The artist Marco Ospina begins by criticizing Colombian painters who value volume over content and as a result produce totally insignificant work. According to Ospina, there are substantial theoretical lapses in these paintings, which he dismisses as “nothing but handicrafts.” In these terms, the social function of art therefore derives solely from painting that communicates beauty. The author refers to the art produced by primitive people, which already foreshadowed a baroque and a classical style; over time, these works became more complex and gradually led to contemporary forms of expression. Ospina suggests that baroque styles of art are produced during times of “anxiety,” whereas classical art is created during times of “peace and wellbeing,” providing examples of both alternatives during different stages in the history of art. Ospina refers to mankind’s present state of turmoil that has prompted an explosion of art movements during the first half of the twentieth century. Amid this confusion, contradictory trends abound in modern art: there are both baroque and classical movements, but the period is defined by the predominantly baroque trend that produced Impressionism, Expressionism, and Surrealism. Within these parameters, Ospina makes connections between painting and “social reality.” Referring to art history and technique, he ends his essay with a discussion of the value of the line, the plane, light, shadow, colors, and the unity of theme and form. He concludes by saying that he “hopes the winning style will be the most harmonious option, the one that offers humanity the greatest beauty, eliminates man’s inhumanity to man, and puts an end to poverty and war; this is the fervent hope of artists who believe that beauty can also be created by men in order to promote social harmony.”     

The book Pintura y realidad [Painting and Reality] by the Colombian artist Marco Ospina (1912–1983) was first published in installments in the National University of Colombia’s Revista Trimestral de Cultura Moderna [Quarterly Magazine of Modern Culture] in 1947 (see: “El arte de la pintura y la realidad” [The Art of Painting and Reality], doc. no. 1056293), and was reprinted in August 1949. Theoretically, there are no major differences between the text that was published as magazine articles and this book; however, the book is important because it was one of the few written works to be published by an artist at that time. In Colombia, from the 1930s through the 1950s, only literary critics, politicians, novelists, and poets were thought to have the authority to discuss art. During the 1940s, a number of noted art critics, gallery owners, collectors, and booksellers immigrated from Germany, Austria, and Spain and settled in Colombia.  

Marco Ospina is considered one of Colombia’s earliest abstract painters. Though he was born at the dawn of the century, he belonged to the generation of modern artists who were extremely active in the 1940s. This generation included Guillermo Wiedemann (1905–1969), Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar (1923–2004), Édgar Negret (b. 1920), and Alejandro Obregón (1920–92). 

During that period, the greatest contribution made by Colombian artists to the publishing world had been in the form of book illustrations, as in the case of Santiago Martínez Delgado (1906–1954), who illustrated poems by Guillermo Valencia in 1941; and Sergio Trujillo Magnenat (1911–1991), who provided illustrations for posters, magazines, and novels. Other artists at the time (Luis Alberto Acuña for example) wrote about pre-Hispanic and colonial art; Ignacio Gómez Jaramillo published a book of memoirs and several newspaper articles. But, other than Ospina, who published the book Pintura y realidad [Painting and Reality], no other artist at the time published their own personal views about art.