The ambiguities of modernity: tradition and avant-garde in Leopoldo Marechal’s Historia de la calle Corrientes

Abstract

This article offers a detailed study of Historia de la calle Corrientes (1937) by Leopoldo Marechal. Marechal’s book, which contains images by avant-garde photographer Horacio Coppola, was commissioned by the city of Buenos Aires in order to celebrate its fourth centennial (1536-1936). The paper begins by contextualizing the book within Marechal’s oeuvre as a whole and then shows how the author hesitates between celebrating the growth of a city that projects itself into the future and lamenting the loss of an irretrievable past, which is demolished under the transformation of Buenos Aires into a modern metropolis. By analyzing the various actors involved in the process of the book’s composition (the commission from the mayor's office, Marechal’s writing, Coppola’s photography, the typographer’s and printer’s design, the supply of the collector's archive) the tensions that run through the book and, in a broader sense, the modernist project of Buenos Aires in the mid-1930s are made explicit. The essay contends that Historia de la calle Corrientes is a crystallization, in book form, of the aesthetic project of avant-garde classicism that the Buenos Aires City Hall sought to capture in its architectural renovation of the city center.