Representations of the European culture in Argentina in the early sixties

BERENICE GUSTAVINO

Leiden

Congreso; Imagining Europe: Perspectives, Perceptions and Representations from Antiquity to the Present. LUICD Graduate Conference; 2011

Leiden University Institute for Cultural Disciplines

The years following the Second World War are considered by the art historiography the period that established New York as the center of the international artistic world. However, at the beginning of the sixties, the intellectual and artistic references for the Argentinian art critics continued to come from Europe. Out of this verification, I proposed to analyze the representations of “the European” in Del Arte, Argentinian publication dedicated to visual arts and current cultural affairs, published monthly in Buenos Aires between July 1961 and July 1962. Del Arte was interested in local and foreign artistic activities; it published regularly the exhibitions agenda, the art market information and numerous articles of art criticism. Since their second issue, Del Arte extends its interest expressly over the “Pan-American” world. However, every month it published articles dedicated to prestigious Europeans figures of the cultural sphere. André Malraux, Pablo Picasso, José Ortega y Gasset, Herbert Read were some of the personalities frequently quoted, interviewed and photographed in the magazine. With these inclusions, the publication exhibited the artistic, aesthetic and intellectual references which determined the universe of the editor as well as that of a relevant portion of the Argentinian artistic world. In the pages of Del Arte, thelocal events that reached international echoes (like the First American Biennial of Art) and the interest in the fortune of Argentinian art abroad (the Argentinian participation in the VI Sao Paulo Biennial or the career of the Argentinian artists living in Paris) appeared next to these European presences exhibiting the tensions of the local artistic sphere in the early sixties: the concern about the definition of its own art; the highlighting of Latin American art and the ambition of integrating the international art circuit.