Journal Articles and Catalogue Essays by Michele Greet
1923 Os modernistas brasileiros em Paris, Gênese Andrade ed. São Paulo: Editora Unesp, 253-279. , 2024
“Dialogues on Modernist Bodies,” Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, 6:1, 100-104. , 2024
H-ART. Revista de historia, teoría y crítica de arte, no. 17: 177-186., 2024
Tarsila do Amaral's paintings of rural Brazilian landscapes present a natural world replete with ... more Tarsila do Amaral's paintings of rural Brazilian landscapes present a natural world replete with vibrant colors, whimsical creatures, and luxuriant plant life. By co-opting aspects of surrealism's visual lexicon, particularly biomorphism, Amaral created timeless myths that in their strangeness and indecipherability conveyed the uncertainly of the moment. When she exhibited these paintings in Paris in 1928, Amaral's adoption of surrealist notions of transformation, ambiguity and uncertainly was on full display. Her landscapes of this period present dichotomies between the rational and the irrational, the natural and the artificial, order and chaos, thereby challenging Parisians' imagined construct of Brazil, and creating an original and enigmatic interpretation of the natural world.
Hutchinson Modern & Contemporary, Study Room , 2023
Alejando Mario Yllanes, Ex. Cat. Ben Elwes Fine Art, London, 2023
Bolivian painter and print maker Alejandro Mario Yllanes (1913-c. 1960) produced unprecedented im... more Bolivian painter and print maker Alejandro Mario Yllanes (1913-c. 1960) produced unprecedented images of the struggles and exploitation of the Aymara people, while also celebrating the bold colours and swirling energy of their folk rituals. His Andean landscapes pulse with the patterns and rhythms of traditional textile and ceramic design, and his figures possess the exaggerated musculature and distorted bodies of a people accustomed to a life of toil. Colour for Yllanes is not tied to the natural world, but instead draws on the vibrancy of native costume, the hyperbole of local legend, and effervescence of the thin mountain air. Indeed, his images encapsulate the two poles of Andean life: backbreaking labour and the myths and rituals that sustain such a precarious existence. Working in the 1930s and 1940s, Yllanes' artistic career follows a distinct path from conventional narratives of Bolivian art history, which centre on artistic production in the capital city of La Paz. His outlook aligns more with the radically political manifestations of indigenismo in Peru, Ecuador, and Mexico than with the milder renditions of the trend practiced by officially sanctioned artists in Bolivia. Moreover, he was among the first Latin American artists (along with such figures as Adolfo Best Maugard (1891-1964) in Mexico and Elena Izcue (1889-1970) in Peru) to incorporate the motifs and design practices of indigenous peoples, in this case Aymara artistic traditions, in his work. Like Best Maugard and Izcue, Yllanes was inspired by the doctrines of education reform aimed at native populations, which manifested in his powerful murals for the Warisata school, an audacious experiment in indigenous education implemented in the high Andes. Together these practices make him one of the most innovative painters in pre-Revolutionary Bolivia. The history of modern art in Bolivia privileges Cecilio Guzmán de Rojas (1900-1950), who returned from Paris in 1929 and took over as Director of the Academía de Bellas Artes in La Paz in 1932. Guzmán de Rojas championed a version of indigenismo, that while elevating indigenous peoples as worthy subjects of fine arts, circumvented the socially critical and overtly political aspects of the trend and instead focused on decorative and symbolist renditions of an imagined indigenous past. Scholarly focus on artistic production at the academy left little room for figures like Yllanes whose clashes with the government and frequent absences from the country situated his work outside official narratives. His highly innovative work deserves reconsideration, however.
Historical Narratives of Global Modern Art: An Anthology. Irina D. Costache & Clare Kunny, eds. Routledge Research in Art History series. New York and London: Routledge, 2023, 192-203.
Archives of American Art Journal, 2022
This essay examines the work of New York-based Bolivian artist María Luisa Pacheco, whose groundb... more This essay examines the work of New York-based Bolivian artist María Luisa Pacheco, whose groundbreaking exhibition of abstract paintings in La Paz in 1962 helped validate abstraction as a legitimate form of artistic expression in Bolivia, where socially oriented figural painting still reigned supreme. The Pacheco Papers at the Archives of American Art illuminate the shifting circumstances and conflicting expectations the artist faced while exhibiting in different contexts throughout the Americas and bring to light the unique strategy—informed by her residence in both Bolivia and the United States—Pacheco developed to connect notions of the local to a style critics deemed “universal.” While many midcentury Latin American artists explored means of infusing abstraction with markers of local identity, Pacheco invented an innovative visual language that evoked the Bolivian landscape through shape, color, and texture, resonating across hemispheres.
Rómulo Rozo ¿Una vanguardia propia? Christian Padilla ed. Bogotá: Proyecto Bachué, 127-139., 2020
Rómulo Rozo ¿Una vanguardia propia? Christian Padilla ed. Bogotá: Proyecto Bachué, 89-120., 2020
Art Inquiries XVIII, no. 1, 2020
Exhibition review
Tarsila do Amaral. Exh. Cat. São Paulo: Museo de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand., 2019
Tarsila do Amaral. Exh. Cat. São Paulo: Museo de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, 2019
Lincoln Kirstein’s Modern. Exh. Cat. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2019
See link to article
Oxford University Press: Grove Art Online, Feb 27, 2019
New Geographies of Abstract Art in Postwar Latin America, 2018
Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos, 2017
*Errata The name of the 1926 "Salon de France" was incorrectly transcribed. The correct title of ... more *Errata The name of the 1926 "Salon de France" was incorrectly transcribed. The correct title of the salon is the "Salon du Franc"
M i c h e l e G r e e t I n the somber, circumspect climate following World War I, a new classici... more M i c h e l e G r e e t I n the somber, circumspect climate following World War I, a new classicism permeated the visual arts. This "return to order," as it came to be known, eclipsed the emphasis on the more radical aesthetic experiments-distorted flattened figures, bold non-natural color, and abstracted or entirely nonobjective compositions-that were the hallmark of avant-garde art before 1914. 1 Artists such as Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque turned to painting monumental nudes, idyllic peasants, and images of maternity and tradition, which conveyed the postwar desire for order and stability. 2 These paintings expressed a yearning to return to the land, nature, and traditional values after the chaos of war. 3 According to Kenneth E. Silver, "Picasso was the first, strongest, and most prolific practitioner of a wartime revival of traditional draftsmanship, brilliantly aping Ingres in portraits of his friends and colleagues. After the war, he was the best and most unabashed neoclassicist (while continuing to make Cubist art)." 4 These images were not a wholesale reversion to the past and traditional modes of painting, however; postwar artists were seeking an aesthetic model that emphasized continuity over rupture, while still expressing their modernity. Their notion of classicism was broad and their sources varied, including classical
Circulations in the Global History of Art; Studies in Art Historiography series. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Catherine Dossin, and Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel eds. Ashgate: 2015, 133-147.
Papers of Surrealism, 2015
Various scholars have suggested a contiguity or affinity between Brazilian artist Tarsila do Amar... more Various scholars have suggested a contiguity or affinity between Brazilian artist Tarsila do Amaral’s iconic painting Abaporu and surrealism; none have engaged in an in-depth analysis of her actual relationship with surrealism, however. This close reading of Abaporu will demonstrate that Amaral deliberately and systematically engaged with the tenets and formal languages of surrealism. Her engagement was not one of pure emulation; instead she turned the surrealists’ penchant for satire and desire to disrupt hierarchical schema back on itself, parodying the images and ideas put forth by the movement to create a counter modernism. Amaral’s sardonic appropriation of surrealism’s formal languages and subversive strategies was the very factor that made Abaporu the catalyst of the Anthropophagite Movement.
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Journal Articles and Catalogue Essays by Michele Greet
Since the late nineteenth century, art museums have played crucial social, political, and economic roles throughout Latin America because of the ways that they structure representation. By means of their architecture, collections, exhibitions, and curatorial practices, Latin American art museums have crafted representations of communities, including nation states, and promoted particular group ideologies. This collection of essays, arranged in thematic sections, will examine the varying and complex functions of art museums in Latin America: as nation-building institutions and instruments of state cultural politics; as foci for the promotion of Latin American modernities and modernisms; as sites of mediation between local and international, private and public interests; as organizations that negotiate cultural construction within the Latin American diaspora and shape constructs of Latin America and its nations; and as venues for the contestation of elitist and Eurocentric notions of culture and the realization of cultural diversity rooted in multiethnic environments.
Paris was the artistic capital of the world in the 1920s and ’30s, providing a home and community for the French and international avant-garde, whose experiments laid the groundwork for artistic production throughout the rest of the century. Latin American artists contributed to and reinterpreted nearly every major modernist movement that took place in the creative center of Paris between World War I and World War II, including Cubism (Diego Rivera), Surrealism (Antonio Berni and Roberto Matta), and Constructivism (Joaquín Torres-García). Yet their participation in the Paris art scene has remained largely overlooked until now. This vibrant book examines their collective role, surveying the work of both household names and an extraordinary array of lesser-known artists.
Author Michele Greet illuminates the significant ways in which Latin American expatriates helped establish modernism and, conversely, how a Parisian environment influenced the development of Latin American artistic identity. These artists, hailing from former Spanish and Portuguese colonies, encountered expectations of primitivism from their European audiences, and their diverse responses to such biased perceptions—ranging from rejection to embrace to selective reinterpretation of European tendencies—yielded a rich variety of formal innovation. Magnificently illustrated and conveying with clarity a nuanced portrait of modernism, Transatlantic Encounters also engages in a wider discussion of the relationship between displacement, identity formation, and artistic production.