The Chilean Letters of Mario Pedrosa

Abstract

Catalogs, articles and dissertations evaluate that the creation of the Salvador Allende Solidarity Museum/MSSA, located in Santiago de Chile, occurred due to the solidarity of artists, critics, and historians who contributed to the sending of works of art to the Chilean capital in support of the socialist government of Salvador Allende (1970/1973). The reading of Mário Pedrosa's correspondence, during his exile in Chile, in that period, suggests, however, that obtaining the works abroad not only depended on the authority that the critic enjoyed in international artistic circles, but also on the confrontation of political and institutional difficulties and obstacles. The documentation kept in the MSSA archive includes letters from Pedrosa to Miró, Calder, Argan, Penrose, Brett, Szemann, Amaral, Ashton, Hélio Oiticica, Antônio Dias, among many others. Through intense correspondence, Pedrosa boosted a voluminous, diverse and heterogeneous network of sociability, spread across several countries, whose movement did not occur without incompleteness, accidents, surprises and contingencies.I argue that the solidarity expressed in the works sent to create the MSSA collection resulted from a rare negotiation in the artistic world, an original facet of the relations between art and politics that embodied the institution.