This document is important because its author, H. D. Barbagelata (1887−1971) was a Uruguayan writer who sent the text from Paris, highlighting the participation of Colombian artists in an event held in a city that is so thoroughly identified with the arts. Along those lines, Colombian artists’ trips to Europe were unquestionably an obligatory step in their artistic education. To exhibit one’s work in Paris meant standing side-by-side with contemporary European artists. This article thus performs double duty: on the one hand it confirms that Colombian artists can hold exhibitions in Paris and, on the other, it stresses the fact that reviews of their work were being published in Colombia.
The document also reveals something else: the arrival in Bogotá of a new kind of art that, like the work of Rómulo Rozo (1899–1964), was a far cry from the academic style of the day. This document therefore shows that new artistic languages and the international movements they inspired were reaching Colombia in the early twentieth century.
Rozo spent most of his life in Mexico. He studied at the Escuela de Bellas Artes [School of Fine Arts] in Bogotá, then moved to Madrid where he went to the Escuela de Bellas Artes de San Fernando. After that he went to Paris, where he studied under Antoine Bourdelle (1861−1929). He exhibited at the Exposición Iberoamericana in Seville in 1929, where he won the Grand Prize. Some years later he settled in Mexico. His sculpture reflects a great interest in pre-Colombian cultures, as revealed by its use of symbols and its sophisticated design. Rozo is therefore among the group of early twentieth-century Latin American artists whose work referred directly to pre-Hispanic cultures. Mexican muralism was the major example of this kind of art.
Hugo D. Barbagelata (1887−1971) was the editor of the magazine Estudiantil (1903−1905), and Razón (1907), as well as being the Paris correspondent for several Latin American magazines. His published works include, El Centenario de la reconquista [The Centenary of the Reconquest] (Montevideo, 1906); Hombres de América [Men of the Americas] (1913), and Artigas y la revolución Americana [Artigas and the American Revolution], (Paris, 1914).