In this article, Alejandro Otero [Rodríguez] discusses the accusations that the realist painter Pedro León Castro made in 1949 against young artists living in Paris, himself included. Among other things, León Castro accuses them of having “weak and corrupt morals,” and calls them “champions of disaster.” Speaking from his own pictorial and personal point of view, Otero denies the charges, which he describes as both “false testimony” and proof of shallow thinking. He makes it clear that he has no intention of discussing any of the theoretical aspects of the realist movement, since all he wants to do is address León Castro’s values and his morals as an “un-perverted” painter.   

In this article, the Venezuelan painter and art critic Alejandro Otero [Rodríguez] (1921–90) responds to the article written by Pedro León Castro in June 1949, as part of the controversy that erupted following Otero’s January 1949 exhibition at the Museo de Bellas Artes de Caracas where he showed, for the first time, Las Cafeteras, the radical series he produced in Paris in 1947–48. There were others involved in the debate, including Guillermo Meneses, César Rengifo, Domingo Maza Zabala, and J. R. Guillent Pérez. Otero’s article is of great interest because, when he quotes and discusses what León Castro had to say about young artists living in Paris on grants—a group that would subsequently band together to form Los Disidentes in 1950—he shows that initial reactions to Abstraction in Venezuela were of a moral rather than theoretical nature. Otero makes that clear in each of the choice phrases he quotes from León Castro’s article: “murky feelings and insatiable appetites;” “drifting through horrific paradises;” or “celebrating black masses under the sign of existentialism.”      

Written in a humorous and somewhat offhand style, Otero’s article is interesting because he is more concerned with pointing out the prejudices that surround theoretical arguments in the visual arts as those expressed by Pedro León Castro. Otero very briefly and superficially refers to realism and Abstraction, highlighting the banality of the arguments used by realist painters to explain and defend their movement in terms that are at once “grandiloquent and devoid of any true substance,” and that “have nothing to do with any problem as such” that is worthy of mention.   

This article was published in: Alejandro Otero. Memoria Crítica, compiled by Douglas Monroy and Luisa Pérez Gil (Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores / Galería de Arte Nacional, 1993).