The Club de Grabado de Montevideo

Georgia Phillips-Amos

    I dreamt I was going far away from here,
    the sea was choppy,
    waves black and white,
    a dead wolf on the beach,
    a log surfing,
    flames in open seas.

Was there ever a city called Montevideo?

— Christina Peri Rossi

In Montevideo I searched for nothing in particular in mounds of flea market junk: acrid leather goods, discount bras, and little bottles of designer perfume. Then I started noticing recurring pages from small publications from the 1960s and '70s buried there. Moldering calendar months covered in poetry of utopian imagination, and poetry of exile, different from year to year. As loose pages of frayed paper they blended in easily, hidden beneath other lost things come apart. Commanding printed images of caged birds, flowers growing from layered barbed wire, a dove reaching with fingers instead of feathers, men meeting, looking suspicious and paranoid, all shared small references to a Club de Grabado de Montevideo (CGM). Together these fragments tell a history in woodcuts and screenprints of collectivized art-making, international socialist solidarity, and a radical vision for shared cultural production.

The following is the product of interviews with some of the surviving members of the CGM, as well as my own translations of archival interviews and of the texts contained within the prints themselves.

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1953–68

The CGM printmaking collective existed between 1953 and 1993 in Uruguay's capital city. In August of 1953 a building in the center of Montevideo — the former studio of the painter Pedro Blanes Viale — was turned into club headquarters. Over time it became a public workshop for making woodcuts and linocuts. A forum for communal printmaking and a space for teaching and exhibiting work, the CGM was an independent local platform for participating in political, and aesthetic, conversations internationally.

Cultura Independiente

We affirm that in order to advance towards our first stage, which we see as the massive diffusion of printmaking as art form, we can't remain at the margins of the political social and cultural processes of our country (Uruguay), of Latin America, or of the world.

On the contrary, it is our duty to assume a combative, and fearless defense of civil liberties, to act in defense of a social justice that permits a just redistribution of resources and a respect for human rights.

— Club de Grabado de Montevideo (1967 Almanac)

In 1949 the twenty-six-year-old artist Leonilda González arrived in Paris to study in the studios of the cubist painters André Lothe and Fernand Léger (also a Communist Party member). In April of 1953 she attended the socialist Continental Congress of Culture, organized by Pablo Neruda in Santiago de Chile. González connected with other Uruguayan artists while abroad, and came in contact with collective initiatives developing elsewhere in Latin America, such as the Taller de Gráfica Popular from Mexico (founded in 1937), the Club de Grabado de Porto Alegre (founded in 1950) and the Club de Gravura de Bagé (founded in 1951), both from Brazil. Upon her return to Montevideo, González, together with Aída Rodríguez and Nicolas Loureirro, rented a space initially known as "El Taller" (The Workshop) where the CGM evolved into being. At the time, most young Uruguayan artists with the financial means to do so would go to Europe in order to be recognized at home. It was a great shift to establish a vibrant shared place for learning in Montevideo itself, with other collectives in Latin America as points of reference.

In an attempt to break from capitalist conditions for cultural production, the CGM functioned on a membership basis; socios paid small dues in exchange for monthly prints, and access to the workshop. A national history of social clubs in Uruguay meant a framework for reimagining a means of art-making already existed in cinema and theater clubs funded by member dues. As a consequence, the print club grew fast, and participating artists quickly became accountable to fellow members, rather than the wider market. There were 50 members to begin, 1,500 in 1964, and 3,500 by 1973. With each member paying one peso a month, the model wasn't just financially pragmatic but also political, representative of a concerted effort to create a cultura independiente, a popular narrative that could exist parallel to state-approved cultural production.

Influenced by the cultural criticism of British anarchist Herbert Read, the collective saw an educational role for artists, and sought to reduce the barriers preventing proletariat workers from being consumers of art. González sought to have prints be "as readily available as potatoes." Aiming to do away with the idea of art as precious and develop a direct line between artists and nonartists, the CGM made their process accessible. In 1955 the Club de Grabado threw their first of several street exhibitions on Plaza Libertad. They held workshops in their Montevideo studio, the prints they produced were inexpensive, and CGM artists traveled with exhibitions through rural Uruguay, making portable prints available throughout the (very small) country.

Many of the images focus on populist scenes — people carrying baskets of fruit, a group of workers, women resting on a balcony with their hair in rollers. Most layer sharp contrasting color with radical prose and poetry, taken from the works of South American writers and poets. But beyond a shared aesthetic, CGM members were bound to one another in their use of printmaking as a public and socialist practice — working to create places to make art outside of preordained state or university patronage.

In addition to monthly pieces, the club began producing an annual almanac in 1966. These were collaborative calendars, with artists taking on different months, together weaving their works chosen around a theme, their connective tissue being a shared reflection on the political climate of the year. Together they act as a people's history for the years in which they were made.

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1968–73

"I shall say only one sentence. The revolutionary ideal of the nineteenth century was internationalist; in the twentieth century it became enclosed in nationalism and the only internationalists left are the artists."

— Herbert Read, Cultural Congress in Havana, Cuba, 1968

By 1969 signs were starting to show of the vicious Cold War violence that would spread throughout the Southern Cone in the years to come. In 1968 Uruguayan president Jorge Pacheco Areco declared a national state of emergency in order to quell labor disputes and censor the press. The Montevideo-based socialist urban guerrilla group Los Tupamaros responded by escalating their militancy, kidnapping a bank manager and a former FBI agent, as well as establishing a people's prison to deal with what they saw as...