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Recovering Abstract Art Narratives in Latin America: Lidy Prati’s Writing

Recuperando narrativas del arte abstracto en América Latina: la escritura de Lidy Prati
Ayelen Pagnanelli

Résumés

Pionera de la abstracción geométrica entre 1944 y 1955, Lidy Prati fue una joven artista inmersa en la exploración de la abstracción y la creación de obras de arte formalmente transgresoras en el Río de La Plata, en América del Sur. Sostengo que Prati publicó en la revista Lyra en 1956 una genealogía innovadora y crítica del arte abstracto que incluía el arte indígena y no occidental, que era contraria a la genealogía sostenida por otros representantes del arte concreto argentino. A través de una reconstrucción feminista del contexto personal de su escritura, este artículo ilumina las contribuciones de una mujer a las narrativas sobre el arte abstracto.

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1When in 1956 Lidy Prati published a text she stated her genealogy of abstract art in Lyra magazine, the artistic, social, and her personal context were profoundly different from when the magazine Arturo was published in 1944.It was a moment that inaugurated a new taste for abstraction in Buenos Aires, Argentina. More than a decade after the emergence of the inventionist young artists who proposed the production of utopian artworks where non-figuration, geometric abstraction, and the exploration of the irregular frame predominated and, after the so-called Revolución Libertadora – a military government that overthrew Juan Domingo Perón in 1955 – modern art enjoyed a broader reception.

  • 1 Prati passed away in 2008.

2Lidy Prati (Lidia Elena Prati), was born in Resistencia, Chaco, Argentina in 1921, into a wealthy industrialist family. As a teenager, she moved to the city of Buenos Aires.1 In 1942, she took art lessons with Tomás Maldonado who was her same age and, the following year she began participating in art exhibitions (Weseley 2009, p. 154). Between 1944 and 1955 she produced an important oeuvre that made her one of the most relevant figures of local abstraction, although she did not obtain due recognition during her lifetime. The crucial role that Prati played in the development of abstraction in the Rio de la Plata region, a fundamental episode in the history of global abstract art of the 20th century, has been undervalued in the history of art. Through a feminist reconstruction and an analysis of some of her artistic and conceptual acts from the 1940s and 1950s, I argue that towards the mid-fifties, Prati managed to configure a transgressive genealogy of abstract art that sharply contrasted the view held by former members of the Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención (AACI) such as Tomás Maldonado.

3 To reveal Prati’s boldness in 1956, the context in which her Lyra piece was published must be taken into consideration. In this article, I propose the conceptualization of personal history of abstraction to recall this contextual dimension. This concept incorporates what traditional art history hinders when it only centers around artistic production, originality, and formal innovation. It is grounded in the idea that the personal is political (Hanish 1970), popularized by the radical feminism of the North American seventies, but previously suggested by philosopher Simone de Beauvoir who, after her meticulous work on the condition of women, would later became a feminist (de Beauvoir 2007; Suárez Tomé 2022, p. 42‑46). In short, it is rooted in the belief that it is necessary to integrate the lives, sociality, material conditions of production and the critical and historical fortune of the artists as factors of analysis when writing art history, as feminist art historians have duly performed. In this sense, it echoes Griselda Pollock’s cultural producers concept by which the author urged scholarship to encompass all aspects of social relations around art making (Pollock 2003, p. 5).

4In terms of histories of abstraction, Prati has been included in several exhibitions, surveys and studies of abstract art from the region that have seldomly delved into the gendered dynamics of abstraction (Sur moderno 2019; Giunta 2013; América Fría La Abstracción Geométrica En Latinoamérica (1934-1973) 2011; Karo Dame 1995; Ledezma 2007; Latin American artists of the twentieth century 1993). In contrast, some exceptions are Andrea Giunta’s inclusion in her book on women artists, Feminismo y arte latinoamericano and María Amalia García’s essay in the exhibition catalog Yente-Prati focusing on Prati’s biography and her interventions in Arturo magazine and the AACI (García 2009; Giunta 2018). By closely examining Lidy Prati's interventions in Buenos Aires until 1956, this article presents how framing abstract art from a personal history can be a useful interpretative lens for the study of the avant-garde.

Prati in Arturo

  • 2 For an analysis of Prati’s participation in Arturo, see María Amalia García, 2009, “Lidy Prati y su (...)
  • 3 “Tomás Maldonado and Lidia Elena Prati’s Marriage License” 1944 (Updated 1975).

5As recent scholarship on South American abstraction has shown, Prati was a fundamental ideologue of Arturo. Revista de artes abstractas, which inspired avant-garde groups to center around the concept of inventionism (García 2009; Giunta 2020). This magazine had a single issue published in a format of approximately 28 cm x 20 cm, of moderately artisanal production with an estimated circulation of 250 copies in the (Southern hemisphere) summer of 1944. The editorial committee was made up of Edgar Bayley, Gyula Kosice, Rhod Rothfuss and Carmelo Arden Quin. Tomás Maldonado, Prati’s recent husband and Bayley's younger brother, made the cover illustration. Prati was, then, the only woman on the team and made the numerous vignettes that appear throughout the magazine which she signed Lidy Maldonado.2 ( It is important to note that only during this period did she sign her married name; later, still married, she resumed the use of her maiden name (Prati and Maldonado got married in 1944).3García has pointed out this act as an acceptance of “sexist social structures” by this group of artists (García 2009, p. 95); to this interpretation, I would add that, within Arturo’s male homosociality, signing her married name was a way of legitimizing her presence in the group since it reinforced that she was linked to one of the men who were part of it. In this way, Prati stressed her privilege as a married woman within the avant-garde.

Figure 1: Page detail with a reproduction of a work by Piet Mondrian included thanks to Lidy Prati, in Arturo (1944).

  • 4 The expression Rothfuss used was marco recortado, which has been subsequently translated as “irregu (...)

6Prati's contributions were not only aesthetic and conceptual but also practical. The magazine was partially financed with money from her family, owner of a cotton factory in the province of Chaco (Bertone 2006, p. 67). One of her contributions was the insertion of a reproduction of a painting Piet Mondrian (Figure 1). In addition to insisting that it be part of the magazine (Ibid., p. 64, 67), Prati colored the black and white reproduction to include red (García 2018, p. 14‑15; García 2009; Bertone 2006). This reproduction accompanied the influential text by the Uruguayan artist Rhod Rothfuss “El marco: un problema de la plástica actual” (The Frame: a Problem of Current Plastic Art), where he reflected on how the rectangular frame represented a limit for the development of a theme since it ended up dominating the composition (Rothfuss 1944; Pérez-Barreiro 1996, p. 75‑76; Lauría 2002, p. 35). His solution: artworks with an irregular frame,4 an aesthetic idea that became central for inventionist’s formal explorations (García 2021). Hence, Kandinsky's Two, etc., with its rectangular frame, Mondrian's painting colored by Prati and a work by Rothfuss himself illustrated the page (Figure 1). As a result, the inclusion of Mondrian's artwork lobbied by Prati was located in the horizon of aspirations at the heart of inventionism. Arturo has been widely analyzed as a space where young artists were experimenting theoretically about the type of art they wanted to generate, prioritizing reflection over artistic production (García 2018; Cristina Rossi 2018). Their lack of emphasis on geometric abstraction at this stage has also been singled out (Ibid.), while it later became central to these artists' concerns. Geometric abstraction was precisely what Prati promoted through the inclusion of Mondrian’s reproduction (García 2018, p. 8).

Figure 2: Page detail with Lidy Prati’s one vignette signed as Lidy Maldonado, in Arturo (1944).

7Another of Prati’s contributions were her various non-figurative vignettes. One of them, reproduced on a full page in Arturo, was composed of a continuous and serpentine black line; the line’s thickness varied across the surface and generated a contained form (Figure 2). Due to this self-contained quality, García has called it a prototype of an irregular frame (García 2009, p. 94). It is worth remembering that, except for the painting Invención n. 2, Maldonado's visual contributions in Arturo, especially the cover, are far from the non-figuration of self-contained compositions proposed by both Prati's vignettes and Rhod Rothfuss’ Trabajo en estudio (Figure 1) which are more in line with the irregular frame explorations. These tensions and complexities in the visual attitudes in Arturo have been pointed out (García 2018, p. 14). However, Prati's vignettes populated the magazine and visually evoke the irregular frame–proposed by Rothfuss, these were works whose irregular shape was determined by the internal composition of the work – Prati’s vignettes illustrate self contained shapes of the irregular frame (García 2009, p. 94). Indeed, one of the earliest surviving explorations of her irregular frame artworks adopts the motifs of her vignettes in Arturo. The small tempera, in the artist's Archive, repeats the vignettes’ line: the black line now maintains the same thickness and instead of meandering, it zigzags. It reiterates triangles and circles while adding colors: blue, red and a shades of white. In light of this small tempera, there is a demonstrable continuation between her vignettes and the irregular frame, the fundamental idea in Arturo’s inventionism.

  • 5 “Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención Statute”, 1946, Lidy Prati Archive.

8Around 1946, those who had been part of Arturo formed groups joined by more artists: the AACI, Madí and then, Perceptismo. Prati was part of the AACI, and shared the role of Secretary with Edgar Bayley and Jorge Souza.5. Through the years it lasted, just three women were part of this group while Madí – which was active up until the mid 1950s – had several women participating in its events and its magazine; Perceptismo had none.

  • 6 See Maria Faxedas Brujats, “Women artists of “Cercle et carré”: abstraction, gender and modernity”, (...)
  • 7 For a more detailed description of Werbin’s participation in the AACI, see Ayelen Pagnanelli, 2023, (...)

9Male homosociality significantly affected the AACI to the extent that all three women were in relationships with male members of the group. As mentioned, Prati was married to Maldonado, and then, Nélida Fedullo was with Jorge Souza, and Matilde Werbin was married, first, to Raúl Lozza and later was with Edgar Bayley (Pagnanelli 2019). Regardless of their artistic tendencies and later contributions, being associated with men in the AACI allowed these women to join the group. This phenomenon has been traced to other avant-gardes,6 s thereby establishing the need to observe the sociability in this avant-garde group. If ignored, one might miss how Perceptismo emerged. This was a group split that otherwise can be written off as caused by artistic differences alone. Werbin had married Lozza in 1937, when she was only sixteen years old, yet her decision to take Edgar Bayley, who was part of the AACI as her partner, triggered the departure of the Lozza brothers from the association, led them to create Perceptismo, and thus, reconfigured the scene.7 ,

10Hence, Prati, Werbin and Fedullo were the only women who managed to be a part of the AACI. Given that their participation was subject to these social ties, it is not surprising that, in the event that these relationships might end, the women might not be allowed to continue their membership of the avant-garde group.

Prati (not) in Maldonado's genealogy of abstract art

  • 8 For a more extensive analysis of Prati’s production during this period, see María Amalia García, 20 (...)

11Prati actively participated in the AACI experiments that had been prompted by Rothfuss’ ideas in Arturo (García 2019a; García 2021). The irregular frame was, then, one of these artists' attempts to break with the idea of a painting as a window to the world, resulting in works that questioned the categories of both painting and sculpture. Such was the case of Concreto, from 1945, made based on an artwork by Mondrian (Figure 3); where the artist abandoned the frame’s orthogonality and used wood as its support. Concreto is a quote and an exploration of the European artist’s work but, as Giunta has suggested, it goes beyond it since it introduces the ideas of the irregular frame (Giunta 2020, p. 49; Giunta 2018, p. 76). Prati took up Mondrian's colors and figures, and converted them into these forms independent of the rectangular frame, translating the AACI’s theoretical ideas into a plastic object. In this period, her explorations were varied and extensive, including an in depth study of Gestalt theory, their detailed analysis exceeds the possibilities of this article.8 This article accounts for some specific contributions to illuminate her centrality in abstract art and expose how her omission of art histories amplifies the defiant nature of the narrative she constructed in Lyra.

Figure 3: Lidy Prati, Concreto, 1945, oil on wood, 62 x 48 cm, in Arte Concreto Invención (1946).

Figure 3: Lidy Prati, Concreto, 1945, oil on wood, 62 x 48 cm, in Arte Concreto Invención (1946).

Figure 4: Page detail of “Lo abstracto y lo concreto en el arte modern” in Arte Concreto Invención (1946): 5, 6, 7.

  • 9 García suggested this work as part of those experimentations, see María Amalia García, 2009, “Lidy (...)

12Prati’s artistic experiments during her time with the AACI were excluded from a central text that created a genealogy of abstract art from the Río de la Plata region. In the AACI's first publication, Arte Concreto Invención of 1946, Maldonado published his influential article “Lo abstracto y lo concreto en el arte moderno” (The Abstract and the Concrete in Modern Art) (Maldonado 1946). He aimed to position himself as a theoretical leader through this aesthetic reflection, building a genealogy of abstraction based on European artists and then, in that narrative, inserting the AACI’s achievements, whichhe represented (García 2011, p. 68; Lauría 2002, p. 38‑39). In his words, “the fundamental battle waged by the truly revolutionary art of our day has been aimed at concretizing space and forms,” and, in this sense, he expanded on how to achieve non-representation. In this text, he mentioned Prati on two occasions: first when he pointed to those who initially “broke the traditional form of the frame” and second, when he spoke of those who materialized the figures in “forms” (Maldonado 1946). However, he later omitted the woman who – it bears recalling – was his wife, when he marked the AACI’s final development. “And along this path we arrive at the maximum discovery of our movement: the separation in space of the constituent elements of the painting without abandoning its coplanar arrangement (Molenberg, Raúl Lozza).” Next, he stated “the painting, as a ‘containing organism’, was abolished” (Ibid.). Thus, Maldonado claimed that the AACI had achieved non-representation through coplanars, a type of artwork that had this particular arrangement that he refers to. The article was accompanied by examples of coplanars by Molenberg, Lozza and a sculpture by Maldonado (Figure 4); but he did not refer to Prati’s Concreto whose reproduction appears only a few pages after the article (Maldonado 1946, p. 9).9

13Molenberg and Lozza’s artworks share Prati’s geometric planes of color, fixed in their position thanks to the rods that join them, and the abolition of the “containing organism”. Nonetheless, Maldonado did not mention Concreto; nor did he include its reproduction along with his work and those of his peers. “Lo abstracto y lo concreto en el arte moderno” consolidated the coplanar as the AACI’s pinnacle. In this way, Maldonado effectively eliminated Prati from both the text and the visual references of their group’s magazine. His voice monopolized the theoretical reflections and the genealogy for the AACI. Already in 1946, Prati would find that the omission of her contributions to abstraction would be repeated throughout her life. It was a situation that she denounced in an interview decades later, she asserted that “they had to erase me: that is what they always did” (Prati in Bertone 2006). This impression coincides with her displacement from the center of the Buenos Aires artistic scene after 1955 (García 2009, p. 96).

  • 10 Prati exhibited in: the Annual Salon of the Sociedad de Acuarelistas y Grabadores (1943), in Comte (...)

14However, until 1955, Prati exhibited profusely (Weseley 2009).10 In 1949 she did so at the “2do Salón Argentino de arte no-figurativo” (2nd Argentine Salon of non-figurative art) at Van Riel Gallery (2° Salón argentino de arte no-figurativo 1949). In fact, together with Juan del Prete and Alfredo Hlito, she was part of the organizing committee of this salon (Hlito 1949). It had a particularity, namely that women artists made up 27% of participation. Out of the eighteen exhibitors, five were women: Nélida Fedullo, María Bresler, Yente, Diyi Laañ and Prati herself. Not all of them were in the AACI, two of the artists were from Madí: María Bresler and Diyi Laañ; while Yente had remained independent of the avant-garde groups along with Juan Del Prete, her life partner.

  • 11 Along with GAMA she exhibited in Van Riel Gallery (1952), the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeir (...)

15Since 1952, Prati participated in the Grupo de Artistas Modernos de Argentina (GAMA) (Group of Modern Artists of Argentina) which brought together some of those who made up the AACI such as Maldonado, Hlito, Enio Iommi, Claudio Girola, but where others joined like Antonio Fernández Muro, Hans Aebi, Miguel Ocampo and Sarah Grilo, and was sponsored by Aldo Pellegrini (García 2011, p. 177). Unlike the AACI,which was no longer active, Madí and Perceptismo, GAMA brought together artists who worked in different modes of abstraction. They held several exhibitions together both nationally and internationally until 1955, that is, already a decade after the publication of Arturo (García 2009; García 2011).11

  • 12 Divorce sentence, 1954, Lidy Prati Archive.
  • 13 For a discussion of this moment in the history of divorce in Argentina, see Isabella Cosse, Verónic (...)

16Meanwhile, by 1952-3, the Prati-Maldonado marriage had effectively ended (García 2009). Maldonado had begun another relationship, and in 1954 he emigrated to Germany to take a position as a professor at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm (Escot 2008, p. 105). On December 27, 1954, the Prati-Maldonado couple obtained a divorce ruling.12 This happened in an exceptional moment for civil legislation in Argentina, when, briefly, divorce regulations were relaxed in the last months of the Peronist government and an important number of divorces were granted.13 This separation and later divorce are important pieces of Prati’s context and her rapport with the artworld in the 1950s.

  • 14 For a full list of the exhibitions after 1955, see David Weseley, 2009, “Lidy Prati. Biografía” in (...)

17By the time Prati’s essay and interview were published in Lyra in 1956, her position in the artistic field, and especially in the abstract art scene, had been substantially modified. Agreeing with García, the artist found it impossible to sustain her activity as an artist after the separation (García 2009, p. 96). Manuel Espinosa, also from the AACI, her friend and witness at her wedding, expressed the artist's impossibility of remaining in those circles. In an interview, he commented that, after the separation, “Lidy was left very alone” (“Dossier Espinosa” 2004, p. 48). Somehow, it seems that the interpersonal ties that kept her there were broken, and her presence as an artist was unsustainable. Just as her participation in the abstract art scene was feasible, in part, because she had married a male artist who participated there, once that relationship ended, she was unable to remain. The obstacles were social and financial as her family’s financial situation declined on par (this accentuated after her father’s death in 1964 (Weseley 2009, p. 158). Perhaps as a result, Prati exhibited very sporadically after 1955.14 Despite this, she remained in the Buenos Aires artistic milieu for decades. From the mid-1950s she made drawings, worked as an art critic, as an administrator in the Argentine Foreign Ministry and as a layout designer for magazines such as Lyra and Mundo Argentino. In fact, she was part of Artinf’s coordination committee, a cultural magazine launched in 1970 by artist Germaine Derbecq, writer and journalist Odile Baron Supervielle and curator Silvia de Ambrosini. Writing would be Prati’s new way of intervening in the arts scene. This contextual information about Prati’s private, family and work life is not merely colorful; rather, it is indispensable for constructing a narrative enriched by the personal histories of abstraction.

Figure 5: Page detail of Lidy Prati in Lyra (1956).

Figure 5: Page detail of Lidy Prati in Lyra (1956).

Figure 6: Page detail with Lidy Prati’s photograph in Lyra (1956).

A Different Framework for Abstraction

18In 1956, Lyra, a magazine dedicated to the arts, published four pages about Prati while announcing that she would be responsible for its layout (Figure 5). The interview featured a brief artistic biography, along with a photograph capturing Prati in an assertive pose, facing the camera, and showcasing one of her paintings in the background. Through this photograph, Prati invariably presented herself as an avant-garde artist (Figure 6).

  • 15 García has written about Prati’s investigations of the period, see María Amalia García, 2009, “Lidy (...)

19Untitled, the painting in the work in the background dates from her time as part of the AACI. It was executed in 1948, a year Prati together with Maldonado, Girola, Hlito and Iommi resumed their visual searches of the orthogonal frame after their irregular frameand coplanar explorations some years prior (García 2009, p. 90). Maldonado’s contact with Swiss Concrete artist Max Bill drove these new directions. In Untitled, Prati explores the formal relationship of shapes and color against the background. The irregular triangular figures that are repeated in the composition in various colors against the white background accentuate a vibration that she continued to investigate in works such as Vibración “a.10” from c.1950 and Vibración al infinito from 1953.15 Due to their placement, color and grouping, the grayish and blue triangles that are in the middle of the painting, could be perceived as a single figure insofar as the short distance between them creates tension against the background. By these means, Prati applied Gestalt theory.

Figure 7: Page details of the interview to Raquel Forner” in Lyra (1956).

  • 16 For an example of a biased interview to an artist married to another artist, Paula de Berni, see Pa (...)

20Prati’s interview followed another with the renowned Argentine artist Raquel Forner. A photograph of the artist accompanied it, but this time, she was at her home, looking at her works of art (Figure 7) (Fuentes 1956). Forner had gained great recognition in the cultural field in the 1930s due to her harrowing figurative paintings depicting the horrors of the Spanish Civil War (Bertúa 2012). She was awarded the Grand Prize of Honor of the National Salon of 1956 in the hands of the de facto president, General Pedro Eugenio Aramburu. Giunta mentioned that this was a moment when the government demonstrated its commitment to promote so-called high culture to differentiate itself from Peronism (Giunta 2015, p. 66). Forner's biographical description in Lyra was already poetic and kind, as was the interview in general.16 In it, Forner stressed the changes in the new government -the self-proclaimed Revolución Libertadora–, called for the dissemination of Argentine art abroad with government assistance, and avoided falling into the discussion between figuration and abstraction espoused by the magazine. On one side, Lyra presented a successful female, figurative artist married to an artist, and on the other, a barely recognized, abstract artist recently divorced (it must be noted though that civil status was not mentioned in either case). Forner was even invited to speak against abstraction twice, something she gracefully avoided. Lyra’s juxtaposition of these two women could be read as an attempt at a discursive duel between two women artists.

21In the second half of the 1950s, no longer closed in geometry, abstraction included a plurality of tendencies (García 2019b, p. 15‑16). Moreover, artists who had not been part of the 1940s avant-garde added abstraction into their visual repertoire. In this context, Forner's La aventura from 1954, a recent artwork, was reproduced beside her interview. The caption read “illustrating a new phase in her painting,”, referring to a work dominated by a composition that incorporated abstraction, and which was, in effect, the prelude to a body of work that ventured into abstraction. Thus, the reproduction of La aventura brought Forner visually closer to Prati's position. Since Prati was Lyra’s layout designer, it is possible to think that Prati could have decided to include it. In this way, she visually suggested that Forner was exploring abstraction, hence bridging the apparent aesthetic differences the magazine attempted to foreground.

22Strangely, the space dedicated to Prati was divided into two sections. First, an essay written by the artist; second, an interview where it is evident that she had to deal with an interviewer who was more interested in making clear his position against abstract art than in engaging in a conversation about her oeuvre. In both sections, Prati expanded on the categories of “abstraction” and “concrete”, the same ones that filled Maldonado's text. The central problem she articulated was how we interpret art and, in response, she provided a genealogy of abstract art.

23In a move that distanced her from the readings of those who had been her peers in the AACI, Prati began her text by associating the creations of the native peoples of the now Argentine territory and other non-Western cultures with modern art. She indicated that abstract painting dated from the time humans lived in caves, and concrete painting from Paleolithic painting, exemplifying this by talking about the “designs of Peruvian textiles, boards painted in Tierra del Fuego (…) Diaguita ceramics unearthed in recent years,” (Prati in Neri 1956). She ended the sentence with the sole footnote of her text, a 1923 book on a local archaeological research on pottery that she referred to as “Alfarería draconiana de Eric Boman y H. Greslebin” (Prati in Ibid.). The book’s title was actually Alfarería de estilo draconiano de la región diaguita. It was a pioneering aesthetic study, in a formalist key, of objects produced in the Argentine territory, especially of the culture that today is called la Aguada (Patti and Schavelzon 1997; see also Fasce and Mantovani 2022).

  • 17 Maria Alba Bovisio and Penhos Marta, 2021, “La “invención” del arte indígena en la Argentina” in Ar (...)
  • 18 Torres García reflected on this subject, see Joaquín Torres-García, 1939, Metafísica de la prehisto (...)

24In those first decades of the 20th century, the idea of an “indigenous art” associated with pre-Hispanic production began to take shape, and indigenist currents of thought developed in Argentina.17Ideas circulated, such as those espoused by Ricardo Rojas, which involved decontextualizing objects to render them fitting designs for a modern American aesthetic in the realm of the decorative arts (María Alba Bovisio and Penhos 2017; Fasce and Mantovani 2022). The use of “pre-Hispanic” motifs was vindicated, symbolically placing them in a past that denied the continuity of the Indigenous communities in the present. Similarly, Uruguayan artist Joaquín Torres-García’s abstract poetics –and his followers in Montevideo – integratedpre-Hispanic visuality.18In his 1946 essay, Maldonado had excluded precisely that connection in the references of his genealogy of abstraction despite them being originally included in Arturo (Cristina Rossi 2008, p. 92‑93).

25In her only footnote, Prati indicated: “Parallel lines, crossed lines, oblique reticulation, triangles, rhombuses, meanders (meanders are absolutely one of the most complicated combinations, based on straight lines that others have invented)” (Prati in Neri 1956). In this way, she highlighted the work required to produce the objects and the level of complexity that they implied, from a perspective that seemed to consider them in terms of their visuality. Only then does she mention European avant-garde artists, discursively bridging both practices. In this essay,Prati included discussions around Amerindian and abstract art in her genealogy, albeit perhaps in a superficial and formalist manner yet recognizing the work of the artists.

26In passing, she mentioned the German anthropologist, her contemporary, Franz Boas, known for his ideas that destabilized notions of white/European superiority, especially for positing cultural relativism which insisted on studying each culture in its specific socio-historical context (Boas 1947; Feest 2004; Darnell 2015; Pöhl 2008). In fact, a copy of the interview is preserved in the artist's personal archive with some sections that she highlighted, including an idea that Boas held in his book Primitive Art “the history of art documents us in intensus that the way of thinking about art is the way of making and the way of making art are the works of art themselves” (Prati in Neri 1956). In 1947, Fondo de Cultura Económica,a publishing house of Mexican origin that was characterized for its dissemination of books of contemporary thought to the wider public, edited and translated Primitive Art i. In it, Boas maintained that “each culture can be understood only as a historical product determined by the social and geographical environment in which each people has been placed and by the way in which it develops the cultural material that comes into their possession” (Boas 1947, p. 10). The connection that Prati made between non-Western art and abstract art is based on the active reading and appropriation of Boas's ideas, as well as the attention paid to contemporary discussions of archeology and anthropology.

Figure 8: Page detail Lyra (1956).

  • 19 Prati also included the reproduction of a Greek statue in the Louvre Museum that she does not menti (...)

27The artist had access to Boas's book, which is possible to assert since several of the images that illustrate the interview’s second page were originally published in Fondo de Cultura Económica’s edition of Primitive Art. This allows us to infer that Prati's argument was not only textual but also visual: in the magazine, the artist introduced a reproduction of a drawing of an Etruscan vase, Koryak embroidery (from Eastern Russia), a Peruvian textile, a vase from Finland and another from Peru, and a diagram of symbols that represent stars of the Native Arapaho communities of the central US territories.19 In Boas's book, most of these images are part of the second chapter in which the author reflected on the non-figurative formal aspects that he found in cultural objects produced by communities throughout the planet (Boas 1947, p. 23‑70). There is no mention of the images’ provenance but their inclusion reveals how closely she read this author. Naming examples not only of Native Communities but of non-Western cultures beyond the American continent, Prati underpinned her argument by including these images extracted directly from Primitive Art, in what may have been her own decision in her role as Lyra’s layout artist. In this way, she made use of Boas's images as visual evidence to support her framework for understanding abstract art. Thus, between the combination of visual references and her writing, Prati first included non-Western productions, and only later did she name European artists present in the genealogies of concrete art: Malevich, van Doesburg, Mondrian and Vantongerloo. Although references to primitivism were made since Arturo (Arden Quin 1944), in 1956 Prati expanded on the relationship between concrete art and “primitive” art, placing the former as another example of non-figuration on equal terms with the latter.

28Her reflection on abstract art and its non-Western roots can be understood within an array of views on modern art as an appropriation of the other. Namely, as the art produced by children, people in a situation of confinement due to mental health issues and indigenous communities. In the case of those who suffer from mental illnesses, in 19th century Europe, romantic artists had already turned their gaze towards their creativity. They located the relationship between people with mental illnesses and those considered “primitive” through a link “of direct visuality”; in turn, this vision appears in the practice of the French artist Dubuffet who in the 1940s collected what he called art brut, which he felt were the impulsive expressions of those who made them (Foster 2001, p. 11). On the other hand, these readings on modern art, so widely used in Europe, were not shared in Latin America.

29Brazil presented a special relationship between modern art and rationality. Art historian Kaira Cabañas has argued how art produced by psychiatric patients shaped the conception of Brazilian modern art (Cabañas 2018). She traced the interest of art critics such as Mário Pedrosa – a key figure in 20th century Brazil – in the art produced by patients and exposed how modern art in Europe was framed as intrinsically different from art forms made by so-called others, be they patients, children or people from other parts of the world. Thus, abstract art in Brazil was not a purely rational effort derived from European artists.

30From the late 1940s, Pedrosa wrote about Gestalt theory, a branch of Psychology that studied perception and which art historian Adele Nelson has inscribed in a global interest in visual perception (Nelson 2022). Pedrosa worked on it especially in his 1949 thesis, “Da natureza afetiva da forma na obra de arte” (On the Affective Nature of Form in the Work of Art), which allowed him to take a pluralistic approach to artistic practices (Pérez-Barreiro 2017, p. 17). This text was followed by Forma e Personalidade in 1951. He understood abstraction as distant from rationality and was involved with Nise da Silveira, a Brazilian psychiatrist interested in the art of patients (Ibid., p. 24), and in the children's art program at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro. In 1950, he shaped his concept virgin art, contemporary with Dubuffet's art brut, a concept through which he understood the art of patients (Cabañas 2017, p. 69‑73; Cabañas 2018, p. 71). Years later, he would continue a path aiming towards the decolonization of art with projects such as the Museu das Origens and even the Sixth São Paulo Biennial of 1961 that had objects from all regions of the world (Nelson 2017; Sommer 2017). Pedrosa's conception of modern art, in his case, later led to a vision of art and cultural productions that included the art of others.

31It is relevant to emphasize that Prati was in contact with Pedrosa and his ideas. In this sense, García articulated the links between AACI artists, especially Maldonado and Prati, with the Brazilian scene since both traveled to Rio de Janeiro in 1951. A photograph of them at Pedrosa's has survived and Prati’s archive preserved a copy of the critic's book, Forma e Personalidade, which he gave them as a gift during the visit (García 2011, p. 151). He championed concrete art and, in turn, Prati’s artworks were immersed in Gestalt research such as in Untitled, reproduced in Lyra (Nelson 2022, p. 40; García 2011, p. 95, 165). Prati's ideas exposed in the magazine, where she integrates references to objects from non-Western and Indigenous communities of the Argentine territory, can be comprehended within the context of discourses that traversed both modern art and the art created by those traditionally regarded as others in Brazil. This dialogue aligns with Pedrosa's perspectives. In fact, Nelson has noted that in the texts published by the critic in this period there are two apparently contradictory views on modern art: on the one hand, the universality of creativity and, on the other, the Eurocentric development of the artistic avant-garde (Nelson 2022, p. 49). In contrast to Maldonado, who, in his essay “Lo abstracto y lo concreto en el arte moderno”, delineated a European genealogy of concrete art, Prati, in 1956, recovered a non-Western genealogy and extended it beyond the confines of European art history. In this exploration, a similar contradiction found in Pedrosa’s thinking appears to be at play.

Forward Readings of Local Abstraction

32In addition to hierarchizing non-Western productions, Prati used her reading of Boas on cultural relativism to provide an interpretive framework for abstract art. First, she compared Da Vinci to Raphael and Michelangelo, suggesting that different artistic trends can coexist contemporaneously as they did in the Italian Renaissance. Then, she pointed out that the Popes created an unprecedented art that “conformed in the first instance with a way of interpreting a reality, also unprecedented (...) How is the 'Sposalizzio della Virgine' at the Brera Museum different from Picasso’s 'Guernica'?: in the mode of interpretation” (Prati in Neri 1956), she asked and responded. Through a variety of examples, now taking the canonical works of art history, she insisted that different works, from different contexts, must be understood in their specificity. Prati, again employed the Boasian operation of cultural relativism as a method to interpret reality, and especially abstract art from well-known art historical examples.

Figure 9: Page detail of Lyra (1956).

  • 20 For a reading of this scientific language in inventionist writings, see Ayelen Pagnanelli, 2021, “‘ (...)
  • 21 Prati dates it 1919 but the image belongs to a work from 1932-1940 at the Peggy Guggenheim Collecti (...)
  • 22 This image was reproduced in the magazine Art d’aujourd’hui in 1952.
  • 23 The image does not have a caption, but see “Herbert Matter”, https://www.meer.com/en/7481-herbert-m (...)

33The artist then described the particular context in which, as she thought, concrete art emerged. She used a series of concepts and references to scientific and military advancements, such as atomic bomb, atom, mathematics, radioactivity, laboratory, to underscore that abstract art and concrete art emerge from a scientific-technological environment.20. She placed technological advances on par with artistic developments, as a context that artists could not ignore. In the portion of the interview where she expanded these ideas, Prati confronted the interviewer who made his position clear: “Twisted pieces of wire and geometric planes are not art. Not even science. That has a name and I will tell you: absolute sterility” (Neri 1956). To which Prati responded: “a piece of stone is as sterile as a wire or a white (color)” and mentioned works by European artists built from those material elements (Brancusi, Max Bill, Vantongerloo) “a piece of wire, collected or found, in rubble, can communicate to me: ruin, war and any other type of association” (Prati in Ibid.). Prati not only crafted her argument with words but, again, I argue that she, as the layout artist, incorporated images in the page margins to emphasize it. She included Max Bill's Tripartite Unit that had received an award at the 1951 Sao Paulo Biennial, a sculpture by Brancusi ,21 one by the Italian Bruno Munari,22 and a photograph by Herbert Matter from 1946 where the image of a mushroom cloud from an atomic bomb appears within the silhouette of a human face.23 Then, in response to the interviewer who tried to lecture her – today it would be called mansplaining (Solnit 2014) – about the lack of merits of abstract art, the artist responded: “I repeat, saisis la cause, as Leonardo advised. What determines art are always the causes” (Prati in Neri 1956). At the heart of Prati's reflection is the understanding of concrete art as the product of its context, and she explained it both through phrases by Da Vinci, as in this case, and with a Boasian interpretation.

  • 24 While some members of the AACI were part of the Communist Party, Prati was not. On this subject, se (...)

34In addition to making this lucid reading of abstract art, the artist had a sharp feminist reflection. In this regard, Prati does not seem to have ever defined herself as a feminist nor was she politically active.24 However, today it is possible to conceptualize one of her criticisms in particular as a feminist observation. When she wrote on Da Vinci, she questioned the idea that he was a genius:

Leonardo imagined that man could fly. And Leonardo did not fly. And he had theoretical, technical, and speculative material at his disposal; material that today with tenderness and admiration makes us say that “Leonardo was a genius.” Leonardo was a “genius” because he “didn't” fly.

Speaking of Leonardo now as a painter, do we consider him a genius, because we like him? Is painting a motivation for taste, above all other considerations? (Prati in Neri 1956).

35Prati recognized the indisputable merit in Da Vinci's theoretical thinking. What she acutely questioned was not only his designation of genius as an artist, but also the use of genius for art and artists in general.Nonetheless, she would later speak of Leonardo as her teacher (Bertone 2006, p. 72).Prati questioned whether genius is not, in truth, a matter of taste. Contemporaneously with this reflection, De Beauvoir challenged the use of genius for the cultural sphere, for the French philosopher, “you are not born a genius: you become one; and the feminine condition has made this future impossible until the present” (de Beauvoir 2007, p. 129). It is unknown if Prati had access to this book either during her travels in Europe or in its version early translated into Spanish, yet we could assume that she might have been aware of it or might have come to the same conclusion simultaneously (Nari 2021; Smaldone and Pérez Buchelli 2021; Ben 2021; Tarducci 2020). Despite this, Prati’s criticism points to the relationship between taste and genius, how something subjective becomes the criterion of objective artistic evaluation and that critique was pushed forward much later on. The critique of genius as an intrinsically gendered concept was systematized by feminist art historians to the discipline in the 1970s who questioned notions that are the basis of art history (Nochlin 1971; Battersby 1989; Pollock and Parker 1981, p. 13,114). However, Prati questioned it organically, in this space where she was able to voice her ideas about abstract art.

36Likewise, the artist criticized her fellow abstractionistswithout calling them out by name. In fact, she does not even mention her ex husband: “And like Giotto, all men who have made art will be artists, not founding chapels that are called ‘abstract’ or called ‘concrete’, will be called painting” (Prati in Neri 1956). Here she highlighted that what mattered was making art rather than generating new definitions about the production itself. This was a theme that ran through the Río de la Plata avant-garde in the 1940s, an art scene that has been known for its aesthetic written reflection and its virulence (María Cristina Rossi 2004). Throughout her writing, Prati does not advocate for a new term. Instead, she provided a novel framework for interpreting abstraction. Up until the mid 1959s, her interest lied in making artwork this has been further suggested thanks to recent studies on the materiality of her pictorial production that demonstrate her skillful combination of technique and appropriate use of materials (Marte 2021, p. 257). Prati’s attention to the craft and her ingenious reflections point to her remarkable awareness of the ideas of her time which she articulated both in her artistic practice and in her writings in Lyra.

In conclusion

37In Lyra magazine, Lidy Prati managed to publicly expose both her thoughts and her own genealogy of abstract art, which constitutes a novel narrative counter to that of Maldonado. Cultural magazines were the privileged medium to build a discourse on abstraction, and were spaces where the voices and ideas of men were generally published (Pagnanelli 2023). In fact, there are no published texts authored by Prati in the magazines of avant-garde groups, not even in those of AACI, where she actively participated. Even though her oeuvre unmistakably reveals that she was immersed in the experimentations proposed in Arturo, featured in her inclusion of Mondrian's work, her vignettes, her early irregular framed artworks, and her interest in Gestalt theory, Prati utilized a cultural magazine as a platform in 1956 –already when abstraction had been largely accepted as an artistic trend– to disseminate her own ideas. Not only did she defend concrete art, showing her erudite knowledge of the history of European art and the Old Masters, but she produced a genealogy that incorporated non-Western art and questioned the conceptual bases of art history.

38In any case, the publication of this text in Lyra, as a strategy, did not have the impact of the manifesto written by Maldonado a decade earlier, which was later compiled into a book and thus widely circulated perhaps due to the nature of art historical writings on abstract art at the time (Maldonado 1997). As mentioned, after 1955 Prati was no longer at the center of the Buenos Aires artistic scene. In an interview she reflected: “I painted until 1956, then I did some layout work in LYRA magazine... but then I had no place, I don't know if it was because I was a woman or what, but I never had a place” (Bertone 2006, p. 65). I agree with Prati in the suspicion that her gender had something to do with her low visibility. Art history, we know, often accepts women into the canon only in exceptional cases, hence reinforcing the notion that most women will never measure up (Mary D. 2003; Deepwell 2014). Rather than assuming that Prati has not gained recognition because none was due, we can move towards positioning Prati’s writings and artworks within the horizon of possibilities available to women through the approach of a personal history of abstraction informed by feminist scholarship.

39Incorporating the personal in abstract art modifies how we understand avant-garde groups. Firstly, this perspective underscores that the voices of men were the dominant ones, without losing sight of women’s agency, since some artists, like Prati, still managed to publish their thoughts on abstraction. Secondly, it integrates the sociality of these groups as a fundamental part of their analysis. To make sense of AACI and the paths some of its members took, it is especially relevant to look at the affective dimension of those relationships. And, thirdly, it presents the nuances through which abstract art was theorized, in this case considering Prati’s inclusive vision of non-Western productions that echoecurrent decolonial conceptions.

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Notes

1 Prati passed away in 2008.

2 For an analysis of Prati’s participation in Arturo, see María Amalia García, 2009, “Lidy Prati y su instancia diferencial en la unidad del arte concreto” in Yente Prati, Buenos Aires, Fundación Costantini.

3 “Tomás Maldonado and Lidia Elena Prati’s Marriage License” 1944 (Updated 1975).

4 The expression Rothfuss used was marco recortado, which has been subsequently translated as “irregular shaped canvas,” “irregular frames,” “cutout frames,” “irregular cut frame,” and other similar terms which are used throughout this article.

5 “Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención Statute”, 1946, Lidy Prati Archive.

6 See Maria Faxedas Brujats, “Women artists of “Cercle et carré”: abstraction, gender and modernity”, Woman’s Art Journal, 1 janvier 2015, vol. 36, no. 1, p. 37‑46.

7 For a more detailed description of Werbin’s participation in the AACI, see Ayelen Pagnanelli, 2023, “Mujeres de vanguardia: forjando un espacio en las revistas argentinas”, H-ART. Revista de historia, teoría y crítica de arte, 31 May 2023, no. 14.

8 For a more extensive analysis of Prati’s production during this period, see María Amalia García, 2009, “Lidy Prati y su instancia diferencial en la unidad del arte concreto” in Yente Prati, Buenos Aires, Fundación Costantini.

9 García suggested this work as part of those experimentations, see María Amalia García, 2009, “Lidy Prati y su instancia diferencial en la unidad del arte concreto” in Yente Prati, Buenos Aires, Fundación Costantini, p. 89.

10 Prati exhibited in: the Annual Salon of the Sociedad de Acuarelistas y Grabadores (1943), in Comte Gallery and Maldonado’s studio (1945), Primera Exposición de la AACI, Salón Peuser; Tercera exposición de pintura a cargo de la AACI, Centro de Profesores Diplomados de Enseñanza Pública; and Arte Concreto-Invención (1946), Arte Nuevo-Pintura Joven, Salón Kraft (1947), Nuevas Realidades, Van Riel Gallery; Galerías Pacífico, José Mimó Mena y el grupo concreto, Taller Libre de Arte, Caracas Venezuela (1948), Arte concreto, Salto Bookstore, Milan, Italy; 2do Salón Argentino de arte no-figurativo, Van Riel Gallery (1949), Arte concreto, Instituto de Arte Moderno (1951), Galeria di Arti Visivi, Rome, Italy (1952), 2nd International Contemporary Art Exhibition, New Delhi (1953), Asociación Ver y Estimar; Pintura, escultura, arquitectura, urbanismo, mueble, Müller Gallery (1954), Pintura, escultura, arquitectura, urbanismo, Gath y Chaves (1955).

11 Along with GAMA she exhibited in Van Riel Gallery (1952), the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro, in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and the Second Sao Paulo Biennial (1953).

12 Divorce sentence, 1954, Lidy Prati Archive.

13 For a discussion of this moment in the history of divorce in Argentina, see Isabella Cosse, Verónica Giordano, Karina Ramacciotti Inés and Valobra Adriana María (eds.), 2014, Contigo ni pan ni cebolla : debates y prácticas sobre el divorcio vincular en Argentina : 1932-1968, Buenos Aires, Biblos.

14 For a full list of the exhibitions after 1955, see David Weseley, 2009, “Lidy Prati. Biografía” in Yente Prati, Buenos Aires, Fundación Costantini. It should be mentioned that Maldonado stopped exhibiting artwork after his separation from Prati. However, he had a long and successful career as a Design scholar, at Ulm, the Politecnico di Milano, Università di Bologna and Princeton University, among others.

15 García has written about Prati’s investigations of the period, see María Amalia García, 2009, “Lidy Prati y su instancia diferencial en la unidad del arte concreto” in Yente Prati, Buenos Aires, Fundación Costantini, p. 90.

16 For an example of a biased interview to an artist married to another artist, Paula de Berni, see Pablo Montini, 2020, Los desterrados : artistas rosarinos en Cinema para todos (1931-1933), Rosario, Ivan Rosado.

17 Maria Alba Bovisio and Penhos Marta, 2021, “La “invención” del arte indígena en la Argentina” in Arte indígena: Categorías, prácticas, objetos, Cordoba, Encuentro grupo editor; for a contemporary discussion on terminology, see Pablo Javier Fasce, 2017, “El noroeste y la institucionalización de las artes en Argentina : tránsitos, diálogos y tensiones entre región y nación (1910-1955)”, Doctoral dissertation, Universidad Nacional de San Martín, Buenos Aires.

18 Torres García reflected on this subject, see Joaquín Torres-García, 1939, Metafísica de la prehistoria indoamericana, Montevideo, Asociación de Arte Constructivo; for a study on this relationship, see César Paternosto, 1989, Piedra abstracta. La escultura inca: una visión contemporánea, Buenos Aires, Fondo de Cultura Económica; for a study on this relationship and materiality, see Niko Vicario Niko, 2021, “Material Relations: Torres-García and Concrete Art from Argentina” in Purity is a myth : the materiality of concrete art from Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay, Los Angeles, Getty Conservation Institute.

19 Prati also included the reproduction of a Greek statue in the Louvre Museum that she does not mention in her text, Statue, Héra de Samos 570.

20 For a reading of this scientific language in inventionist writings, see Ayelen Pagnanelli, 2021, “‘Y que un bello cuadro es una eyaculación’ Género en el discurso invencionista”, Boletín de Arte, 28 April 2021, vol. 21; Ayelen Pagnanelli, 2019, “Arte abstracto argentino: una lectura de género (Buenos Aires, 1944-1954)”, MA thesis, IDAES-UNSAM, Buenos Aires.

21 Prati dates it 1919 but the image belongs to a work from 1932-1940 at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, see “Bird in Space”, https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/669.

22 This image was reproduced in the magazine Art d’aujourd’hui in 1952.

23 The image does not have a caption, but see “Herbert Matter”, https://www.meer.com/en/7481-herbert-matter

24 While some members of the AACI were part of the Communist Party, Prati was not. On this subject, see Ana Longoni and Daniela Lucena, 2004, “De cómo el “júbilo creador” se trastocó en “desfachatez”. El pasaje de Maldonado y los concretos por el Partido Comunista. 1945-1948”, Políticas de la Memoria, 31 December 2004, no 4, p. 117‑128.

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Ayelen Pagnanelli, « Recovering Abstract Art Narratives in Latin America: Lidy Prati’s Writing »Artelogie [En ligne], 22 | 2024, mis en ligne le 06 janvier 2025, consulté le 15 mai 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/artelogie/15262 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/12wv5

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Ayelen Pagnanelli

Becaria posdoctoral de la Universidad Nacional de San Martín, Centro de Investigaciones en Arte y Patrimonio (Universidad Nacional de San Martín-Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas).

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