"The twentieth-century art of Latin America is art in the western tradition, and its leading figures - Wifredo Lam, Roberto Matta, Diego Rivera, Joaquin Torres-Garcia, to name only a few - have achieved international stature. Yet much of the writing about this art has offered either a victimized view of an art tradition dominated by foreign models or a romanticized view of what Latin American art should be.

This pathfinding book, by contrast, seeks not to "invent" Latin American art but to look at it from the points of view of its own artists and critics.".

"Drawing on some forty years of studying and teaching Latin American art, Jacqueline Barnitz surveys the major currents and artists of the twentieth century in Mexico, the Caribbean, and South America (including Brazil), with a short introduction to the nineteenth century. She progresses chronologically from modernismo and the break with nineteenth-century academic art to some of the trends of the 1980s, setting each movement within its historical and cultural contexts.

She gives particular weight to the first half of the century, which has received little attention in English-language publications, and discusses contracts between Latin American artists and the United States or Europe where relevant. Most importantly, she presents the artists as active contributors to western art, not as passive receivers of information from abroad."--BOOK JACKET.