Patricia Cisneros is getting wall-to-wall coverage of her gift of 102 works to MoMA that will join her previous donation of 40 works. Here’s the Economist on the news with quotes from MoMA’s head Glenn Lowry:
The curators focused on geometric abstraction, a movement that grew up in the 1940s and took its cue from Europeans like Piet Mondrian and artists of the Bauhaus group. Made of metal, paint on wood, plexiglass or woven paper, as well as more conventional materials to study the relationship between planes and angles, Latin American modernism evolved in four countries—Brazil, Venezuela, and the Río de la Plata region of Argentina and Uruguay—into an aesthetic all of its own. Artists such as Clark, Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Pape, Jesús Rafael Soto, Alejandro Otero and Tomás Maldonado have long been regarded as modernists, but it is only in the last decade or so that their work is being studied seriously alongside that of European and American modernists. “A whole chapter of international modernism is revealed in these works,” Mr Lowry says, “allowing a more complex understanding of modern art as an international, multifaceted movement.”
