The 1950s and 60s were once again times of turmoil in Argentina; Peronism was replaced by democratic governments and military dictatorships that shared only one ruthless aim: eliminating Peronism. Perón himself returned to power briefly in the 1970s, before dying in office and transferring power to his third wife "Isabelita"; her disastrous period in charge resulted in another military backlash and the nightmarish Proceso. Since 1983, following the debacle of the South Atlantic conflict, Argentina has been unshakeably if imperfectly democratic. All of these ups and downs have been reflected in the country's postwar art as much as, if not more than in its literature, cinema and music. The reactionary politics of virtually everyone who held power in Argentina from 1944 to 1983 were either rebelled against by mainly leftist, engagé artists, or dictated by a more conservative approach, often based on mainstream artistic schools in Europe. Raquel Forner (1902-87) came to the fore in the 1950s - even though she had begun to paint in the 1920s as a student of Spilimbergo - mainly because she was so unmistakeably influenced by Picasso. This comes through in her style - in which human figures are amalgamated with symbolic images - and subject matter. She painted two series of haunting oils about the Spanish Civil War and World War II: España (1937-39) and El drama (1939-46); the spine-chilling Retablo de dolor (1944), at the MNBA, which belongs to the second group, also reveals her interest in the religious paintings of El Greco. Sometimes likened to Karel Appel, a member of the CoBrA group - further proof that European comparisons remain legion in Argentina - she set herself apart in the 1960s by concentrating on the theme of the human conquest of space, as expemplified by her colourful 1968 masterpiece Conquest of Moon Rock . Unusual sculptor Libero Badii (born 1916), some of whose work, including later paintings, is displayed at the Fundación Banco Francés, Belgrano, Buenos Aires, won a national prize in 1953 with a sensually organic marble figure, Torrente , which can be seen at the MNBA. Arp and Brancusi are easily detectable influences on his earlier works. From 1955 to 1963, Jorge Romero Brest was director of the MNBA; politics had its dictators and so did the art world, for this staunchly anti-Peronist guru of Argentine art then went on to direct the highly influential and virtually monopolistic Centro de Artes Visuales at the capital's wealthy Instituto Torcuato di Tella until 1970, and he had the power to make or break artists. Essentially a democrat, however, he staged increasingly subversive exhibitions by avant-garde artists after General Juan Onganía's mob seized totalitarian power in 1966, purportedly to combat Marxism and Peronism. President Onganía sent the police in to close an exhibition by minor artist Roberto Plate, which comprised a mock public lavatory in which visitors were encouraged to draw graffiti. In a famous interview Onganía said that he had taken such drastic steps because someone had outrageously drawn a penis and Argentina was not ready for that kind of thing; what really riled him, no doubt, was the fact that most of the graffiti consisted of political slogans and insults personally directed at him. Romero Brest's most famous achievement while in charge of the MNBA was the discovery of four artists who went under the label of Otra figuración, after a ground-breaking joint exhibition of that name held in Buenos Aires in 1961. Part German-style Expressionism, part Dubuffet, part de Kooning and quite a lot of Rauschenberg, the young artists who had met in Paris dominated Argentine painting throughout the rest of the decade. Ernesto Deira (1928-86), Jorge de la Vega (1930-71), Rómulo Macció (born 1931) and Luis Felipe Noé (born 1933) all produced highly acclaimed work, though Vega is usually regarded as the most original. Deira's Homenaje a Fernand Leger (1963) at the MNBA speaks for itself; heavy neofigurative shades of Francis Bacon are easily detectable in Macció's Vivir un poco cada día (1963) also at the MNBA; while Noé's Ensoresque masterpiece Introducción a la esperanza (1963), at the same museum, illustrates his theory of " cuadro dividido ", in which several paintings are chaotically assembled to make one work. Vega's Intimidades de un tímido (1960s) at the Museo Nacional is typical of his vast canvases, brimming with vitality but largely mysterious in their imagery. Of all four group members, his work is hardest to pigeonhole. Similarly, while Alberto Heredia (born 1924), admirer of Marcel Duchamp and living up to his description as a "ramshackle artist", was closely related to the Otra figuración, he also has a lot in common with both Surrealism and Pop Art. His now famous Camembert Boxes (1961-63), filled with day-to-day flotsam and jetsam, are seen as a breakthrough in Argentine sculpture, while the gruesome later work Los amordazamientos (1972-74), displayed at the MNBA, is apocalyptic in its depiction of human despair. Worldwide, the 1960s was marked by the new artistic phenomenon of Happenings, and what Argentine artists called Ambientaciones; despite their often massive scale and laborious preparations, they were by nature ephemeral events, and all we have left now are photographic documents. Marta Minujin (born 1941), whose colourful Colchón (1964) can be seen at the MNBA, has been a leading exponent. Her two key works in 1965, La menesunda and El batacazo , both staged at the Centro de Artes Visuales, were labyrinths meant to excite, delight, disturb and attack the visitor's five senses, and they caused both scandal and wonderment in Buenos Aires. She continued to perform into the 1970s, poking fun at national icons like Carlos Gardel and the ovenbird, Argentina's national bird; after creating Obelisco acostado in 1978, the following year she went to construct a 30-metre-high Obelisco de pan dulce , a half-scale model of Buenos Aires' famous phallic symbol clad with thousands of plastic-wrapped raisin breads, erected at the cattle-raisers' temple, the Sociedad Rural in Palermo. To celebrate the return to democracy in 1983, her Partenón de libros was a massive monument covered in books - many publications had been banned or even burned under the junta - also raised in the open air in the capital.