Finding their place in the sun

After decades of waiting in the wings to do an occasional star turn, Latin American art is edging onto center stage at mainstream museums. From New England to Southern California, institutions that pride themselves on geographic diversity but primarily focus on Europe and North America are paying more attention to the art of Central and South America.

And nowhere more so than the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, where a retrospective exhibition of paintings by Gunther Gerzso -- a historically important but under-recognized Modernist from Mexico -- opens this weekend. The assembly of 122 paintings and drawings is the largest show of the artist’s work in 30 years and the most ambitious project in the 62-year-old museum’s history.

With a hefty, scholarly catalog published in Spanish and English editions and an itinerary that will take the show to the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City and the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum in Chicago, this is a project that might be expected to come from a much larger institution -- or one that devotes itself exclusively to Latin American art. Instead, it’s the work of Diana C. Du Pont, the Santa Barbara museum’s curator of modern and contemporary art, who puts an extraordinary amount of time and energy into Latin American projects.

It’s only natural in Santa Barbara, a town where Spanish Colonial- and Mission-style architecture reflects the region’s Latino heritage, Du Pont says. What’s more, “it’s possible,” she says. Unlike more crowded fields of scholarship, Latin American art offers lots of fresh subjects for North American curators.

Du Pont has made her mark with such exhibitions as “Point/Counter Point: Two Views of 20th Century Latin American Art” in 1995 and “Portrait of a Decade: David Alfaro Siqueiros, 1930-40” in 1997. She also played a leading role in the museum’s acquisition of Siqueiros’ 1932 mural, “Mexico Today,” which was moved last year from the backyard of a Pacific Palisades residence to the front of the museum on State Street.

Her latest project, “Risking the Abstract: Mexican Modernism and the Art of Gunther Gerzso,” examines the career of a cosmopolitan artist who died in 2000, at 85. He became known as a set designer of Mexican films in the 1940s, supported himself in the film industry until 1962, and returned to the field in 1984, when John Huston persuaded him to design sets for “Under the Volcano.” But his heart and soul were in painting.

Going against the grain of Mexico’s dominant art form -- figurative murals with social and political messages -- Gerzso became the nation’s leading abstract painter. His signature works are luminous, geometric abstractions, inspired by pre- Columbian architecture and intricately crafted of crisp squares and multiple layers of thin, translucent pigment. Du Pont presents him as a bridge figure who crossed over from Surrealism to abstraction -- the Mexican counterpart to New York’s Abstract Expressionists.

“Jackson Pollock had his skeins of dripped paint; Barnett Newman, his ‘zips’ of ragged line that bisect his paintings; Adolf Gottlieb, his bursting orbs; Marc Rothko, his ethereal bands of color,” she says. Gerzso’s icon is the square, the basic building block of Mexico’s ancient architecture.

“His journey is that of a creator who set sail on the seas of scenic design and touched land at the port of painting, who immersed himself in the dictates of dreams called Surrealism and emerged with an abstraction all his own, who took reality as a point of departure and displayed the effects that it could produce,” Saul Juarez, director general of the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, writes in the exhibition catalog.

The late Mexican writer Octavio Paz, who championed Gerzso’s painting, has described it as “a system of allusions” that “tells no story” but points “toward another reality.”

ADMIRATION GREW

Du Pont’s exhibition is a labor of love, research, jet lag and international diplomacy, which began in 1995, when she put some of Gerzso’s work in her “Point/Counter Point” show and invited him to speak at the museum. She was intrigued with two of his paintings that had been given to the museum, and her admiration grew as she began to track his career.

“If you love painting, as I do, you have to love this work,” she says, pulling one of Gerzso’s classic abstractions from a storage rack and marveling over his skill. Well-educated but self-taught as a painter, he adapted Old Master glazing techniques to his own brand of Modernist abstraction, she says.

The market for his work and that of other Latin American artists is steadily growing. Many North American museums, including the venerable Museum of Modern Art in New York, have had important Latin American pieces in their collections for many years. But now that interest in the field is rising, curators who want to develop new ideas and explore the careers of forgotten artists find that they must travel extensively and establish professional relationships with their peers in Central and South America.

Du Pont has focused on an artist who was born in Mexico City June 17, 1915, to European emigres and became part of a sophisticated international community. His father, Oscar Gerzso, was born in Budapest; his mother, Dore Wendland Gerzso, in Berlin. Oscar died in 1916 and the following year Dore married Ludwig Diener, a German jeweler who owned a store in Mexico City.

The family lived in Europe in the early 1920s and Gunther went to school in Switzerland from 1927 to 1931, under the tutelage of his mother’s brother, art collector and dealer Hans Wendland. Gerzso was being groomed to take over his uncle’s art business, but the family suffered from reverberations of the 1929 stock market crash and he returned to Mexico, completing his education at a German school in Mexico City.

Upon graduation Gerzso spoke five languages and had a flair for art, but he decided to pursue a career in the theater -- a choice that was probably inspired by meeting Italian set designer Nando Tamberlani while going to school in Switzerland. A drama professor in Mexico suggested that he go to the United States and work at the Cleveland Play House, which trained actors and technicians. Gerzso took the advice and lived in Cleveland from 1935 to 1940, moving up quickly from a student stagehand to a paid set designer. Concurrently, he developed friendships with artists and sharpened his skills in painting and drawing.

Gerzso returned to Mexico in 1941, hoping to concentrate on painting. After a year of financial struggle, he took a job as a set designer for the film “Santa,” based on a novel by Federico Gamboa. During the next two decades, Gerzso worked on more than 150 film sets for Churubusco Studios.

He was a weekend painter during most of that period, but he was well connected with Mexico’s community of expatriate artists, including Surrealists Leonora Carrington and Gordon Onslow-Ford of Britain, Wolfgang Paalen of Austria and Matta of Chile. In Gerzso’s view, the Mexican mural movement had a stranglehold on creativity. He was schooled in European art and was much more interested in the art that emerged from the expatriate community.

Still, Du Pont says, he risked isolation and neglect by the Mexican art establishment as he developed his own artistic voice. Arriving late at Surrealism but early in the evolution of Mexican abstraction, he worked his way from nightmarish scenes with figures encased in threatening landscapes to shimmering, multifaceted fields of color. Over time, the geometric shapes grew bigger and bolder, with large blocks of color overlaying mosaic-like clusters. One of his final works, “Nocturnal Landscape,” painted in 1999, is a haunting, deep blue piece that seems to foreshadow his death.

Gerzso was often considered a foreigner in Mexico, but his painting reflects his search for his Mexican roots through study and travels to pre-Columbian sites, Du Pont says. Unlike other Mexican artists who expanded their horizons by traveling and studying abroad, he was grounded in European culture before embarking on a quest for his Mexican identity.

Apparently, he found it.

“All my paintings are self-portraits,” Gerzso told Du Pont in 1999, while they were working on the exhibition.

CHANGE IN THE AIR

The Gerzso show in Santa Barbara is a striking example of a nationwide development. “There’s much more interest in Latin American art than there was a decade ago,” says James Ballinger, director of the Phoenix Art Museum, where three Latin American exhibitions are on the schedule during the coming year.

“Globalization has something to do with it,” Ballinger says. New technology, worldwide travel and the economic boom of the ‘90s, which fueled collecting, have produced “more interest in more art in general,” he says.

And now that the U.S. Census Bureau has formally declared Latinos to be the nation’s largest minority group, it shouldn’t be surprising that Latin American art is a major part of the mix -- all across the country.

In the Northeast, the Museum of Modern Art in New York -- now undergoing a massive expansion and operating a temporary exhibition space in Queens -- has agreed to loan about 100 Latin American artworks from its collection to Manhattan’s Museo del Barrio for exhibition next spring. When MoMA’s new facility opens, it will have more space for the full range of art it collects, including Latin American material, which will be shown in an international context, says John Elderfield, chief curator of the department of painting and sculpture. Among special projects slated for the new building is a retrospective of Venezuelan painter Armando Reveron’s work, to be organized by Elderfield.

The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston recently added 20 pieces of Latin American art to its encyclopedic holdings as part of a bequest from two New York collectors. Highlights are on view in the exhibition “A Singular Vision: The Melvin Blake and Frank Purnell Legacy.”

In Texas, Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts established a Latin American art department two years ago and hired a high-profile curator, Mari Carmen Ramirez, to oversee it. Among her projects is “Inverted Utopias: The Avant-Garde in Latin America, 1920-1979,” a 200-piece exhibition scheduled to open next June. The Dallas Art Museum, which claims the Southwest’s preeminent collection of pre-Columbian art, currently offers two shows of Latin American textiles.

Meanwhile in Southern California, San Diego’s Museum of Contemporary Art and Museum of Art recently joined forces to purchase “Border Crossing,” a large fiberglass sculpture by Mexican American artist Luis Jimenez, and installed it on the concourse of San Diego City Hall. The acquisition is only the latest indication of the museums’ Latin American agenda. The MCA, which frequently fosters artistic exchanges with Tijuana, organized the 2000 traveling exhibition “Ultrabaroque: Aspects of Post-Latin American Art”; the San Diego Museum of Art last winter presented “Axis Mexico: Common Objects and Cosmopolitan Actions,” featuring the work of 19 contemporary artists.

At Los Angeles’ leading art museums, Latin American art tends to remain in the shadows, but in 1997 the County Museum of Art acquired more than 2,000 Latin American artworks from the collection of Bernard and Edith Lewin. The museum subsequently appointed its first full-time curator of Latin American art, Ilona Katzew, who is preparing an exhibition of Colonial Mexican painting, to open in April. Also on LACMA’s exhibition schedule are “Lords of Creation: The Origins of Sacred Maya Kingship” in 2005 and “Rufino Tamayo and His Circle” in 2006.

At L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art, Mexican philanthropist and collector Eugenio Lopez and the Jumex Corp. have funded an initiative to support contemporary Latin American art and they have underwritten a show of Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto’s conceptual sculpture, to open Sept. 28. Curator Alma Ruiz, who oversees MOCA’s Latin American projects, is also planning an exhibition of Colombian artist Doris Salcedo’s sculpture.

As for Santa Barbara’s Latin American program, “it’s open-ended,” Du Pont says. But she isn’t talking about catch-all group shows or parades of national treasures. “It’s time to do in-depth, one-person exhibitions for Latin American artists whose work deserves attention,” she says. “This is where we can make a contribution.”

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Risking the Abstract: Mexican Modernism and the Art of Gunther Gerzso

Where: Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1130 State St., Santa Barbara

When: Tuesday-Thursday, 11 a.m.-5 p.m.; Friday, 11 a.m.-9 p.m.; Saturday, 11 a.m.- 5 p.m.; Sunday, noon-5 p.m.

Ends: Oct. 19

Price: $4-$7

Contact: (805) 963-4364