Jesualdo Sosa (1905–82) was an educator well known throughout Latin America for his critical teaching practices (he worked in Cuba for a number of years) and for his research on the history of education in the region starting in the early nineteenth century. His circle of friends included Pablo Neruda, Rafael Alberti, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Nicolás Guillén. In Uruguay, where he also enjoyed an active social life and frequented gatherings of artists, journalists, poets, and writers in cafes, he never hid the fact that he was a member of the Communist Party. In 1935, he published Vida de un maestro, where he recounts his ground-breaking experiences at a rural school in Canteras del Riachuelo. In 1970, his book V. I. Lenin: acerca de la educación was published. The classification category that opens this report suggests that the document was put together in response to a request from the Brazilian Communist Party for information from its counterpart in Uruguay. The document is then strictly confidential. The artists chosen to represent Uruguay at the edition of the São Paulo Biennial in question were Juan Ventayol (1915–71), Manuel Espínola Gómez (1921–2003), and José Pedro Costigliolo (1902–85), all of whom Sosa considers “petite bourgeois” artists. All three were, by this point, well established on the Uruguayan scene; at the dawn of the sixties, each was processing in his own way the influences of both Spanish “art autre” and North American Abstract Expressionism. The author’s assessments are mostly political in nature; he addresses the political affiliations of the artists and of their relatives, specifically whether or not they were members of the traditional political parties. In one case, he detects sympathy for the Cuban Revolution—cause for euphoria among Uruguayan intellectuals and within the class alliance that was taking shape in Uruguay at the time. Notwithstanding, Sosa does express his own personal opinions, mostly against abstract art, specifically in the framework of his vision of the world art market and the supposed direct relationship between abstract-concrete experiments and the interests of transnational capitalism. Indeed, what he calls “the worldwide modern art movement promoted by art dealers” is the first heading of this report. Citing the spokesman of the University of Birmingham, he refers to an “extremist art” manipulated by invisible international actors who “confuse” local audiences about what is of artistic value. Sosa characterizes biennials, such as the São Paulo Biennial, as one of the “obliging” associations that renders services to “international art”; it does the bidding of art dealers and other agents in the cultural field. Throughout his analysis, Sosa expresses his adamant support of figurative art with “realist” contents—“socialist realism” was an important tendency at the time—and interprets the power of “tame [abstract] art” as a political operation devised in the centers of international financial capitalism and enacted by local critics (he mentions specifically the Argentinean Jorge Romero Brest). He asserts that the work of Joaquín Torres García, which had suddenly leapt in value on the international market, is an instrument used by that “invisible body” of agents bolstering abstract art via anarchist and Trotskyite local elements. He describes Cuban José Gómez Sicre as a representative of the “Super State”—which is, in Sosa’s view, what the Pan-American Union in Washington had turned into. Sosa accused the Uruguayan Grupo 8 of “double dealing”: it supported the Cuban Revolution but also exhibited its abstract works at the Conference of the Inter-American Economic and Social Council held in Punta del Este, Uruguay. After remarking on the procedures for selecting artists for biennials, whether in Venice or in São Paulo, Sosa offers an intellectual, moral, and political description of each of the judges that determined the Uruguayan participation in the event in Brazil.
