Revolution for Whom? Spanish and Portuguese South America
In the late eighteenth century, new ideas of freedom spread throughout the Americas, raised by the Declaration of Independence in the former British American colonies in 1776 and by the French Revolution of 1789. These principles, combined with poor conditions for a majority of people in French, Spanish, and Portuguese America and a growing distrust of monarchy, soon led to revolutions against colonial authorities. In the first three decades of the nineteenth century, most European American colonies gained their independence. While each revolution was unique, all were connected to the broader trend of using nationalism to oppose unequal power dynamics. During these rebellions, the majestic horse, a vital part of the history and mythology of power (consider Pegasus and centaurs, for example), was associated with liberators, who were admiringly depicted on their mounts to convey independence, courage, triumph, and heroism (Figure 8.1).
Spanish South America
From revolutionary Mexico in the northern hemisphere, rebellion rippled south. Spanish American nationalists in Mexico had gained momentum for their cause when they united against the peninsulares. The southern parts of the Spanish American empire underwent a similar experience because the patriot creole group also coveted the potential benefits of independence: free trade, control over tax revenue, and local governance. There were two initial focuses: one in northern South America led by Simón Bolívar from Caracas, and another in the far south of the continent led by José de San Martín from Buenos Aires. Under the leadership of Bolívar and San Martín—the libertadores (liberators)—military operations began that aimed at controlling the royalist stronghold in Peru to achieve and spread independence throughout South America (Figure 8.15).
The Northern Liberation Movement
Between 1807 and 1810 in the judicial district of Caracas, Venezuela (in the Viceroyalty of New Granada), royalists and patriot creoles from the upper-class elite struggled to create a self-governing body. Then, on April 19, 1810, the creoles of Caracas deposed the Spanish administrative officers and created a junta to govern in the name of Fernando VII. The junta, whose authority was recognized by other cities in the Viceroyalty of New Granada, then called for the creation of a congress, which met for the first time in March 1811.
Not all in the congress favored governing in the name of the still-imprisoned king of Spain. On July 5, 1811, patriot members who believed the body should instead govern on behalf of the people of New Granada officially declared the independence of Venezuela, making it the first South American republic. Royalists struck back. They received support among Venezuela’s large African and pardo population, whose interests had been advanced when the Spanish government gave them the opportunity to purchase White status with the cédula real. White creoles, like the patriots in the Venezuelan congress, had opposed greater rights for people who were not of European ancestry. Cities in the western part of New Granada had not recognized the authority of the Caracas junta or sent representatives to the Venezuelan congress, and they also proclaimed their loyalty to the king.
The royalists received unexpected additional support for their cause when, on the Thursday before Easter in 1812, a massive earthquake hit Caracas, killing thousands. The Catholic clergy, who supported the royalist cause, convinced the lower social classes that God had punished Caracas because of its disregard for the king’s authority, which had been granted by God. The royalist members of the government reinstituted the district’s previous political links to Spain, and a bitter civil war between royalists and patriots ensued.
Simón José Antonio de la Santísima Trinidad Bolívar y Palácios, part of the creole elite and impassioned about the new ideas of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, entered the fight in 1811 as an appointed colonel of the rebel patriot army. After his first defeat, he took refuge on the island of Curaçao and then fled to the city of Cartagena (in modern-day Colombia). From this new base, he was able to launch a successful campaign to invade Caracas in 1813 and reestablish the republic (Figure 8.16).
Figure 8.16 Simón Bolívar.The Venezuelan libertador Simón Bolívar in Arturo Michelena’s 1898 painting, made almost seventy years after Bolívar’s death. (credit: “Retrato ecuestre de Bolivar” by Galería de Arte Nacional/Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)
Bolívar’s success in battle was based on his commitment to fighting to the last soldier, in what became known as “war to the death” (guerra a muerte). This strategy aimed at radicalizing the conflict and reducing support for the royalist cause. For example, all Spaniards who did not actively support the movement for independence were sentenced to death. Bolívar’s dramatic military plan left entire provinces depopulated and kept his army almost constantly in battle. His success was short-lived, however. In 1814, defeated in Venezuela, Bolívar returned to Cartagena.
In 1815 after Napoléon Bonaparte’s fall, the newly restored Spanish king Fernando VII sent military forces to South America to shore up his absolute authority. These Spanish forces were able to restore colonial power and defeat Bolívar and his patriot troops. Once again ousted, Bolívar sought shelter in the British colony of Jamaica, where he penned his “Letter from Jamaica” to a newspaper. In this candid document, he outlined his vision of a unified Spanish America and reiterated his defense of independence and conviction that it would triumph.
The most prescient part of the document was Bolívar’s extended analysis of the past, present, and future of Spanish America. The letter reveals his creole bias in its argument that the lower social classes were not equal to the task of gaining independence. Bolívar stressed that the mixed-race people of the Americas were condemned to civic ignorance, oppression, and vice because the Spanish colonial system had acted as a tyrannical father and deprived them of liberty, equality, property, and security. They were forced onto the lowest social rungs, where they were unable to participate in the sociopolitical and economic affairs of their country.
Bolívar’s emphasis on his country’s lack of preparation for self-government was used to reinforce his claim that Spanish Americans in general needed firm guidance and a powerful executive in their newly independent nations. Unlike many others who simply advocated for independence from Spain, Bolívar focused on the need for a strong central government rather than the federal system adopted by Mexico in its Constitution of 1824, in which power rested primarily with local authorities. Bolívar was also a promoter of Spanish American unity, and he expressed hope for a league of American nations whose representatives would regularly meet and assist each other.
From Jamaica, Bolívar went to Haiti, where he received asylum and economic assistance from President Alexandre Pétion. Though there was a clear bond of sympathy between them, their relationship had its problems. Pétion’s regime was genuinely liberal, but there were schisms within its ranks, and the international situation was shaky—neither France nor the United States had yet recognized Haiti as a nation. Pétion’s assistance was therefore discreet. Bolívar received hard cash, armaments, and a recruited Black military force under one condition: Put an end to slavery in the newly independent nations.
With the help of those forces, Bolívar sailed back to the Orinoco River delta in Venezuela and turned the tide in favor of the patriot army. He was able to do so, however, only after gaining the support of the mixed-race cowboys, the llaneros, who dominated much of the region, and of their chieftain José Antonio Páez. Thousands of llaneros joined Bolívar’s army at this critical juncture. A key reason for his success was likely his ability to enlist both the marginalized mixed-race and Black populations and the creole elites in his cause. It was only after he allowed the common people to join his army that he was able to consistently win the wars of independence, whose decisive victory came at Boyacá, Colombia, in August 1819. After liberating Venezuela, Bolívar took the rest of New Granada. Bogotá fell only after he had led an army of twenty-five hundred men up to the Orinoco River, climbed over the Andes Mountains, crossed flooded rivers and plains in the midst of the rainy season, with Bolívar carrying soldiers who had become too weak to stand, and descended on the enemy.
In 1819, Bolívar established the Congress of Angostura (in modern-day Ciudad Bolívar in Venezuela), which approved the creation of the nation of Colombia (encompassing modern Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador). The congress vested Bolívar with dictatorial powers. He rejected monarchy, with its potential to lead to dictatorship, but he also warned against federalism and popular democracy, for which he felt Spanish Americans were unprepared. He advocated a republican form of government anchored in a powerful hereditary senate. The senate—formed by educated and suitable individuals—was to be a sound intermediary between the people and the government. In his Angostura Address, Bolívar outlined his ideas about how to balance freedom and order as well as how to navigate sensitive race relations. Military brilliance does not necessarily signal political skill, however, and neither Bolívar’s fledgling dream of a representative republican system nor his ideal of pan-American unity were shared by others in the region. With time, it became clear those ideas were not to succeed.
In an 1821 gathering in the city of Cúcuta (in present-day Colombia), patriot representatives from Venezuela and New Granada (also present-day Colombia) decided on the unification of the former territories of the Viceroyalty of New Granada (Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and Panama) into one federative nation called Gran Colombia. Bolívar put Francisco de Paula Santander in charge of New Granada’s regional administration. The revolutionary Cúcuta Congress outlined a liberal program of reforms and adopted a centralized constitution and the gradual granting of citizenship rights to all.
The most pressing Issue was slavery. Enslaved and mixed-race people demanded emancipation, which had been promised in the rhetoric of national liberation and which Bolívar had assured Pétion he would accomplish. In 1820, he ordered Santander to promise emancipation and recruit an army of five thousand willing enslaved people. Afraid of alienating the region’s mine and landowners, who depended on slave labor, Santander limited the recruitment to three thousand and instructed the rest to return to their masters.
Bolívar’s position—already presented in his Jamaica letter’s critique of Spanish colonial control—was clearly reflected in the constitution. Accordingly, the republic of New Granada, the first to grant its citizens the responsibilities of self-government, limited voting rights to male property owners. Minorities (women, poor White people, and people of African descent) still yearned for freedom and equality. The Abolition of Slavery Law, enacted by the Cúcuta Congress, delegated a gradual and complicated process to committees of local notables, which simply prolonged the institution of slavery.
Like the port town of Caracas in the north, the port of Buenos Aires in the south reaped significant benefits from the eighteenth-century reforms aimed at developing the Spanish Empire’s outskirts. Formerly subject to the authority of the Spanish Viceroyalty of Peru, in 1776 Buenos Aires became the seat of the newly created Viceroyalty of Río de la Plata (modern-day Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Uruguay). The port was the principal outlet from which silver from Bolivia and animal hides and tallow from the vast plains of Argentina and Uruguay reached markets abroad. The town’s residents, known as Porteños, also enjoyed abundant opportunities for trading in contraband with the British and Portuguese.
The population of Buenos Aires quadrupled in the last half of the eighteenth century (it was almost forty thousand by 1800), and merchants and civic leaders took pride in their growing prosperity. Accordingly, rising fortunes in Río de la Plata created a newly favorable environment for those who preferred rupture to reform. There was a ripe international market for South American products like sugar, hides, cacao, tobacco, and silver, and the creole elite were eager to open their ports to British, Dutch, and French merchants. And with their easy access to Atlantic foreign merchants, Argentine elites in Buenos Aires also had much to gain from greater autonomy.
Following Napoléon’s invasion of Spain in 1808, the creole militia officers in Argentina formed a new governing junta that proclaimed support for Fernando VII. However, after almost two years, radical changes within the patriot majority of the junta led them to repudiate Spanish authority, silence local opposition, and proclaim Argentina’s revolutionary patriot movement on May 25, 1810. Not all regions of Río de la Plata, however, recognized the authority of the junta, which was based in Buenos Aires. Successful military campaigns in the central part of Argentina soon brought this area under the control of the junta, but its troops were not able to secure Uruguay and Paraguay, which rejected control by Buenos Aires.
In March 1816, Argentina’s conservative local leaders invoked a congress in Tucumán. The congress declared the independence of the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata on July 9, 1816 (now Independence Day in Argentina), less as a sign of revolutionary militancy than as a practical recognition of their political situation. Resistance came not from faraway Spain but from the neighboring royalist provinces, Uruguay and Paraguay, when Argentina attempted once again to extend its authority there.
Paraguayans had already declared their independence from both Spain and the Argentine government in 1811. The new country quickly devolved into a dictatorship under José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, a lawyer who had briefly taught theology at a seminary in Paraguay. He was chosen one of Paraguay’s ruling consuls by the country’s Congress on October 1, 1813. (In imitation of the Roman Republic, Paraguay had two consuls, chief executives who each also controlled one-half of the country’s army.)
In March 1814, Francia, who was an advocate for the common man, passed a law requiring racial intermarriage; White Europeans could marry only people of African, Indigenous, or mestizo ancestry. A few months later, Paraguay’s congress made Francia the country’s only consul and gave him absolute power for three years. In 1816, congress made him dictator of Paraguay for life. Intent on realizing the ideals of the French Revolution and influenced by the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Francia, while continuing to support the Catholic Church by building new churches and funding religious festivals, attempted to improve the lives of the poor by abolishing tithes and giving the Paraguayan government control over institutions such as hospitals and orphanages that had been run by the Church. He instituted measures to modernize agriculture and established national industries. Focused solely on reforming society and determined to make Paraguay self-sufficient, Francia ended foreign trade, prevented river traffic between Argentina and Paraguay, and adopted a position of neutrality in foreign policy. Paraguay was thus isolated from the revolutionary turmoil that gripped the rest of South America.
Just as the people of Paraguay charted their own path to independence, the inhabitants of the eastern province of Montevideo (modern-day Uruguay) resisted threats from La Plata and Brazil and built their own movement, under José Gervasio Artigas. Montevideo remained in Spanish hands until 1814 when it fell to the Argentines, who ignored Artigas’s demands for autonomy. Creole patriots had the upper hand all over Spanish South America. The only exception was the Viceroyalty of Peru, the most solid bulwark of Spanish power in South America, where royalist armies were stationed and most creoles remained steadfastly royalist. Peru was a constant threat to patriots, and its liberation was vital.
By 1817, the Argentine general José Francisco de San Martín y Matorras, who had fought against Napoléon in Spain in 1812, had set up a plan to isolate and attack royalists in Peru, the Spanish stronghold. He organized an army camp at the base of the Andes, and under his command, Argentine forces scored great successes. In January 1817, after careful preparation, he led his five thousand soldiers through the Andean mountains, where altitudes approached more than ten thousand feet above sea level, and over six different passes into Chile.
Chile had already broken from the Viceroyalty of Peru when creole Spanish Americans there had established their own junta in 1810; however, the region had been plagued by fighting between royalists and various pro-independence factions who supported differing degrees of autonomy. When royalists gained the upper hand, the leader of one of those factions, Bernardo O’Higgins, found himself exiled to Argentina. There he met San Martín, and together they planned an assault on Spanish royalist forces in Chile (Figure 8.17). San Martín’s assistance secured a decisive victory, and O’Higgins declared Chile’s independence in 1818.
Figure 8.17 José de San Martín and Bernardo O’Higgins.In this late nineteenth-century painting by Julio Vila y Prades, the Argentine José de San Martín (left) and Bernardo O’Higgins of Chile are shown crossing the Andes to liberate Chile in 1817. (credit: “San Martín and O’Higgins crossing the Andes” by Museo Histórico y Militar de Chile/Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)
The northern and southern forces of the South American independence movements converged in the firmly royalist Viceroyalty of Peru and made Lima, the capital city, their target. From the north, one stream of revolutionary armies led by Bolívar flowed from the Viceroyalty of New Granada, and from the south, another led by San Martín swept up from the Viceroyalty of Río de la Plata and the newly independent Republic of Chile.
San Martín departed Chile in 1820 with both land forces and sailors on ships. He had the assistance of Scottish former naval officer and mercenary Thomas Cochrane, one of the foreigners who on their own initiative had joined the South American patriots in their struggle for independence. San Martín launched a naval assault on royalist Peru in Lima and landed on its shores in September 1820. Though the highlands remained in royalist hands, his arrival started an uprising along the coast, and he gradually expanded his foothold until he occupied Lima itself. On July 28, 1821, Peruvian creoles in the city were forced to declare independence and accept San Martín as Protector of Peru.
Lima was now under San Martín’s military and civil rule, but royalist troops continued to control the vast Peruvian hinterland, and the inhabitants of the capital saw him and his forces as foreign invaders. Following his liberation of Bogotá in 1819, Bolívar and his armies had moved on to Ecuador. Making little progress against the remaining royalists, San Martín and Bolívar—rivals for control of the independence movement—decided to meet in Guayaquil, Ecuador. In 1821, Guayaquil’s valuable port and naval base had fallen under Bolívar’s control, and in 1822, he had entered the city of Quito and declared Ecuador’s independence. In July 1822, San Martín set sail for Guayaquil with hopes of convincing the port city’s merchants to unite with Lima. However, Bolívar had arrived earlier and pressed his Guayaquil supporters for union with Colombia. When San Martín landed in the city, the possession of the city no longer figured in their discussion. Probably disillusioned, San Martín conferred with Bolívar behind closed doors. The talks were secret, but by their end, San Martín had decided to leave the completion of the liberation of South America to Bolívar. Shortly thereafter, San Martín withdrew from the independence struggle and went into a self-imposed exile in Europe, never again to return.
Bolívar occupied Lima in 1823, and in February 1824, a Peruvian congress named him dictator of Peru. He won a significant victory against Spanish forces in August 1824 at the Battle of Junín, and in December 1824, his skilled chief of staff Antonio José de Sucre defeated a much larger Spanish force at the Battle of Ayacucho. In 1825, following their defeat by Sucre, royalist troops in Upper Peru (renamed Bolivia in honor of El Libertador) accepted a general amnesty.
In regard to the place of South American nations in the larger geopolitical sphere, both Bolívar and San Martín demonstrated a continent-wide outlook and support for close alliances among the newly independent nations. San Martín shared with the Mexican conservatives an admiration for the British constitutional monarchy, but Bolívar rejected the mystical figure of the king and believed the republican system was the best guarantee of stability. In 1822, Gran Colombia became the first Spanish American nation to receive diplomatic recognition from the United States.
The United States was anxious that European countries not use the Latin American wars of independence as an excuse to intervene in the Western Hemisphere. Such an action would threaten not only the young nation’s security but also its commerce. In 1815, in the wake of Napoléon’s defeat at Waterloo, Austria, Prussia, and Russia had formed the Holy Alliance. Its purpose was to protect European empires by discouraging revolution, such as the one that had engulfed France. At conferences in 1820 and 1821, the Holy Alliance declared their right to intervene in rebellions that threatened to unseat European monarchs. And, in 1820–1821, a rebellion in Naples was crushed by invading Austrian troops. Although the Holy Alliance had not intervened in 1820 to help Fernando VII when Spanish liberals had forced him to reinstitute the Constitution of 1812, in 1822, they agreed to support an invasion of Spain by France’s Louis XVIII for the purposes of bringing an end to the Spanish revolutionary movement and restoring the imprisoned Fernando to the throne.
The members of the Holy Alliance intended also to Assert Fernando VII’s control over his rebellious American colonies. The United States opposed such intervention as did Britain, which carried on extensive trade with Latin America. Britain’s foreign minister proposed that the United States join Britain in issuing a joint statement warning France and the Holy Alliance against imposing their will on the former Spanish colonies. U.S. secretary of state John Quincy Adams, however, considered it “more candid as well as more dignified” for the new country “to avow our principles explicitly” than to allow the British to take the lead. Accordingly, with the reluctant agreement of President James Monroe, in 1823, Adams set forth the Monroe Doctrine, a principle of U.S. foreign policy that warned European nations to refrain from interfering with independent countries in the Western Hemisphere. Although gratified by U.S. support, Bolívar trusted more in British influence to block Spain’s attempts to regain its American colonies and did not give much importance to the Monroe Doctrine. In 1824, Great Britain joined the United States in officially recognizing Gran Colombia, whose representatives obtained a significant loan from the London financial market.
In 1826, Bolívar convened the Congress of Panama to strengthen fraternal ties among the newly independent nations in former Spanish America, adopt programs of mutual cooperation, and create a permanent alliance. Conspicuously absent were the United States, Haiti, and Brazil. However, the main difficulty was the internal fragility of the new nations. The legacy of the Spanish American revolutions was contradictory. Although the new nations had broken free of Spain, colonial social hierarchies persisted. These then escalated into a social struggle among the enslaved Africans, Indigenous groups, mestizos, pardos, and White people. Provinces fought each other, and after defeating royalist forces, the popular armies faced civil wars over a new postcolonial order. Creole leaders like Bolívar and San Martín were not the only heirs of independence. The main postcolonial leaders were the local military chieftains, who often forged alliances with wealthy creole landowners and perpetuated their power.
Dueling Voices
Justification for Revolution
Simón Bolívar and other Spanish American patriots believed they were justified in proclaiming independence from Spain. In his “Letter from Jamaica,” Bolívar deplored Spain’s mistreatment of its American colonies and the brutality of its attempts to defeat their fight for liberty. The Spanish government, however, believed the people in its American colonies had received the benefits of its protection and were now behaving ungratefully. In a letter to U.S. secretary of state John Quincy Adams, a Spanish official named Don Joaquín de Anduaga protested U.S. recognition of the revolutionary governments, reiterated Spain’s lack of responsibility for the rebels’ anger, and took pains to differentiate Bolívar’s revolution from the U.S. War of Independence. Compare Bolívar’s position (immediately following) with that of Anduaga, which follows Bolívar’s.
The hatred that the Peninsula has inspired in us is greater than the ocean between us. It would be easier to have the two continents meet than to reconcile the spirits of the two countries. The habit of obedience; a community of interest, of understanding, of religion; mutual goodwill; a tender regard for the birthplace and good name of our forefathers; in short, all that gave rise to our hopes, came to us from Spain. As a result there was born principle of affinity that seemed eternal, notwithstanding the misbehavior of our rulers, which weakened that sympathy, or, rather, that bond enforced by the domination of their rule.
At present the contrary attitude persists: we are threatened with the fear of death, dishonor, and every harm; there is nothing we have not suffered at the hands of that unnatural stepmother-Spain. The veil has been torn asunder. We have already seen the light, and it is not our desire to be thrust back into darkness. The chains have been broken; we have been freed, and now our enemies seek to enslave us anew. For this reason America fights desperately, and seldom has desperation failed to achieve victory . . . .
We have been harassed by a conduct which has not only deprived us of our rights but has kept us in a sort of permanent infancy with regard to public affairs. If we could at least have managed our domestic affairs and our internal administration, we could have acquainted ourselves with the processes and mechanics of public affairs. We should also have enjoyed a personal consideration, thereby commanding a certain unconscious respect from the people, which is so necessary to preserve amidst revolutions.
—Simón Bolívar, “Letter from Jamaica,” 1819
I have seen the Message sent by the President to the House of Representatives, in which he proposes the recognition, by the United States, of the insurgent governments of Spanish America. How great my surprise was, may be easily judged by anyone acquainted with the conduct of Spain towards [the United States] . . . . And, moreover, will not his astonishment be augmented to see that [the U.S.] is desirous to give the destructive example of sanctioning the rebellion of provinces which have received no offence from the mother-country,—to whom she has granted a participation in a free constitution,—and to whom she extended all the rights and prerogatives of Spanish citizens? In vain will a parallel be attempted to be drawn between the emancipation of this Republic [the U.S.] and that which the Spanish rebels attempt; and history is sufficient to prove, that if a harassed and persecuted province has a right to break its chains, others, loaded with benefits, elevated to the high rank of freedom, ought only to bless and embrace more closely the protecting country which has bestowed such favours upon them.
—Don Joaquín de Anduaga, letter to John Quincy Adams, March 9, 1822
Imagine transporting the U.S. president and all the members of Congress and their families across the ocean in forty vessels on a trip that lasted months. This is what the Portuguese royal House of Braganza did in 1807, and for more than a decade after that, Portugal ruled its empire from the Americas rather than from Europe. This unprecedented move set the tone for the independence of Portuguese America, which was pursued relatively peacefully compared to the liberation movements in Spanish America. Furthermore, whereas Spanish America fragmented into many countries, Portuguese America remained one nation, Brazil. In September 1822, Brazil became independent under a Portuguese-born king and adopted a constitutional monarchical system. The monarchy brought political stability to the region but did not challenge colonial hierarchies.
The Establishment of the Kingdom of Brazil
In 1807, when Napoléon instituted his Continental System aimed at isolating Britain and economically destroying it, Portugal, notable for its long-standing alliance with Britain, was not able to comply. To punish Portugal’s breaking of his naval blockade, Napoléon obtained the Spanish Crown’s permission to invade Portugal by land (since the French navy was not capable of facing the British at sea). French troops commanded by General Jean-Andoche Junot swept across the Iberian Peninsula to storm into Lisbon.
In view of these events, Lord Strangford, Great Britain’s diplomatic envoy to Portugal, counseled the Portuguese royal family to move the court to Portuguese America. Queen Maria wore the Portuguese Crown, but because she had been declared mentally incapacitated, her son the Prince Regent João was left with the decision. The imminent arrival of French forces in November 1807 finally convinced João that fleeing to Brazil was the only solution. As the troops approached, the Portuguese royal family and its entourage of about ten thousand people escaped to Brazil in a fleet under British convoy (Figure 8.18). In return for their assistance, the British received generous commercial privileges in Brazil.
A Royal Family Flees.In 1807, the Portuguese House of Braganza and its court fled to Brazil to avoid being captured by French troops. The scene was imagined in this small-scale painting by an unknown nineteenth-century artist. (credit: “Embarkation of the Portuguese Royal Family” by Itamaraty Historical and Diplomatic Museum/Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)
In 1808, after a short stop in Salvador, Bahia, the royal family and their courtiers were welcomed by Brazilian colonists and departed to settle in Rio de Janeiro on the southeastern coast. For the first time in modern history, a European monarch, heir, and court had set foot in their American domain. On April 1, 1808, Brazilian ports were opened to all friendly nations, which really meant Great Britain; all previous manufacturing prohibitions intended to protect Portuguese industry were revoked; and the Bank of Brazil was established. As a result, Brazil’s total population jumped from almost three million in 1798 to almost four million in 1818.
The Portuguese Crown’s willingness to share power with the local planter aristocracy led to the expansion of institutions such as hospitals, libraries, and schools and universities. Vital reforms in administration, agriculture, and manufacturing were instituted. Though the cultural initiatives were welcome, the new tax burden imposed to pay for the needs of the royal court, the expanded bureaucracy, and the war against France, as well as Brazil’s great dependence on Great Britain, were not. The presence of the Portuguese Crown centralized control of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro to a great degree, however, and this centralization became a powerful force for the unification of Brazil as one nation.
Even after the fall of Napoléon in 1814 and the restoration of Bourbon kings in both France and Spain, the Portuguese Crown resolutely stayed on in Brazil. On December 16, 1815, Brazil was officially given the status of a kingdom. When Queen Maria I died there in 1816, her son became João VI, king of the United Kingdoms of Portugal, Brazil, and Algarve (the southern edge of Portugal).
Brazil also opened its ports to Bonapartist immigrants, including republican-minded scientists, architects, artisans, freemasons, engineers, painters, and officers who crossed the Atlantic with their liberal books and ideas intending to settle permanently in the new land. Under the sponsorship of King Joao VI, a group of Bonapartist artists and artisans, knowns as the French Artistic Mission, were invited to Brazil in March 1816 to establish an Arts and Crafts lyceum in Rio de Janeiro. The Lyceum later became the Academia Imperial de Belas-Artes under Emperor Pedro I. French painter Jean-Baptiste Debret, who had studied at France’s prestigious Academie des beaux-arts, was part of the group. Debret developed in interest in the enslaved and Indigenous peoples and produced many lithographs and paintings depicting people and everyday life in Brazil. He also painted many portraits of the imperial court (Figure 8.19). After returning to France in 1831, Debret joined the Académie des beaux-arts. By the end of the decade, he had published three volumes of engravings: A Picturesque and Historic Voyage to Brazil, or the Sojourn of a French Artist in Brazil (Voyage pittoresque et historique au Brésil ou Séjour d’un artiste français au Brésil).
King João VI.This small-scale 1817 portrait of King João VI of Portugal was painted by Jean-Baptiste Debret, who immigrated to Brazil as a member of the French Artistic Mission. (credit: “Portrait of John VI of Portugal” by Museu Nacional de Belas Artes/Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)
Link to Learning
Explore the work of French artist Jean-Baptiste Debret who lived in Brazil between 1816 and 1831 during that nation’s transition to independence and whose work depicted street scenes, local costumes, and gender relations.
King João VI was more sympathetic to his Brazilian subjects than King Fernando VII was to his own in Spanish America. Nevertheless, rebellions within Brazil were suppressed with force. For instance, in 1817, Brazilians from Pernambuco—a sugar-planting province on the northeastern coast—reacted to the arrest of a liberal military officer by declaring the province an autonomous republic. King João VI quickly put a brutal end to their experiment. He finally returned to Portugal in 1821, six years after Napoléon’s fall, when the Cortes, the Portuguese parliament, demanded his return.
Pedro I and Brazilian Independence
João left his son and heir Pedro I as prince regent in Rio de Janeiro, with instructions to preserve the family’s lineage and power. The talented twenty-three-year-old prince enthusiastically took to his duties. The Cortes wanted to reduce Brazil to its former colonial status and ordered the dismantling of Rio’s central government structure. In January 1822, it commanded the prince to return, but Pedro sided with the Brazilians when they asked him to stay. (This event became known as O Fico, from the Portuguese ficar, to remain.)
The intentions of the Cortes could now no longer be ignored, however, because they generated conflicts among conservative and liberal factions in the Brazilian provinces. When the Brazilian elites rejected rule by Portugal, Pedro took the final step. He broke with Portugal and on September 7, 1822, declared Brazilian independence on the banks of the Ipiranga River in the province of São Paulo (Figure 8.20). This event became known as the Grito do Ipiranga (Ipiranga Cry). Pedro I was acclaimed Constitutional Emperor and Perpetual Defender of Brazil, and he was crowned in Rio de Janeiro with much pomp and ceremony.
Figure 8.20 The Grito do Ipiranga.Pedro Américo’s massive 1888 painting shows Pedro I declaring Brazil’s independence with the Grito do Ipiranga on September 7, 1822. (credit: “Independence or Death” by Museu Paulista collection /Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)
At first, the Portuguese Cortes refused to recognize Brazil’s independence, though away from the cities of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo and their adjoining provinces, few local juntas declared themselves in favor of Portuguese rule. Determined to beat the Portuguese, Pedro I invited Thomas Cochrane, a former British naval officer, to serve Brazil as first admiral and commander in chief (Figure 8.21).
Figure 8.21 Thomas Cochrane.Thomas Cochrane, Earl of Dundonald, is shown in a nineteenth-century engraving based on a painting by James Ramsay. Lord Cochrane played a major role in winning independence for Brazil. (credit “Thomas Cochrane, 10th Earl of Dundonald” by Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology/Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)
Cochrane was one of the most daring and successful naval captains of his day; the French called him “the Sea Wolf.” After being struck off Britain’s Navy List because of a financial scandal in 1814, he began a new career as a mercenary. In 1818, he organized the Chilean navy, and with José de San Martín he played a crucial role in securing Chile’s independence and liberating coastal areas in Peru. He was living in semiretirement on his estate in Chile when Pedro I asked him to serve Brazil. Cochrane organized a small Brazilian naval squadron to block Portugal’s access to Brazil’s ports. His first success came with his blockade of Salvador, the main port of the province of Bahia. By preventing resupply of coastal cities and garrisons, Cochrane forced Portuguese fighting forces to abandon the northern provinces of Brazil by 1823. In 1825, the Treaty of Rio de Janeiro recognized Brazil’s independence from Portugal.
The presence of the Braganzas in Rio for thirteen years before independence had unified the nation, and Brazilians still looked to the royal court as a source of power and authority. Most educated citizens accepted the monarchy, with which they identified themselves, and nothing served better to end regional divisions than the external threat from Portugal. In May 1823, Pedro I summoned elected representatives from all provinces to come to Rio and draft the new empire’s constitution. Most were Brazilian sons of the old landed aristocracy, and some had represented Brazil in the Portuguese Cortes, including the liberal José Bonifácio de Andrade e Silva, educated at Portugal’s Coimbra University. The assembly drafted a document that sought balance among the executive, judiciary, and legislative branches of government but disagreed over slavery, the scope of citizenship, and civil rights. Although Pedro I favored the gradual abolition of slavery, Brazilians whose wealth came from sugar plantations were especially concerned that the institution not be interfered with.
The Past Meets the Present
Women and the Fight for Independence
Valued primarily for their sexual purity, domestic virtue, and Christian charity, women found their claims to political equality in Spanish and Portuguese America seriously limited. As a result, they responded in different ways to the struggle for independence, which pervaded every aspect of their lives. Poor women suffered disproportionately, and many made significant contributions to the cause, including taking up arms and even commanding troops. The women depicted here are just some examples of those who fought for independence and political power in the revolutionary period (Figure 8.22).
Figure 8.22 Fighters for Independence.(a) Manuela Sáenz, (b) Juana Azurduy de Padilla, (c) Empress Maria Leopoldina, and (d) Maria Quitéria all played a role in the fight for independence in South America. (credit a: modification of work “Retrato de Manuela Sáenz en 1825 por Pedro Durante” by Museo Nacional de Arqueología, Antropología e Historia del Perú/Wikipedia, Public Domain; credit b: “Portrait of Juana Azurduy” by Salón de Espejos de la Alcaldía de Padilla/Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain; credit c: “Portrait of Archduchess Maria Leopoldina, later Empress consort of Brazil” by Schönbrunn Palace/Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain; credit d: “Maria Quitéria” by Museu do Ipiranga/Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)
Born in Quito, Ecuador, in 1797, Manuela Sáenz de Vergara y Aizpuru was the illegitimate child of an Ecuadorian mother and a Spanish aristocrat. In 1817 she married British citizen James Thorne, and in 1822 she met and fell in love with Simón Bolívar. As a result, she left her husband and joined the fight for independence, becoming a close collaborator of Bolívar and a fierce proponent of the revolutionary cause and women’s rights. After she prevented his assassination in 1828, Bolívar called her “libertadora del libertador” (“the woman who liberated the Liberator”). After Bolívar’s death in 1830, Sáenz ended her days running a tobacco shop in a fishing village on the coast of Peru, where she died of diphtheria in 1856 and was buried in a common grave. However, with the rise of feminism in the 1980s, she became a symbol and rallying point for a variety of liberation movements, especially upon publication of The General in His Labyrinth by the award-winning Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez.
Under the strict casta system of Spanish colonial rule, Juana Azurduy de Padilla, born in 1780 in what is today the city of Sucre, Bolivia, was a mestiza. As a child, she had a close relationship with her White Spanish father, who taught her to ride, shoot, and work the land alongside the Indigenous people who lived there. After becoming orphaned as a teen, she went to a convent school to be educated, but she eventually returned to her family’s estate and married her neighbor Manuel Padilla, an influential politician with progressive views. Azurduy and her husband became patriot guerrilla military leaders in 1809, joining the Army of the North in Upper Peru. Azurduy was known for her ability to recruit and lead Indigenous people and eventually rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel in 1816. At the time of her death, she was relatively unknown; however, today the Azurduy province in the Chuquisaca Department is named for her.
The life of Maria Leopoldina of Austria was one of royal patronage and political influence. She married Dom Pedro, later Emperor Pedro I, in 1817 and dedicated her energies to supporting the cultural and scientific development of her adopted nation, Brazil, bringing the Austrian painter Thomas Ender and many others there. It was after Pedro had read one of Leopoldina’s letters that he enacted the Grito do Ipiranga. In her letter, she urged him to defy Portugal and break away from it, saying, “Brazil under your guidance will be a great country. Brazil wants you as a monarch . . . Pedro, this is the most important of your life . . . . You have the support of all Brazil.” Although Pedro I’s autocratic methods of government and scandalous private affairs made her life difficult, Leopoldina was very popular among her Brazilian subjects and remained so even after her death in 1826.
One of those subjects was Maria Quitéria, born in 1792 in the province of Bahia. During the Brazilian War of Independence, Quitéria disguised herself as a man to serve in the Brazilian revolutionary army. Her superiors acknowledged her skills with weapons and military discipline, and even after her identity as a woman was discovered, she was allowed to continue fighting. She was “a lady as brave as honest,” and in 1823, she was decorated by Dom Pedro I for her service. Maria Graham’s Journal of a Voyage to Brazil mentions her as an “illiterate, but lively [person, who] has clear intelligence and acute perception. I think that if they educated her, she would become a notable personality. One observes nothing masculine in her conduct, rather she is of gentle and friendly manners.” After serving in the war, Quitéria married Gabriel Brito and had one daughter, Luisa. Although she died forgotten and in poverty, today she is seen as a national heroine.
In the aftermath of independence, some women wondered what the consequences of their participation in the cause would be: After all, if women had fought and died for independence, why did they not have the right to vote or run for office? But another century passed before they realized such gains.
Consider the role each of these women played in the fight for independence. How do you think their distinct backgrounds influenced the actions they took?
Why do you think several of these women died in relative obscurity? What can the later rediscovery of their legacies teach us?
Pedro I’s talents did not include the ability to deal with the legislature. When it attempted to limit the power of the emperor in the first constitution, he dissolved the assembly and finished writing the constitution himself, with the help of a small and select council. Acting as an autocrat, Pedro I issued a liberal constitution in 1824 that ignored slavery and added a fourth branch of government, the moderator (moderador), to the executive, legislative, and judiciary. The moderator branch, which consisted of the emperor, empowered Brazil’s ruler to oversee the three other branches and to “balance” them by resolving disagreements among them.
Resentment of Pedro’s autocratic tendencies persisted as he took no notice of slavery and made unpopular foreign-trade and financial decisions. When news of the July Revolution of 1830 in France, which toppled an autocratic king, reached Brazil, popular demonstrations broke out calling for the expulsion of the emperor. In April 1831, Pedro I abdicated in favor of his only son, the six-year-old Brazilian-born Pedro II, and sailed for Portugal to secure the throne for his daughter Maria. He never returned. His departure eliminated the dominant influence of Portuguese-born courtiers and traders in Brazilian society, completing the transition to full Brazilian independence.
Nineteenth-Century Eyes on Latin America
Latin American movements for independence sought to throw off the rule of mercantilist parent countries and an economic model that hindered the development of rapidly growing colonial states. The successful movements, led by well-educated elites, many times faced resistance from a majority race-mixed population that sided with the homeland. The lack of popular support forced the exploitive White creole minority, who feared the oppressed mixed-race majorities, to negotiate their successes at each step. Liberators like Bolívar, San Martín, Pedro I, and Iturbide received no significant assistance from outside sources and many times lacked a unified direction or strategy. They encountered problems of vast geographic distances and natural obstacles, as well as the economic and cultural isolation of the various regions they were trying to unite.
Brazil’s path to independence shows more continuity with its colonial legacy than that of any other Latin American country because, although it was free of Portuguese rule after 1822, it became not a republic but an independent empire. The first emperor, Pedro I, was a prince of the Portuguese royal house and still an heir to its throne. Moreover, Portuguese-born men continued to control trade and to hold positions of power in the bureaucracy, the army, and the church. The conservative-liberal division dominated political life in imperial Brazil and marked the conflicting interests and ideals of various economic groups. Independence did not provoke major changes in the area’s colonial socioeconomic structures. The new Brazilian constitutional monarchy simply regularized the status quo.
The movement for Latin American independence sparked great outside interest in the region, and this curiosity fostered both foreign travel and writing. It was often through such accounts that people in the United States and Europe learned about South America. Ordinarily, nineteenth-century European women did not travel for pleasure; tourism is a twentieth-century invention. When Maria Dundas Graham Calcott came to South America with her navy officer husband in the 1820s, she was governess to Pedro I’s daughter, the future queen of Portugal Princess Maria da Glória. Graham’s diaries from 1821 to 1823 therefore shed a unique light on the Brazilian court during the independence process. Her accounts also reveal her wide-ranging interest in people’s lives in both Brazil (Salvador and Rio de Janeiro) and Chile (Santiago). In Chile, Graham studied science and botany with her family’s friend, the former British navy officer Thomas Cochrane.
Though her reports were produced for the enlightenment and entertainment of her contemporaries, today they yield insights into gender relations in the newly independent South American nations as well as into Graham’s own elite circles in the early nineteenth century. Her interest was in “suitable” subjects like fashion and motherhood that related to the lives of Brazilian women. Public areas of activity were largely male, and her diaries show that female foreign observers like herself remained outsiders. Graham was an urban elite woman with a Protestant background whose discourse stressed civilized English customs and behaviors as a model for the world. But despite that bias, or perhaps even because of it, through her perception of private aspects of Brazilian women’s lives, her accounts reveal much about public events in South American society as well as her own models of femininity. Her travel narrative is a window into how she saw nineteenth-century Brazilian women shape their lives and their environment.
Link to Learning
Explore the life and works of Maria Graham that offer a rich window into the gender dynamic within private and public spaces in newly independent Chile and Brazil.
Sally James Farnham, Equestrian Portrait of Simón Bolivar, dedicated 1921, bronze, 13 feet 6 inches tall (located at Central Park South and Avenue of the Americas, New York City) photo: David Shankbone, CC BY 2.5
The roots of Independence
The extensive Spanish colonies in North, Central and South America (which included half of South America, present-day Mexico, Florida, islands in the Caribbean and the southwestern United States) declared independence from Spanish rule in the early nineteenth century and by the turn of the twentieth century, the hundreds of years of the Spanish colonial era had come to a close. How did this happen? The Enlightenment ideals of democracy—equality under the law, separation of church and state, individual liberty—encouraged colonial independence movements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The Enlightenment began in eighteenth-century Europe as a philosophical movement that took science, reason, and inquiry as its guiding principles in order to challenge traditions and reform society. The results of these changes in thought are reflected in both the American and French revolutions—where a monarchical form of government (where the King ruled by divine right) was replaced with a Republic empowered by the people.
In Spain, the occupation by Napoleon during the Peninsular War (1808-1814) also inspired liberators to fight against foreign invaders. The examples of rebellion in the British Colonies, France, and Spain empowered Latin American revolutionaries who speculated on whether independence was a realistic and viable alternative to colonial rule. The term “Latin America” originated in the nineteenth century, when Argentinean jurist Carlos Calvo and French engineer Michel Chevalier, in reference to the Napoleonic invasion of Mexico in 1862, used the term “Latin,” referring to those whose national language—like Spanish—was derived from Latin, to denote difference from the “Anglo-Saxon”English-speaking people of North America.
It was largely the creoles who instigated the fight for liberation. Creoles remained connected to Europe through their ancestry and since they were often educated abroad, these ideas of self-determination held great appeal for them. Peninsulares on the other hand were more directly tied to Spain in ancestry and allegiance. In 1793, the Colombian creole Antonio Nariño, who would later serve as military general in Colombia’s struggle for independence, printed a translation of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, demonstrating the bilingual and bicultural aspect of Latin American independence. Translations of speeches made by the founding fathers of the United States, including Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, also circulated in Latin America.
Not all creoles however, believed in independence and democracy—in fact, there existed an opposition of creole royalists who supported the Spanish Crown and allied themselves with the Peninsulares. Creole patriots (as opposed to the royalists) were attracted to the idea of independence and thought of themselves as Latin Americans, not as Spaniards. Despite having been born and raised in a Spanish viceroyalty to Spanish parents, they were culturally connected to Latin America. Situated at the interface of both identities, creole patriots considered themselves descendants of, but different from, the Spanish.
Simón Bolívar
In 1819, Simón Bolívar (above) articulated a concept of a Latin American identity that was racially unique, stating that “our people are nothing like Europeans or North Americans; indeed, we are more a mixture of Africa and America than we are children of Europe….It is impossible to say with any certainty to which human race we belong.”1 With this newfound sense of Latin American identity, creole revolutionaries approached independence from the standpoint of the Enlightenment, but with an added cultural dimension informed by their local experiences.
The first two, and most notable, countries in the Americas to gain independence were the United States (1776), led by General George Washington, and Haiti (1804), led by Toussaint L’Ouverture (left). Other Latin American countries, with the exception of Cuba and Puerto Rico, also embarked on their struggles for independence in the early nineteenth century—Chile and Mexico, for example, began in 1810, though their autonomy was not secured until later: Chile in 1818 and Mexico in 1821. Since territories were freed in sections with the ultimate goal of liberating an entire viceroyalty, the fight for independence came slowly and in stages.
In the northern part of South America, Simón Bolívar initiated his fight for independence by liberating the countries that formed part of the Viceroyalty of New Granada. On August 30, 1821, Gran Colombia, a conglomerate of recently freed countries formerly part of the Viceroyalty of New Granada (including modern-day Colombia and Venezuela), was established at the Congress of Cúcuta (see map below). At this same congress, Bolívar was elected president.
The first two, and most notable, countries in the Americas to gain independence were the United States (1776), led by General George Washington, and Haiti (1804), led by Toussaint L’Ouverture (left). Other Latin American countries, with the exception of Cuba and Puerto Rico, also embarked on their struggles for independence in the early nineteenth century—Chile and Mexico, for example, began in 1810, though their autonomy was not secured until later: Chile in 1818 and Mexico in 1821. Since territories were freed in sections with the ultimate
Simón Bolívar
In 1819, Simón Bolívar (above) articulated a concept of a Latin American identity that was racially unique, stating that “our people are nothing like Europeans or North Americans; indeed, we are more a mixture of Africa and America than we are children of Europe….It is impossible to say with any certainty to which human race we belong.”1 With this newfound sense of Latin American identity, creole revolutionaries approached independence from the standpoint of the Enlightenment, but with an added cultural dimension informed by their local experiences.
In the northern part of South America, Simón Bolívar initiated his fight for independence by liberating the countries that formed part of the Viceroyalty of New Granada. On August 30, 1821, Gran Colombia, a conglomerate of recently freed countries formerly part of the Viceroyalty of New Granada (including modern-day Colombia and Venezuela), was established at the Congress of Cúcuta (see map below). At this same congress, Bolívar was elected president.
Following the liberation of Ecuador in 1822, and of Panama in 1821, Gran Colombia grew with the inclusion of both these countries. In his attempts to liberate as much of Latin America as possible, Bolívar traveled further south and freed Bolivia in 1825—a country whose name pays homage to its liberator.
Heroes, Martyrs, and Liberators
Despite economic volatility and political upheaval, there was a desire among nationals for artists to document Latin America’s autonomy and in the process create a new Latin American iconography. Portraits of liberators, allegorical depictions of independence, and representations of important battles comprised the artistic production of the early nineteenth century. Tied to the desire to establish a national identity, portraiture and history painting were in high demand—the former documented the likenesses of revolutionary figures, while the latter recorded the major battles and landmark events of independence. While these genres existed before independence, their popularity significantly increased in the early nineteenth century.
With the exception of Mexico, Cuba, and Brazil, there existed no government-sponsored art school or established artistic communities in early post-independence Latin America. As a result, artists were either trained within small art studios, or by working artists, or in many cases were not formally trained at all—which helps to explain the diversity of styles in early nineteenth century painting. Often neglected or even wrongfully categorized, the early nineteenth century is a time of transformation when both artists and viewers were adapting to a changing society, articulating a sense of national identity, and in the process, creating a new artistic tradition.
Portraits
El Libertador Simón Bolívar was born in 1783 in Caracas, Venezuela to an aristocratic family. He was tutored by Simón Rodríguez, who introduced Bolívar to the work of Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau—specifically his ideas on the origins of inequality. Bolívar’s privileged background also permitted him to travel abroad, and in 1804 he met the French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte and the Prussian naturalist, and explorer, Alexander von Humboldt who had travelled extensively in Latin America and ignited Bolívar’s patriotism.
Bolívar posed for Colombian painter Pedro José Figueroa, a descendant of a colonial family of portraitists and miniature artists. In Simón Bolívar: The Liberator of Colombia (above), Figueroa emphasizes Bolívar’s military triumph through the three medals that decorate his uniform: the Order of the Liberators of Venezuela, the Cross of Boyacá and the Liberators of Cundinamarca. In another portrait by Figueroa (below), The Liberator is depicted in military uniform with large gold epaulettes, a sword dangling from the waist, and a prominent belt with his initials “S.B.” imprinted on the buckle.
Pedro José Figueroa, Bolívar and the Allegory of America, 1819, oil on canvas, Museo Quinta de Bolivar, Bogotá (Ministerio de Cultura de Colombia)
In both portraits by Figueroa, Bolívar appears almost entirely frontal, his posture stiff and anatomy awkward—a colonial aesthetic that the artist carries over into the nineteenth century. Privileging textures, color, and clothing, these paintings stress the historical or social importance of the sitter. The use of text within a portrait—another hallmark of colonial painting—appears in the two Figueroa portraits of Bolívar, as well as in Portrait of Bolívar in Bogotá by José Gil de Castro (below). In each of these portraits, the use of text helps to reinforce Bolívar’s heroism, stating yet again, and this time in written form, that he is indeed El Libertador. While military dress seems to be a consistent feature in the portraiture of Bolívar, his facial features and skin tone change according to artist. Despite the fact that Bolívar was a creole, Figueroa calls attention to his uniquely Latin American character by depicting him with darker skin—a reference to the racial mixing that characterized Latin America after colonization.
José Gil de Castro, Portrait of Bolívar in Bogotá, 1830 (Museo Nacional de Arqueologia, Antropoligia, e Historia del Perú, Ministerio de Cultura del Perú)
In contrast to Figueroa, Gil de Castro presents Bolívar in a full-length portrait, providing a view of both The Liberator and his surroundings. The format and composition of the portrait, as well as the pose, recall The Emperor Napoleon in His Study at the Tuileries by the French artist Jacques-Louis David (left). The interior view of both portraits provide further information about the personalities of these generals. In the case of Napoleon, for example, David includes a copy of Plutarch’s Lives on the floor, in an attempt to position Napoleon within an ancient lineage. In Gil de Castro’s portrait of Bolívar, the globe placed prominently in the background announces Bolívar’s worldliness and regional ambitions, as reflected in his liberation of multiple Latin American countries.
Jacques-Louis David, Napoleon in His Study at the Tuileries, 1812, oil on canvas, 203.9 x 125.1 cm (National Gallery of Art)
The military attire and heroic pose of Bolívar, shown with one hand tucked inside his jacket and his body positioned at an angle, recall the portrait of Napoleon. Though both portraits represent interiors—far from any battle—Bolívar and Napoleon proudly wear their military uniforms. The military heroism of Bolívar is further accentuated by the red banner of text at the top, which reads “Peru recalls the heroic deeds revered to its Liberator.” Painted in 1830, the year of Bolívar’s death, Gil de Castro depicts an aging yet noble Bolívar, quite different from the young liberator seen in Figueroa’s earlier portrait (top of page). The strong similarities between Portrait of Bolívar in Bogotá and The Emperor Napoleon in His Study at the Tuileries, as well as with other full-length portraits of military generals, suggest that even after independence Latin American artists continued to look to Europe for artistic models.
History Painting
While portraiture could capture the personality and physical features of a hero, its potential to convey narrative was limited. History painting solved this problem, allowing artists to record the pivotal battles or moments in the wars of independence. Additionally, and perhaps more importantly, history painting was often imbued with moral lessons about heroism and patriotism. As a result, in European art it was considered the most elevated genre of painting—above still life, landscape, and portraiture.
José María Espinosa, Battle of Palo River, c. 1850, oil on canvas, 81 x 121 cm (Museo Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá)
Historical subjects were also painted by some of the same artists who created portraits of the heroes of Latin American independence. This was the case with the Colombian creole painter José María Espinosa, a largely self-taught artist who specialized in miniature portraits, but who had also served in General Nariño’s Campaign of the South. Painted from memory but based on first-hand experience, Espinosa memorialized the battle of Palo River. Probably due to his lack of experience with this new genre, Espinosa organized his composition as if it were a landscape. Focusing on the topography and vegetation of Colombia rather than on particular military heroes and pivotal moments, Espinosa’s Battle of Palo River (above) is better understood as a landscape view rather than a representation of the particulars of an historical event. His landscapist approach is also reflected in his handling of the composition, in which he delineates foreground, middle ground, and background, creating an illusionistic sense of deep space. In the foreground, the ground closest to the viewer, two military soldiers energetically ride on horseback, while in the middle ground the battle intensifies near the river, all culminating in a peaceful sunset. The cropped tree positioned at right frames the event, which unfolds in various stages culminating in the background.
The end of Gran Colombia
Despite the ambition of Gran Colombia, it remained politically complex, and worsened when Bolívar proclaimed himself dictator in 1828, a move he justified by pointing to insurrections. He became increasingly unpopular and that same year survived an assassination attempt. After 1828, Bolívar retreated to Santa Marta, Colombia where he died in 1830 while awaiting voluntary exile in Europe. Despite his attempts to create unity, and with the wars of independence now over, Latin American countries no longer saw a reason for partnership. Gran Colombia dissolved in 1830, and in the ensuing decades the countries of Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Panama, as we know them today, were established.
1As quoted in Marie Arana, Bolivar: American Liberator (Simon and Schuster, 2013), p. 223.
Jorge Luis Borges was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. His father was a lawyer who also published a few poems. Borges would credit him with teaching a young Borges about the possibility of language. His mother translated the works of William Faulkner and Franz Kafka into Spanish. At the age of nine, Borges would follow in her footsteps and publish a Spanish translation of Oscar Wilde’s “The Happy Prince.” He went on to translate works of Walt Whitman and James Joyce when he was older. After World War I, Borges edited literary magazines, such as Prisma and Proa. In his writing, experimentation with space and time are the hallmarks much of his work. His use of Magical Realism and experimental style ran counter to the Expressionism popular at the time. Borges’s writing, especially the works after 1930, would have the attention to detail and daily life that instils realism into the texts. His form of Magical Realism incorporates moments of improbability that provide the contrast with the reality he is rendering. The improbable connections in his work may be reflection of Jung’s influence on Borges’s writing. This attention to detail takes precedence in his work over traits such as developing sympathetic characters. “The Garden of Forking Paths” is from his first major collection of the same name, published in 1941. The short story combines elements of detective fiction with experimental plot structures and different realities. Borges undercuts the expected ending of the detective fiction by providing the reader with multiple possible outcomes. In the work, Borges uses one of his favorite concepts, a labyrinth, to explore ideas of space, connection, and time.
Gabriel García Márquez and Jorge Luis Borges are the best known Latin American writers in history. Márquez won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, arguably mostly for his best known novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967). Later novels that were also critically acclaimed include Love in the Time of Cholera (1985) and The General in his Labyrinth (1989).Márquez was born in Colombia and raised by his maternal grandparents. His grandfather, a liberal war veteran, was an enthusiastic storyteller, and his grandmother was fond of telling fantastic stories that included ghosts, premonitions, omen, and other fantastical and gothic elements. Márquez was particularly influenced by her matter of fact treatment of the supernatural, which he later imitated in his writings through the use of “magical realism,” the incorporation of supernatural or “magical” elements into fiction that is predominately realistic.In 1948, Márquez began his writing career as a journalist in Colombia while studying law at the National University of Colombia. In the mid-fifties, he moved to Caracas, Venezuela, and continued working as a columnist there. He later worked as a correspondent in Europe and travelled widely in the Southern United States (he was a devoted Faulkner fan) before settling in Mexico City. He later moved his family to Spain, where they were living when he became famous.A committed leftist, Márquez eventually was critical of U.S. imperialism and for many years denied entrance to the U.S. until the ban was removed in 1991 by President Bill Clinton. In later life, Márquez moved to Cuba, where he supported the Castro regime.In the short story “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” (1955), which Márquez claimed was written for children, includes elements typical of Márquez’s writing, particularly magical realism and folk elements. The elements of magical realism are characterized by the matter of fact inclusion of supernatural intrusions into everyday life. The folk characteristics here are directly traceable to Márquez’s upbringing in rural Colombia, where he regularly heard folktales from the region as part of his early education.
“Capoeira Conviver I” by bongo vongo is license under CC BY-SA 2.0
Capoeira is a Brazilian martial art, game, and dance largely derived from African roots. It was initially developed and practiced by slaves in Brazil. Unlike most of Latin America, which was largely colonized by Spain and, to a lesser extent, France, Brazil was under Portuguese control until 1822. African slaves were first imported during the 16th century, adding to an already enslaved indigenous population. More African slaves were brought into Brazil than any other country, many estimates numbering over four million. Brazil outlawed the slave trade in 1850 but did not emancipate its slaves until 1888, the last Western country to do so.
Capoeira initially emerged as a fighting technique, particularly practiced by escaped slaves and possibly openly practiced on plantations disguised as a dance or game. Many escaped slaves in Brazil formed autonomous settlements, called quilombos, in remote locales. After emancipation, there were few opportunities or means of employment for recently freed former slaves. Some capoeiristas were hired by criminal gangs, leading to the formal prohibition of capoeira by the Brazilian government in 1890.
In the early 1900s the style evolved into a less aggressive form of dance and martial art instead of a tool of combat and intimidation. Formal capoeira schools were first formed in the 1930s led by a mestre (master). With the prohibition of capoeira over, new capoeira schools spread throughout Brazil, many with governmental support. Groups soon started to tour throughout the country and internationally, assisting in the spread of the style and eventual recognition as a sport by the Brazilian government in 1972.
Capoeira potentially influenced the development of breakdancing, which emerged as part of the hip hop movement in New York City in the 1970s. There were documented capoeira troops in New York City during that period and there are numerous similarities between the two styles. Both focus on acrobatic movements, largely of the lower body, with the hands, and sometimes head, used for stability.
“Capoeira show Master de fleuret” by Marie-Lan Nguyen is licensed under CC BY 2.5
“Breakdancer – Faneuil Hall” by Chris Kirkman is licensed under CC BY 2.0
Instruments
Berimbau (single-string bow)
The lead instrument in the capoeira is the berimbau, a single string instrument. Likely of African origin, typically three berimbaus of different pitches (low, middle, and high) are used during the capoeira, with the lowest leading the ensemble. The instrument is constructed out of a long wooden bow, a wire string, and a gourd that is held against the player’s stomach. Along with positioning the instrument against the player’s body, the left hand holds a metal coin or stone. The instrument is struck by a slender stick held by the right hand, which also holds a rattle called caxixi. Three different tones can be produced depending on the pressure applied by the coin/stone against the string: a lower tone if the stone is not against the string, a buzzy sound if the string is lightly against the string, or a higher tone if the stone is pushed tightly against the string.
” Mancha” by Kevin Nesnow is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Atabaque
In addition to the berimbau, there are a number of supporting percussion instruments used in capoeira. The atabaque is a tall hand drum that is used in many other Afro-Brazilian traditions in addition to the capoeira.
Pandeiro
The pandeiro is a frame drum similar in construction to a tambourine with a head on one side and metal jingles along the rim. Unlike the berimbau, the pandeiro is derived from a similar instrument found in Spain and Portugal. In addition to the capoeira, the pandeiro is used in other national styles in Brazil, such as samba and choro.
Dance/Martial Art
The posture used for the capoeira is defensive with a bent stance that is low to the ground and constant side-to-side movement, called ginga. The ginga step is the basic movement in capoeira and from which most other steps and movements are derived. The continual movement and crotch position makes the dancer/fighter more difficult to attack. Most of the focus is on lower body movements with striking kicks and sweeps. Some movements can also be quite acrobatic.
Title: “Negro Nao Quer Mais Sofrer” (“The Black Man No Longer Wants to Suffer”)
0:00 – 0:24 Berimbau leads the ensemble, with other instruments, including the atabaque, added in. Notice the slight momentary modifications in the berimbau’s pattern through the course of the song.
0:24 – 0:38 Lead/Main Vocalist
Negro não quer mais correr
(The black man no longer wants to run)
Negro não quer mais sofrer feitor
(The black man no longer wants to suffer the master)
0:38 – 0:46 Group Vocals
O-o-o, 0-o-o, O-o-o
O0:46 – 0:58 Lead Vocalist
Negro nasceu na senzala
(The black man was born in slave quarters)
Ficou doente sem amor
(Got sick without love)
0:58 – 1:05 Group Vocals
O-o-o, 0-o-o, O-o-o
O1:05 – 1:20 Lead Vocalist
Ele veio do cativeiro
(He came from captivity)
Na chibata do feitor
(For the master’s whip)
O suor que se escorreria
(The sweat would run)
É sangue do trabalhador
(Its worker’s blood)
1:20 – 1:28 Group Vocals
O-o-o, 0-o-o, O-o-o
O1:28 – 1:46 Lead Vocalist
Ai meu Deus o que eu faço
(Oh my God, what do I do?)
A imagem não se apagou
(The beauty does not disappear entirely)
Até hoje nessa vida
(Even today in this life)
A escravidão não se acabou
(Slavery never ends)
1:46 – 1:57 Overlapping call & response
Group vocals: O-o-o, 0-o-o, O-o-o O
Lead vocalist: le le le le le o
1:57 – 2:16 Lead Vocalist
Ai meu Deus o que eu faço
(Oh my God, what do I do?)
A imagem não se apagou
(The beauty does not disappear entirely)
Até hoje nessa vida
(Even today in this life)
A escravidão não se acabou
(Slavery never ends)
2:16 – End Overlapping call & response
Group vocals: O-o-o, 0-o-o, O-o-o OLead vocalist: le le le le le o
Source: LibreTexts Humanities
Geometric Abstraction in South America, an introduction
by Dr. Gillian Sneed
Joaquín Torres-García, Color Structure, 1930, oil on canvas, 24 x 20 inches (The Museum of Modern Art, New York)
During his decades spent living in Europe, Uruguayan artist and theorist Joaquín Torres-García experimented with several different artistic modes, including making representational paintings (depicting recognizable images) in a Neoclassical style or with bright colors and bold brushstrokes. While living in Paris, he would also come into contact with European geometric abstraction (abstract art based on geometric forms) and created a group with other artists he encountered there. He transitioned from making small toys and representational paintings to making geometric abstractions. He eventually returned to Uruguay and helped influence artists in Argentina, Brazil, and later, Venezuela to make art in this new modern style.
Geometric Abstraction rose to prominence in South America between the 1930s and the 1970s. Prior to this period, traditional representational art styles rooted in the traditions of academic painting were officially sanctioned and considered respectable in the region. This radical departure toward geometric abstraction was embraced by artists and state powers across Latin America as a way of culturally distancing themselves from the colonial past (c. 16th to early 19th century), while signifying their alignment with a new modern, economically independent future.
Joaquín Torres-García in Paris
Joaquín Torres-García, Color Structure, 1930, oil on canvas, 24 x 20 inches (The Museum of Modern Art, New York)
Like many Latin American artists of his generation, who lived, worked, and studied in Paris between World War I and II, Torres-García came to Paris because it was seen as the artistic capital of the West. While living there in the 1920s and early 1930s, he met Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian, the Dutch founders of the art movement De Stijl (also known as Neoplasticism). Together, they formed the artistic group “Circle and Square,” which promoted geometric abstraction in opposition to Surrealism, an art movement based on dream-like imagery and the subconscious that was well known in France at the time. Torres-García was inspired by Mondrian, but was critical of De Stijl’s strict austerity. He wanted to propose a more “human” approach to geometric abstraction that would engage his interests in Latin American Pre-Columbian and European ancient and Classical art.
Piet Mondrian, Composition II in Red, Blue, and Yellow, 1930, oil on canvas, 46 x 46 cm (Kunsthaus Zürich)
Torres-García’s Color Structure, made in Paris in 1930, demonstrates his interest in many of the same principles as the Neoplasticists, including the grid, a reduced palette of primary colors, and the use of the Golden Ratio. These qualities are also evident in Mondrian’s Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow (made the same year as Torres-Garcia’s Color Structure), a non-objective painting divided asymmetrically by thick black lines into squares of various sizes filled with flat planes of white and primary colors, the largest one, a bright red. Torres-García was inspired by De Stijl’s emphasis on the grid and Constructivism’s geometry, as well as what he believed to be the “universalism” of nonobjective art—in other words, he believed that geometric abstraction, which does not depict recognizable figurative imagery, could be visually understood across all cultures. In Torres-Garcia’s Color Structure, we also see a grid composed of different sized of rectangles in blue, yellow, white, and red, arranged vertically and horizontally.
A Fibonacci spiral that approximates the Golden ratio (diagram: Dicklyon)
Torres-García also adopted van Doesburg’s and Mondrian’s use of the Golden Ratio, an important concept to him, which he felt would help his art become integrated with natural and cosmic forces. But, unlike Mondrian, Torres-García emphasizes Color Structure’s imperfections: the grid is drawn freehand with wavy lines and the colors are muddy and include tonal variation and rough brushwork.
Constructive Universalism in Uruguay
Sun Gate, 500 and 900 C.E., Tiwanaku, Bolivia (photo: Brent Barrett, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
When Torres-García returned home to Uruguay in 1934 (for financial reasons and the encouragement of friends), after more than forty years living abroad, he sought to bring geometric abstraction to Latin America as a way to reconcile this style with the region’s own cultural histories and artistic traditions. Dissatisfied with what he saw as a lack of emotion or humanity in Constructivism and De Stijl, he developed his own style called Universalismo Constructivo (Constructive Universalism), which sought to combine the “reason” of Constructivism’s and De Stijl’s geometry with the sources of abstract art found in the arts and crafts of ancient civilizations from around the world. He incorporated pictographs (simplified images or symbols) related to the cultures of various ancient civilizations (including Pre-Columbian cultures), into his images. He felt these pictographs communicated common ideas to people everywhere, making them “universal.”
As a cultural nomad who lived abroad in the U.S. and Europe for 43 years before returning to Uruguay, Torres-García was interested in the concept of “universalism” because he wanted to find visual elements that were shared by all cultures, underpinning his belief in the metaphysical wholeness of the universe. He also wanted to show how the geometric principles of pre-Columbian, Indigenous artistic styles actually anticipated later European geometric abstraction. His ideas paralleled psychologist Carl Jung, who believed that archetypal images could connect individuals to collective cultures and universal experiences. Torres-García was not relating to Jung directly, and for him, the metaphysical was much more important than the psychological. His search for the universal was not based on the psyche of the individual, but rather the universal collective.
Joaquín Torres-García, Arte universal (Universal Art), 1943. Oil on canvas, 106 cm x 75 cm (Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales de Uruguay)
We find an expression of these impulses in his painting Universal Art, a composition in earthy browns depicting many interconnected rectangular compartments filled with pictographs, including shapes, symbols, and recognizable images such as the sun, the moon, scales, fish, a heart, a house, boats, and people, that appear as if they are carved into wood or stone. Like his earlier works that borrow from Mondrian, Torres-García creates an asymmetrical grid based on the Golden Ratio with a reduced color palette, but his earth tones convey more warmth, and his rough, painterly strokes and shading appear more “crafty” and reveal a human touch.
Later, Torres-García founded an arts and crafts workshop called the Taller Torres-García to disseminate his artistic theories to a younger generation of Uruguayan artists, whose style came to be known as the School of the South. Following Torres-García’s innovations in the 1930s and 1940s, artists across Latin America—especially in Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela—began working in geometric abstraction, which would dominate the painting and sculpture in those countries until the 1960s and 1970s.
The cover of Arturo by artist Tomás Maldonado, an organic, abstract automatist woodcut, contradicts the kinds of constructive geometric abstraction being advocated inside the magazine’s pages, and demonstrates that this was still early on in the process of theorizing and practicing the new style. Tomás Maldonado, Arturo magazine cover, 1944
AACI and Madí in Argentina
In 1944, a group of Argentine and Uruguayan artists based in Buenos Aires published the first and only issue of a magazine about abstract art titled Arturo, with texts and reproductions of artworks by Torres-García, Mondrian, and the Russian abstract artist Wassily Kandinsky. The magazine was intended to promote Concrete Art (a term first used by Theo van Doesburg to describe nonobjective geometric abstraction) in Argentina.
Two Argentine Concrete Art groups emerged from the magazine: the Association of Concrete-Invention (AACI) and the Madí Group. These developments took place during the first term of the presidency of the Argentine populist Juan Domingo Perón, whose administration officially sanctioned naturalistic, figurative art styles, which these Concrete art movements fought against.
Inventionist manifesto alongside photographs of artworks, included inside the catalogue for the group’s first exhibition
AACI
The AACI was founded in 1945 by Argentine artist Tomás Maldonado and poet Edgar Bayley. The catalogue for the group’s first exhibition included their manifesto—a written statement declaring the group’s intentions, motives, and views—titled the “Inventionist Manifesto.” It called for artists to “invent” their own images, rather than trying to copy what they see, and justified Concrete art through Marxist political theories. [1]
Tomás Maldonado, Development of a Triangle, 1949. Oil on canvas, 31 3/4 x 23 3/4 in (Museum of Modern Art)
Embracing Mondrian’s and van Doesburg’s strict Concrete aesthetics while rejecting Torres-García’s emphasis on symbolism and a hand-made aesthetic, the AACI emphasized a rigorous, mathematical, even mechanical-looking approach to geometric abstraction with flat, planar colors. These principles are on display in Maldonado’s Development of a Triangle a composition on a white ground of intersecting straight and angular lines and a series of triangles, one yellow and another violet. [2]
Madí Group
In 1946 the Madí Group was formed by artists Rhod Rothfuss, Carmelo Arden Quin, and Gyula Kosice. [1] Like the AAIC, Madí endorsed making nonobjective artworks with flat planes of bright color. But, unlike the AAIC, Madí art was more playful and experimented with three-dimensions and unusual materials such as Plexiglas and neon.
Rhod Rothfuss, Tres círculos rojos (Three Red Circles), 1948, filler and enamel on wood, 100 x 70 cm (Museu de Arte Latino-Americana de Buenos Aires)
Madí artists often rejected the traditional rectangular picture frame in favor of an irregularly-shaped canvas, known as a marco recortado (cutout frame). The cutout frame was first conceived by Rothfuss in an essay he wrote for Arturo, in which he argued that irregularly-shaped canvases would allow artworks to function like other objects in the world, rather than as windows framing views of another world. One example of the cutout frame is Rothfuss’s Three Red Circles, a bright yellow geometrically-shaped composition with shapes delineated with thick black lines, a blue rectangle at the top and on the side, and three small red circles on the left.
Max Bill, Tripartite Unity, 1948–1949, stainless steel, 113,5 cm x 83 cm x 100 cm (Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Universidade de São Paulo)
Concrete and Neo-Concrete Art in Brazil
Max Bill
In 1951, Swiss Concrete artist and former Bauhaus student Max Bill won the grand prize for sculpture at the First São Paulo Biennial (a large international exhibition occurring every two years) in Brazil, for his metallic sculpture of flowing, intertwining ribbon-like forms, called Tripartite Unity. This sculpture would influence a young generation of Concrete artists in the country, including the Grupo Ruptura in São Paulo and the Grupo Frente in Rio de Janeiro. Concrete art captured the values of science and mathematical precision heralded in Brazil in the 1950s, a period of rapid industrial growth, modernization, and the development of a new capital in Brasília defined by architect Oscar Niemeyer’s futuristic International Style architecture.
The Grupo Ruptura
Judith Lauand, Espaço Virtual (Virtual Space), 1960. Tempera on canvas, 45 cm x 45 cm x 2.7 cm (Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Universidade de São Paulo)
The Grupo Ruptura was formed in 1952 with an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo. The group’s name meant “rupture,” and it sought to break with traditional art styles, namely naturalistic painting, which was seen as elitist (though this break was not specifically tied to political radicalism). Their works were characterized by flat colors and a reduced palette, geometry, and industrialized media like enamels and mechanical techniques like spray painting that would not reveal the hand of the artist. Their works also incorporated Gestalt psychological theory (a perceptual theory about how the brain forms a whole image from many component parts) by training the viewer’s eye on outlines as contours of a solid shape, as in Judith Lauand’s Virtual Space, a painting of a pinwheel-like shape of white and purple lines in a field of black. Lauand was also the only woman in the Grupo Ruptura.
The Grupo Frente and Neo-Concrete art
The Grupo Frente was founded by artist and teacher Ivan Serpa in Rio de Janeiro in 1954. Many of the artists involved were his former students at the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro. They rejected the Grupo Ruptura’s strict adherence to purity, science, and math and promoted instead more creative intuition in geometric abstraction. This shift in the Grupo Frente’s brand of Concrete art eventually led to a new style altogether, known as Neo-Concrete art, pioneered by artists Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape, and later, Hélio Oiticica.
Lygia Clark, Bicho, 1962, aluminum (photo: trevor.patt, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
The principles of Neo-Concrete art were theorized by poet Ferreira Gullar in his “Neo-Concrete Manifesto” (1959), which called for more sensuality, freedom, and feeling in Concrete art. Like Torres-García who sought to infuse geometric abstraction with more emotion, the manifesto sought to distance the new movement from the dogmatic rationalism of European Concrete art styles like Neo-plasticism and Constructivism.
Gullar also developed the theory of what he termed the “non-object,” by which he meant an art object that would function as a mediator between the spectator and the physical experience of the object. This is exemplified by Lygia Clark’s Bicho (Critter), a metal sculpture made of moveable flaps intended to be manipulated and rearranged by the spectator-participant (or someone who observes and participates). As Clark’s Bicho suggests, Neo-Concrete art adapted Concrete art’s geometric shapes and transformed them into organic three-dimensional objects to be handled by spectators, or environments to be physically entered, which helped to break down boundaries between art and life in Brazilian art of the 1960s.
Carlos Cruz-Diez, Chromo-Interference (Cromo Interferencia), from AGPA 73: Pan American Graphic Arts (AGPA 73: Artes gráficas panamericanas), 1973, screenprint, 43 x 42.5 cm (Museum of Modern Art)
Optical and Kinetic Art in Venezuela
Two other forms of geometric abstraction, known as Optical (or Op, a style of abstract art based on patterns and optical illusions) and Kinetic art (objects that have moving parts), became popular in Venezuela in the 1950s and 1960s. These styles were dominated by three artists in the country: Carlos Cruz-Diez, Alejandro Otero, and Jesús Soto. Their works included small and large-scale abstract sculptures and public artworks made of bright colors and industrial materials that moved, or appeared to move.
Jesús Rafael Soto, Penetrable BBL Bleu, conceived 1999, given to LACMA in 2020 (Los Angeles County Museum of Art)
A famous example are Soto’s “penetrables,” tubes of colored plastic suspended from the ceiling in box-like shapes, into which participants could enter and play. While Brazilian Neo-Concretists sought to move away from the purely optical toward the experiential and sensual, the Venezuelans still embraced the visual, but also created participatory and sensually experiential environments and objects to be interacted with, like Soto’s penetrables.
The Op and Kinetic works by these artists received corporate and government support from the Venezuelan regime of Colonel Marcos Pérez Jiménez’s dictatorship of the 1950s, as well as later democratically elected administrations in the 1960s and 1970s, and resulted in the commissions of several large-scale public artworks. The state and corporate leaders believed such works helped position Venezuela on the world stage as a modern, forward thinking, and technologically advanced country. This was important to them as they were growing their oil industry for international export. These works were used by corporations and the state as propaganda promoting Venezuela as an international modern center of industry, revealing how state-patronage and nationalist interests intervened in the so-called “avant-garde” art in the country during the period.
Another important artist in the history of Venezuelan abstraction was Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt), a German emigrant, who developed her own approach to geometric abstraction, creating delicate sculptures and environments (sculptures that occupy entire gallery spaces) made of wire. Gego’s large Reticulárea (Reticular), created at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas in 1969, comprises a sprawling wire grid that filled the gallery’s floor, walls, and ceiling, into which spectators could enter and walk around.
Contributions and Legacy
Latin American geometric abstraction united international principles of modernist abstraction with local cultural traditions, and led to more participatory forms of art. It also served as an ideological tool for both Latin American artists and nation-states to signal a break with traditional art styles—associated with their colonial past—and to assert a new, modern, and often utopian industrialized future. Latin American geometric abstraction is probably most notable for the large number of women artists who were leaders in these movements and who achieved successful artistic careers in their lifetimes, something that was much less common with mid-twentieth century art movements in the U.S. and Europe. [3]
Notes:
[1] Their formulation of “Concrete-Invention” was rooted in their commitment to Marxist materialism and anti-idealist revolutionary and collective art.
[2] The term “Madí” has various purported origins: it may have represented the combination of the first syllables (in Spanish) of the term “dialectic materialism,” it may have been an abbreviation of “Madrid,” or it could have been an acronym for “Carmelo Arden Quin.”
[3] In addition to the women artists mentioned in this article, Judith Lauand, Lygia Pape, Lygia Clark, and Gego, were many others, including Lydi Prati, Mira Schendel, Fanny Sanín, María Freire, Amalia Nieto, and Mercedes Pardo.
The origins of modern art in São Paulo, an introduction
by Dr. Adriana Zavala
Anita Malfatti, The Fool, 1913, oil on canvas, 61 cm x 50.6 cm (Museum of Contemporary Art of University of São Paulo, Brazil)
Modern art in São Paulo
1922 was an important year for avant-garde activities in Brazil. During the week of February 11–18, which was also Carnival and the centennial celebration of Brazil’s declaration of independence from Portugal, a multidisciplinary event, known as Semana de Arte Moderna (Modern Art Week) took place at the Municipal Theatre of São Paulo. It featured an art exhibition, poetry readings, music, and dance festivals organized by the painter Emiliano di Cavalcanti, and poets Oswald de Andrade and Mario de Andrade (no relation to Oswald).
Municipal Theatre of São Paulo, 1903–11, São Paulo, Brazil (photo taken during the 1920s, Brazilian National Archives)
Victor Brecheret, Eve, 1921 (photo: Pinheiro Natália, CC BY-SA 4.0)
Modern Art Week was intended to announce the São Paulo avant-garde’s break with earlier art. The exhibition of art included works by the sculptor Victor Brecheret, who returned to Brazil from Rome in 1919, paintings by Anita Malfatti, completed during her time in Berlin and New York, and di Cavalcanti, along with numerous other painters, sculptors, and architects. One of the other painters who would play a significant role in the development of Brazilian modernism was Tarsila do Amaral.
The Semana was conceived as a reaction against the official academic art and literature. Academic art was associated with the conservative oligarchy (powerful families who owned huge coffee plantations) and remained intent on emulating the time-worn Romanticism of nineteenth-century Europe. In many respects the impetus for the art exhibition was the radical newness of Brecheret’s sculptures and Malfatti’s expressionist paintings. Brecheret’s sculptures were rendered in a dramatically stylized, proto-Art Deco style, and Malfatti’s paintings were met with derision from the establishment when first exhibited in 1917.
At the time of the Semana, São Paulo was one of the fastest growing cities in Brazil. Industrialization was transforming this coffee-growing center into a thriving metropolis with electrified street lamps, a café culture, movie theaters, and luxurious department stores. Young Brazilian intellectuals were hungry for art and literature that matched the city’s vibrant energy and they were also part of a political movement intent on challenging the stranglehold of the oligarchy. Like their peers in Argentina, writers and artists like Mario and Oswald de Andrade and di Cavalcanti were eager for an intellectual culture that was not only modern and up-to-date but also intrinsically Brazilian.
The controversy surrounding Malfatti’s paintings
Anita Malfatti, The Fool, 1913, oil on canvas, 61 cm x 50.6 cm (Museum of Contemporary Art of University of São Paulo, Brazil)
When Malfatti exhibited a selection of her paintings, including The Fool and The Man of Seven Colors, the art critic Monteiro Lobato attacked her in an influential São Paulo newspaper (“A Propósito da Exposição”). He described her painting as “beastly” and “deformed,” the latter a satirical play on the translation of her Italian last name (“mal fatti”); he declared her painting to be akin to art produced by the mentally insane, work born of “paranoia and mystification,” and finally he dismissed her as “a girl who paints.”
Anita Malfatti, The Man of Seven Colors, 1915–16, charcoal and pastel on paper, 62 x 46 cm (Museu de Arte Brasileira, São Paulo)
Describing her as an amateurish follower of the “excesses” of Picasso, Lobato described two kinds of artists, those who see things “normally,” in the tradition of Praxiteles, Raphael, Rubens, and Rodin, and feel called to preserve the rhythm of life aesthetically, and, those who see things as “deformed” and “sadistic.” He wrote that such artists, Malfatti among them, were merely “shooting stars” destined to oblivion. Lobato was surely offended both by her expressionistic and non-naturalistic use of color but also by her engagement with the male nude, which was still taboo for women artists.
Malfatti’s approach was, however, entirely in keeping with modern art in Berlin and New York where she had studied with Lovis Corinth and Homer Boss. It was Boss who had challenged her to use pure color, as seen in the high key yellow, green, and blue in both The Fool and The Man of Seven Colors.
In Man of Seven Colors she used expressive lines to emphasize the sculptural quality of the nude body and areas of pure color to emphasize figural torsion. The fact that the nude is headless suggests a distancing from the individual portrayed, and the potential erotic charge. The painting engages the viewer more emotionally and cerebrally than sexually, given the model’s modest posture.
Anita Malfatti and modern art in Brazil
Anita Malfatti, The Woman with Green Hair, 1916 (private collection)
In the wake of the controversy surrounding the exhibition of Anita Malfatti’s work, young writers like Mario de Andrade rallied to her side, championing her for initiating modern art in Brazil. Twenty of her paintings were included in the exhibition during the Semana, including works like The Yellow Man and Woman with Green Hair, the titles of which call attention to the innovative use of color that had so incensed Monteiro Lobato. Emiliano di Cavalcanti recalled that Malfatti’s exhibition was “a revelation . . . [she] came from the outside, and her modernism . . . had the seal of experience in Paris, Rome, and Berlin.” [1]
Emiliano Di Cavalcanti
Di Cavalcanti worked as an illustrator for newspapers and magazines. He designed the program for the Semana de Arte Moderna, and his image for the cover declares his embrace of modern art and of stylistic diversity. It features a female nude standing on a pedestal, but the figure is rendered with a combination of sharp and sensual curving lines, not unlike Malfatti’s work and even Picasso’s already infamous Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1906–07).
Emiliano di Cavalcanti, Semana de Arte Moderna, 1922
Di Cavalcanti invokes the turn in avant-garde art toward primitivism, whereby artists like Pablo Picasso and the Emil Nolde drew inspiration from objects appropriated from Indigenous peoples and cultures in Africa and the South Pacific, as well as pre-conquest civilizations of the Americas to challenge establishment values by engaging in formal and conceptual experiments inspired by the exotic “other.” Throughout Latin America primitivism was made even more complex as many artists were rediscovering “other” cultures within their own local contexts and appropriating these in order to innovate and at times challenge European domination of the arts and remnants of colonial practices.
Here, di Cavalcanti sets the nude amidst a primitivistic background of foliage. In the lower right, a simplified human figure recalls a trope of ethnographic sculpture. In the middle- and background there appear to be modernist, even Cubist paintings hung askew. Their frames are articulated with jagged lines that lend additional energy to the composition.
Despite being a leading figure in the emergence of Brazilian modernism, di Cavalcanti’s own style was still overtly sensual. His portraits and figural compositions aimed at championing “another concept of femininity” as representative of the authentic Brazil, or brasilidade, and in this regard his work was somewhat atypical of the art movement launched by the Semana de Arte Moderna. [2]
In a context dominated by the white elite, di Cavalcanti’s pictorial interpretations of Brazil’s working classes need to be understood as a confrontation of prevailing notions of beauty. They are also in dialogue with Mexican muralists who wanted to focus on the working class and make art for the people. To the modern eye however, his work appears to internalize stereotypes of Brazil’s exotic “other” even if his aim was to subvert academic authority by affirming the beauty and value of Brazil’s mixed-race working class.
Emiliano di Cavalcanti, Samba, 1925, oil on canvas, 175 x 154 cm (Collection of Genviève and Jean Boghici, Rio de Janeiro)
Di Cavalcanti’s approach is exemplified in Samba, a painting completed in 1925 following a two-year sojourn in Paris where he met Picasso. The painting depicts a partly nude Black woman and a partially clothed mulatta swaying to the music of a guitar, strummed by a young Black man. The figures’ vacant stares serve to heighten the quality of sensual abandon. Art historian Edith Wolfe has observed that the solid, naturalistic bodies suggest an affinity for Picasso’s post-Cubist classicism transferred to the favela in the service of nationalistic modernism. [3]
Cover of Klaxon no. 3
Di Cavalcanti’s primitivized bodies seem to risk re-colonizing Brazil’s marginal communities, especially its women, in the service of the male gaze. Others have argued that the artist’s aim was to extoll Brazilian unity by celebrating and reconciling racial and class disparities. Di Cavalcanti’s Samba exemplifies the quest for an art that was both modern and Brazilian, and that followed in the wake of the Semana de Arte Moderna.
Building from the Semana de Arte Moderna, artists and writers went on to champion modernism in the pages of the journal Klaxon, considered the first publication of the Brazilian avant-garde and published between 1922 and 1923. By 1923, however, not only di Cavalcanti, but also Malfatti, Brecheret, Oswald de Andrade, and Vicente do Rêgo Monteiro were all in Paris, where each in their own way engaged with the avant-garde in the pursuit of a Brazilian modernism.
Read more about Klaxon from the Documents on 20th-century Latin American and Latino Art
Source: Dr. Adriana Zavala, “The origins of modern art in São Paulo, an introduction,” in Smarthistory, November 2, 2019, accessed July 18, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/modern-art-sao-paulo/.
Doris Salcedo: Third World Identity
by Art21
In her Bogotá studio, artist Doris Salcedo discusses the stereotypes she faces as a citizen of a Third World country and how she embraces these first-hand experiences of discrimination to inform her art. Shown working alongside her team of assistants, whose collective labor underscores the political messages of her sculptures, Salcedo proposes a more humble role for artists working today. Doris Salcedos understated sculptures and installations embody the silenced lives of the marginalized, from individual victims of violence to the disempowered of the Third World. Although elegiac in tone, her works are not memorials: Salcedo concretizes absence, oppression, and the gap between the disempowered and powerful. While abstract in form and open to interpretation, her works serve as testimonies on behalf of both victims and perpetrators. Salcedos work reflects a collective effort and close collaboration with a team of architects, engineers, and assistants and—as Salcedo says—with the victims of the senseless and brutal acts to which her work refers. Learn more about Doris Salcedo: http://www.art21.org/artists/doris-sa…
“Colombian artist Doris Salcedo discusses why she split the turbine hall floor. Her new work, Shibboleth, is a long snaking fissure that ran the vast length of the Turbine Hall, as if striking to the very foundations of the museum. Something similar might be said of the concept that underpins the piece. The word ‘shibboleth’ refers back to an incident in the Bible, which describes how the Ephraimites, attempting to flee across the river Jordan, were stopped by their enemies, the Gileadites. As their dialect did not include a ‘sh’ sound, those who could not say the word ‘shibboleth’ were captured and executed. A shibboleth is therefore a token of power: the power to judge, reject and kill. What might it mean to refer to such violence in a museum of modern art? For Salcedo, the crack represents a history of racism, running parallel to the history of modernity; a stand off between rich and poor, northern and southern hemispheres. She invites us to look down into it, and to confront discomforting truths about our world.” (Shibboleth: TateShots; Tate Modern, London) URL:https://youtu.be/NIJDn2MAn9I
The Turbine Hall
Since 2000, the Tate Modern has commissioned installations (the Unilever series) for the museum’s enormous Turbine Hall, including Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project (2003) and Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds (2010). In the eighth iteration, the Colombian artist Doris Salcedo produced Shibboleth, a deep meandering crack in the floor. Despite the unassuming nature of this work, it defies neat description and exists in a limbo between sculpture and installation, and the provocative title complicates the work instead of decoding it.
Salcedo has offered few explanations beyond stating how the fissure represents the immigrant experience in Europe. Though this theme is apparent in the work, it is by no means the only issue raised. As photographs of the installation demonstrate, visitors contorted their bodies in infinite ways as they tried to see below the crack. In Shibboleth, Salcedo elaborates a complex socio-political topic in a work with a tremendous formal presence.
Coded identification
Salcedo’s installation requires attentive viewing. The rupture measures 548 feet in length but its width and depth vary (changing from a slight opening to one several inches wide and up to two feet in depth). The viewer’s perception into the crevice alters, as he or she walks and shifts to better glimpse inside the cracks and appreciate the interior space, notably the wire mesh embedded along the sides.
Change in perspective is one of Salcedo’s goals. To go from viewing this installation as a fissure in concrete to an artwork about the disenfranchised may seem like a big step. It is helpful to think of Shibboleth as a work of conceptual art since the ideas that frame the physical crack in the floor are of equal, if not greater importance than the material work itself. Salcedo’s installation at the Tate Modern would be completely different if it were simply untitled; indeed, the analysis of the work would then settle exclusively on its formal qualities. But Salcedo has bestowed a curious and specific name: “Shibboleth,” a codeword that distinguishes people who belong from those who do not.
Every community, culture, and nation has its shibboleth. Among the U.S. military, “lollapalooza” was used during World War II since its tricky pronunciation could identify native, English-speaking Americans. But the sinister history of the word “shibboleth” illustrates how friends and enemies are separated by fine, linguistic lines. Any stranger in a foreign land appreciates the vulnerability this entails, especially the fear of being outed as a foreigner and exposed in a hostile environment.
Salcedo’s experience as a Colombian artist working abroad has made her especially sympathetic to the plight of marginalized people. Between 2002 and 2003, Salcedo completed two installations that make this clear. In the first work, the artist staged a performance where she lowered empty wooden chairs over the side of the Palace of Justice in Bogotá. The performance lasted 53 hours and commemorated the 1985 siege in that building where three hundred people were held hostage; the siege ended in a bloody confrontation between rebels and the military.
The second installation also honored the victims of senseless violence. Salcedo piled more than 1,500 chairs into a space between two buildings in Istanbul. The breathtaking sight of this nearly three-story sculpture highlighted how warfare disrupts everyday life and creates refugees out of ordinary citizens as it recalls the countless shoes discovered at concentration camps at the end of World War II.
For Salcedo, the ravine in the Tate Modern’s floor represents the immigrant experience in Europe, notably the racial segregation that marks immigrants of color as irrevocably “other,” a permanent state apart. Yet, the artist offers some hope. After seven months, the show ended and the Tate Modern filled the crack, leaving a scarred floor. This is a remarkable symbol of the possibility of healing through figurative and literal closure; however, the mark is also an obstacle to any attempts to erase the past.
From an institutional perspective, this scar is remarkable for other reasons: it is usually unimaginable for museum officials to permit an artist to permanently alter the exhibition space.
Salcedo’s act remains transgressive: the act of deliberately breaking one’s media (in this case a concrete floor) is an act of rebellion. In this way, Shibboleth joins a tradition of artists experimenting with surface. In the late 1940s, Lucio Fontana developed “Spazialismo,” an approach to art-making that converted the two-dimensional canvas into a three-dimensional space. Fontana slashed his monochrome canvases, and revealed a new space underneath the gashes. The artist’s bold move to disrupt the canvas’s nearly sacred surface was revolutionary and influenced later artists.
Throughout the 1970s Gordon Matta-Clark sawed into the walls, floors, and ceilings of buildings, often leaving cracks like the line of light in Splitting. For centuries, a canvas was a flat plane, the support for an image rather than an object in its own right. A building by definition sought to be structurally sound; any structural damage makes it unstable and dangerous. To highlight their subversion, these artists flaunt the negative space made by their incisions: Matta-Clark’s cuts in Splitting are illuminated by blinding light, while Fontana’s slashes and Shibboleth each reveal a startlingly dark void previously unseen.
Meanings
Matta-Clark, Fontana, and Salcedo create art that is difficult to classify. Is this painting? sculpture? architecture? installation? intervention? Salcedo’s strength as an artist is her ability to balance the formal impact of Shibboleth with its message, while preventing one from overshadowing the other. Salcedo’s reticence to discuss her process and meaning at length is our opportunity to develop infinite interpretations.