IV BIENAL AMERICANA DE GRABADO, SANTIAGO DE CHILE
Pablo Neruda [introduction], Josef Albers [Cover Artist]
Pablo Neruda [introduction]: IV BIENAL AMERICANA DE GRABADO, SANTIAGO DE CHILE. Santiago de Chile: Sociedad de Arte Contemporaneo, 1970. Text in Spanish. Square quarto. Printed French folded wrappers. 218 pp. 37 black and white plates. Cover artwork by Josef Albers. Uruguay and Paraguay sections bound upside down. Spine lightly cocked and mild edgewear to wrappers, but a very good or better copy.
7.185 x 7.185-inch softcover catalog with 218 pages and 37 black and white plates. Exhibit catalog for the fourth American Biennial of Engraving in Santiago, Chile. Held 7 August - 13 September 1970 at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Chile.
Includes work by Wilfredo Lam, Rufino Tamayo, Jose Guadalupe Posada, and many othersartists from the Southern Hemisphere.
“Beginning in the 1960s, Latin America experienced a regional surge in print-focused biennials, which seminal critic Marta Traba links to a concurrent “boom” in drawing and the graphic arts. The first of these biennials, the Bienal Americana de Grabado (American Print Biennial) took place from 1963 through 1970 in Santiago, Chile. Hemispheric in focus, the exhibition was held at the Universidad de Chile’s Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (MAC), and later the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (MNBA). It was subsequently followed by the Bienal Internacional de Grabado in Buenos Aires, Argentina (1968-1972), the Bienal Americana de Artes Gráficas in Cali, Colombia (1970-1986) and the Bienal de San Juan del Grabado Latinoamericano (1970-2001) in San Juan, Puerto Rico.With a purview that included North, Central and South American countries as well as the Caribbean, the Santiago Bienal wove a network of collaboration across the continent, strategically engaging influential critics, curators and institutions. This article explores its role in the “second wave” of biennials in the Global South, contextualising it in relation to other contemporaneous exhibitions in the region, notably the Bienal de São Paulo in Brazil (est. 1951), the Bienal Americana de Arte in Córdoba, Argentina (1962-1966) and the Bienal de Arte Coltejer in Medellín, Colombia (1968-1972, 1981) . . . .
“Upon the inauguration of the first Bienal Americana de Grabado at the MAC in November 1963, the museum’s then-director Nemesio Antúnez wrote of the organisers’ effort to foster, “the embrace of Costa Rica with Uruguay and Cuba, Brazil with Canada and Paraguay, Colombia with Bolivia and Mexico, Canada with Peru and Cuba, Guatemala and Paraguay with Colombia, Argentina and the US with Brazil, Cuba with Peru and Nicaragua”, ending with the phrase, “el grabado con todos y todos con Chile” (printmaking with all and all with Chile).
“Tellingly, Antúnez used the adverb “americanamente” (Americanly) to characterise the tenor of the desired encounters among participating countries. These opening remarks reflect the executive committee’s enthusiastic commitment to the ideal of Pan-American cooperation. Amidst the backdrop of the Cold War, Pan-Americanism was coloured by the power struggle among the United States, the Soviet Union and their allies, which played out through cultural and economic diplomacy, as well as overt and covert intervention. The Bienal’s first edition came two years after the establishment of US President John F. Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress, which aimed to foster economic cooperation and development throughout the Americas to stave off the spread of pro-communist sentiment in the wake of the Cuban Revolution. Within this complex relational field, the Bienal organisers promoted regional inter- connection from a place of agency and strategic understanding, building international recognition by securing participation from acclaimed institutions and figures, while also reaching across Cold War spheres of influence by, for example, cultivating relationships with both Cuban and US entities.” [Maeve Coudrelle, “The Imprint of Hemispheric Exchange: The Bienal Americana de Grabado, 1963-1970”, OBOE Journal 3, no. 1 (2022): 38-51.]
Josef Albers (1888 – 1976) was a German-born American artist and educator whose work formed the basis of some of the most influential and far-reaching art education programs of the twentieth century.
Albers enrolled as a student in the Vorkurs of Johannes Itten at the Weimar Bauhaus in 1920. Although Albers had studied painting, it was as a maker of stained glass that he joined the faculty of the Bauhaus in 1922, approaching his chosen medium as a component of architecture and as a stand-alone art form. Walter Gropius, asked him in 1923 to teach in the preliminary course ‘Werklehre' of the department of design to introduce newcomers to the principles of handicrafts.
In 1925, Albers was promoted to professor, the year the Bauhaus moved to Dessau. At this time, he married Anni Albers (née Fleischmann) who was a student there. His work in Dessau included designing furniture and working with glass. As a younger art teacher, he was teaching at the Bauhaus among artists who included Oskar Schlemmer, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee. The so-called form master, Klee taught the formal aspects in the glass workshops where Albers was the crafts master; they cooperated for several years.
With the closure of the Bauhaus under Nazi pressure in 1933 the artists dispersed, most leaving the country. Neither Josef Albers nor his wife Anni spoke a word of English when they left Germany for the United States in 1933 to teach at Black Mountain College, an art and design school that had opened a few months before on a shoestring budget in rural North Carolina. Founded by a radical educationalist John Rice, Black Mountain was committed to experimentation, cross-disciplinarity and the idea that everyone should pitch in, whether it was to teach a class, or fix the plumbing.
The Alberses were defining influences on the school, whose students and teachers included many of the most influential US artists, designers and artisans of the late 20th century, from Cy Twombly and Robert Motherwell, to Willem and Elaine de Kooning. Merce Cunningham formed his first dance company there, John Cage staged his first happening, and they began lifelong collaborations with Robert Rauschenberg. The Alberses persuaded friends to help out, either by teaching like Xanti Schawinsky and Lyonel Feininger, designing buildings like Marcel Breuer and Walter Gropius, or donating books to the library like Alfred Barr and Walker Evans.
Josef Albers taught at Black Mountain College for sixteen years. In 1950 he joined the faculty at Yale University as chairman of the Department of Design.