Paraguayan Art in the Twentieth Century

Valerie Fraser

Modernism arrived late in Paraguay. During the first half of the twentieth century art was academic and unadventurous. Ticio Escobar, Paraguay's leading critic and art historian, identifies Jaime Bestard as the leading exponent of post-impressionist interpretations of the local landscape and Polish-born Wolf Bandurek as the first to introduce a more expressive, socially concerned content, but it was not until the 1950s that the impact of developments in neighbouring Argentina and Brazil began to be felt. This coincided with a growing awareness of Paraguay's unique bilingual culture, as explored in the bilingual poems of Augusto Roa Bastos, exiled in Argentina from 1947, and with the rise to power of Alfredo Stroessner, the dictator who controlled the country from 1954 to 1989. Not surprisingly, the dictatorship, known as the Stronato, encouraged an art of introspective intensity, but unlike in Argentina where political repression resulted in often surrealist investigations of private, psychological nightmares, in Paraguay artists turned their gaze on their own country, the landscape, the peoples and the rural and indigenous cultures.

In 1953 a small group of artists including Olga Blinder established the Grupo Arte Nuevo to try and open up Asunción not so much to new art as to any art, and in 1954, weeks after the military coup that brought Stroessner to power, they held a ground-breaking "Week of Modern Paraguayan Art". By displaying art in the streets and shop windows of the city centre the Arte Nuevo group introduced their art to new audiences and drew attention to the acute lack of opportunities in Paraguay for aspiring artists. For the Arte Nuevo group, as for many artists elsewhere in Latin America, the central problems were the familiar twentieth century dichotomies of figuration versus abstraction, and the local or national versus the international. Long before César Paternosto began elaborating his theories about the indigenous American roots of abstraction, artists in Paraguay had discovered that indigenous crafts - basketry, textiles, pottery, petroglyphs and body painting - provided ideas for forms of abstraction that were entirely local. The other, less acknowledged source of an abstracted national style has been colonial art and in particular the work produced by indigenous craftsmen working in the eighteenth century under the tutelage of Jesuit missionaries. Olga Blinder and Brazilian Livio Abramo organised an exhibition of colonial Paraguayan art for the 1961 São Paulo Bienal, and the artist, poet and playwright Josefina Plá published an important study of the arts of the Jesuit missions, 'El Barroco Hispano-Guaraní', in 1975. The sculpture in particular often has a bold, simple power and strong sense of spirituality (see for example the anonymous sculpture of Christ, UECLAA 611).

The strength of these very local alternatives to the rapidly urbanising and modernising culture of São Paulo may have encouraged Abramo to exchange the relative political openness of Brazil in the 1950s for Stroessner's Paraguay. His influence here was to be considerable. An Instituto Paraguay-Brasil, sponsored by the Brazilian government, had been established in Asunción in 1942 and ten years later this was consolidated as the Misión Cultural Brasileña, an organisation with strong links to the National University of Paraguay. In 1956, as part of the Mission's programme of cultural exchange, Abramo showed a selection of his work in Asunción and ran a short course in engraving. Following the overwhelming success of these initiatives, together with Edith Jiménez and other local artists, he established the 'Julián de la Herrería' print workshop, named after a Paraguayan artist who in the 1920s began using indigenous motifs in his pottery. In 1959 the Brazilian Mission brought another artist-educator, Augusto Rodrigues, to Paraguay to exhibit the work of pupils of his from the Escolinha de Arte of Rio de Janeiro, an organisation dedicated to encouraging young people to express themselves through art. This too was well-received and prompted the Mission to establish an Escolinha de Arte in Asunción. Abramo, deeply committed to the idea of art as an educational tool, settled in Asunción in 1962, heading up the Visual Arts programme of the Brazilian Cultural Mission until his death in 1992. Abramo, Edith Jiménez and Olga Blinder regularly ran courses at the Mission and its successor from1974, the Centro de Estudios Brasileños.

Semi-detached from the circle of Brazilian-influenced engravers the most significant figure of recent decades is undoubtedly that of Carlos Colombino who found coded ways of mocking those in power through his abstracted figurative works. Others of his generation found other means of expression: Ricardo Migliorisi (1948) through fantastical realism and Enrique Careaga (1944) through constructivism, for example. For some years after the fall of Stroessner in 1989 Paraguayan art was in danger of losing its way but the strength of mature artists such as these have helped to encourage a younger generation to find new rigour and direction.