The Noisemakers examines Estridentismo, one of Mexico’s first modern art and literary movements. Founded by poet Manuel Maples Arce, Estridentismo spurred dynamic collaborations and debates among artists, writers, and intellectuals during the decade following the Mexican Revolution. Lynda Klich explores the paradoxical aims of the movement’s writers and artists, who deployed manifestos, journals, and cubo-futurist forms to insert themselves into international vanguard networks as they simultaneously participated in the nationalist reconstruction of the 1920s. In crafting a cosmopolitan Mexican identity, Estridentista artists both circulated images of modern technologies and urban life and updated such traditional subjects as masks and Mexican types. Klich reads the movement’s radical cultural production as a call for active sociopolitical engagement and characterizes Estridentismo as an ambitious program for national cultural and social modernity in the early twentieth century. Exploring the tensions that emerged from these divergent cosmopolitan and local proposals, The Noisemakers brings Mexico into the dialogue of global modernisms.
Lynda Klich is Assistant Professor of Art History at Hunter College, City University of New York, and Curator of the Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Collection.
"In The Noisemakers, Lynda Klich unpacks the nuances of the Estridentista movement and its protagonists with respect to the visual art and ideology of the postrevolutionary period and its international context. Interweaving her careful visual, literary, and documentary analysis with its historical and aesthetic context, she provides a key contribution to the historiography of modern Mexican art through a new reading of the dynamic insertion of this movement’s visual, verbal, and social strategies, particularly as expressed through muralism, easel painting, and printmaking, in relation to other avant-garde artistic currents and political initiatives of the period.”—Karen Cordero Reiman, Professor Emerita, Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City, and author of Another Promised Land: Anita Brenner's Mexico
"A fresh and innovative analysis of one of the noisiest artistic movements anywhere in Latin America in the 1920s. Lynda Klich explores how the avant-garde strategies of the Estridentistas played out in the multifaceted art world of postrevolutionary Mexico, balancing nationalist pro-worker politics with cosmopolitan aesthetic concerns and refracting but never duplicating ideas generated in Europe and the United States."—James Oles, Wellesley College, author of Art and Architecture in Mexico
360 pp.7 x 10Illus: 144 color images
9780520296404$60.00|£50.00Hardcover
Jun 2018