In this review, the Colombian critic Jorge Gaitán Durán praises the work of the German painter Guillermo Wiedemann in terms of its ability to synthesize a range of aesthetic and human components. The author begins by referring to the previous century’s crisis in European values, dismissing those who said it was the death knell of Old World culture. In Gaitán Durán’s opinion a powerful, well-reasoned renewal took place in the mid-twentieth century that was rooted in traditional values. Wiedemann’s work is inspired by that renewal but also owes something to his time in America; despite his European roots he understands how to express the essence of the Colombian landscape. The critic reviews Wiedemann’s work from that perspective, supporting his views on criteria such as the artist’s use of color and search for form. In his earlier work the dominance of color relegated composition to a second plane, but in his 1949 work there is clearly an interest in formal expression that leads to a synthesis of great poetic purity. Gaitán Durán suggests that color is still the painter’s strong point, and ends his review with two complaints: one concerns the “artificial use of hard, black lines on some canvasses;” the other concerns the tendency to succumb to empty, superficial decorativism.

In June and July 1949, the German painter Guillermo Wiedemann (1905–1969), who lived in Colombia, had a one-man show at the recently opened Galerías de Arte in Bogotá. In this review, the critic and poet Jorge Gaitán Durán (1924–1962) discusses the artist’s latest work, praising the synthesis of color and formal aspects that could be glimpsed in his paintings. Wiedemann came from Germany ten years earlier, when war broke out in 1939. His painting was of an Expressionist nature, which changed after the move as it became influenced by his observations of tropical Colombia and its inhabitants. The work this artist produced until the 1960s, when he died in Florida, clearly shows how he drew on both his earliest European roots and his experience in America to develop his own unique view of the world.

The critic Gaitán Durán, who was only twenty-four years old when this article was published (see “Plásticas: El arte de Edgar Negret” [Visual Arts: The Art of Edgar Negret], doc. no. 1094140), mentions the early signs of Wiedemann’s formal quest in his work, since his formal research would not lead him to abstraction, in which he excelled until the 1950s. This article testifies to Wiedemann’s career in Colombia and documents his reasons for transitioning from figurative to abstract art.