Latin Art Exhibit: Vision Quest : With 172 pieces, this ambitious historical survey in San Diego tries to do too much

You’ll need a Sherpa guide to find the central premise behind “The Latin American Spirit: Art and Artists in the United States, 1920-1970.”

A sprawling, hugely ambitious historical survey on view at the San Diego Museum of Art through July 16, the show is above reproach in its effort to provide a new perspective on Latin art. However, this unwieldy extravaganza wobbles severely off course before it gets out of the gate. Assembled by a committee of seven curators and three consultants under the stewardship of Bronx Museum director Luis Cancel, the show, not surprisingly, lacks a central vision. With all those cooks, how could it be otherwise?

More problematic is the fact that “The Latin American Spirit” tries to do far too much. Including 172 pieces by 155 artists from 13 countries, the show sets out first and foremost to dismantle the prevailing stereotype of Latin art, which Cancel describes as “bright colors, exuberant brush strokes, lots of folksy storytelling and maybe a little graffiti.” Cancel’s point is well taken, and the show succeeds in illustrating that more than a few Latin artists have been highly sophisticated participants in the avant-garde dialogue of the last 50 years.

Mexican painter Frida Kahlo and Chilean artist Roberto Matta (who served as an assistant to Le Corbusier) did much toward the development of Surrealism, for instance. Joaquin Torres-Garcia worked with Antonio Gaudi on the Church of the Sagrada Familia, and ‘60s Pop star Marisol, of Venezuelan heritage, starred in two Warhol films. We’re invited to note that Latin artists have managed to infiltrate the beau monde, but in asking us to applaud the fact, the show undermines the very re-evaluation it seeks to encourage. “The Latin American Spirit” fails to offer fresh criteria by which to judge these artists and pays dutiful homage to the standard text of 20th-Century art history--a history that has traditionally excluded Latins.

Murky ideology aside, one nonetheless gets the feeling there are several trenchant points lurking around this particular grouping of work. But because we’re asked to look at so much stuff that appears at a glance to be unrelated and come up with the correct deduction, one reaches the “to hell with it” point fairly early on. One of the stated aims of the show, for example, is to provide an in-depth examination of Puerto Rican art, but because of the way the show is installed, one comes away having learned nothing whatsoever about the subject. Even after reading the exhaustingly comprehensive catalogue, which finally lurches to a close on page 343, one is apt to scratch one’s head while wandering through the show.

Got your decoding ring on?

The show includes native Americans of Hispanic heritage, Latin artists who emigrated to the United States, Latin artists who spent time in the U.S. that played a significant role in the development of their style, and Latin artists who made a prominent contribution to the history of American art. These various artists are then divided into six categories that pretty much boil down to a capsule history of the 20th-Century art avant-garde.

The categories include: Constructivism and the New Geometry (which is broken down into an early and late subcategory that includes Op-Art, Color Field Painting and Minimalism); Arte comprometido --or, art that conveys a social message (the style for which Los Tres Grande , Orozco, Siqueiros, and Rivera are best known); New World Surrealism, (where we find most of the work by Kahlo and Matta); The Figurative Perspective, which has its roots in the School of Mexican Realism established in the ‘20s and ‘30s; The Abstract Spirit; and Idea and Process: Beginnings. The show is not strictly chronologically arranged, and with several artists turning up in more than one section, the maze of galleries is transformed into a veritable network of invisible crisscrossing arrows.

If you throw academicism to the wind and decide to simply look at the work, “The Latin American Spirit” includes several marvelous pieces by exceptionally gifted artists--most of whom you’ll have heard of. While one of the goals of the show was to showcase unfairly neglected Latin artists, the curators failed to locate an unsung genius to resurrect, and the show is dominated by Latin artists who’ve already achieved international reputations.

Rivera, Orozco and Siqueiros are, of course, present and accounted for, with Rivera commanding the greatest amount of wall space. Rivera helped pioneer the style of social realism that came to be associated with WPA art, and one greets his flat, iconic homages to laborers and peasant women like familiar old friends; these indelible pictures have carved out a permanent niche in the 20th-Century vocabulary of images. Lest one think Rivera spent his life in the fields, a portrait of ‘40s socialite C.Z. Guest, posing nude and painted in a luminous style evocative of Anthony Vargas, proves otherwise, and also emerges as one of the unexpected pleasures of the exhibit.

The same can be said of a photograph of the mural Rivera executed for Rockefeller Center, only to have it destroyed under orders from Mr. Rockefeller himself when the cheeky artist inserted a portrait of Lenin in his composition.

In the Surrealist section (and a few other sections as well), we find the ruthlessly candid autobiographical work of Frida Kahlo. Paired with Rivera in a turbulent lifelong romance, Kahlo (who always painted herself with a faint mustache) introduced the fantastic folklore of Latin America into Surrealism’s collective unconscious. Violent and disturbing, this is clearly the work of a tormented woman (Kahlo was crippled for life from injuries sustained in a car accident at the age of 19). The magical forms of Matta inhabit a similar South American Borgesian realm, as do the creepy, crawly critters cooked up by Wilfredo Lam, whose work is evocative of Miro.

In “The Figurative Perspective” department, we find Fernando Botero whose portraits of painfully engorged figures are the work of a man with a skewed vision on a par with Balthus. The star of “The Abstract Spirit” section is Rufino Tamayo, an artist adept at several styles. A work from 1930 titled “Mandolins and Pineapples” combines Cubist design with brushwork reminiscent of Cezanne, while a 1936 work titled “The Family” is heading toward pure abstraction.

That about does it for the big guns of the exhibit; however, there are several works by lesser known artists that hold their own alongside the big boys. Carlos Raquel Rivera’s “Fog,” an enchanted landscape done in the early ‘60s, gives off an inexplicable perfume of terror, while Antonio Garcia’s 1939 “Woman Before a Mirror” shimmers with the melancholy grace of Edward Hopper. Rooted in lurid Mexican folklore, Raul Auguiano’s images of kidnaped and murdered children are, of course, powerful, while Joaquin Torres-Garcia’s work from the ‘20s pulsates with the hip, boogie-woogie rhythms Stuart Davis mined so efficiently.

The show also looks at several lesser known artists who devoted their lives to hammering out ideas and approaches that came to be associated with other artists. Abstractionist Jose Antonio Fernandez Muro worked the same metaphysical field as Rothko, Luis Hernandez Cruz paralleled Barnett Newman, and a 1966 collage by Leonel Gongora roams the same terrain as Rauschenburg.

From these reasonably interesting points, “The Latin American Spirit” really starts roamin’ in the gloamin’--this poorly edited show is badly in need of a shave and a haircut. Expendable pieces include Raul Martinez’s ‘60s Day-Glo Pop art poster, loads of icky Op-Art (this stuff looks endearingly kitsch at best, stultifyingly corporate at worst, regardless of what country it hails from) and several mediocre hard-edged abstractions.

The exhibit peters out with a spattering of conceptual work that includes a video by Juan Downey, an installation by Raphael Ferrer, and one of the most overtly political pieces in the show, a work by Luis Camnitzer. Titled “Leftovers,” it’s a wall of neatly stacked, blood-smeared crates from American arms dealers.

Does this piece--which seems fairly easy to read--resonate differently when seen in the context of this show? Not particularly, and the same can be said of any and all the works on view. The connections the curators seek to draw are simply too numerous and varied, and hence, they only succeed in hinting at them. Latin art has inarguably been given short shrift by historians of the 20th Century, and it’s a wrong in need of righting, but it’s too big a task to accomplish in one fell swoop. “The Latin American Spirit” trips itself up in attempting exactly that.