Poet Juvenal Ortiz Saralegui (1907–59) was among the intellectuals won over by the impassioned discourse on painting and ideology voiced by David Alfaro Siqueiros while the Mexican artist was in Montevideo (February–April 1933). Like poet Basso Maglio (1899–1961), Ortiz Saralegui was one of the creators of the Asociación de Escritores Revolucionarios (AER), which was affiliated with the CTIU.
Ortiz Saralegui’s political position and commitment—he was, in the thirties, an anti-fascist activist and a staunch supporter of the Second Spanish Republic (1931–39)—is unquestionable. In this article, his aim—as he explains—is to strike a balance between the objective revolutionary cause embraced by leftist artists (a political matter) and respect for subjective aesthetics (an ethical matter). During this period, the term “pure art” was used by communist intellectuals in reference to any art without an explicit social or revolutionary “message.” Ortiz Saralegui dares to express the view that not all “purist art” is “bourgeois art”: if a work expresses intimate rebellion in the artist’s own language, it is not necessarily at the service of the “bourgeoisie.” Ortiz Saralegui attempts to break the tie between abstract and inward-looking art of that sort and any possible class content. Such art must be distinguished, conceptually, from “bourgeois art,” that is, from art seen as serving the interests of capitalism, since it is neither supported nor understood by the bourgeoisie—or by the proletariat, for that matter, in an apparent paradox. Art of that nature provides—Ortiz Saralegui argues—a means of ushering in definitions of the artist in the field of revolutionary art. The problem, then, is less ideological than tactical: what’s at stake is convincing artists making “pure art” to commit to social realism.
[For further reading, see in the ICAA digital archive the following texts, also by Juvenal Ortiz Saralegui: “Consideraciones sobre la expresión heroica” (doc. no. 1225615), “Fuera del Salón Oficial” (doc. no. 1221528), “Hacia el arte revolucionario” (doc. no. 1198856), and “Los jurados de los salarios artísticos de 1935 atentó contra la cultura” (doc. no. 1225596)].
