This open letter from journalist Jorge Mejía to architect Luis Miró Quesada Garland indicates, to some extent, the terms in which abstract art was questioned when it first emerged in Peru. Mejía ventures a classification of forms of artistic expression on the basis of transformations in the artist-object relationship over the course of history. He establishes three periods: a classical (or emotional) phase that revolved around the “reproduction of nature”; a modern (or intuitive) phase where nature was deformed to represent “the reality that lies under the object”; and an ultra-modern phase of “extra-natural expression” under the influence of intellectual invention. Mejía asserts that it has yet to be determined if aesthetic sensibility is innate, as Emmanuel Kant claimed, or acquired through experiences akin to the ones that give rise to a “transcendent emotional outbreak.” Because ultra-modern art does not make use of recognizable forms from nature, it does not appeal to emotion, but awakens purely intellectual admiration.

Due to both his radical stance and his interest in theory, architect Luis Miró Quesada Garland (1914–94) was a leading figure in the debates on art in Peru in the mid-20th century. He was the main writer of the “Expresión de principios” released by the Agrupación Espacio, a group of Peruvian architects, writers, artists, and intellectuals. Published in 1947, that document would become the foundational text of Peruvian modern art. Son of one of the owners of Lima-based newspaper El Comercio, Miró Quesada Garland published a periodic column in that influential newspaper’s Sunday supplement. From that platform, Espacio and Miró Quesada Garland himself advocated and defended the most recent international tendencies in modern art and architecture. Indeed, his writings laid the basis for the theory of abstraction in Peru in the fifties, which was characterized by a formalist and atemporal understanding of art. As this exchange of letters with journalist Jorge Mejía published in Miró Quesada Garland’s Sunday column in the newspaper indicates (Lima, August 1955), the architect’s stance had already taken shape by the early fifties. [See in the ICAA digital archive Miró Quesada Garland’s article “Dudas y creencias sobre el arte contemporáneo” (doc. no. 1138869)]. Miró Quesada Garland disagreed with the categories that Mejía formulated, since in them—he argued—aesthetic values were seen as less important than temporal considerations. 

[For further reading on the Espacio group and its publication Espacio, see the following articles: “Expresión de principios de la Agrupación Espacio” (doc. no. 1126309), and (unsigned) “Dice Fernando Syszlo que no hay pintores en el Perú ni América: el joven pintor peruano declara sentir su pintura y la de los demás pero no puede explicarla” (doc. no. 1137793). The following texts were written by the Agrupación Espacio itself: “Posición” (doc. no. 1143745), “Presencia” (doc. no. 1150278), “Polémica” (doc. no. 1137823), “Prescindir o no prescindir” (doc. no. 1138933), and “Polémica: ¿hay pintores en el Perú?” (doc. no. 1139402). See as well the following texts by Samuel Pérez Barreto: “El Perú y la cultura: Sentido y expresión de las formas” (doc. no. 1138491), “Polémica: ‘polémica Espacio’” (doc. no. 1137916), and “Pintura: la guerra de los pintores: plumas por pinceles” (doc. no. 1137839)].