Venezuelan Art and the Search for a National Identity, 1920-1960

FAIN: FT-55205-07

Marguerite Katherine Mayhall
Kean University (Union, NJ 07083-7133)

Venezuelan Art and the Search for a National Identity, 1920-1960, examines the rise of geometric abstraction in painting and Corbusian-derived architecture as a phenomenon tied to cultural and political concerns of Venezuelan intellectuals in the 1920s through the late 1950s, and will demonstrate that works of art made in these modes both responded to and influenced their political and cultural environments. Using an interdisciplinary approach, I investigate how geometric abstraction and its associated architecture came to be viewed by many as the quintessential “Venezuelan” national style by the early 1960s, after a period of intense debate over the validity of such styles for the national context.