The last modernist

 

UNTIL he moved to Paris in 1949 at the age of 24, Fernando de Szyszlo had never seen a Rembrandt or a Van Gogh. “It was a shock to discover the modern world,” he says. But growing up in Lima, the son of a Polish geographer and nephew of a Peruvian writer, he marvelled at Peru’s wealth of pre-Columbian pottery and textiles—“the only original art that was within our reach”.

In Paris he discovered Cubism, surrealism (“I identified with surrealist texts, not the paintings”) and abstraction. He forged friendships with other Latin American artists, including Mexico’s Rufino Tamayo and Venezuela’s Jesús Soto (who more or less invented kinetic art), and writers such as Octavio Paz. Some of his friends remained in the French capital. But Mr de Szyszlo returned to Lima.

Latin Americans “were the poor relatives [of art], accepted at the banquet but only at a side table. If I wanted to change that I had to be here.” He is speaking in his modernist concrete house in a quiet district of Lima, which contains his studio and is built around a patio filled with palms and his sculptures.

Mr de Szyszlo, like Tamayo, rebelled both against the socialist realism of Mexican muralism and against the unthinking copying of European artistic fashions. Instead he has spent his life developing a unique pictorial language, a restrained abstract expressionism...

from The Economist: The Americas http://ift.tt/1Ix5CaI