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Chilean Art in the Twentieth Century
Natalia Pollak
The early masters of twentieth century Chilean art were educated according to the traditional teaching of the Academia de Bellas Artes (Academy of Fine Arts). However, influenced by the European canons of the age, these artists were to develop a national language that bridged 19th century Academicism with the first vanguards of the twentieth century. In 1913 the Generación del trece (Generation of 1913) was formed by a group of artists who, against the teachings of the Academy, sought to represent Chilean life via their own experience and observation. Established by Juan Francisco González, this group emerged in the wake of an exhibition of Chilean painting shown that year at the Salon de Mercurio.
At the start of the 1920s another group of Chilean artists was formed. Established in 1922, the Grupo Montparnasse (Montparnasse Group) favoured an expressive art that ran counter to academicism, naturalism and realism: all of which they considered as obstacles to creative freedom. Influenced principally by Cézanne, its members were Luis Vargas Rosas, Henriette Petit, Julio Órtiz de Zárate, Manuel Ortiz Zárate, José Perotti and Camilo Mori (1896-1973).
Between the 1920s and the 40s, the need to create a vanguard congruent with the progressive, revolutionary and modernist ideas of a new generation of Chilean intellectuals arose. The group Generación del 28 was formed under the direction of Camilo Mori. This generation dedicated itself to aesthetic investigation and focused almost exclusively on painting, defending its autonomy as a system of intrinsic formal relations. The members of this group practiced a painting defined by the strong, expressive use of form and colour.
From 1940 onwards a group of artists, now considered the fathers of Chilean modernism, formed the Generación del 40 (Generation of 1940) and later the Grupo de Estudiantes Plásticos or GEP. Including José Balmes, Gracia Barrios, Elsa Bolívar, Roser Bru, Juan Egenau, Eduardo Martínez Bonati, Ricardo Bindis and Juana Lecaros, the GEP emerged from the Escuela de Bellas Artes in 1946. The group's founding was motivated by discontent; while remaining loyal to those of their teachers considered worthy of staying in the school, such as Pablo Burchard and Camilo Mori, the students fought for better teaching and for a deeper understanding of recent tendencies in international art. They used a communal workshop and held conferences, exhibitions and other events. This type of collective, open-access workshop method of teaching has remained pertinent to artistic practice in Chile to this day, and continued through the work of the Taller 99 de Grabado (Taller 99 printmaking workshop), founded in 1956 by Nemesio Antuńez.
With the emergence of the Grupo Rectángulo (Rectangle Group) in 1955, the early abstraction exemplified by the 1940s generation become more rigorous; natural forms were eliminated and replaced with schematic compositions and pure colours. Amongst the most outstanding groups of the next generations of Chilean art were the Grupo Forma y Espacio(1965) and the Grupo Signo. The artists who formed the latter group abandoned easel painting; experimenting with acrylic paint applied with paintbrushes, cloth and their own bodies. The members of this group (Gracia Barrios, José Balmes, Alberto Pérez and Eduardo Martínez Bonati) often incorporated the visual language of mass culture and pointed to situations of conflict in Chile and internationally by using collaged newspaper clippings. From the electoral campaign of 1964 a movement known as the Muralistas Urbanos (Urban Muralists) emerged. This group (Ramón Parra, Inti Peredo, Elmo Catalán) was active during the presidency of Salvador Allende and with the imposition of Augusto Pinochet's regime (1973) they continued to work underground, denouncing his government, a cultural phenomenon that was the result of the collective commitment of both art students and amateurs.
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