Mary Kate O’Hare

Acasual encounter with one of Charmion von Wiegand’s emblematic works, The Wheel of the Law, #83 (1958), in 2005, marked the beginning of Mary Kate O’Hare’s no-return trip along North and South America’s imaginary. What the Associate Curator of American Art at the Newark Museum (New Jersey) found in the writings of this Russian-American artist aroused her interest in discovering the links that rallied artists from the American continent around a common language: that of abstraction. Based on the notion that Joaquín Torres-García, by whom von Wiegand had works, was a pioneer of South American constructive art, O’Hare organized an exhibition that conceptually associated Arshile Gorky, Alexander Calder or Ellsworth Kelly with Torres- García and some of his Latin American fellow artists such as Gyula Kosice, Lygia Clark, Tomás Maldonado, Geraldo de Barros and Jesús Rafael Soto. Constructive Spirit. Abstract Art in South and North America, 1920s-50s, open to the public until 23 May, is structured on the basis of these parallels that give evidence of a sui generis abstraction, unique in terms of its artistic experimentation, yet conceived to be global.

C.L.: The work by von Wiegand that inspired this exhibit belongs to the Newark Museum. How many of the works exhibited in Constructive Spirit belong to the Museum?
MKO: Around 35 out of a total of 95 works on exhibit. The Newark Museum has an exceptional collection of geometric art from the U.S., but not, precisely, from Latin America.
C.L.: How, then, did the idea of building bridges between abstract art from North and South America originate?
MKO: I was acquainted with the work of Torres-García and other artists, but when I inquired into abstract art in the U.S. I discovered many parallels linking both scenarios.
C.L.: What did you think about this discovery?
MKO: I wondered: might these artists have known one another? How come there are so many connections in their art? The exhibition was conceived to provide answers to these questions.
C.L.: What was the criterion for the selection of works?
MKO: It was very important to represent artists in a manner that fit their ideas and the way in which these conformed to the themes I proposed.
C.L.: What was your intention?
MKO: It was clear to me that I wanted people to interact with the works. Also, the fact that I would be showing many never-before- seen works from Latin America, or at least never seen in this way by an audience, was very relevant.
C.L.: The absence of Colombian artists such as Ramírez Villamizar and Carlos Rojas (an award-winner in one of the earliest São Paulo biennials), Cubans such as Ernesto Briel, and Mexican abstract artists such as Gunther Gerszo is quite evident.
MKO: I know. It was impossible to show them all. There are still many fields we must focus on.
C.L.: Are there any similarities between Constructive Spirit and the exhibition Geometry of Hope (Grey Gallery, NYU, 2008) in terms of their global approach to Latin American art? MKO: In a certain way, Constructive Spirit was structured on the basis established by Geometry of Hope. C.L.: But your proposal widens this vision.
MKO: It makes reference not only to the connections between artists from South America and the United States at a given period, but also to the way in which South American abstract artists such as the Argentinean Juan Mele and the Brazilian Anatol Wladyslaw shared ideas, even though they lived in different places and did not know one another.
C.L.: What part of your reasearch work helped you polish the concept behind the exhibition?
MKO: Reading these artists’ writings. Fortunately, many of them were prolific writers. This allowed me to find visual parallels in their works.
C.L.: What parallels did you find?
MKO: Very profound ideas regarding design, harmony, balance, and the concern to create dynamic compositions that they all shared. I also discovered an essay by Gyula Kosice on Latin American abstract art, which was circulated in the United States in the 1950s.
C.L.: How much did you know about Latin American art before you curated this show?
MKO: I never attended a class on Latin American art before I received my Ph.D. in Art History from Rutgers University in 2004.
C.L.: You are currently a regular lecturer at Rutgers. Do you find this omission annoying?
MKO: I must be honest: I found this omission terribly annoying. Fortunately, this has been gradually undergoing a change for the better in my university and in other institutions for higher learning.
C.L.: Have you traveled in Latin America?
MKO: I had the chance to travel in Latin America to do in situ research work and see many of the works.

THE CONDUCTING THREAD

C.L.: Why doesn’t the exhibition follow a chronological order?
MKO: It is more interesting to show intercrossings and dynamics than to speak only of history.
C.L.: What is, then, the conducting thread? MKO: The conceptual connections among artists. A large part is about the dialogue that sometimes took place in the same time and space, but in other cases, did not.
C.L.: Why show South American and US art within a time frame beginning in the 1920s?
MKO: It was a very important moment in which it became established that Joaquín Torres-García and Stuart Davis were pioneers of the geometric abstraction movement.
C.L.: That is the reason why you chose them to open the exhibition?
MKO: Indeed, two works I consider fundamental for this exhibition open the show: Torres-García’s New York Street Scene (1920) and Stuart Davis’s Egg Beater No. 2 (1928).
C.L.: Torres-García lived in New York between 1920 and 1924, at the same time as Davis. Independently of this coincidence, why do you exhibit them together?
MKO: In those years, Torres-García already divided his compositions into a grid and used elements derived from a mature abstraction to represent the environment.
C.L.: What links him to Davis?
MKO: At that same time, Davis was fascinated by the urban scene and found in it all the information he needed for his art. What is most outstanding in Egg Beater No. 2 is the way in which he renders color and the relationship with space through pure abstraction.
C.L.: Did you discover a shared concern?
MKO: Both of them seem to say: “The sources of universal abstraction appear to be in the local”.
C.L.: In this section you include a transcendent work by Joaquín Torres-García − Locomotora con casa constructiva (1934).
MKO: It is a tribute to his native city, Montevideo. In it, he seems to say to his students: “Observe what you have in front of your eyes and then try to find your own voice to depict it”.
C.L.: Can any other examples of this conceptual connection be discovered in the exhibition?
MKO: Charles Green Shaw’s Polygon (1936) is an early example of structured frame. Moreover, Green Shaw was one of the first artists to convey the abstracted shapes of skyscrapers onto his canvases. Around that time, Héctor Ragni – one of Torres- García’s Montevideo students − showed the same artistic concern.
C.L.: What led you to encompass a diversity of disciplines such as photography and video?
MKO: Many artists used photography as a medium to channel their interest in urban geometry. The work of Aaron Siskind, Chicago 248 (1953), illustrates this constant search, which took this artist to cities such as New York and Chicago.
C.L.: You associate Siskind with the Brazilian Geraldo de Barros.
MKO: Geraldo de Barros found interesting shapes and figures in Sao Paulo’s modern architecture and rendered them in his series “Fotoformas”. São Paulo, Brazil (1949) and Estaçao de Luz, São Paulo, Brazil (1949) are dynamic compositions based on the superposition of photographs on one negative.
C.L.: You are also presenting Vibración en el espacio, Carlos Cruz- Diez’s video on Gego’s work.
MKO: It features multiple sculptures by Gego, among them the one entitled Gegofón (1959), which is on display at the exhibit. This work was lost for a long time and it was re-discovered in New York. For me, this was the first time that one work combined sculpture and video.

NORTH-SOUTH DIALOGUE

C.L.: Do you maintain the notion that artists from the U.S. and South America did, in fact, communicate, and that this left an imprint on their art?
MKO: In my research I found out that many of these artists, such as the members of the group Los Disidentes or Ellsworth Kelly, lived in Paris in the mid-twentieth century. Perhaps they did not know one another personally, but they did know one another through the exchange of reproductions of their works.
C.L.: Can you mention some great moments in the process of discovering this exchange?
MKO: Arte Madí Universal magazine conducted a follow-up of the work of abstract artists around the world, including US artists. The first time I read it I was breathless when I saw the reproduction of George L. K. Morris’s dining-room and the abstract murals I knew so well.
C.L.: What happened then?
MKO: Then I found out that Morris and other US abstract artists had sent their works to Argentina for them to be exhibited together with Madi artworks in the 1950s.
C.L.: Can you mention other coincidences you show in Constructive Spirit?
MKO: For instance, the unity principle in Alejandro Otero’s art definitely approximates it to Ellsworth Kelly’s. Irene Rice Pereira and Jesús Rafael Soto were, to my judgment, two siblings separated at birth. Both were concerned with light and reflectivity. In the 1940s, Pereira even worked with plexiglass in the manner of Soto.
C.L.: You feature Soto and Rice Pereira alongside Abraham Palatnik.
MKO: Palatnik’s Kinechromatic Device S-14 (1957-58) reflects the way in which, in abstract art, time connects the work with the viewer and makes him/her participate. In spite of this, the work was initially rejected by the São Paulo Committee because its members did not know to what discipline it corresponded.
C.L.: Was there a common language among the abstract artists you include in your exhibition?
MKO: There was a transcendent language that was not limited by national and geographical borders. It was, certainly, a global communication.

A NEW READING
C.L.: Do you consider that Constructive Spirit paves the way to understanding that Latin American art is unique in and by itself and not a by-product of other art?
MKO: The intention to create a new abstraction, something different from the European one, is evident.
C.L.: How is this evident?
MKO: Many of these artists experimented with elements such as color and form in a way it had never been done until then. Part of my motivation was to prove that it is not true when they say that they merely copied others.
C.L.: You also suggest that modernist abstraction was linked to the geometric iconography in Pre-Columbian cultures.
MKO: Part of the constructivism of Torres-García and other South American artists is based on going back to their roots, on studying Pre-Columbian art in order to create a new world with abstraction as their point of departure. These were the same ideas held by US artists such as Charmion von Wiegand, who studied Native American art to incorporate ideas and shapes in their abstract works.
C.L.: What was your motivation for featuring Torres-García and George L.K. Morris, one of the founders of the abstract movement in the United States?
MKO: Their works demonstrate that in the 1930s and 1940s, US artists were influenced by Torres-García’s concepts and knew his work.
C.L.: So you notice that influence in other artists?
MKO: As suggested by their similarities, Torres-García may have had an influence on Louise Nevelson’s abstract art. For Nevelson, wood is a living element, as it may be observed in Dark Shadows (1957).
C.L.: That is why you also find parallels with the work of Francisco Matto?
MKO: In Construcción (1948), Torres-García’s disciple, Francisco Matto, abstracts the figure of a wooden llama and transforms it into an abstract eye. Matto traveled in South America and collected Pre- Columbian art; Nevelson, on the other hand, obtained the pieces of wood she used in her works in the streets of New York.
C.L.: Has Roberto Matta’s influence on the work of Gorky, Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock been recognized in the United States? MKO: Personally speaking, I think Matta had a strong influence on a group of artists who, like Gorky, migrated to pure abstraction around that time in New York. But this is not evident in Constructive Spirit.
C.L.: Do you consider that this type of exhibitions has a bearing on the re-writing of the history of art?
MKO: It is important that this exhibition may contribute to expand the notion of the US public regarding what Latin American artists are.
C.L.: How can this be achieved?
MKO: I hope this mistaken stereotype that identifies Latin American art only with Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera disappears. What we are showing here is some completely cutting-edge art, estremely sophisticated and radical.
C.L.: What is your contribution to the study of US art?
MKO: My contribution is to exert an influence on the public notion regarding these US artists. The majority of them have not been properly valued throughout history.
C.L.: In your opinion, what contribution has Latin American art made to the world of art?
MKO: Personally speaking, I consider it has been as immense as it has been underestimated.

MARY KATE O’HARE

The Associate Curator of American Art at the Newark Museum is a graduate of Rutgers University, the State University of New Jersey, where she obtained her PhD in Art History. At present, she teaches courses and seminars on nineteenth-century and modern art at Rutgers, where she is an adjunct faculty member, and at William Patterson University (New Jersey). Her curatorial background includes Off the Pedestal: New Women in the Art of Homer, Chase and Sargent (Newark Museum, 2006) and At the Movies: Edward Hopper’s “The Sheridan Theater” (Newark Museum, 2007).