This article was written by the journalist and art critic Luis Freire Sarria, following his visit to the Museo de Arte de la Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, in Lima. There, he would discover, among the collections, a great quantity of Pop-art, Op-art and Hard Edge works that had been produced during the second half of the nineteen sixties and during the time of Fernando Belaúnde Terry’s first government from 1963 to 1968. According to Freire, “they are the remnants” “of the development of Pop Art and abstraction with impeccable technical quality and tied to their international origins.” After reviewing the works and their authors, he wondered, “What became of them?” As a matter of fact, he recalled that after the deposition of the president and the establishment of the Peruvian revolutionary military government led by General Juan Velasco Alvarado, the “experiences of avant-garde agitation were halted or integrated in his Populist movement.” The author warned that the possibility of merging the national and the Andean with the international remained the prevailing problem for young Peruvian artists.

This article, written sometime after the end of twelve years of military dictatorship in Peru—in its first phase led by General Juan Velasco Alvarado (1968–75), who implemented populist and nationalist cultural policies—chronicles the cosmopolitan and avant-garde movements that were in play during the previous period of the sixties. These were trends that were abruptly halted by Velasco’s new regime’s perspective and function for the arts, where the participation of the general public and, in particular, of the marginalized classes was privileged, somewhat similar to a preview on post-modernism. To this regard, Freire’s account foreshadows recent research and descriptive anthologies addressing this period in Peru seldom studied. An example of this was the Arte Nuevo group, an inescapable historical reference that emerged in the mid-sixties. The author’s objective was the confrontation of the shattered development of modernity and experimentation with the aftermath of a military revolutionary zeal, or what he considered to be its cultural ruins and the utopia of nationalist art. The collective art group known as Grupo Arte Nuevo included artists Luis Arias Vera (1932–2016), Gloria Gómez-Sánchez (1921–2007), Teresa Burga (b. 1935), Jaime Dávila (b. 1937), Víctor Delfín (b. 1927), Emilio Hernández Saavedra (b. 1940), José Tang (1941–2006), Armando Varela (b. 1933) and Luis Zevallos Hetzel (b. 1933). [Please refer to the ICAA digital archive for the following texts on Grupo Arte Nuevo: “Espíritu renovador: exposición del Grupo ‘Arte Nuevo’” by Juan Acha (doc. no. 1142771); “Exagerado sentido realista: Exposición de Luis Arias Vera” (without author) (doc. no. 1142510): “La nueva imagen del IAC” (doc. no. 1142594), and “La pintura se fue a la feria: Happening vs ‘bienal’” (doc. no. 1142737), both by Mário Belaúnde Guinassi (pseudonym, Juan Gris); “Mala noche de Buendía” (doc. no. 1142628">1142628), and “Resentido social” (doc. no. 1142644), both by Felipe Buendía; (untitled) [“Nos encontramos en un mundo determinado...”] by the Grupo Arte Nuevo (doc. no. 1142628">1142628); “Grupo Arte Nuevo” (without author) (doc. no. 1142834); “Op-Pop-Sex” (without author) (doc. no. 1142804); and “Treinta minutos de charla con la señora Gloria Benvenuto de Gómez Sánchez, nuevo valor de la Pintura Nacional” (without author) (doc. no. 1142413)].