The Cardinal of Buenos Aires was furious. By the end of 2004, a plaster cast of Jesus Christ crucified in a US fighter jet lured tens of thousands of people to a small public museum in the city. “In the face of this blasphemy that shames our city, let us all together make amends and ask for forgiveness,” Jorge Bergoglio wrote in a public letter. A group of Catholics broke into the exhibition and destroyed some pieces. After several protests in the city, the exhibition was closed and reopened by court order. León Ferrari (1920-2013), the visual artist who dedicated his life to denouncing the crimes of power in collusion with the Catholic Church, rose to worldwide fame. When he won the Golden Lion for best artist at the Venice Biennale in 2007, he thanked that cardinal “for the favour”. Ferrari, whom the Buenos Aires National Museum of Fine Arts (MNBA) is celebrating this week with its first major retrospective in the country, died in July 2013. Two months earlier, Pope Francis, Jorge Bergoglio, had been anointed pope in Rome.
“Western and Christian Civilization,” a statue of Christ that Ferrari bought in a Santeria in Buenos Aires and crucified in 1965, modeled on an American bomber plane, was the first work the self-taught plastic artist dedicated to the militancy that would characterize his life: political grievance . A sculptor, conceptual painter and researcher, Ferrari was one of the greatest masters of Argentine art and perhaps its great provocateur.
Argentinian plastic artist León Ferrari, in a nude portrait. IESARI MATIAS
His works, which questioned the sexual morality of the Church and Christianity’s complicity with 20th-century authoritarianism and imperialism, made him one of the great enemies of Argentina’s military dictatorship (1976-1983), which made disappear a man and his three children and let him flee into exile in Brazil. Many of his sculptures, collages, paintings, and news archives on his country’s military repression, which he has compiled under the title We Didn’t Know, are some of the 250 works on display this week at the MNBA in the First Large, retrospective dedicated to the artist in the city since censorship in 2004.
“It was a great omission for this museum, so dedicated in Argentina, not to dedicate an exhibition to it. We wanted to correct that,” says the director of Fine Arts of Buenos Aires, Andrés Duprat. The exhibition, titled Recurrences, was scheduled to open in 2020 to mark the artist’s 100th birthday, along with other exhibitions at the Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Center Pompidou in Paris and the Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven. Due to the pandemic, the Buenos Aires exhibition was the last to open. “We have not yet reached the 100th anniversary, but the opening of this exhibition this year is also significant ten years after his death and as the country celebrates the 40th anniversary of the return of democracy,” says Duprat.
León Ferrari was born in Buenos Aires on September 3, 1920, the son of an architect who renovated churches and a ceramics teacher. He graduated as an industrial engineer, had three children and began his artistic career as a ceramist in Italy. Civilization, the iconic work with which he established his struggle against art, was created in 1965 in response to the horrors of the Vietnam War. That year she was rejected for the Di Tella Prize in Buenos Aires, but her work has since been denounced as complicity between the Catholic Church and authoritarianism.
Ferrari went into exile in 1976 and lived in São Paulo until the early 1990s, where he worked on mail art and lithography. His abstract work, the most political sculptures and installations, as well as his artistic interventions on the front pages of the Vatican newspaper or iconic photographs of the Argentine military dictatorship form the main axes of the retrospective opened by the MNBA.
An artistic intervention by León Ferrari on a photograph of the Argentine military junta. Courtesy of MNBA
“León has always been very aware of the Argentine reality. We try to bring together the recurring themes of his work, such as the violence of power, intolerance and religion,” says Cecilia Rabossi, curator of the exhibition. “A lot of people understand that side of the provocateur, but he was also a thorough investigator and a very dedicated person. The idea underlying his work is to work with the history of art and beauty in the service of exposing atrocities.”
Through August, the MNBA will be hosting the retrospective of one of the most irreverent artists in the national canon. His authorities are not concerned that the episodes of 2004 will be repeated, when a court closed the exhibition celebrating the 50th anniversary of his work for ten days. “I think that cultural battle has been won and that we have learned a lot as a society. Society’s response in favor of freedom of expression was very important,” says Nora Hochbaum, curator and former director of the Recoleta Cultural Center when that museum faced censorship. “Today, when Argentina has a problem with these recalcitrant sections of the extreme right, we remember León, who was a fighter for all rights. His work is a testament to his strong beliefs, the commitment of the artist. It’s good that so many young people can see it today.”
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