Valerie Fraser (University of Essex)

Tuesday, 25 October 2011, 6.00 to 7.30pm, Birkbeck, Room 255, Malet Street, London  WC1E 7HX

Under the government of Salvador Allende the visual arts enjoyed extraordinary popularity in Chile. Between 1970 and 1973 the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes alone hosted over 50 exhibitions ranging from major loans from MoMA New York to popular Chilean craft. This paper will contextualise this boom by exploring developments during the preceding two decades, when ideas about the potential for art to engender social change took root in Chile (in part influenced by the writings of the English art critic, poet and anarchist Herbert Read). In conclusion Valerie Fraser will briefly address the change of direction after the coup of 1973.

Nemesio Antúnez, La Ronda, copper engraving, 4.3 x 12.7 cm, 1953

Valerie Fraser teaches art history at the University of Essex.  She has published widely on aspects of the art and architecture of Latin America and is Director of the Essex Collection of Art from Latin America (ESCALA).  She is currently directing an AHRC-funded research project entitled Meeting Margins: Art in Latin America and Europe, 1950-1978 in collaboration with colleagues at Essex and the University of the Arts London, which is investigating transnational exchanges between artists from Europe and Latin America, and within Latin America in the post-war decades.  Her own research for this project focuses on art in Chile and this paper summarises some of the findings to date.