Hemispheric Integration, Volume 3

Exploring art made in Latin America during the 1930s and 1940s, Hemispheric Integration argues that Latin America's position within a global economic order was crucial to how art from that region was produced, collected, and understood. Niko Vicario analyzes art's relation to shifting trade patterns, geopolitical realignments, and industrialization to suggest that it was in this specific era that the category of Latin American art developed its current definition. Focusing on artworks by iconic Latin American modernists such as David Alfaro Siqueiros, Joaquín Torres-García, Cândido Portinari, and Mario Carreño, Vicario emphasizes the materiality and mobility of art and their connection to commerce, namely the exchange of raw materials for manufactured goods from Europe and the United States. An exceptional examination of transnational culture, this book provides a new model for the study of Latin American art.

"Hemispheric Integration analyzes the relationship between art, trade, and the trade in art from Latin America during the 1930s and early 1940s. Emphasizing the materiality and mobility of works of art, this book explores how the geo-cultural category Latin American art was forged at the nexus of geopolitical and geo-economic transformations which indelibly marked the postwar period and which continue to haunt the present"--Provided by publisher.
"Joining a growing body of transnational studies (i.e., books by Lori Cole, María Amalia García, Michele Greet, Olga Herrera, Anna Indych-López, and Harper Montgomery), Vicario intervenes with an original and rigorous approach that puts into practice a social history of art embedded in the matter of art and in the dynamics of industry and trade."-- "CAA Reviews"