company, 88, 96, 254n50 provincialism, strategic, 182 – 94, 212, 219 Quijano, Aníbal, 217 Radio y Televisión Interamericana (rti), 13 Rama, Ángel, 21 – 22, 139, 265n64 Ramírez, Mari Carmen, 219 Ramírez Villamizar, Eduardo, 45, 50, 54, 84, 87 Ramos Gálvez, José Carlos, 211; Andes-­ Andenes, 201, 202 Raphael [Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino], 183, 246n78 Rauschenberg, Robert, 79, 208 Rayo, Omar, 178, 213 Rembrandt van Rijn, 63 Rendición de Breda series, 50 – 56, 51, 53, 60, 70 Rengifo, Luis Ángel, 93 Renoir, Auguste, 52 Reverón, Armando, 199 Reyes Posada, Carlos José, 249n107 Richards, Nelly, 206 Rionegro, Santander, 121, 124, 145 Rivera, Diego, 117 Rivero, Mario, 164, 175, 176, 271n34 Robayo, 211, 212 Roberts, John, 207

Rockefeller, John D., 234n30 Rockefeller, John D., III, 103 Rockefeller, Nelson, 6, 15, 44 – 45, 234n30, 237n59 Rockefeller Foundation, 48, 103, 104, 257n87 Roda, Juan Antonio, 33, 41, 46, 50, 54; Engel on, 63; Jaramillo on, 87; Retrato de Beatriz González, 52 – 54, 53; Velázquez and, 52, 245n63 Rodríguez, Manuel H., 169 Rodríguez, Víctor Manuel, 144 Rojas, Carlos, 33, 131, 177, 208; Engel on, 117; González and, 50, 54 Rojas, Carlos, works of: Ingeniería de la visión, 277n70; Limones amarillos, 79, 117, 118; Marta Traba cuatro veces, 95, 96; Mujer en faja, 46, 79 Rojas, María Eugenia, 107 Rojas Pinilla, Gustavo, 5, 9, 13, 167; National Salon and, 84, 253n24; populism of, 44; women’s rights and, 106 Romero Brest, Jorge, 42 – 43 Romoli, Kathleen, 269n9 Rosenquist, James, 212 – 13 Rostow, Walt Whitman, 1, 12, 78 Rothko, Mark, 50 Rozo, Romulo, 269n10 Rubiano Caballero, Germán, 164 – 66, 168, 176 Ruhlmann, Émile-­Jacques, 192, 193 Ruiz Gómez, Darío, 194, 212 – 13, 278n82 Salazar, Francisco: Positivo/negativo, 197, 198 Salcedo, Bernardo, 131, 159, 197, 205 – 6, 226 Salcedo, Bernardo, works of: Hectárea de heno, 201 – 2, 203, 207; Lo que Dante nunca supo, 107 – 8, 108; Vivo recuerdo de la visita de Nuestra Señora de Bojacá . . . , 165, 271n40 Salcedo, José Joaquín, 6 Salmona, Rogelio, 177 Salón de Artistas Jóvenes, 47 Samper Ortega, Daniel, 82 – 83 San Victorino marketplace, 18, 20, 24, 193, 215 Sanandresito (black market), 134 – 35 Santander, Francisco de Paula, 154 – 68; Gonzalez’s portrait of, 24, 29, 145, 151, 154, 155. See also Apuntes para la historia extensa

310

Index Santos, Eduardo, 22, 237n59 São Paulo Biennial, 3, 96, 182, 189, 194, 196, 213 – 16 Schama, Simon, 62 Schelchkov, Andrey, 168 Schiller, Friedrich, 43, 194 Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr., 44 Schultz, Paul, 105 scrapbooking, 116 – 17, 121, 125 – 26 Serpa, Horacio, 224 Serrano, Eduardo, 149, 267n103 Shulkovski, Anatoli, 168 Silberstein, Casimiro Eiger, 242n13 Siqueiros, David Alfaro, 260n8 Situationists, 117 Smith, Norman, 139 Smith, Tony, 177 Soares, Teresinha, 215 Sobrinho, Cicilo Mattarrazzo, 195 social realism, 41, 45 socialist realism, 8 Sontag, Susan, 25 Soper, Fred, 169 Soto, Jesús Raphael, 197 Steinberg, Leo, 208 stereotypes, Latino, 42 Stevenson, Adlai, 44 Suárez, Marco Fidel, 273n75 Subdesarrollo 70, 141 – 45, 142, 149, 218 Los suicidas del Sisga series, 23 – 25, 28 – 29, 71 – 86, 72, 98, 108 – 11, 179; Arbaláez on, 93; Bonilla Aragón on, 97, 100 – 102; colors of, 100 – 101; cursilería of, 74, 75, 94 – 102, 105; Giraldo on, 96 – 97; Medellín on, 93, 109; Traba on, 25, 29, 74, 94, 100, 132–33, 187 Tamayo, Fernando, 101 Taussig, Michael, 255n52 Tejada, Lucy, 42, 107, 156 Televisor en color, 222, 223 Third World, 11, 12, 138, 143 – 4 4, 218, 241n3 Thoré, Théophile [pen name: W. Bürger], 62, 248n88 Tomasello, Luis: Atmosphere chromo­ plastique, 197 – 99, 198 Torres García, Joaquín, 199 Torres Restrepo, Camilo, 24, 67, 114, 120, 134, 150, 250n109

Tossi, Claudio, 215 Townsend, Peter, 209 Traba, Marta, 1, 3, 4, 7, 33, 54, 107, 217, 221; on Alcántara, 90 – 92; on Ánimas benditas, 116; Castro and, 137; on cultural dependency, 137, 213; cultural resistance theory of, 9 – 12, 145, 153 – 54, 178; on Granada, 95 – 96; husband of, 140, 254n39; on indigenism, 41, 47; on Lacemaker series, 35, 40 – 43, 46 – 47, 55, 68 – 69, 141; Lleras Restrepo and, 137; on Martínez Delgado, 49; on Mejía, 88 – 89, 255n52; on modernism, 42 – 43, 45; on National Salon, 11–12, 81, 83 – 93; on Los Nuevos, 41; Rama and, 139, 265n64; on Rojas, 95; on Sisga Suicides, 25, 29, 74, 94, 100, 132, 187; on “technological dictatorship,” 47; on Velázquez, 54; on Vermeer, 49, 55 Traba, Marta, works of, 13; Art in Latin America Today, 43; “Beatriz González: Cursilería as Art,” 215; Las ceremonias del verano, 138, 176; Dos décadas vulnerables del arte latinoamericano, 178 – 79; “El genio anti-­servil,” 43; Los muebles de Beatriz González, 11 – 12, 25, 182, 188 – 89, 218, 236n42; El museo imaginario, 13, 14; El museo vacío, 43; La pintura nueva en Latinoamérica, 43, 176; El son se quedó en Cuba, 137, 255n64 Triana, Jorge Elías, 40 Tropicália movement, 4, 115, 215, 232n11 Tropical Oil Company, 45, 237n59, 249n103 Turbay Ayala, Julio César, 222 La última mesa, 183, 184, 188 – 89, 216 lo último, 11 – 18 Umaña Luna, Eduardo, 84 United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America, 7, 64 Universidad de Los Andes (Uniandes), 4, 11, 33; Department of Fine Arts at, 46 – 47, 208; founding of, 13, 47 – 48 Universidad Industrial de Santander (uis), 66 – 67, 249n107 Urdaneta, Alberto, 81, 82, 253nn25 – 26 Uribe, Álvaro, 228 Uribe Echavarría, Rodrigo, 194 – 97, 199, 204 Uribe Uribe, Rafael, 266n73

Index 311 Valencia de Castaño, Gloria, 1, 11, 13, 23, 107, 156, 231n1 Valencia Diago, Gloria, 35, 39 – 40 van Isschot, Luis, 66 van Meegerenen, Hans, 246n80 Vargas, Getúlio, 168 Vargas, Tulia, 76, 251n3 Vásquez, Samuel, 196, 201 Velázquez, Diego, 50, 52; Arachne myth and, 248n90; Brown on, 62, 247n87; Traba on, 54, 60 Velázquez Toro, Magdalena, 259n115 Velezefe [Luis Fernando Vélez Ferrer], 255n57; “Escultura moderna,” 90, 91 Veloso, Caetano, 4 Venice Biennial, 3, 79, 126, 195 Vermeer, Johannes, 34, 241n5; forgeries of, 246n80; González on, 56; Traba on, 49, 55; The Lacemaker, 28, 32, 33 – 36, 37, 41 – 42, 60 – 62, 69, 76 Vermeeriana series, 14, 60, 61, 63; Engel on, 63 – 64; Traba on, 83 – 84 Versión de la rendición de Breda (I), 51 Vidales, Luis, 242n13 Vieco, Hernán, 85

Villeglé, Jacques, 79 La Violencia, 3, 5, 84, 166, 167, 226, 232n8; Bogotazo riots and, 171; Marquetalia and, 7; Medellín and, 109 Vlaminck, Maurice de, 64 voting rights, 106 – 7 War of a Thousand Days (1899 – 1902), 156, 166 Warhol, Andy, 76, 187, 274n10 Wesselman, Tom, 177, 212 – 13 Whiteford, Michael, 106 Wiedemann, Guillermo, 41, 45, 87 Wilde, Oscar, 25 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 177 Zalamea, Alberto, 137, 140, 147, 254n39, 266n75, 267n97; Movimiento Democrático Nacional and, 268n1; Nacionalismo Popular Revolucionario and, 179 Zalamea, Jorge, 85, 86, 254n39 Zea, Gloria, 238n65 Zerner, Catherine Wilkinson, 188 Zurbarán, Francisco de, 57, 60

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