Grupo Montparnasse
The Grupo Montparnasse was a circle of Chilean artists who absorbed the ferment of early twentieth-century Paris and translated it into a modern art for Chile. Founding members Luis Vargas Rosas and Camilo Mori had joined the artists' haunts of the Montparnasse quarter and exhibited in the Salon d'Automne of 1920, where they met Juan Gris, Pablo Picasso and others working in the new cubist and expressionist idioms. Their first exhibition, organised by Vargas Rosas in Santiago in 1923, still showed a strong post-impressionist debt, above all to Paul Cézanne; the group's Salón de Junio of 1925 drew in a younger generation. Challenging the norms of Chilean painting, they profoundly shaped the country's art world, moving it decisively from nineteenth-century academic practice toward modernism.
Defining characteristics
- Cézanne-derived structure: faceted planes and constructive brushwork organising landscape and figure
- Post-impressionist color laid in visible, deliberate strokes
- Later work fragmented by cubist and expressionist experiment
- Simplified, emphatic contours and intensified color
- Chilean subjects - city, coast, everyday life - rendered in European modernist idioms
Key figures
- Luis Vargas Rosas (1897-1977) — Co-founder who organised the group's first exhibition in Santiago (1923)
- Camilo Mori (1896-1973) — Co-founder who absorbed Parisian post-cubist experiment and brought it to Chile
- Henriette Petit (1894-1983) — Painter among the early members who carried the group's modernism forward
- Juan Emar (1893-1964) — Writer and critic (Álvaro Yáñez Bianchi) who championed the group's break with academic art
Sources
- Grupo Montparnasse - Wikipedia encyclopedia