Scientist and humanist César Uribe Piedrahita delivered this speech at the opening of the 1938 exhibition of painter Carlos Correa held at the Sociedad Colombiana de Ingenieros [Colombian Society of Engineers] in Bogotá. Uribe Piedrahita described Correa’s work as “painting of reality, of earth and of man, painting of desire, love, and death.” Uribe Piedrahita discussed the influence of Correa’s mentor, painter Pedro Nel Gómez, which he believes is evident in Correa’s work. He also addressed Correa’s effort to continue the school that Nel Gómez had founded. In the speech, Uribe Piedrahita stated that Correa is one of a handful of creators—Débora Arango not among them—that “breaks with old and hackneyed models” and “thrusts real painting at the world.” He also emphasized the female characters in the work of an artist who eschews the classic Aphrodite to create “the Venus of Ayurá, the rough and metal female born in the mine or the beach.” In Uribe Piedrahita’s view, these women are the saviors of men who create machines and weapons of destruction. “Woman resurfaces and gives her breast and womb over to life reborn.”

Colombian sailor and builder of sailboats, researcher, historian, writer, photographer, and poet Enrique Uribe White (1898–1983) created the magazine Pan in 1935. Between the release of its first issue and the publication of its last (1940), it reached a press run of as many as five thousand copies. The magazine, which included book reviews, was known for its abundant illustrations and the literary qualities of texts written by prestigious contributors from Colombia and beyond. 

César Uribe Piedrahita (1897–1952) was a medical doctor as well as a writer; he wrote the novels Toá (1934) and Mancha de aceite  [Oil Stain] (1935) and was an artist who specialized in printmaking and watercolor. The speech reproduced in this document is one of the few positive commentaries on the work of painter Carlos Correa (1912–1985) made during that painter’s lifetime, and the only one to address the work he exhibited in Bogotá. Uribe Piedrahita provides an astute literary interpretation of Correa’s paintings, which were on display in the Colombian capital for the first time in 1938, the same year that the artist moved to Bogotá, and four years before the scandal surrounding his painting Anunciación [The Annunciation] (1941) erupted. That work, which depicts a nude and pregnant dark-skinned woman, created an uproar; it was condemned by the curia of the Archdiocese of Bogotá. A tireless worker and political activist with an intense and contradictory personality, Correa was so critical of his own work that he often destroyed it.