Art at the limits of modernization: The artistic production of Beatriz Gonzalez during the National Front in Colombia.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This dissertation studies the paintings and assemblages made by Colombian artist Beatriz Gonzalez during the 1960s and early 1970s, the institutional framework within which they were exhibited, and the strong reactions her works elicited in the critical press. I relate the polemical character of Gonzalez's works to the social tensions created by an accelerated process of modernization within a deeply traditional Catholic society. I claim that her works exploited conventions of good and bad taste and exposed the process by which institutions constructed official culture as masculine and erudite to the exclusion of the feminine and the popular. While Gonzalez's works, no doubt, share affinities with international Pop Art in their preoccupation with consumer culture and the mass media, the specificity of her subject matter forces us to consider local elite attitudes towards women and "el pueblo" or the lower classes.
The dissertation is structured around five key exhibitions of Gonzalez's work from 1964 to 1971 that mark important moments in her aesthetic development and her consolidation as a leading artist in the Colombian art world. Her career was unfolding as the cultural sphere was also enduring a process of modernization where the primacy of the National Salon was displaced by the International Biennial format. I locate the artist's emphasis on local, private, and popular referents in this context. By interrogating proper versus improper forms of viewing and inserting her paintings into spatially coded furniture "frames," I argue Gonzalez challenged constructive frameworks through which culture was legitimated. Her works engaged issues of class and gender discrimination latent in Latin America's rigid social order and served as nagging reminders of the deeply traditional Catholic Colombian society in which modernization was unfolding.