CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/24/2019

Art against isolation and indifference in 'Sur moderno'

Uruguayan painter María Freire's 1954 oil painting, "Untitled," is reproduced from Sur moderno: Journeys of Abstraction, the catalogue to MoMA's current exhibition of mid-century Latin American abstract and Concrete artwork from the renowned Patricia Phelps de Cisneros gift to the Museum. "There is no synthesis without discipline. There is no synthesis without enthusiasm. There is no synthesis without faith in human values," Venezuelan architect Carlos Raúl Villaneuva wrote in 1957, summing up the spirit of experimentation that flourished in South America between the 1940s and the 1970s. "It is useful to recall… that, just as lions should not be in zoos, paintings and sculptures should not be shut away in museums. The natural environment of wild animals is the jungle. The natural environments for works of art are squares, gardens, public buildings, factories, airports: all the places where man perceives man as a partner, as an associate, as a helping hand, as hope, and not as the withered flower of isolation and indifference."