This is the catalogue, written in French, for the exhibition of drawings by Juan Devéscovi and poems by Xavier Abril that was presented at the Maison de l’Amérique Latine [Latin American House] in Paris (November 1927). In his introduction, Jean Cassou describes Devéscovi as an artist “who is in no danger of making mistakes in seeing.”  Cassou detects strength in “his [the artist’s] pained faces behind their exaggerated tragic laughter.” Like Abril’s poems, his [Devéscovi’s] works bear the imprint of dreams and restlessness, exposing the vital energy of the artists and poets of the New World whose artistic expression is presented “with no decorations, loans, or rhetoric.” César Vallejo, meanwhile, describes Devéscovi’s drawings: “They are ploughed through the nose, the parietal, or half the eye, to distance themselves in Quechua and pontificate in heroic poetic sweetness.” He suggests alternative sources for the draftsman’s inspiration: “Does he shed every vestige of folkloric temptation? Does he argue discreetly with himself? Does he dip his chest in the damned waters of a school?” His opinion is that Abril designs words for the human condition “without recourse to metaphor, to patents, or to brand names.” He stresses that “what is created in the world has, until further notice, a single meaning: to arouse life and humanize it, not simply to imagine it.” Luis Varela y Orbegoso praises Devéscovi’s “racial emotion” and André Warnod underscores his interest in an erudition that incorporates decorative elements of pre-Colombian art in an attempt to express the original spirit of the Indian-Americans. The previous texts are interspersed with reproductions of some of the drawings and handwritten poems that were part of the exhibition.        

The draftsman Juan Devéscovi was one of the most interesting and (paradoxically) little-known members of the Peruvian artistic avant-garde of the 1920s. There are no detailed studies of his career; nevertheless, he was employed as an illustrator at a number of Lima magazines and worked in the modernist style of the period. In 1927, Devéscovi moved to Paris in search of better work opportunities and artistic inspiration, following in the steps of other Peruvian draftsmen, such as Julio Málaga Grenet (1886 –1963), César Moro (1903–1956), and Reynaldo Luza (1893–1978). While living in Paris, he was introduced to the avant-garde aesthetic by the cosmopolitan milieu. He met and befriended César Vallejo, Xavier Abril, the brothers Ernesto More (1897–1980) and Carlos More (1904–1944), and Juan Luis Velásquez (1903–1970), among others. The exhibition at the Maison de l’Amérique Latine [Latin American House] included Devéscovi’s drawings and Abril’s poems, and Jean Cassou and André Warnod wrote introductions for the catalogue. They both associated the deliberate primitivism of the works with the expression of a latent indigenous essence linked to a sort of Surrealist-inspired automatism. Warnod saw Devéscovi as one of the first Latin Americans to use elements taken from pre-Colombian art in a thoroughly modern way. In fact, César Vallejo (who also contributed an introduction to the catalogue) pointed out affinities between his automatic drawing and certain works from Pierre Marie’s collection of Art-Brut, which was exhibited at the Galería Vavin Raspail. In a letter, Devéscovi called his drawings “trash (…) to attract the attention” of Parisian critics (cited in Manuel Pantigoso, Pantigoso, fundador de los Independientes [Lima: URP, 2007], p. 81).