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The Latin American origins of ‘alternative modernism’David Craven aa Professor of Art History and Latin American Studies , University of New Mexico ,Published online: 19 Jun 2008.

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Third Text 36, Autumn 1996 29

The Latin American Originsof 'Alternative Modernism'

David Craven

1 Thomas McEvilley, Artand Otherness,MacPherson and Co,Kingston, New York,1992, p 11.

As we approach the end of a millennium, we seem to be suffering from anexcess of negative historical verdicts that in turn signal a lack of critical rigourin assessing modern developments. Nowhere is this observation morepertinent than to the postmortems for modernism that now endlessly circulatethroughout academe and the art world. A revealing example of this ill-advisedrush to dismiss modernism as a whole can be found, for example, in theotherwise commendable writings of art critic Thomas McEvilley, who wrotethe following:

It can now be recognized that Modernist internationalism was a somewhat deceptivedesignation for Western claims of universal hegemony... Modernist internationalismwas a form of imperial assertion by which non-Western cultures would assimilate toWestern mores. But as Modernism fetishized sameness, post-Modernism fetishizesdifference... this [post-Modernist] project requires art to question and critique thevery culture that produces it... Modernist art, by presenting beautiful objects lackingin apparent content, implied that the society producing such objects was alsobeautiful.1

So, here we have it in quite manichean terms: modernism is bad; postmod-ernism is good. The former is a wing of cultural imperialism and the latter issimply a means of thwarting it. Yet, McEvilley's statement above presupposesa number of untenable claims, such as the assumption that the phenomenon ofmodernism in the arts was monolithic and nondifferential, as well as essentiallyEurocentric. Unfortunately, McEvilley here implicitly starts off his criticism ofmodernism with an utterly uncritical acceptance of the late ClementGreenberg's implausibly reductive definition of modernism.

Contrary to what both Greenberg and many of his opponents would have usbelieve, however, modernist art from the late nineteenth century until the late

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2 See D Craven, 'ClementGreenberg and theTriumph' of WesternArt ' , Third Text 25,Winter 1993/94, pp 3-9.

3 Samir Amin,Eurocentrism (1988),trans. Russell Moore,Monthly Review Press,New York, 1989, pp viiff.See also Paul Gilroy, TheBlack Atlantic, HarvardUniversity Press,Cambridge, Mass., 1993.

4 Oriana Baddeley andValerie Fraser, Drawingthe Line: Art and CulturalIdentity in ContemporaryLatin America, Verso,London, 1989. See alsoRita Eder, 'El muralismoMexicano: Modernismoy modernidad', inModern-idad y modern-ización en el ArteMexicano, 1920-1960,Instituto Nacional deBellas Artes, MexicoCity, 1991, pp 67-81.

5 For two fine assessmentsof postmodernism alongthese lines, see AndreasHuyssen, 'Mapping thePost-Modern', in Afterthe Great Divide, IndianaUniversity Press, Bloom-ington, 1986, pp 179-221;and Hal Foster, 'Intro-duction', The Anti-Aesthetic, Bay Press,Seattle, 1983. See alsoJohn Roberts, Post-Modernism, Politics andArt, ManchesterUniversity Press,Manchester, 1990.

6 For the etymology of theterm 'modernismo', seeMax Henrique Ureña,Breve historia del modern-ismo, Siglo XXI, MexicoCity, 1954, pp 158ff. Seealso Juan RamonJiménez, El modernismo(1953), Aguilar, Madrid,1962; Angel Rama, RubénDarío y el modernismo,Ediciones de laBiblioteca, Caracas, 1920.

1950s can hardly be reduced either to a unified vision or to a uniform aesthetic.Even less can it be forcibly restricted to the doctrine of 'medium purity' or to adefense of so-called 'pure western values', both of which Greenberg maintainedthat modernism embodied.2 Here as elsewhere we must begin by recalling SamirAmin's incisive point that most 'western values' are not just western.3

To speak with insight and sensitivity of modernist art from the late 1800s tillthe post-1945 period is to speak of a plurality of related but also notably divergent andeven fractious tendencies, some of which were grounded in a broad-rangingmulticulturalism and were part of an uneven, non-linear development thatcontravenes the linear concept of historical progress intrinsic to westernmodernisation. These latter tendencies within modernism, which (followingOriana Baddeley and Valerie Fraser) I shall call 'alternative modernism' weregenerally far more progressive than others that are also classifiable as modernist.(Such is also the case with the diverse set of tendencies that are far too easilygrouped together under the overly generalised rubric of 'postmodernism'.4) Thismulti-lateral state of affairs has yet to be duly acknowledged either byGreenberg's canonical definition of modernism or even by many of the counter-arguments of postmodernists. Indeed, what has often been canonised by bothsides in this debate is less modernist art than Greenberg's own highlybowdlerised and quite homogeneous definition of it.

Before I proceed any further, though, let me emphasise that I am not speakinghere as an apologist for modernism in all its multifarious forms, but rather as onewho believes that we need to discuss modernism in a far more stringent anddifferentiated way than has often occurred in recent years. Nor do I wish to arguethat we have nothing left to learn from contemporary commentators likeMcEvilley or even from orthodox formalists like Greenberg. In fact, I think thatwe do. But, surely the question properly put is not 'Modernism, right or wrong?'We need to advance beyond modernism critically, rather than be dismissive of it(which would not constitute a legitimate advance). To do so, we must begin byavoiding sweeping référendums and ad hoc tribunals that simply decide for oragainst modernism, as if modernism itself were not a deeply contradictoryproject marked by a plurality of divergent tendencies, thus being constituted byboth progressive and regressive moments simultaneously.

In order to dispel some of the incomprehension that currently enshrouds theoverly hasty negative verdicts against modernism in its entirety, I shall try toaccomplish at least two different things in this article: first, I shall reconstructempirically the largely overlooked non-European etymology of the concept ofmodernism, along with the anti-colonial strain of it that has been christened'alternative modernism'. Such an analysis will entail a discussion of the poetry ofRuben Dario and the paintings of Diego Rivera in relation to artworks by AntoniGaudî, Pablo Picasso and Paul Klee.

Second, I shall highlight the theory of history, specifically the conception ofuneven historical development, that is presupposed by this above-notedminority voice within modernism. This is a tendency that has in fact contributednotably to an emergent postcolonial discourse that has become so significant atthe end of the twentieth century. When all of this has been done, it will becomeever more clear that postmodernism at its most profound is often a dissentingway of understanding and absorbing the progressive moments withinmodernism and thus in turn of advancing beyond them.5

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7 For a fine analysis ofDarío's poetry and politics,see Jean Franco, ModernCulture of Latin America:Society and the Artist,Pelican, Harmond-sworth,1970, and J Franco,Introduction to Spanish-American Literature,Praeger, New York, 1967,pp 142-147. See also DavidE. Whisnant, 'Rubén Daríoas a Focal Cultural Figurein Nicaragua', LatinAmerican Research Review,Vol 27 No 3, 1992, pp 7-49;Edelberto Torres, Ladramatica vida de RubénDario, Ediciones Grijalbo,Mexico City, 1966; andCharles D Watland, Poet-Errant: A Biography of RubenDario, PhilosophicalLibrary, New York, 1965.

8 Rubén Darío, 'Cabezas:Angel Zárraga', MundialMagazine, Vol II No 19,November 1912, pp 640-41.This included thereproduction of DiegoRivera's Portrait of (Retratode) Angel Zárraga.

9 Ulrico Brendel, 'El salón deotoño', Mundial Magazine,Vol II No 19, November1912, pp 623-24.

10 See Renato Poggioli, Theoryof the Avant-Garde (1962),trans. Gerald Fitzgerald,Harvard University Press,Cambridge, Mass., 1974;and Peter Bürger, Theory ofthe Avant-Garde (1974),trans. Michael Shaw,University of MinnesotaPress, Minneapolis, 1982.

11 Rubén Darío, 'Palabrasluminares', Prosas profanasy otros poemas (1896-1901),reprinted in Rubén Daríopoesia, (ed) Julio ValleCastillo and Ernesto MejíaSanchez, Editorial NuevaNicaragua, Managua, 1994,p 180: "Si hay poesía ennuestra América, elk está enlas cosas viejas: en Palenke yUtatlán, en el indio legendarioy el inca sensual y fino, y enel gran Moctezuma de la sillade oro. Lo demás es tuyo,demócrata Walt Whitman."

RUBEN DARIO AND THE INVENTION OF EARLY MODERNISMIt comes as a surprise for many of us to discover that, far from being coined inthe metropolitan West, the term 'modernism' (or modernismo) was in factinvented in the 1880s on the periphery of the world economic order by RubénDario of Nicaragua, Latin America's first internationally acclaimed modernauthor and still one of her most influential poets. Dario, who lived from 1867 to1916, inaugurated Latin America's earliest genuine avant-garde movementunder the banner of modernism. He evidently first used this term around1885/86 to refer to novel attributes in the writings of Mexican author RicardoContreras.'

In formal terms, Dario's own modernismo in such poems as Azul (1888)constituted a hybrid fusion of various artistic modes featuring heterogeneouscultural citations that were both European and non-European, along with beingat once pre-colonial, colonial, and postcolonial in origin. All of these divergentelements were in turn densely interwoven with references to experiencesgleaned from the five senses.7 Among the contemporary visual artists aboutwhom Dario wrote were the French sculptor Rodin and the late Symbolist LatinAmerican painter Angel Zârraga.*

Revealingly, when in 1912 he wrote an essay for Mundial Magazine about thepaintings of Zârraga, Dario selected Rivera's portrait of Zârraga to accompanyhis essay. Furthermore, in this same issue of Mundial there was a brief discussionof Diego Rivera's modernist paintings by another Latin American author.' To aconsiderable extent, Dario was to modernismo what Apollinaire was to Cubism,Marinetti was to Futurism, and André Breton was to Surrealism. In all four ofthese cases, a literary figure, specifically a poet, played a key role in articulatingthe project of an avant-garde movement many of whose most well-known practi-tioners turned out to be painters. (And here I am using the term 'avant-gardemovements' so as to draw on the key concepts as associated with them in thenow classic studies by Renato Poggioli and Peter Bürger).10

The general dynamic of his poetry was driven, on the one hand, by a reactionagainst the outdated and ossified literary conventions of official Spanish lettersand it was motivated, on the other hand, by an assimilation of certain newdevelopments in nineteenth-century French literature that were then combinedwith pre-Columbian cultural traditions of the remote past. The view motivatingthis unlikely synthesis was articulated by Dario as follows in Prosas profanos(1896): "If there is poetry in our America, it is to be found in the old things.""

Indeed, this notable reference to the artistic representation of "nuestraAmerica" by the founding figure of modernism also reminds us of the earlier andstill celebrated essay of 1891 that had first popularised throughout Latin Americathe explicitly non-Eurocentric phrase of 'our America'. This essay, entitledsimply 'Nuestra America', was written by José Martî (1852-1895), the only LatinAmerican writer of the second half of the 19th century who rivalled Dario inprestige and importance.12 (Incidently, Marti was also an art critic of note whopraised French Impressionism and wrote reviews of Mexican artists, such asDiego Rivera's teachers Santiago Rebull and José Maria Velasco.)" Revealingly,Marti's celebrated essay called for the construction of a postcolonial, multi-racial,and transcultural society. In fact, Marti, who was a leader of the movement for 'national liberation in Cuba, was killed in 1895 while he was engaged in thearmed struggle against western, specifically Spanish, colonialism."

Such a new multi-ethnic society would presuppose a fundamental rethinkingof history, so that, according to Marti, 'The history of America, from the Incas tothe present, must be taught in clear detail and to the letter, even if the archons of

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12 José Martí, 'NuestraAmerica' (1891), in OurAmerica, trans. ElinorRandall and (ed) PhilipFoner, Monthly ReviewPress, New York, 1977,pp 84-95.

13 See José Martí, Ensayossobre arte y literatura, (ed)Roberto FernándezRetamar, Editorial LetrasCubanas, Havana, 1979.

14 Philip Foner,Introduction, OurAmerica, op cit, p 58.

15 José Martí, 'NuestraAmerica', op cit, p 88.

16 Ibid, pp 94 & 93.

17 See David E Whisnant,'Rubén Dario as a FocalCultural Figure inNicaragua', pp 7-49.

18 Rubén Darío, 'ARoosevelt', in Rubén Daríopoesía, op cit, pp 255-256.

19 Ibid.

20 José Enrique Rodó, Ariel(1900), (trans) MargaretSayers Peden, Universityof Texas Press, Austin,1988. See also RobertoGonzález Echevarría,The Case of the SpeakingStatue: Ariel and theMagisterial Rhetoric ofthe Latin AmericanEssay', in The Voice of theMasters, University ofTexas Press, Austin, 1985,pp 8-32.

21 Rubén Darío, 'El reyburgués (Cuento alegre)',reprinted in Rubén Darío:Cuentos completos, (ed)Ernesto Meijía Sánchezand Julio Valle-Castillo,Editorial NuevaNicaragua, Managua,1994, pp 127-131.

Greece are overlooked. Our Greece must take priority over the Greece that is notours".15 Aside from colonial peonage, there were the grave impediments ofracism and imperialism that blocked the path of reconstituting the Americasalong more socially just lines. Accordingly, Marti closed his 1891 essay with twowarnings: First, "Whoever foments and spreads antagonism and hate betweenthe races, sins against humanity"; and second, "The scorn of our formidableneighbor [the United States] who does not know us is Our America's greatestdanger".16

These themes of anti-imperialism and of racial harmony in concert withmulticulturalism were abiding artistic concerns of Dario's mosaic-like concept ofmodernism. In the VII Canto of his book Cantos de vida y esperanza (1905), whichis entitled To Roosevelt', Dario penned a critique of imperial intervention andsoulless utilitarianism that, because of its soaring poetry and pungent politics,has remained a favourite of Central American audiences ever since (particularlyin the mid-1980s during the high point of the Sandinista-led Revolution inNicaragua).17 In the opening section, Dario declared as follows:

£s con voz de la Biblia, o verso de Walt Whitmanque habria que llegar hasta ti, Cazador!jPrimitivo y moderno, sencillo y complicado,con un algo de Washington y cuartro de Nemrod!Eres los Estados Unidos,ères elfuturo invasorde la America ingenua que tiene sangré indïgena,

(It was with a Biblical voice or the verse of Walt Whitman,,that you arrived amongst us, 0 hunter!Primitive and modern, simple and complex,With something of George Washington and a quarter Nemrod!You are the United StatesYou are the future invaderof the ingenuous America that has indigenous blood,)18

Further on in the same Canto, Dario critically contrasts, on the one hand, thethreatening colossus of the North, which had cynically combined the cult ofHercules and the worship of money, with, on the other hand, "la Americanuestra, que tenta poetas/desde los viejos tiempos de Netzahualcoyotl... la America delgrande Moctezuma, del Inca"." (This criticism of the materialism and positivismof North American modernisation was also a prominent theme during thissame period in the work of the other Latin American modernistas, such as JoséEnrique Rodo of Uruguay.) Furthermore, the nature of his own critique of theWest helps us to understand Dario's recorded sympathy for the 1905Revolution in Russia — a fact that had gone largely ignored until Sandinistacommandante Carlos Fonseca did research on it during the mid-1960s.20

Dario's critique was coupled with stark depictions of a view that had firstemerged with European Romanticism, namely, that of the artist's alienation frombourgeois society. (Dario's relationship to this theme has been discussedbrilliantly by Jean Franco.) In his story El rey burgués, Dario told of the contem-porary fate of the artist as one of being condemned to play a barrel-organ in thesnow because he had defied the values of middle class society.21 Similarly, in hisprose poem Canci'on del oro, Dario wrote of a poet/beggar who sings ironic odesto the Golden Calf, or cash nexus, being widely worshipped in a society that was

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22 Rubén Dario, 'La cancióndel oro', reprinted inCuentos completos, op cit,pp 141-144.

23 Dore Ashton, publiclecture on Modernism atthe Museum of FineArts, Santa Fe, NewMexico, April 1994.

24 Charles Baudelaire, 'Lepeintre de la viemoderne' (1863),reprinted in The Painterof Modern Life and OtherEssays, trans. JonathanMayne, Phaidon,London, 1965, pp 12-15.

25 Rubén Darío certainlywas influenced byBaudelaire, as JeanFranco and others havepointed out. See JFranco, Introduction toSpanish-AmericanLiterature, op cit, pp 357-363.

26 Baudelaire, op cit,pp 12-15.

27 Ibid.

28 See, for example, RolandBarthes, Le degré zero del'écriture (1953), trans.Annette Lavers andColin Smith, Hill andWang, New York, 1983,pp 75-76.

29 Perry Anderson,'Modernity andRevolution', pp 97-98.See also, MarshallBerman, All That is SolidMelts into Air, Simon andSchuster, New York,1982, pp 15-16.

30 E P Thompson, ThePoverty of Theory andOther Essays, MonthlyReview, London, 1978,pp 98ff.

being transformed by economic modernisation.22

In sum, the original modernism of Dario — with its collagelike formallanguage of mestizaje and multiculturalism — embodied precisely that multi-lateral trajectory that Dore Ashton perceptively identified when she spoke ofhow modernist art at its most profound "moved backward and forward at thesame time".23 As such, Dario's modernism was inflected by an alienation fromcapitalist social values, pervaded by an opposition to western colonialism,imbued with a desire to revivify, or at least reuse, the non-western and pre-colonial artistic traditions of Latin America without, however, repudiating thatwhich was still of great value in western art — and, finally, it was marked by anambivalent embrace of what Charles Baudelaire had earlier called modernité (ormodernity) in a well-known essay of 1863.2'

Here, I think, it would be worthwhile to correct a very common miscon-ception in art historical literature of the West. For Baudelaire's essay, 'Le peintrede la vie moderne' (The Painter of Modem Life), was neither a definition for nora theorisation of modernism, however much it did contribute to Dario's moretheoretically self-conscious formulation of modernism later on.25 WhenBaudelaire wrote: "By 'modernity1 I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, thecontingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal, the immutable",26 hewas simply defining modernity as the social experience of economic moderni-sation, to which the cultural practices and artistic responses of modernism wouldsubsequently come to constitute a more self-conscious, often dissident, andincreasingly self-critical rejoinder.

This latter point was unintentionally made clear by Baudelaire's choice of theminor late Romantic artist Constantin Guys, rather than his proto-modernistfriend Edouard Manet, as the "painter of modern life".27 In fact, Dario's closestcounterpart in French literature was Stéphane Mallarmé who, according toRoland Barthes and Marcel Duchamp, was the first French modernist, eventhough he himself generally employed the more restrictive but also earlymodernist term of Symbolist. This Symbolist movement of the late 1880s and1990s is justifiably seen as marking the advent of both modernism and the avant-garde in France.28 The modern visual artists for whom Dario showed a preferencewere themselves late Symbolists.

Here, of course, I am following Perry Anderson and Marshall Berman indefining these above-noted terms, so that modernism designates the minorityartistic tendencies in opposition to, yet also tied to, the official high culture in theWest. Similarly, just as the various tendencies of modernism were ambivalentand varied responses to the social experience of modernity, so the latter was acomplexly mediated manifestation of the economic project of capitalist moderni-sation and its allied programme of western imperialism.29 Despite the fact thatmodernism, modernity and modernisation are routinely used as synonyms inmuch art historical literature, it must be emphasised that they have always existedonly in asymmetrical and unsettled relation to each other.

Consequently, we need also to note that the orthodox Marxist framework ofbase/superstructure is simply inadequate to grapple empirically with thisasymmetry and the attendant relative autonomy of each of these variousdomains within society, as Raymond Williams and E.P. Thompson among othershave noted.30 The first step towards clarifying the plurality of practices known as'modernism', then, involves an understanding of how these three terms(modernism, modernity and modernisation) have assumed quite differenthistorical relationships and tensions, depending on which tendency withinmodernism one has in mind and also on the moment in history that is being addressed.

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EARLY ALTERNATIVE MODERNISM IN THE VISUAL ARTSIt was only after the Latin American term 'modernism' crossed the Atlantic todiscover Europe in the 1880s — and its first port-of-call was Barcelona, notParis — that it began to designate certain formal strategies and thematicconcerns in the visual arts that were analogous to those that were found inRuben Dario's modernist poetry and which are now associated with theEuropean avant-garde ana various tendencies of modernism in the morewidely acknowledged sense. Just as Dario, while living in Spain, would have asignificant influence on 1890s Spanish literature, so three of the majoralternative modernists of the early 20th century, namely, Antoni Gaudi, DiegoRivera and Pablo Picasso, spent formative years in Barcelona. Like Dario, thelatter two figures frequented the anarchist and bohemian enclave of theEl Quatro Gats café. Indeed, Picasso even designed the menu for this café and

Antoni Gaudf, Güell Park, 1900-14, Barcelona, Catalonia

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31 See Enric Jardí Casary,Historia de els quatre gats,Editorial Aedos,Barcelona, 1972, p 66.For a fine look atPicasso's relation to thecafé, see the catalogueessay by MarilynMcCully in: Els QuatreCats: Art in BarcelonaAround 1900, PrincetonUniversity Press,Princeton, 1978. For abroader look at therelation of anarchism toavant-garde art andpopular culture inBarcelona, see TemmaKaplan, Red City, BluePeriod: Social Movementsin Picasso's Barcelona,University of CaliforniaPress, Berkeley, 1992.

32 Cited by OlivierDebroise, Diego deMontparnasse, Fondo deCul tura Economica,Mexico City, 1979, p 65.

Pablo Picasso, Bottle ofSuze, mixed media, 1912Collection: Washington University

Ruben Dario left us a vivid description of its décor.31

The label of modernismo (or arte modernista) was evidently first used in thevisual arts, while Dario was in Spain, to refer to such work as Antoni Gaudi'sarchitectural projects in Barcelona, the fin-de-siècle city where Pablo Picasso livedand worked from 1895 to 1904. It was, then, the distinctly anti-colonialmodernism of Barcelona, with a Latin American accent, that first gave us Gaudiand then helped to spawn Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon plus the 'AnâhuacCubism' of Diego Rivera, as Justino Fernandez has aptly labelled it.32 (And whilethe term modernismo generally denoted the Catalan version of art nouveau, in thecase of both Gaudi and Picasso this early designation of modernist obviouslysignified much else as well, thus expanding the concept of modernism so as to

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33 See B W Ife and J WButte, The LiteraryHeritage', in The SpanishWorld: Civilization andEmpire, (ed) J H Elliot,Harry N Abrams, NewYork, 1991, pp 212-213.

34 Kenneth Frampton, ACritical History of ModernArchitecture, Thames andHudson, London, 1980,pp 64-73.

35 Ibid.

36 Antoni Gaudf,Manuscritos, articulos,conversaciones y dibujos,(ed) Marcia Codinachs,Consejería de Culturadel Consejo Reyional,Murcia, 1982, p 93:"Originalidad es volveral origen".

37 Frampton, op cit.

38 Ibid.

39 George R Collins,Antonio Gaudí, GeorgeBraziller, Inc, New York,1960, pp 7, 13.

accommodate the even more divergent network of artistic directions that wouldsoon emerge elsewhere.) In this sense Catalan modemismo was both a distincttendency within modernism proper and a point of departure for developing othertendencies of modernism later on.33

As is now widely noted, Catalan modernism in the work of Gaudi evinced astrikingly ambidexterous ability to go both forward and backward in historysimultaneously. At once a person of the past and a partisan of the future, Gaudiused ultra-modern materials (he was the first architect in Spain to use reinforcedconcrete, which he employed for example in the Parque Güell) in conjunctionwith the time-hallowed artisanal approach to traditional materials such as ashlar,plus archaic building motifs that were both western and non-western in nature.34

The singular-looking towers of Sagrada Familia came from the Berber buildingtraditions of North Africa; the use of azulejos (or blue ceramic tiles) on the facadesof edifices was mudéjar, or Moorish, in origin; the inclusion of Gothic arches wasCatalan in derivation; and the recourse to modern engineering techniques alongwith new materials such as steel arose from the influence of northern Europeanmodernisation, even as Gaudi was also apparently inspired by the Utopiansocialism of William Morris and the arts-and-crafts movement (as KennethFrampton has noted).35

Perhaps Gaudf s best known aphorism is that "originality is achieved byreturning to origins"36 and it should be connected not only to his reaffirmation ofthe local artisanal traditions of Cataluna (his father was a coppersmith and hisgrandfather was a ceramicist), but also to Gaudi's ardent commitment to theCatalan national autonomy movement against the imperial hegemony of Castile.It was, for example, this preoccupation with contesting the hegemonic dominionof the Spanish national state that led Gaudi to design a serrated roofline for theCasa Milâ, which symbolically echoed the shape of Montserrat, the mountainthat had long been a signifier of Catalan independence and which also served asan important subject for Diego Rivera's own landscape paintings while he was inBarcelona in 1911.37

Easily the best metaphor for Gaudi's distinctive concept of modernism is aninvention resulting from it, namely, the modernist 'collage' that he used atParque Güell only shortly before Picasso introduced collage into painting in1912. On the upper deck of Parque Güell, above the market area that is shelteredby reinforced concrete beams and supported by a whimsical red sandstone Doricportico, there are outdoor benches that feature what was probably the first andwhat still remains one of the most striking architectonic 'collages' or modernistmosaics ever produced in the visual arts. This mosaic collage was fashioned fromthe broken shards and left-over fragments of rejects from a local Catalan ceramicworkshop, as well as from the rubble of fractured glass and tableware.38 Acobbled-together mélange of ruins that signify the unevenness of historicaldevelopment to which Gaudi's entire oeuvre so eloquently attests, this modernistmosaic/collage was also a metaphor for the multifacetedness of Catalan nationalidentity that wedded a Utopian gesture of shared public concerns in the future toa sombre sense of the past along with a view of the present as a field of ruins.Here it is important to recall that Sagrada Familia, to which Gaudi devoted thelast decade of his life, originated as a lay church for the expiation of the sins ofthe modern materialistic age, that is, of modernisation.3'

The 'collage' at Parque Güell, then, literally embodies the multiculturalismand dynamic open-endedness that have generally been a hallmark of the bestalternative modernism. In addition, it encapsulated a telling historicalambivalence at once hopeful in its vision of the future and yet harsh in its view

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Paul Klee, Angélus Novus, 1920, watercolour;formerly in the collection of Walter Benjamin

40 Walter Benjamin, TheWork of Art in the Ageof MechanicalReproduction' (1936), inIlluminations, trans.Harry Zohn, SchockenBooks, New York, 1969.

41 Walter Benjamin, ThesisVII on the Philosophy ofHistory' (1940), inIlluminations, op cit, p256.

42 Walter Benjamin, ThesisIX' in Illuminations, opcit, pp 257-258.

of what would precede it. A parallel for Gaudi's modernist belief in redemptionamong the ruins of history can be found in the late writings of Walter Benjamin,who remains one of the major theorists of modernism even as he is now routinelycited by postmodernists. (And quite rightly so, since he introduced such themesas the 'death of the author* — and the historical construction of the subject in hisfamous essays from the mid-1930s.)40 Shortly before his death in 1940, Benjaminwrote eighteen Theses on History in which he famously observed that "There isno document of civilization that is not also at the same time a document ofbarbarism".41 The apocalyptic yet also redemptive concept of history put forth inThesis IX bears repeating because of how deeply it relates to the alternativemodernist work of Dario, Gaudf, Picasso and Rivera. It goes as follows:

A [Paul] Klee painting named Angelus Novus [which was in Walter Benjamin'spersonal collection at the time] shows an angel looking as though he were about tomove away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, hismouth is open, his wings are spread. This is the angel of history. His face is turnedtoward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophethat keeps piling ruin upon ruin and hurls them in front of his feet. The angel wouldlike to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a stormis blowing from Paradise; the wind has caught his wings with such force that he canno longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which hisback is turned, while the pile of ruins before him grows ever skyward. This storm iswhat we call progress."

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Diego Rivera, Zapatista Landscape: The Guerrilla, 1915, oil on canvasCollection: National Museum of Art, Mexico City

43 O K Werckmeister,'Walter Benjamin, PaulKlee, and the Angel ofHistory', Oppositions, No25, Fall 1982, pp 103ff.

44 Pablo Picasso, ThePicture as a Sum ofDestructions' (1935), inPicasso on Art, (ed) DoreAshton, Viking Press,New York, 1972, p 38.

Indeed as Karl Werckmeister has shown, unbeknownst to Benjamin, Kleehimself discussed his artworks in similar terms in 1915, as follows: 'Today isthe great transition from past to present. In the huge pit of forms there liesrubble to which one still clings in part. It furnishes the stuff for abstraction... Inorder to work myself out of my rubble, I had to fly."43

Similarly, one of Pablo Picasso's most famous aphorisms, or anti-definitions,was that "A painting used to be considered a sum of additions. In my case apainting is a sum of destructions".44 This alternative modernist concept of art,which seems so manifestly linked to collage, is no doubt related both to Picasso'stenure in Barcelona modernista and to his commendable commitment to the causeof anti-colonialism, in addition to his important affiliations with anarchistthought (at this time, Barcelona was one of the main centres in Europe foranarchism). In an excellent article and an equally commanding book, PatriciaLeighten has compellingly documented not only Picasso's anti-colonialist viewsand concomitant anarchist vantage point, but also how they figure so signifi-

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45 Patricia Leighten, TheWhite Peril and L'Art nègre:Picasso, Primitivism, andAnti-colonialism', The ArtBulletin, Vol LXXII No 4,December 1990, pp 604-630.See also Temma Kaplan,Red City, Blue Period, op cit,pp 24-28 and James Joll,The Anarchists, pp 207-257.

46 R Wollheim, 'Looking atPicasso's Demoisellesd'Avignon', Public Lecture,University of New Mexico,Albuquerque, March 5,1996.

cantly in his artworks of the early twentieth century.45

The celebrated Demoiselles d'Avignon of 1907, for example, which is namedafter a street in Barcelona's red light district, is not only about the uneasyconfrontation of the two sexes, as Leo Steinberg has argued, and about acompetition with Matisse's work, as Richard Wollheim showed in a recentlecture.44 It is also about the conflict of two cultures — those of western Europeand west Africa — whose formally conflicted convergence gains in pictorialresonance precisely because of the tensely jarring transcultural quality of thework.

And this is a quality that has now become amplified even more so because ofwhat we have recently learned about the depth of Picasso's opposition to Frenchcolonialism in Africa at precisely the moment in history, 1906/7, when this

Santos Medina, La unidad revolucionaria de los Indamericanos (The Revolutionary Unity of Indo-Americans), 1982,oil on canvas. Collection: Sandinista National Liberation Front, Managua, Nicaragua

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painting was being executed. Similarly, it has also been shown that some ofPicasso's collages, such as the Bottle of Suze of 1912, feature newspaper articlesabout the horrifying loss of life in Turkey during the First Balkan War of 1912 andabout anti-war speeches by anarchists before huge crowds that were protestingthe "menace of a general European war" (to quote from one of the articlescomposing the collage that was taken from Le Journal in November 1912)."

As for the use of the idea of the fragment to explain the historical import ofCubism, we need only recall how Diego Rivera incisively defined Cubism alongthese lines:

47 Patricia Leighten,Reordering the Universe:Picasso and Anarchism,Princeton UniversityPress, Princeton, 1989,pp 13ff.

48 Gladys March, DiegoRivera: My Life, My Art(1960), Dover Press, NewYork, 1991, p 58.

49 Thomas Crow,'Modernism and MassCulture in the VisualArts', in Pollock and After,(ed) Francis Fascina,Harper and Row, NewYork, 1985, p 250.

50 This is, of course, theargument made inClement Greenberg,'Modernist Painting'(1965), in The New Art,(ed) Gregory Battcock,New York, 1973,pp 66-77.

It was a revolutionary movement, questioning everything that had previously beensaid and done in art. It held nothing sacred. As the old world would soon blow itselfapart, never to be the same again, so Cubism broke down forms as they had beenseen for centuries, and was creating out of the fragments new forms, new objects, newpatterns and — ultimately — new worlds.48

It was the deftly understated, even camouflaged, quality of Cubistfragments that Thomas Crow had in mind when he observed the following ofthe internal dialogue between high art and mass culture, as well as betweenwestern art and non-western art, in many Cubist collages:

The mixing of class signifiers, was central to the formation of the avant-gardesensibility... to accept modernism's oppositional claims, we need not assume that itsomehow transcends the culture of the commodity; we can see it rather as exploitingto critical purpose contradictions within and between distinct sectors of that culture...This ceaseless switching of codes is readable as an articulate protest against thedouble marginalization of art... [so that] Cubism is... a message [with critical intent]from the margins of society...4'

Similarly, the origins of the visual language associated with Cubism ingeneral and with collage in particular both presupposed and concretelyenacted a profound critique (or deconstruction) of the nature of painting in theWest. At issue was something more than the reductive exercise of working withthe essence of the medium, as proponents of formalism maintain. (In fact, in arecent series of lectures Wollheim largely disallowed this Greenbergianreading of modernism by defining the medium as contingent on "the way theartist shapes the materials", and not as an a piori given with which an artistmust be resigned to work.) As such, the inception of Cubism entailed both anexpansion of the communicative resources of the medium and a necessarycontraction of the pictorial claims of European Renaissance art — that is, itsillusions and illusionism.

Simultaneously, a Cubist painting both evokes and then undermines the highart conventions in the West for constructing perspectival space: as in theabbreviated use of chiaroscuro, in the coy and inconsistent deployment ofoverlapping, and in the original suggestion but subsequent dissolution offigurative references. In addition, there is an artful decentring of the images, soas to disallow through an almost 'anarchistic' annulment, the hierarchicalstructure along with the sense of formal resolution that were almost alwayssalient traits of the classical tradition. As such, a Cubist painting, with its all-overtension between the actual two dimensions of the picture plane and the fictivethree dimensions of Renaissance vintage, is not just about an interrogation of themedium (as Greenberg contended).50 More importantly, modernist space in

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51 For a discussion ofBakhtin on this, seeDavid Craven, 'ClementGreenberg and theTriumph' of WesternArt', op cit, pp 3-9.

52 Rosalind Krauss, 'In theName of Picasso', in TheOriginality of the Avant-Garde and OtherModernist Myths, MITPress, Cambridge, Mass.,1986, pp 23-41.

53 See, for example, bothMeyer Shapiro, TheNature of Abstract Art'(1957) and 'RecentAbstract Painting' (1957)in Modern Art: 19th and20th Centuries, GeorgeBraziller, New York,1978, pp 185-227.

54 For a survey of the 200Cubist paintingsexecuted by Riverabetween 1913 and 1917,see Diego Rivera: TheCubist Years, Phoenix ArtMuseum, 1984,pp 104-109.

55 Baddeley and Fraser, oprit, p 102.

56 Ibid.

57 André Breton, 'A Great,Black Poet, AiméCésaire' (1943), in Whatis Surrealism?, (ed)Franklin Rosemont,Pathfinder, New York,1978, p 232.

Cubist work resulted, whether intentionally or not, in a critique of the officialpictorial language in mainstream western art, of which the medium itself wasone, but only one, component. Indeed, it is precisely because modernist art at itsmost profound was a de-hierarchising and demotic critique of the overarchingconventions of official western art that the collage aesthetic could become soeffective at accommodating a multicultural interplay of western and non-westernelements on equal terms.

In one of the most incisive post-formalist discussions of modernism (and Iwould like to insist here along with Mikhail Bakhtin that we not confuse thenecessity of formal analysis with the fetish of formalism),51 Rosalind Krauss hasdeftly illuminated further how a Cubist collage, with its distinctive use ofmodernist space, addresses the mechanics of pictorial logic per se in the West.52 AsKrauss has rightly observed, two of the formal strategies that develop out ofcollage space are those of figure/ground reversal and of the continual transpo-sition between negative space and positive form, so that there is no visual signwithout the attendant eclipse or negation of its material referent.

Thus, Cubist collage and modernist space end up critically exploring thecultural preconditions of western representation itself, that is, how images havebeen produced in pictorial terms and how these images have traditionally cometo assume the status of signs. Such a self-critical investigation of how and whywestern painting has traditionally worked, specifically of how its system ofrepresentation has been culturally mediated, strongly disallows the assertationabove by Thomas McEvilley that modernism in all its forms hegemonicallyprivileges — that is, naturalises — western art at the expense of non-western art.(This latter point about avant-garde modernism as a critical engagement withwestern hegemony, instead of being an uncritical presentation of it, was made byMeyer Schapiro in a series of classic essays from the 1930s up through the1970s.)53

In fact, the Cubist contestation of western cultural hegemony is preciselywhat allowed Diego Rivera (one of the greatest of the Cubist painters) to recruitCubist collage and modernist space on behalf of the Mexican Revolution of 1910,with its unequivocal commitment to constructing a non-Eurocentric nationalidentity. There are two key works in this regard by Rivera that fuse the shiftingplanes of Cubism with the forces of revolutionary upheaval. These are his Portraitof Martin Luis Guzman (1915) and his Zapatista Landscape: The Guerrilla, which waspainted in 1915 after Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa had taken and brieflyoccuped the capital of Mexico City. (In fact, Guzman, a Mexican novelist, didserve at one point with Villa.)54

A rival and generally unrelated movement that used modernist collage toquite different ends but for very critical reasons nonetheless was Surrealism,which numbered among its ranks at various points such major Latin Americanartists as Wifredo Lam, Frida Kahlo and Roberto Matta.55 And, of course, no otheravant-garde movement contributed more to the emergence of anti-colonialistdiscourse or to the course of multi-ethnic identity in the arts than did theSurrealists.56 In 1943, André Breton called Aimé Césaire's damning indictment ofEuropean colonialism and western racism, in Cahier d'un retour pays natal, (Returnto my Native Land), as "nothing less than the greatest lyrical monument of ourtimes."57 Picasso, who was also deeply moved by this Martinique poet's work,illustrated Césaire's fourth book, Corps perdu, in 1950.

While in Haiti during 1945, Breton declared the following to the poets of thisCaribbean country:

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Wifredo Lam, Noncombustible, 1950, oil on canvas, 107 x 89 cm.Private Collection

58 André Breton, Interviewwith Rene Belance'(1945) and 'Speech toYoung Haitian Poets', inWhat is Surrealism?, opcit, pp 256, 259.

Surrealism is allied with the peoples of color, first because it has sided with themagainst all forms of imperialism and white brigandage... and secondly because of theprofound affinities between Surrealism and 'primitive' thought... It is therefore noaccident, but a sign of the times, that the greatest impulses towards new paths forSurrealism have been furnished... by my greatest friends of color — Aimé Césaire inpoetry and Wifredo Lam in painting.58

As James Clifford has pointed out in his exemplary discussion of'Ethnographic Surrealism', the Surrealist aesthetic was still in keeping, inseveral important respects, with what we have seen to be the most fundamentalcharacteristics of Rubén Darîo's original conception of modernism, for theyvalued fragments, curious combinations and unexpected juxtapositions thatwere drawn from the domains of the erotic, the alien, the pre-colonial and therepressed. Furthermore, the progressive part of the Surrealist trajectorygenerally operated along a track that Clifford has identified as follows:

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Unlike the exoticism of the nineteenth century, which departed from a more-or-lessconfident cultural order in search of a temporary frisson, a circumscribed experienceof the bizarre, modern surrealism and ethnography began with reality deeply inquestion... the "primitive" societies of the planet were increasingly available asaesthetic, cosmological, and scientific resources. These possibilities drew onsomething more than an older orientalism; they required modern ethnography... Forevery local custom or [national] truth there was always an exotic alternative, apossible juxtaposition or incongruity... And it is important to understand their wayof taking culture seriously, as a contested reality — a way that included the ridiculingand reshuffling of its orders... Another outgrowth of ethnographic surrealism... is itsconnection with Third World modernism and nascent anti-colonialism.59

59 James Clifford, ThePredicament of Culture,Harvard UniversityPress, Cambridge, Mass.,1988, pp 120ff.

60 Terry Eagleton, TheIdeology of the Aesthetic,Basil Blackwell, Oxford,1990, pp 8-9.

61 Baudelaire, op cit.

CONCLUSION

A task not only of Dario's original concept of modernism as it has beendeveloped and even transformed through these subsequent movements, butalso of critical theory in the tradition of Marx, Benjamin and Adorno, wasprecisely to salvage for progressive purposes whatever was still viable andvaluable in the various class and ethnic legacies to which we are all heirs.Bertolt Brecht's advice of 'Use what you can', carried with it the implicitcorollary that what turns out to be reactionary in such lineages should bediscarded without nostalgia. One such concept that in some, but not allrespects, remains valuable and emancipatory is modernism, or at least'alternative modernism'. For, as Terry Eagleton has rightly declared, "It is leftmoralism, not historical materialism, which having established the bourgeoisprovenance of a particular concept, practice, or institution, then, disowns it inan excess of ideological purity".60

In fact, from the Communist Manifesto onwards, Marx never ceased to sing thepraises of the progressive aspects of bourgeois society and of capitalism, even ashe relentlessly criticised all the reactionary features of both throughout the sameperiod. (Thus, to say simply that Marx was opposed to capitalist modernisationand the bourgeoisie is off the mark. Rather, he was both for and against each.)Nothing attests more to his multi-lateral approach to society than Marx'sdefinition of socialism as the unrealised potential inherent to capitalism — apotential that capitalism alone brought into being historically but whichironically enough capitalism itself can neither consolidate nor greatly extendbecause of its own structural contradictions. Revealingly, Marx's profoundambivalence about capitalism finds a telling analogue in the deep ambivalence ofthe best alternative modernist artists towards both modernity and moderni-sation, especially in the Third World. The partially'admiring characterisation byMarx in 1848 of capitalist modernisation as a process in which "all that's solid melts intoair" was a telling correlative for Baudelaire's 1863 definition of the historical experienceof modernity as "the ephemeral, the fugitive, and the contingent"."

In order to sum up this discussion of the progressive legacy of modernism, itwould be very instructive to return briefly to the same country in which the termmodernism originated, namely Nicaragua, to see how the lineage of Ruben Darioand modernism have fared in the last two decades. If we examine some of thenotable artworks produced by the Sandinista Revolution of 1979-1989, we shallsee artworks that are anti-imperialist and non-Eurocentric (but not anti-western);.artworks that are richly multicultural and that are unquestionably linked to

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62 For an extendeddiscussion of theseissues, see DavidCraven, The New Conceptof Art and Popular Culturein Nicaragua Since theRevolution in 1979,Edwin Meilen Press,Lewiston, 1989.

63 Arnold Toynbee, A Studyof History, Macmillan,London, 1947. See alsoCharles Jencks, 'What isPost-Modernism?', Artand Design, London,1986, p 2.

modernism. One such work is Santos Medina's painting of 1982 entitled Launidad revolucionaria de los Indoamericanos, which is located quite justifiably withinthe tradition of Ruben Dario's modemismo. This painting combines intentionalreferences to pre-Columbian ceramics, such as Nicoya ware, with allusions toEuropean Cubism and an oblique recollection of Diego Rivera's' contribution tomodernism via 'Anâhuac Cubism'.0 In this situation as in others, modernism isnot simply a regressive remnant of the colonial past, but a still viable modusoperandi as well as raw material for reconstructing a postcolonial present inkeeping with a more egalitarian future.

In closing, I should probably note that one of the very first uses of the term'post-modern' was by the historian Arnold Toynbee in a book entitled A Study ofHistory, which was written in 1938 and published in 1947.*3 Significantly, forToynbee the term 'post-modern' was a chronological one rather than a stylisticone and it denoted basically 'post-Eurocentric' and 'post-modernisation' alongwestern lines, or perhaps more accurately, 'post-colonial'. Such a usage of 'post-modern' is definitely not at odds with the ongoing legacy of progressive, non-Eurocentric tendencies within modernism proper that I have outlined here. So,while there is indeed a sense in which we have entered a postmodern,postcolonial, and post-western-centred period of history, there is another sensein which we still have yet to catch up with modernism.

This is a slightly revised version of a paper that was presented in Spanish at the EscuelaNacional de Artes Plâsticas in Managua, Nicaragua (July 3,1995) and at the Institutode Investigaciones Estéticas of the Universidad Nacional Autônoma de Mexico, MexicoCity (May 23,1995). I would like to thank Alicia Azuela, Rita Eder, Raul Quintanillaand Pedro Vargas for arranging these public presentations and for giving me helpfulcomments. I also presented ea/lier versions of this talk at Oberlin College and at theUniversity of New Mexico.

A version of this paper was also presented in English at Oberlin College in the Fall of1994 and at the University of New Mexico in the Philosophy Department's Spring 1996Colloquia. For their efforts in this regard, I would like to thank Patricia Mathews,Richard Speer, Amy Schmitter and Russell Goodman. For their support of my researchon this paper, I would like to express gratitude to Marcos Sanchez, Holly Barnet-Sdnchez, Stephen Eisenman and Margery Amdur.

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