AMA's Permanent Collection: Part I

This print by José Guadalupe Posada probably began circulating as a leaflet that carried the following message: “From this famous hippodrome on the racetrack, not even a single journalist is missing. Death is inexorable and doesn’t even respect those that you see here on bicycle.”

The Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) affected young José Clemente Orozco deeply, and it is probably due to this experience that his work is tainted with brutal violence. A few years after the armed struggle ended, he began painting scenes from the Revolution.

In addition to working in oils, Peruvian artist José Sabogal made numerous woodblock prints. India Huanca represents an indigenous woman from the Junín Region of central Peru, known as Huanca. The format of the woodcut is inherently rough, allowing the grain of the wood to show through and create the illusion of texture on the printed page.

Uruguayan artist Pedro Figari’s The Marketplace depicts an archetypal South American plaza complete with an arcade and colonial church in the background. The plaza is filled with activity, with more than a dozen figures buying or selling wares or casually socializing.

Argentine artist Emilio Pettoruti began painting street musicians (i.e., The Blind Flutist II of 1918) while living in Italy. By the time he painted The Last Serenade in 1937 urban street musicians had become a signature theme in Pettoruti’s work. Paintings by Pablo Picasso and Gino Severini, who also depicted musicians and harlequins in a cubist style in the 1910s and 1920s, most likely inspired Petorutti’s early renditions of the subject.

By the time Celeste Woss y Gil completed El vendedor de andullo in 1938, she was already a recognized figure in the modern art movement in the Dominican Republic both as a professional painter and teacher. Trained in art schools in Havana and New York, her figurative art captured elements of a Dominican spirit.

Although criticized for these thematic choices in Brazil, Portinari nevertheless established a large international following. A gift to José Gómez Sicre from the artist and his wife, Return from the Fair was presented to the Pan American Union in 1949 marking the first artwork to enter the future permanent collection of the Visual Arts Section and the now Art Museum of the Americas.

Boìuna cannot be separated from the long tradition of the Brazilian anthropophagic movement. The name refers to a mythical creature of Amazonian Amerindian origin that has the ability to manifest itself with various appearances—as a snake, a boat, or a ship—in order to seduce and frighten strangers that enter its territory.

Constructive Composition epitomizes Torres García’s philosophy of Constructive Universalism in its assimilation of the ancient and universal iconography of the Americas within the metaphysical cosmos of the constructivist grid. Archetypal signs—boat, anchor, ladder, clock, star, heart—calibrate timeless values of order and unity, voyage and discovery, stability and love, time and measurement.

In 1957 José Gómez Sicre pronounced Amelia Peláez’s work “among the most outstanding painting Cuba has so far produced,” a signal tribute to its refined, transatlantic modernity and to the artist’s elevated stature among Cuba’s historical vanguardia.

Poleo's approach to the social theme was subtle and stayed away from the violent and expressive deformations used by the Mexicans to represent the victims or executioners. Poleo does not denounce or judge, he merely shows the state of things through a composed scene with a classicist and almost metaphysical air.

Painted in an exaggerated expressionistic style, The Poor Supper depicts a lone woman sitting in a wooden high-backed chair at a tiled table. A small spoon rests in the bowl, suggesting that the meager meal has been finished but two tiny morsels of what appears to be bread remain on the table in front of her bowl. These meager portions could not possibly have satisfied the appetite of the impoverished diner.

Painted toward the end of his New York exile (1939–1948), Hermala II marks a transitional moment in the artist’s trajectory as he moved away from his figural representations of the earlier part of the 1940s and toward his sidereal landscapes of the 1950s.

“An outstanding figure in the generation which initiated the modern art movement in Cuba,” in the words of José Gómez Sicre, Portocarrero first drew acclaim for his paintings of intimate interiors and architectural details that recalled the golden years of colonial Havana.

Study Figure for Unknown Political Prisoner is likely part of Joaquín Roca Rey’s submission for the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) worldwide sculpture competition in 1953 to commemorate the theme of “the unknown political prisoner.”

Acquired by José Gómez Sicre for the OAS collection on the occasion of Oswaldo Guayasamín’s individual exhibition in 1955, Mother and Child is a stark depiction of poverty and suffering. The mother’s crescent shaped head is echoed below by that of the tiny infant cradled in her arms, who tilts back its head in an attempt to nurse from its mother’s emaciated breasts.

Ferrer's artwork Motifs in Blue of 1955 is characteristic of her own approach to geometric abstraction and at the same time it illustrates the principles of Argentine abstract art of the time. Although the painting seems to be organized according to rigid and regular principles, in reality each of the figures is slightly wider in one of its corners making the whole composition rest on a precarious balance. In this respect, Motifs in Blue embodies the values professed by the group of artists to which Grilo belonged at the time, the Grupo de Artistas Modernos de la Argentina (GAMA).