The versatility of form: Mario Carreño in New York

In 1942, the Museum of Modern Art sent Lincoln Kirstein and Alfred Barr on trips to amass a collection of Latin American art, exhibited at the museum in 1943, while emigrés populated and indelibly transformed the New York art world. How and why did the early 1940s present an opportunity for cosmopolitan inclusivity, nestled between the divergent nationalisms represented by pre-war “American Scene” painting and the “American-Type” painting Clement Greenberg championed during the Cold War? This presentation will focus on how artists and curators negotiated this transitional yet pivotal moment through a case study of Cuban artist Mario Carreño. In particular, I will analyze how he and his interlocutors adapted the imagery, symbols, and ideographs of Afro-Cuban secret societies as a means of negotiating the New York art world. They did so based on an understanding of how universals and particulars cohabitate in form, capitalizing on the ways in which the cross-cultural mobility of signs, images, and objects allows them to accrue new resonances and new functions. In turn, this versatility of form equipped art from Latin America to rhyme with what New York Times critic Edward Alden Jewell, describing recent tendencies in art from the US, termed “globalism” (1943). But in the early 1940s “globalism” carried overlapping yet divergent significations, of neo-imperial ambition and of intercultural openness, which continue to be entangled today in the wake of art history’s putatively “global turn.”