Modernism/modernity

The 1920s played host to a remarkable literary scene in Argentina. A variety of intellectual groups created a rich print culture intended to disseminate novel literary, aesthetic, political, and philosophical ideas. Two of these in particular, the Florida Group (creators of the journal Martín Fierro) and the Boedo Group (who launched the magazine Claridad), through their somewhat manufactured rivalry, their discursive force, and their prescriptive ideas commanded a cultural renovation that rippled powerfully into the future. Although the literary debate between the Florida and the Boedo Groups has been thoroughly documented, only limited analysis exists of the art criticism and the art theory developed in their journals.¹ This article will focus on the highly conservative and, more importantly, deeply nationalist artistic criteria advanced in Martín Fierro. On the one hand, the Martinfierristas wielded the perceived cultural authenticity of gauchesca or criollismo to redefine literary and visual practices in order to foster cultural nationalism.² On the other, the journal endorsed the interwar European style known as the return to order, a movement that advocated the retrieval of classical forms, developed in France to promote the idea of reconstruction after the devastation caused by the Great War and then adopted in Italy to serve fascist values. Although this emphasis on classicism and tradition emerged around 1911 in French cubist circles associated with conservative and nationalist factions, after the war it became mainstream.³ By choosing the classicizing principle nested in the return to order as the cornerstone of modernist artworks (rather than promoting the radical fragmentations and distortions promoted by the European [End Page 111] avant-garde), Argentinean intellectuals transferred the seeds of European authoritarian and nationalist styles to a nation where, in contrast, many were fighting to democratize the country's political structures.

To grasp the cultural and ideological agenda of the Martinfierristas, it is necessary to understand their oppositional dialogue with the Boedo Group. The Boedistas were largely young atheists, anarchists, and socialist workers, admirers of the October Revolution. Many of them were European immigrants or first-generation European-Argentineans who had settled in the Boedo neighborhood, a poor southern suburb of Buenos Aires. In 1924 they founded Los Pensadores, the magazine that two years later became Claridad. In its art sections, and more importantly in the work of Boedo's visual branch, Los Artistas del Pueblo (The People's Artists), Claridad shunned all avant-garde practices as inherently bourgeois.⁴ Instead, it championed an aesthetic based on nineteenth-century European realist art, portraying the proletarian struggle in accord with Marxist ideas of the extreme left. Boedo adopted Tolstoy's and Gorky's ideas regarding the social function of art in its most dogmatic implementation (much as it would be later used in the Stalinist era), recruiting social realism to guard against political dissent.

In contrast, the members of the Florida Group were young, upper-class artists, many of them educated in Europe, the descendants of traditional Argentine families of mostly Spanish origins. By the early 1920s, this young elite routinely gathered downtown at Richmond, a coffee shop on the elegant Florida Street. In 1924, writer Evar Méndez, one of the members of this clique and, significantly, Head of Publications under President Marcelo T. Alvear, created the magazine Martín Fierro, named after the gaucho outlaw whose legend constitutes Argentina's national poem.⁵ Florida's publication asserted national values while traveling the road of cosmopolitanism. Through articles written by Italian Futurist expatriates (Sandro Volta and Sandro Piantanida) who arrived in Argentina in the early 1920s, Martín Fierro first espoused the aesthetic principles of Pittura Metafisica and Novecento Italiano. Later, the periodical courted French collaborators (including Marcelle Auclair, André Salmon, Valèry Larbaud, Waldemar George, Jean Cocteau, and Maurice Raynal), who like Volta and Piantanida, measured a work's excellence against the artist's ability to draw from classical sources. Martín Fierro's cosmopolitanism also led to collaborative ventures with the French journal Commerce, founded in 1924 by Larbaud, Paul Valéry, and Leon-Paul Fargue, and with the Spanish Revista de Occidente, launched in 1923 by José Ortega y...