Les Sud-américains de Paris. Visual Art, language and distance during the 1960?s

ISABEL PLANTE

París

Workshop; Crossing French Metropolises. Exiled Artists and Intellectuals during the 20th century; 2019

Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte Paris - Hôtel Lully (German Center for Art History, DFK), París. Organizado por ERC Research Project Relocating Modernism: Global Metropolises, Modern Art and Exile (METROMOD)

During the sixties, a group of Argentine artists received an unprecedented amount of attention in Paris. The visual production made by Antonio Berni, Julio Le Parc, Martha Boto, Lea Lublin and comics? author Copi (Raúl Natalio Damonte), among other residents in the French capital, was on exhibition in galleries and museums, as well as printed on the newspapers and magazines. If, for earlier generations, Paris was seen as the best place to pursue education, during this period it was envisioned as a city in which to gain acclaim and visibility. In 1962, Berni was awarded grand prize in printmaking at the Venice Biennale and, in 1966, Le Parc in painting. Those culminating moments of artistic legitimation meant that the doors (back) to Paris were opened for both artists.In the texts from the time, we find a series of combined demonyms like Sud-américains de Paris or ?Argentines from Paris.? The tensions between the universal and the regional that shaped much of twentieth-century Latin American art took on particular traits during years when the international circulation of artists, works, and exhibitions was increasingly intense. If displacement from one culture to another leaves the individual in a double or skewed place, in a constant negotiation of identity, what did it mean to be an ?Argentine from Paris?? How did the artists deal with that tension? Is it possible to trace the impact of foreignness on their works and activities? Were they expected to use a visual language showing no local or regional traces? Was it possible to capitalize distance, the one separating the Rio de la Plata from the Seine, for their artistic practices? Or should it be suppressed? The main aim for this paper is reconstruct and to analyze the geographic, aesthetic, and political explorations undertaken by artworks and artists, in a back and forth between Paris and Buenos Aires during a period marked, on the one hand, by quick modernization on both sides of the Atlantic (each with an art market and audience that grew in a particular fashion) and, on the other, by the crisis of May 1968 and the rise of Third Worldism and anti-Americanism.