In Latin America, Modernism Began at Home

Latin America is known for iconic midcentury architecture, from Luis Barragán’s Mexico City houses to Lina Bo Bardi’s glass-walled Casa de Vidro in São Paulo. It was part of a wave of modern design that swept over several countries beginning in the 1940s. But in those places, modernism was more than a style—it was a vital expression of progress and national identity at a time of rapid growth and social change. And its primary laboratory, the site of its most audacious experiments, was the home.

At the Museum of Modern Art, "Crafting Modernity: Design in Latin America, 1940–1980" explores the modernism that emerged in six key countries—Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Venezuela—during those heady midcentury decades. Open through September 22, the exhibition presents some 110 works ranging from furniture, photography, and graphic design to glass, ceramics, textiles, and industrial products. Broadly organized around three topics—the home as an incubator for modernism, the emergence of design as a professional field, and the give-and-take between craft and industry—the exhibition looks at modern design as a distinctively Latin American phenomenon.

In each of the show’s six countries, says exhibition curator Ana Elena Mallet, designers were experimenting under challenging, often contradictory circumstances—"trying to be international but also trying to create a local identity," she says. "Trying to be modern but also trying to keep tradition, to be industrial but also keeping the craft." In much of the region, economic growth brought a creative synthesis in the arts. Design, says Mallet, "was in a dialogue with art and architecture."

Casa Pampatar, home of Venezuelan critic and photographer Alfredo Boulton, is a striking case in point. Through photographic images and the Pampatar Butaque (1953), a mahogany and cedar chair designed by Venezuelan modernist Miguel Arroyo, the exhibition evokes the house’s invigorating mix of pre-Hispanic, colonial, and contemporary art and design.

In Mexico, designer and curator Clara Porset championed an intrinsically Mexican approach to industrial design, drawing on the country’s history and culture. Made with woven wicker—admirably suited to hot climates—her Butaque (c. 1957) put another modern spin on the chair that Mallet calls "one of the essential pieces of furniture in Latin America," a hybrid of pre-Columbian and Spanish designs found throughout the region. Similarly, Porset’s Totonaca Chair (1952) was inspired by pre-Columbian Totonac figures.

Several chairs reflect shared aspects of Latin American design, as well as traits that set each country apart. Made of leather and painted wrought iron, the B.K.F. Chair (1938) from Argentina is the lightweight, elegant progenitor of what we now call the butterfly chair.

By the 1940s it was an international design icon, and the exhibition pictures it in modernist homes around the globe, from Argentinian architect Amancio Williams’s starkly sculptural Casa Sobre el Arroyo (House Over the Stream) to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater. By contrast, Brazilian José Zanine Caldas’s Namoradeira Tête-a-Tête Lounge Chair (c. 1960-1980) is effortlessly playful. A modern take on the Victorian courting chair, its near-abstract curves suggest a pair of bear cubs in conversation.

For pragmatic and cultural reasons, most designers made a point of working with local materials. The contours of Joaquim Tenreiro’s debonair Cadeira de Três Pés (Three-Legged Chair, c. 1947), for instance, are traced in four different Brazilian hardwoods laid side by side in thin strips. Material choices could be hyper-local, too. Although most of Colombia is tropical, the high-elevation capital of Bogotá is cold and rainy, making Jaime Gutiérrez Lega’s Ovejo Armchair (1972)—shaggy, freeform sheepskin slung over an angular wooden frame—warmly suited to that locale. At the other end of the spectrum, the polyurethane foam used by Chilean artist Roberto Matta in his Malitte Lounge Furniture (1966) is unabashedly international, befitting a modular seating group produced by an Italian company and then by the design giant Knoll. 

National pressures to industrialize turned some designers toward manufacturing, and the exhibition includes mass-produced flashlights, radios and other products, primarily from Argentina and Brazil, where industrial efforts found the strongest footing. But as economies sputtered and political landscapes shifted, many designers turned with fresh interest to their countries’ rich craft traditions.

What emerged was a new take on both craft and industry. In some cases, that involved rethinking traditional materials, as in Colombian artist Olga de Amaral’s abstract wool and horsehair wall hanging, Cuatro Paisajes (Módulo B) (1976-77). In others, it meant combining craft and industrial processes in unconventional ways. In Brazil, for instance, designer Sergio Rodrigues set up a factory for furniture-making on an industrial scale—but with final products assembled by hand. In Venezuela, Mexico, and Argentina, industrially produced glass, silver, and textiles were also hand-finished. "In Latin America, craft was modern," Mallet concludes, and the hybrid craft-and-industry approach of those decades "is something that we see in the region today."