In this article Jorge Falcón reviews De Manet a nuestros días, the exhibition of French painting that opened at the Municipalidad de Lima on March 15, 1950. According to the writer and militant communist, the exhibition’s local reception—which focused solely on “the adjective ‘French’ used to describe the paintings”—reflected the city’s colonial outlook. He notes the absence of French painters whom he believes cannot be excluded from an overview of modern visual art: Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, and Vincent Van Gogh. Though he acknowledges formal and technical values in the exhibited works, he complains that “new forms do not always express a new spirit.” The author hits the raw nerve of abstraction; that is, the aesthetic presumptions and non-figurative languages of the exhibition which “reveal the decadence of bourgeois culture” by excluding the kind of realist works that see to it that art expresses the true concerns of contemporary mankind. Though Falcón is glad that Pablo Picasso is included in the event, he is sorry that he is not represented with works such as Guernica and/or Paloma de la Paz that “reject artistic and social escapism.” The exhibition, on the other hand, privileges “abstractionists of life and those who disfigure natural forms.” Falcón regrets that only one “message” can be found in the works from the beginning of the century.    

De Manet a nuestros días, the exhibition organized by the French critic Gaston Diehl (1912–99), which traveled to several Latin American countries, provided residents of Lima with their first opportunity to see a wide range of works of art that sought to reflect the origins and current status of modern French painting. This event forced local critics to express their opinions about the evolution of the avant-gardes, a process that was represented rather unevenly by the exhibition. The resulting discussion offers an interesting preamble to the enthusiastic debate about non-figurative art that dominated the conversation in art circles throughout the 1950s.

Some of the major arguments presented in that debate came from left wing intellectuals such as the writers Juan Ríos (1914–91) [see the article in the ICAA digital archive, “A propósito de la exposición de pintura francesa contemporánea” (doc. no. 1138917)] and Jorge Falcón (1908–2003). While recognizing the formal accomplishments of contemporary art, these thinkers were nonetheless passionately opposed to “formalism” and non-figuration, both of which were seen as symptoms of a supposed bourgeois decadence (that was also widespread in Europe). This was something that, according to these two Peruvian writers, also applied to progressive intellectuals who had become disaffected with the PCF (Partido Comunista Francés), such as André Malraux (1901–76) and Jean Paul Sartre (1905–80). The suggested solution to this malaise, in their opinion, is a commitment to social causes (as expressed in Mexican muralism) and certain approaches proposed by Picasso (in Guernica, for example). The most meaningful response to those ideas came from the poet and artist César Moro (1903–56), who defended the idea of cosmopolitanism, though he critiqued the exhibition for what he considered its scant rigor and lack of commitment to renewal and rupture in modern visual art [see “Reflexiones extemporáneas sobre una exposición de pintura” (doc. no. 1138657)].