Lopez Duran, Fabiola2025-01-162025-01-162024-122024-12-06December 2https://hdl.handle.net/1911/118173My dissertation asserts that, between 1943 and 1952, distinct factions of the Jewish community in Buenos Aires deployed artmaking and collecting to promote a communist-leaning platform to emerge from the margins of society into intellectual leftist circles while concurrently encouraging Argentina to engage in the global shift of capital formation towards development economic practices. In this way the Jewish diasporic impulse towards avant-garde cosmopolitanism in the visual arts, characterized by the instrumentalization of current artistic trends in the service of creating an interconnected, global community, goes beyond navigating identities and becomes the foundation for actively constructing culture in Argentina. This dissertation interrogates how culture is constructed through a network of interacting political, economic, and social agendas. Within this framework, I contend that the Jewish community strove to establish cultural capital as a resource that it invested, accumulated, and converted into other forms of capital. In this sense, cultural production became a process of position-taking and nation-building for the Jews in Argentina. The first part of my dissertation focuses on the seminal institution Sociedad Hebraica de Argentina (SHA), which acted as a mediator between the Jewish community and the Argentinean intellectual elites using artmaking and collecting as cultural capital to influence the development of the nation. Chapters 1 and 2 examine various artistic endeavors that the SHA promoted a leftist leaning ideological stance with subtle communist undertones, while establishing a vehicle to integrate the Jewish community into the larger national rhetoric through its commitment to modernization and development in Buenos Aires. The second part of my dissertation explores the Jewish contingency of Arte Concreto Invención, one of the most important and innovative avant-garde movements to emerge in Buenos Aires in the 1940s. This group created a space outside of official channels for Jews to navigate their place within the local, cultural scene with like-minded intellectuals, many of whom were also emigrés. Because they functioned outside of consecrated spaces, these Jews had more freedom than affiliated institutions and collectors to take a radical and innovative approach to artmaking and challenge the dominant discourses. Chapters 3 and 4 address how these artists, including Gyula Kosice, Martín Blazsko, Grete Stern, Yente, and Diyi Laañ, embraced non-figurative art as a way to propel Argentinean society forward. I contend that this coincides with the Jewish community’s desire to make the country global and modern and promote communist ideology.application/pdfenArgentinean ArtJewish CommunityGrupo MadiSociedad Hebraica ArgentinaThesis2025-01-16