José Carlos Mariátegui (1895–1930)

6 Hardcover volumes with 32 issues in facsimile. It is noted that some original advertisement pages were left out of this edition. Amauta was a highly influential Peruvian magazine founded and directed by José Carlos Mariátegui (1894–1930), which ran from 1926 to 1930. It was a pivotal publication for the avant-garde, indigenous, and socialist movements in Latin America.
It includes articles on sociology, politics, literature, and art, featuring contributions from thinkers across Latin show more America.

Exhibition Review: “Avant-Garde Networks of Amauta: Argentina, Mexico, and Peru in the 1920s," Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin
By Michele Greet
The Avant-Garde Networks
of Amauta: Argentina,
Mexico, and Peru in the
1920s, organized by Natalia
Majluf (former Director and
Chief Curator of the Museo de Arte
de Lima) and Beverly Adams (former
Curator of Latin American Art at
the Blanton and newly appointed
Estrellita Brodsky Curator of Latin
American Art at the Museum of
Modern Art) was a groundbreaking
exhibition. By presenting Latin
American artistic developments
not as offshoots of European
movements, but rather as innovative
nodes of artistic production and
creativity in their own right, the
exhibition expanded understanding
of global avant-garde practice in an
unprecedented manner.
The exhibit highlighted the artists
featured in the Peruvian avant-
garde journal Amauta, founded by
writer and intellectual José Carlos
Mariátegui in 1926 and published
until his untimely death in 1930, as
well as artists associated with the
broader networks that informed the
journal. Amauta, whose title in the
Quechua language means teacher or
wise man, was not exclusively an art
magazine, but rather presented visual
material amidst poetry, literature,
and political essays by an array of
international contributors. Its stance
was adamantly anti-imperialist,
asserting that art, broadly conceived,
could be simultaneously modern,
grounded in local tradition, and
politically engaged. This was the first
international exhibition to celebrate
the stylistically diverse yet highly
innovative artists featured in the
pages of Amauta.
While Mariátegui maintained
epistolary contact with artists and
intellectuals around the world,
many of whom he had met during
his exile in Europe in the early
1920s, the exhibition honed in on
three countries whose presence
was particularly prominent in the
journal: Argentina, Mexico and
Peru. Taking this widely circulated
journal as a point of departure,
the curators showcased the artists
and works that shaped notions of
the avant-garde in the Americas,
rather than imposing contemporary
Eurocentric standards on the
selection of objects. The exhibition,
which comprised over 300 objects
in a wide variety of media (including
painting, sculpture, textiles,
photography, prints, and popular
arts) opened up a whole world of
imagery that is often sidelined in
more traditional exhibition formats.
Moreover, the inclusion of extensive
archival materials, letters, brochures,
subscriptions, and photographs
augmented and provided context for
the stunning works on display.
After having toured major
museums in Madrid, Lima, and
Mexico City, the show reached its
final destination at The Blanton,
where it was organized into five
rooms, each with a thematic
focus.
1
The first, “The Birth of
Amauta,” introduced the journal,
its political orientation, and major
protagonists—such as Peruvian
artist José Sabogal, whose rough-
hewn woodblock prints graced the
cover of the journal and defined its
aesthetic. The journal advocated
indigenismo, a pan-Latin American
intellectual and artistic trend that
aimed to denounce the political and
economic exploitation of Native
American populations as a defining
modernist strategy in Latin America,
advancing this agenda in essays,
illustrations, and reproductions of
works of art. Sabogal’s stunning
cover designs featured the indigenous
peoples of Peru executed in myriad
styles ranging from the geometric
simplicity of the sower, based on
traditional Andean art forms, that
graced the cover of issue 5 (1927)
(fig. 1), to the monumental presence
of the “India coella” he designed for
issue 8.
The second room was much larger
and coalesced around the theme
“Imagining an Avant-Garde for
the Americas.” Here the exhibition
expanded beyond Amauta to
explore parallel movements that
emerged in other metropolitan
centers in the Americas, some of
which never appeared in Amauta,
but were major players in defining
a notion of the avant-garde in Latin
America. The exhibition highlighted
estridentismo, for example, a
Mexican movement characterized
by works such as Ramon Alva
de la Canal’s striking El Café de
Nadie. Although incorporating
estridentismo in the exhibition
provided a counter narrative to the
dominance of Mexican muralism
in histories of Latin American
modernism, its inclusion muddied
the exhibition’s theme of Amauta’s
centrality in establishing avant-
garde networks, since the journal
actually highlighted Diego Rivera’s
murals (not estridentismo or Rivera’s
cubism) and was instrumental in
circulating images of his Ministry of
Education murals for the first time
outside Mexico. Other standouts
in this room, by artists that were
featured in Amauta, included Emilio
Pettoruti’s Blind Flutist (1920) (fig.
2) and Juan Devéscovi’s still lifes,
whose hard edges, clean lines, and
flattened spaces propose a purist
aesthetic as a Latin American avant-
garde language.
The third room in the exhibition,
entitled “The Politics of Popular Art,”
was by far the most groundbreaking
in its introduction of little known
material and its challenge to traditional
constructs of the avant-garde. Not
only did it feature the work of several
outstanding women artists, it also
positioned popular or folk forms as
important original sources for artists
working in Latin America. Artists did
not just mine popular art for its
unique visual forms, but rather
co-opted and promoted this material
as a strategic indicator of regional
identity and a means to establish a
locally grounded, yet internationally
recognizable avant-garde language.
Standouts in this section included
Elena Izcue’s geometric designs based
on ancient Andean vocabularies that
she created for Peruvian Art at School ,
a book for primary school students (c.
1924) (fig. 3), and Mexican artist
Lola Velásquez Cueto’s intricate
textiles that draw on motifs from
popular art. Also in this room were
Gabriel Fernández Ledesma and
Guillermo Ruiz’s wooden doors for
the convent of La Merced, carved by
the students at the Escuela Libre y
Talla Directa. The doors, which were
reproduced in Amauta in January
1929, feature an array of meticulously
rendered animal motifs that portray
local fauna. All of these examples
foreground the new methods of
teaching and anti-academic
techniques promoted as a means to
establish an avant-garde methodology
and practice rooted in place.
The next room, “Forms of
Realism,” commenced with the
Argentine group “Artists of the
People,” whose work comprised
primarily politically oriented prints.
Also featured here were several
lithographs by Rivera, similar in style
and content to his mural paintings in
Mexico, and Jorge Vinatea Reinoso’s
Andean Vanguardists (1930), which
depicts three indigenous men as
protagonists in the fight for political
agency executed in a naturalistic
style. The selection of the works in
this room challenged the Eurocentric
notion that vanguardism must be
defined by formal experimentation
and instead posited forms of realism
as expressions of avant-garde activity.
The final room “Indigenism
as avant-garde” served as an
excellent synthesis of the ideas
presented throughout the previous
sections. Displayed here were
more paintings by Sabogal’s
cohort such as Julia Codesido
and Camilo Blas, as well as works
by the pioneering photographer
Martín Chambi. The curators
offered a poignant comparison
of José Sabogal’s Varayoc, Indian
Mayor of Chincheros (1925) (fig.
4) and Carlos Mérida’s Mayor of
Almolonga (1919) (fig. 5). While
each artist paints in a distinctive
style, Sabogal employing loose quasi-
impressionist brushwork and Mérida
adopting a flat, precise graphic
approach, the compositions share
striking similarities. Both feature
full-length portraits of imposing and
distinguished indigenous leaders
whose form extends from the top to
the bottom of their vertical frames.
Sabogal’s mayor stands before an
Andean landscape, his torso rising
above the horizon line to indicate
his authority over the land, whereas
Mérida’s mayor stands in front of
a colonial style arcade presumably
by the sea. Both sport vibrant red
tunics, red hats or head wraps, and
carry a staff indicating gubernatorial
authority. Their direct gaze, erect
posture, and formidable presence
exude authority and present an
image of dignity and intelligence that
challenges stereotypes of indigenous
ignorance and primitivism.
The Avant-Garde Networks
of Amauta was a trailblazing
exhibition. By focusing on the
contributors to and networks of
this pioneering journal the curators
reconstructed the aesthetic priorities
of an era. This approach expands
our understanding of where and how
avant-garde movements emerged,
and reveals that these movements
could take myriad forms both
politically and aesthetically, and
develop in various media. Especially
significant was the show’s emphasis
on women artists, and artists whose
work engaged popular art forms.
The 350-page illustrated catalogue
includes essays by top scholars in
the field, whose diverse perspectives
provide deeper context for the works
in the show, and will undoubtedly
serve as an unprecedented scholarly
resource for those researching the
period and the artists who defined
it, as well as for anyone interested
in learning more about avant-garde
production in Latin America.
2
The
exhibition and catalogue brought
together a magnificent array of
artworks, many of which have never
been exhibited in the United States.
In so doing, the curators expressed
their trust that audiences are capable
of processing and appreciating art
outside a Eurocentric modernist
canon. So few museums are willing
to mount shows that challenge and
de-center European notions of the
avant-garde, relying instead on name
recognition to insure blockbuster
attendance. The Avant-Garde
Networks of Amauta, and the
museums that hosted it, did just
that, taking a bold step in moving
exhibition practice in a new and
exciting direction.
Michele Greet
George Mason University

The shortlived but brilliant Latin American journal Amauta
The story of José Carlos Mariátegui’s magazine is told in an illuminating exhibition at Madrid’s Museo Reina Sofia
Published MAR 8 2019

To build an exhibition around a magazine is a bold endeavour. It’s even more challenging when the publication is not dedicated exclusively, or even primarily, to the visual arts. Yet the curators of a new show at Madrid’s Museo Reina Sofia have risen to the occasion.

The Avant-garde Networks of Amauta: Argentina, Mexico and Peru in the 1920s illuminates a brief chapter in Latin American culture that saw politics, art and literature come together in a burst of creativity and openness thanks to the obsessive passion of one man, José Carlos Mariátegui.

Born in 1894 in Moquegua, southern Peru, Mariátegui grew up in Lima. By the time he founded the journal Amauta in 1926, he was already an established writer and editor known for his Marxist politics. In 1918 he had founded a newspaper, La Razón, which championed university reform and workers’ rights. Threatened with jail by Peru’s authoritarian, capitalism-friendly government, which was headed by Augusto Leguía, he left for Europe in 1920.

He returned in 1923 with, he said, “the purpose of establishing a journal”. This show begins with a whistle-stop tour through the art and literature that inspired him on his travels. Always a pluralist, Mariátegui was as attracted to the acerbic satire of German graphic supremo George Grosz — represented here by lithographs including one of a quartet of moustachioed soldiers marching down the street with buffoonish pomposity — as he was to the more earnest vision of Russian-born artist Alexander Archipenko, whose bronze, Cubist-style sculpture of a woman, “Egyptian Motif” (1917), dominates one gallery with angular hieratic grandeur.

Mariátegui had a dreamy streak. In Milan, he made close friends with the Argentine painter Emilio Pettoruti. The latter’s portrait of Mariátegui — in profile, eyes gazing intently at blank pages on his knee — captures his dauntless fervour while maintaining a metaphysical mood typical of figurative Italian art at that time. Yet at the same time Mariátegui found himself drawn to the Futurist flag-bearer Filippo Marinetti, who saw industrialisation as the road to a brave new fascist world.

Inclusivity was at the kernel of Mariátegui’s publishing enterprise. “The journal . . . does not represent a group. Rather, it represents a movement, a spirit,” he announced when presenting the first issue of Amauta. The magazine, he said, would express Peru’s “vigorous current of renewal . . . [whose] instigators . . . have been called avant-gardists, socialists, revolutionaries, etc.”

Another crucial seam running through Amauta was Indigenism — an ideology that championed a sense of connection to Latin America’s indigenous communities, who were under threat of land grabs and exploitation of their labour. Mariátegui referred to the Inca as “the most advanced primitive communist organisation in recorded history”. As the magazine’s title he chose a Quechua word for “wise man”. Meanwhile the first cover, designed by Peruvian painter and muralist José Sabogal, is stamped with a single portrait of an Inca sage in bold red and black, his almond-shaped eyes narrowed under a traditional headdress.

How much exchange genuinely occurred between Hispanic circles and their Inca counterparts is never entirely clear. But certainly the ancient culture proffered a wellspring of stimulation. A raft of works here, many of which were reproduced in Amauta, include “Allegory to the Workers”, a 1926 oil painting of workers in the fields by Peruvian artist Carlos Quízpez Asín. Captured facing forward, clutching their hoes and pitchforks, one with a fist raised in solidarity, the figures are as timeless and stylised as icons.

More compelling are a clutch of small woodblock prints — two of impoverished Mexicans and one of the Virgin of Guadelupe — by Sabogal. Boasting the intimate immediacy that is the virtue of woodblock, which Sabogal adopted because it reminded him of traditional engraving on gourds in the Central Andes, one depicts a couple riding a donkey, the man staring back over his shoulder at the viewer as if remonstrating us for nosiness. Another shows a fierce-eyed face wedged between his neck-high serape and his sombrero.

Both Mariátegui and Amauta were comets destined to fly high and burn out early

That Sabogal, a Peruvian by birth, was making images of Mexicans is typical of the borderless nature of the Latin American avant-garde. As the exhibition’s title suggests, Amauta sat at the crucible of a network of radical political and artistic exchanges across the region with special bonds to Mexico, where the revolution had wrought remarkable changes in life and art, and Argentina, which was home to both a vital university reform movement and a vibrant, innovative literary scene.

Over the course of its brief existence Amauta would feature or review the work of talents from Latin America and beyond including Jorge Luis Borges and his artist sister Norah, Sigmund Freud, José Ortega y Gasset and Diego Rivera. Among the myriad exhibits alluding to this constellation, welcome discoveries include a 1918 copy of Hélices, Poems (1918-1922) by Guillermo de Torre, with a cover designed by Norah Borges in an airy pattern that interlocks rainbows and tented dwellings. Also ravishing is a copy of Five Metres of Poems by Carlos Oquendo de Amat. Printed by Mariátegui’s Minerva press in 1927, the poem unfurls over five metres of concertina-style pamphlet and evokes, through surreal, cinematic imagery and audacious textual layout, the Andean landscape where its author grew up.

Both Mariátegui and Amauta were comets destined to fly high and burn out early. Aside from the risk of publishing a journal grounded in Marxist theory, Mariátegui was physically frail, having lost a leg to illness in 1924. In 1927, the year he also started the Peruvian Socialist party, he was arrested and Amauta temporarily closed under the suspicion of a “Communist plot”.

Although he later resumed activities, the office was again raided by police in November 1928 — this time on the grounds of a “Jewish plot” — and documents, journals and correspondence were confiscated. Aware that he was in danger, Mariátegui started to plan a trip to Argentina, but in March 1930 he fell ill again. He died on April 16 of that year.

It is impossible for an exhibition to do more than touch on the scattered, sparkling galaxy of ideas and images that made Amauta so brief yet bright a moment in Latin American culture. Yet its legacy is assured due to the presence of a magnificent archive — vital to the creation of this show — much of which is now available online.

Today, with countless strands of culture available at our fingertips, it’s difficult to imagine the effort required to put together such a cross-disciplinary, multinational publication. Fortunately, this show will travel on to Lima, Mexico and Texas. Its editor would surely approve of such nomadic spirit. show less

A classic Marxist analysis of the condition of the lower classes in a Latin American country.

Biblioteca Amauta.
Obras completas de José Carlos Mariátegui; 2.
Esquema de evolución económica -- El problema del indio -- El problema de la tierra -- El proceso de la instrucción pública -- El factor religioso -- Regionalismo y centralismo -- El proceso de la literatura.

Biblioteca amauta; 6.
Obras completas de José Carlos Mariátegui.
Prólogo / Alberto Tauro -- El artista y la época -- Tópicos de arte moderno -- Autores y libros -- Autores y escenarios del teatro moderno.