3 Olga de Amaral is unique among contemporary Latin American artists. At the heart of this uniqueness lies in the fact that her work is essentially unclassifiable. For exam- ple, is it art or is it handicraft? The Crafts Revival, so-called, that took place in Britain and in the United States, in the late 19th century and the earlier years of the 20th, has no place in the history of Latin American art. Nor is there much that corresponds to a later phase of interest in handicraft, which affected artistic circles in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s, in the wake of the Vietnam war. In Latin America, craft —the French use the expressive phrase 'les metiers d'art'— is part of the folk art tradition. Olga, who makes what can loosely be described as tapestries and textiles, is nevertheless universally recognized as an important and completely individual artistic creator. In these circumstances it is necessary to look at the wider background. First, one must recall that the Pre-Columbian peoples were among the most inventive of all weavers. Many of the techniques they used were completely unknown outside the South American continent. Fortunate circumstances —conditions of extreme dry- ness or extreme cold, or a combination of both— have preserved a number of these weavings for our admiration today. What strikes one about them is that they have all the aesthetic confidence of great works of art. European tapestries, from the Renais- sance onwards, tended to become more and more dependent on designs supplied by painters —that is to say by people at one remove from the actual process of production. What we admire about the result is often simply the ingenuity with which the weavers managed to bridge the gap between two different, and to some extent incompatible, aesthetic worlds. Another element in Pre-Columbian culture was the cult of gold. Anyone who vis- its the spectacular Gold Museum in Bogota must be aware that the region which is now Columbia lay at the very centre of this cult. It was this abundance of gold which fascinated the European conquistadors and led them into the commission of many crimes. Though both sides —Native Americans and Europeans— worshipped gold, it is clear that they worshipped it in different ways. For the original inhabitants of the Americas, the precious metal embodied the warmth and brightness of the sun. It also, because it was incorruptible, became a symbol of immortality. But it did not necessarily represent wealth, in the crude fashion that European understood this concept. A large part of Olga's production has been concerned with gold, but there are in fact no equivalents for what she makes in Pre-Columbian archaeology. Nevertheless one feels that such objects ought in logic to exist —that she has supplied a lack. There is, however, another and quite different way of looking at her work —an approach which involves an analysis of Latin American Modernism. It has been both the good fortune and the misfortune of 20th century art from the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking countries of the Americas that what first attracted attention to them, or at any rate attention from outside, was the work of the Mexican muralists. The murals of Rivera, Orozco and others supplied Latin American art with an easily identifiable image - figurative, narrative, often highly politicised. This encouraged critics to ignore the fact that there was a flourishing alternative tradition of a very different sort. If this tradition stems from any single individual, it stems from the Uruguayan Con- structivist Joaquin Torres-Garcia (1874-1949). It was Torres-Garcia who, after his return to Montevideo from Europe in 1942, founded the Asociacion de Arte Constructivo. les metiers d'art edward LuCie-smith