As an emergent field, Latin American Geometric Abstraction has reached unprecedented demand. Less than ten years after first appearing in a Latin American art sale, auction estimates for Geometric Abstraction particularly from Brazil, Venezuela, and Argentina have quadrupled. This paper will examine two vital catalysts behind the recent demand for Latin American Geometric Abstraction: Christie’s highly curated sale program from 1999 to 2004 and a number of groundbreaking exhibitions organized by Mari-Carmen Ramírez at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston such as Inverted Utopias, Avant-Garde Art in Latin America.

Three landmark sales offered during this period featuring the collections of Bruno Musatti, Jimmy Belilty, and Paulo Bittencourt will serve to further demonstrate how the new sale format introduced at Christie’s and seconded by Sotheby’s established a foundation for Geometric Abstraction’s booming market. Using the work of Venezuelan artist, Gego (Gertrude Goldschmidt) I will trace how a crossover to the Contemporary Art sales greatly increased both an appreciation and demand for Geometric Abstraction.

In the interest of full disclosure, this paper is largely based on my experience at Christie’s Latin American Paintings where I was employed as a Specialist from 2000 to 2005, precisely the period I will be touching upon on my discussion. Likewise, it is important to note that little has been written on the Latin American Art market during this period. For this reason, some background information may be helpful.

Since its inception in 1980 by then modern art specialist Mary-Anne Martin at Sotheby’s, the category has been, for the most part, treated and mistreated as a sub-gender of Modernism. Given its regional definition, one based not on periodic but geographical boundaries, the bi-annual Latin American sales at both auction houses have traditionally included works produced by Latin American artists, or traveling foreigners working in Latin America, from the 17th to the 21st centuries. The difficult nature of a sale that expands over five centuries, a vast territory comprising of more than twenty-one nations, two languages, and hundreds of dialects, offering within the same sale session both a 17th century Peruvian Cuzco painting and a contemporary artwork by a living artist residing in Berlin, is at best incomprehensible and at worse, self-discrediting.

Thus how do we explain the popularity of Geometric Abstraction in a collecting field that has firstly: privileged Modernism, and more specifically Indigenism above all other art historical movements; secondly: a field persistently offered as a one-fits-all sale category where important distinctions have been deliberately disregarded given its higher marketability as a unified product, and thirdly: a field that is eternally re-discovered by the media once every ten years or so?

I believe, like so many young art historians and dealers, that the current interest in Geometric Abstraction is the result of both: exhibition opportunities crafted by influential collectors and the emergence of revisionist positions by a new generation of highly trained curators deeply resentful of the way Latin American art was originally “exotiziced” by American institutions at large. While we are all aware of the significance of the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection and its involvement in landmark exhibitions such as The Geometry of Hope, recently held at New York University’s Grey Gallery, I want to turn your attention to the sale of three much smaller but equally pioneering collections.

Conceptualized by Ana Sokoloff, former Department Head for Latin American Paintings at Christie’s, and yes, my former boss, the sale of these now iconic collections championed a re-examination of Latin American Geometric Abstraction and of its contribution to the history of twentieth-century visual culture. The late 1990s were an auspicious time for the auction business. Sales were good, spirits were high, Christie’s move to a new headquarters at Rock Center was imminent, and the price-fixing scandal between Sotheby’s and Christie’s was still years ahead. Beginning with the Bruno Musatti collection in the spring of 1999, a Latin American paradigm-shift reformulated the traditional sale format by including an entire group of low-estimated contemporary artworks at the beginning of the Evening Sale, traditionally the session reserved for six-figure estimates or lower prized property expected to sell for significantly above the high estimate.

A cursory review of the Latin American sale catalogue of June 1999, reveals the curatorial approach inaugurated at this time. Demonstrating a clear affinity for the experiential qualities of Geometric Abstraction and its subsequent influence on contemporary art was the introductory note commissioned to curator Charles Merewether. In the words of Merewether, these artworks present:

“art as a field of exploration…a way of discovering our relationships to the world. Here the construction of the subject and its meaning are given through the materiality of the object and its perception. In particular, the work of Clark and Pape offer insight into the Brazilian Neo-Concretist movement of the sixties; a movement that emerged out of the heritage of Constructivism. Rather than constructed within a representational field, the practice of painting is redefined within the perceptual field of its viewing. This concern, informed as it was by contemporary phenomenology (led by the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and various Brazilian philosophers), also reveals the work of the succeeding generation.” 1

The department’s high regard for Geometric Abstraction was again made apparent in November 1999 when the collection of Jimmy and Leonora Belilty from Caracas was simultaneously and partly offered in the Contemporary Art Department’s Evening Sale. This selling strategy would become a more common practice for certain Latin American works deemed to do better when sold within the more “commercial and international” context of a Contemporary art sale.

Six months later, in June of 2000, the Estate of Paulo Bittencourt from São Paulo was presented as a special section of the Latin American Morning Session alongside other significant contemporary Latin American work. Unfortunately, whereas the sale results for the previous two collections had been positive, and in some cases, quite remarkable, June 2000 marked the beginning of a five-year downturn for the Latin American art market. A bought-in rate of approximately 50% by the fall of 2000 crushed much of the initial interest in Geometric Abstraction fracturing the only existing commercial venue for this genre.

By this time, important decision makers and influential dealers had begun to raise concerns as to the marketability of Geometric Abstraction and more importantly, its placement in evening sales. Internally, management who initially supported a change in the configuration of the Latin American Evening Sale questioned whether it was worth the pagination cost to present meager estimates of $30,000-$40,000. Unfortunately, without avid support or a substantial demand for these works, making a persuasive argument for their historical importance alone proved difficult during this period.

No other single-owner collection including Geometric Abstraction was subsequently offered at Christie’s after the year 2000. Much energy however, was spent on consigning special pieces from this period such as Gego’s Tronco No. 2. Offered at a then record estimate of $100,000-150,000 in 2002, Tronco No. 2 became the most expensive Gego sold at auction at a hammer price of $110,000. Apart from this instance, few other artists from this period achieved any significant appreciation until 2004. As it is often the case, it didn’t take long for the market to change. By 2004, Sotheby’s had developed its own taste for Geometric Abstraction. Championed by Gabriela Palmieri—previously a Latin American specialist now working in the Contemporary department—several key pieces by Gego were included in the Contemporary Morning Sale session. This development contributed greatly to the rapid success of Geometric Abstraction at auction. Not only did the sale introduce Gego to a wider audience, it also translated into a psychological stamp of approval for Latin American collectors doubtful of the international merits of their own artists.

MUSEUM CATALYSTS

However influential, it would be misleading to imply market demand alone is responsible for the recent increase in prices for Latin American Geometric Abstraction. As noted in the introduction, the revisionist approach practiced by curators Mari-Carmen Ramírez at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and others such as Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro at the Blanton Museum, University of Texas at Austin; now Director of the Cisneros Collection, are due ample credit for expanding an appreciation of this category.

Concurring with this notion, Carmen Melián, Head of Latin American art at Sotheby’s, attributes the new interest in non-figurative art at least in part to recent museum exhibitions, such as: “Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America” at the MFA Houston, in 2004, and “Beyond Geometry: Experiments in Form 1940s to 1970s,” which opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in June 2004 and then traveled to the Miami Art Museum.” 2

Amongst these museums, the MFA Houston deserves particular attention. As one of the foremost institutions in this country to make a curatorial commitment to collecting Latin American art from this period, the MFA Houston has most recently acquired the Adolpho Leirner Collection of Brazilian Constructivist Art, arguably the most celebrated collection of its kind in private hands. The collection, “which consists of the finest examples of Geometric Abstraction in paintings, constructions, drawings, posters, and graphic materials by Brazil’s foremost artists of the post-World War II era, has long been regarded as a brilliant window into the seminal decades of Brazil’s modernization.”3

As a matter of fact, the first comprehensive showing of the collection in the United States took place at the MFAH in an exhibition called “Dimensions of Constructive Art in Brazil: The Adolpho Leirner Collection.” As conceived by Mari Carmen Ramírez, the Wortham Curator of Latin American Art and director, International Center for the Arts of the Americas at the MFAH, the presentation was organized to reveal the innovation and originality achieved by various Brazilian constructive tendencies as well as to illustrate specific traits that separate them from related movements in Europe and the United States. Not coincidentally, a carefully chosen descriptive vocabulary based on “innovation, originality, and authenticity,” has also proven an efficient marketable strategy for the internationalization of this genre.

“In the 1950s and 1960s, the contributions of artists from the São Paulo-Rio de Janeiro axis opened up a highly original chapter in the history of international Modernism that has only now been fully been recognized outside Brazil,” said Ramírez. “It has been my privilege to highlight examples from the Leirner Collection in two of the MFAH´s major presentations of Latin American art: Inverted Utopias: Avante-Garde Art in Latin America, organized in 2004, and Hélio Oiticica: The Body of Color, presented this year.”4

Amongst the shows organized by Ramírez, the most radical curatorial departure was Inverted Utopias, previously presented as Heterotopias: cien años sin lugar at Centro Cultural Reina Sofia in Madrid, Spain. Inverted Utopias presented itself as a provocation. 5 Co-directed by Ramírez and writer/curator Héctor Olea, the show aimed to institute an intellectually challenging curatorial goal: to avoid the format of a survey exhibition. Ramírez is a vocal critic of the first generation of Latin American art surveys produced in the United States throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s. Contemptuously, she has referred to them as: “a blind alley of collective exhibitions focused on historic subject matter.”6

Inverted Utopias aimed to replace the linear methodology inherent in these surveys with a curatorial approach that sought to operate across chronology and geography. Six “constellations,” a type of thematic umbrellas, were introduced as functioning nexuses meant to interact within themselves and each other. Some of the highlights resulting from this innovative approach were visually stimulating interrelationships among artists traditionally obscured by Modernism or compartmentalized into topical narratives. The strength of the curatorial approach lied in its flexible design allowing for some artists to be included in more than one constellation. 7 Chronologically, the scope of the material presented in the exhibition was for the most part limited to two specific periods: the 1920-30s and 1960-70s in Latin America. Within these periods, the selection was arguably biased towards Geometric Abstraction, a decision that consciously opposed stereotypical expectations of Latin American art as dependent on figurative painting.

It is an exciting time for the Latin American Art market. As it reaches maturity, it continues to shed its exoticism while retaining its fascinating incongruities and historical dislocations. My prediction is that as we enter a period of price adjustments both in the financial and art markets, Geometric Abstraction will continue to attract new collectors drawn to its experiential and pictorial vocabulary. Deeply ideological, irreverent, and at times, even poetic, Geometric Abstraction will be someday identified as one of Latin America’s most hopeful and creative periods within its unique history of modernism.

1 Christie’s New York, Latin American Art, June 2-3, 1999, p. 14.

2 Amy Page, ¨Latin American Uprising,¨ Art Info, accessed September 10th, 2008, [artinfo.com]

3 Press Release, MFAH, ¨The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Makes Major Commitment to Brazilian Art with Acquisition of The Adolpho Leirner Collection of Brazilian Constructive Art¨, March 16, 2007, accessed September 2nd, 2008: [mfah.org]

4 Ibid.

5 Mari Carmen Ramírez, “A Highly Topical Utopia: Some Outstanding Feature of the Avant-Garde in Latin America,” Inverted Utopias, Avant-Garde Art in Latin America, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 7.

6 Ibid., 5.

7 Artists included in more than one constellation include: Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark, Cildo Meireles, Leon Ferrari, Siqueiros, Soto, Gego, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Orozco, JTG, Kosice, and Waldemar Cordeiro.