Juan Friede (1901–90) studied the life and work of the painter and sculptor Luis Alberto Acuña Tapias (1904–84). He started his project with an investigation of artists with strong roots in the land that go back to colonial times. Then he went on to reconstruct Acuña’s art experience in Bogotá, Mexico, and Europe. The writer takes a perspective from which he is able to recover the artist’s strong relationship with the land, his people, and his past. Friede highlights Acuña’s search for his own art, including a full awareness of the Colombian situation, in which the artist considers the protagonists to be peasants and natives.
A businessman whose prolific research on Colombia covered its history, anthropology, and art, Friede was one of those foreign critics who developed modern art criticism in Colombia in the 1940s. In this study, his voice was added to those of the critics and intellectuals, including the artist’s own voice (explicit through texts he wrote himself). The writer’s voice reflects the tensions of the time, marked by the struggle to reach a cultural definition of Colombia. The polarized sides were those who defended European values (in Friede’s opinion, representing the nation) and those, like the writer, who saw the emerging Pre-Columbian elements as important symbols that defined the very nature of the country. These elements were strengthened through their correlation to the visual arts. Friede reinforced the value of what was indigenous when he informed the reader that he wrote the study on Acuña in 1945 at the immense archaeological site of San Agustín (in the department of Huila). The writer was living there at that time, facilitating direct relationships between artists such as Pedro Nel Gómez (1899–1984) and Carlos Correa (1912–85).
