After decades of waiting in the wings to do an occasional star turn, Latin American art is edging onto center stage at mainstream museums. From New England to Southern California, institutions that pride themselves on geographic diversity but primarily focus on Europe and North America are paying more attention to the art of Central and South America.
And nowhere more so than the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, where a retrospective exhibition of paintings by Gunther Gerzso -- a historically important but under-recognized Modernist from Mexico -- opens this weekend. The assembly of 122 paintings and drawings is the largest show of the artist's work in 30 years and the most ambitious project in the 62-year-old museum's history.
With a hefty, scholarly catalog published in Spanish and English editions and an itinerary that will take the show to the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City and the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum in Chicago, this is a project that might be expected to come from a much larger institution -- or one that devotes itself exclusively to Latin American art. Instead, it's the work of Diana C. Du Pont, the Santa Barbara museum's curator of modern and contemporary art, who puts an extraordinary amount of time and energy into Latin American projects.
It's only natural in Santa Barbara, a town where Spanish Colonial- and Mission-style architecture reflects the region's Latino heritage, Du Pont says. What's more, "it's possible," she says. Unlike more crowded fields of scholarship, Latin American art offers lots of fresh subjects for North American curators.
Du Pont has made her mark with such exhibitions as "Point/Counter Point: Two Views of 20th Century Latin American Art" in 1995 and "Portrait of a Decade: David Alfaro Siqueiros, 1930-40" in 1997. She also played a leading role in the museum's acquisition of Siqueiros' 1932 mural, "Mexico Today," which was moved last year from the backyard of a Pacific Palisades residence to the front of the museum on State Street.
Her latest project, "Risking the Abstract: Mexican Modernism and the Art of Gunther Gerzso," examines the career of a cosmopolitan artist who died in 2000, at 85. He became known as a set designer of Mexican films in the 1940s, supported himself in the film industry until 1962, and returned to the field in 1984, when John Huston persuaded him to design sets for "Under the Volcano." But his heart and soul were in painting.
Going against the grain of Mexico's dominant art form -- figurative murals with social and political messages -- Gerzso became the nation's leading abstract painter. His signature works are luminous, geometric abstractions, inspired by pre- Columbian architecture and intricately crafted of crisp squares and multiple layers of thin, translucent pigment. Du Pont presents him as a bridge figure who crossed over from Surrealism to abstraction -- the Mexican counterpart to New York's Abstract Expressionists.
"Jackson Pollock had his skeins of dripped paint; Barnett Newman, his 'zips' of ragged line that bisect his paintings; Adolf Gottlieb, his bursting orbs; Marc Rothko, his ethereal bands of color," she says. Gerzso's icon is the square, the basic building block of Mexico's ancient architecture.
"His journey is that of a creator who set sail on the seas of scenic design and touched land at the port of painting, who immersed himself in the dictates of dreams called Surrealism and emerged with an abstraction all his own, who took reality as a point of departure and displayed the effects that it could produce," Saul Juarez, director general of the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, writes in the exhibition catalog.
The late Mexican writer Octavio Paz, who championed Gerzso's painting, has described it as "a system of allusions" that "tells no story" but points "toward another reality."
ADMIRATION GREW
Du Pont's exhibition is a labor of love, research, jet lag and international diplomacy, which began in 1995, when she put some of Gerzso's work in her "Point/Counter Point" show and invited him to speak at the museum. She was intrigued with two of his paintings that had been given to the museum, and her admiration grew as she began to track his career.
"If you love painting, as I do, you have to love this work," she says, pulling one of Gerzso's classic abstractions from a storage rack and marveling over his skill. Well-educated but self-taught as a painter, he adapted Old Master glazing techniques to his own brand of Modernist abstraction, she says.
