ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book provides case studies that push beyond the current historiography of Latin American art and makes an argument for the study of artists and artworks outside the canon. It explains by spotlighting national territories often overlooked in the histories of Latin American abstraction such as Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Mexico. The book examines the origins and development of gestural, lyrical, calligraphic, or Informalist abstraction in Latin America, as well as assemblage, environmental, and kinetic art. It demonstrates the messy and much more diverse history of abstract art especially in contrast to the increasingly pervasive presence of geometric abstraction as the face of Latin American art of the postwar years. The book proposes a shared preoccupation by postwar American—in its broadest sense—artists with abstract art and the legacy of the incomplete European avant-garde project.
