Art and Propaganda during Peronist Argentina

Iliana Cepero (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

362 Seiten

2025
Brill (Verlag)
978-90-04-73307-7 (ISBN)

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This book compares political propaganda and abstract-concretist art, two representational systems at opposite ends of the imagery spectrum that are often studied separately. When analyzed in tandem, they reveal the fascinating visual contest that took place between the government and artists in crafting a modern image of the country.

This book chronicles the history of the visual languages developed in Argentina during Peronism, exploring how art and propaganda interacted with and responded to their historical context. At the heart of this study is the term “intentional citations”, a framework that advocates for the socio-cultural specificity of Latin American modernist art, in contrast to models that overly rely on European concepts of modernism and the avant-garde. Readers will discover how Argentinian artists cited European artworks to express particular ideas and goals, how Peronist propaganda employed various artistic traditions—including abstraction—for political purposes, and how ideologues rebranded Perón and Eva as a formidable ruling couple. This book also examines how the Peronist regime and artists competed for control of the cultural field. Despite their stark political differences, however, both factions pursued similar goals.

Iliana Cepero, Ph.D. (2013, Stanford University) is Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Studies at The New School, New York. She has published essays on Cuban and Argentinian art and photography, including “Martín Fierro, Argentine Nationalism and the Return to Order” (MODERNISM/modernity, January 2019), and “Luc Chessex, Robert Frank, and the Representation of Labour in the Magazine Cuba/Cuba Internacional, 1968 and 1971,” (Art History, November 2018).

Acknowledgements

List of Figures

Introduction

1 Awkward Pastiches or Intentional Citations?

2 Resignification, Hybridization, and Anthropophagy

3 Inverted Exoticism

4 Internal Colonialism

5 Summary of the Chapters

1 Progress, Immigration, Nationality. Cultural Debates in Argentina from 1837 to 1939

1 The Generation of ’37: We Are Children of France

2 The Myth of a White Argentina

3 The Generation of 1880: Order and Progress

4 The Positivist Sociologists: Nationality Is Patriotism and Hard Work

5 The Centennial Generation: We Are Essentially Spaniards

6 The Payador, Melodrama, Popular Culture, and Mass Media

7 Martinfierristas and Boedistas in the 1920s: Redefining Cultural Nationalism

8 The Generation of the 1930s: Hispanism and National-Catholicism

9 Cosmopolitanism and New Hispanism in Sur

10 Affordable Literature for the Working Class

11 Perón’s Hispanism

2 Abstraction Arrives in Buenos Aires

1 Arturo and the Beginning of a New Era

2 Legibility of Argentinian and Latin American Art in Today’s Art Circuits

3 An Alternative Model of Interpretation

4 International Constructivism in the 1930s and the Parisian Art Scene

3 Intentional Citations. Abstract-Concretists and Peronism

1 The Cutout Frame

2 The Stained-Glass Grid

3 The Coplanar

4 The Return to Painting-as-Object

5 Choosing Between Cold and Hot Abstraction

6 Old Debates Resurface

7 Perón Institutionalizes Culture and Promotes High and Popular Culture

8 A Turning Point in the Perón and Abstract-Concretists Relationship

4 Indoctrinating the Masses

1 The Undersecretariat for Information and Press

2 Justicialismo: a Third Way

3 Folklore

4 The Gaucho and Tellurism

5 The First Five-Year Plan

6 The Second Five-Year Plan

7 Religious and Moral Values

8 Transforming the Common Individual into a Bourgeois

9 Rewriting National History

10 A Straightforward Style for a Political Religion

5 Photographing the Ruling Couple

1 The Tango Star and the Descamisado: Quintessentially Argentinian

2 The Regal Perón

3 The Politician, the Actress, and the Queen

4 The Humanitarian and the Spectacle of Welfare

5 The Spiritual Leader of the Nation

6 Clarity and Emotion in Photographs

7 The Sword and the Cross

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

Erscheinungsdatum	24.06.2025
Reihe/Serie	Avant-Garde Critical Studies ; 47
Verlagsort	Leiden
Sprache	englisch
Maße	155 x 235 mm
Gewicht	794 g
Themenwelt	Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Allgemeines / Lexika
Themenwelt	Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Kunstgeschichte / Kunststile
ISBN-10	90-04-73307-8 / 9004733078
ISBN-13	978-90-04-73307-7 / 9789004733077
Zustand	Neuware