In this essay, Tomás Maldonado discusses modern art—and modern life—and claims that both offer an “institutionalized” kind of art education. His definition therefore includes “the education of the artist,” “the training of artisans,” and “elevating the public’s taste” via fine arts academies, applied arts schools, and art museums. Maldonado provides a list of the key factors that have reduced those institutions to “a state of profound crisis” that includes the “purifying” influence of modernism, the decline in handcrafts caused by industrial production, and the extreme gap between high art (in museums) and the art of the masses. He also notes “an inability, at an aesthetic and art criticism level, to use scientific methods to clarify such phenomena in a studio, description, or critique.” Once that crisis is overcome, according to Maldonado, it is not a matter of replacing art academies or faculties but of confronting the structural problem that does not recognize the particular scientific and technological culture to which it belongs. He closes by reiterating his faith in “a totally new approach to industrial design” as the solution to the problem of art education for the people.

This text appeared in Projeto Construtivo Brasileiro na Arte, the catalogue for the exhibition organized in São Paulo by Aracy Amaral (b. 1930) and Lygia Pape (1927–2004). The event was hugely influential in Brazil, prompting an innovative reading of the meaning of the rationalist movements in Brazilian art. The exhibition was presented in 1977 at the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo and, later on, at the MAM-RJ (Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro). [For additional information about this exhibition, see the following in the ICAA Digital Archive: “Projeto construtivo brasileiro na arte” (doc. no. 1110680) by Pape; “A arquitetura é a grande arte de nosso tempo —1948: Romero Brest em São Paulo” (doc. no. 1314972) byJorge Romero Brest; and “Arte Concreta” (doc. no. 1315020) and “Da arte concreta à arte neoconcreta” (doc. no. 1315036) by Ferreira Gullar.]

Tomás Maldonado (1922–2019) was born in Buenos Aires, where he proposed starting the movement and association known as Arte Concreto-Invención. In 1954 Maldonado went to Ulm, Germany, as suggested by Max Bill, to be a professor at the Hochschule für Gestaltung (Advanced School of Form), where he was subsequently appointed director. After the Second World War the school inherited the cultural depth of the Bauhaus. Maldonado, who had trained as a painter—and whose works of Geometric Abstraction were originally published in the Buenos Aires magazine Arturo (1944)—went on to become one of the major theorists of the “Ulm Model,” a design approach created during his administration that was as concerned with popular design as it was with mass communication.

[For additional information about Maldonado’s writings, see the following in the ICAA Digital Archive: “A educação artística e as novas perspectivas científicas e pedagógicas” (doc. no. 1110401); “El diseño y la vida social” (doc. no. 730402); “Problemas actuales de la comunicación” (doc. no. 730604); “Lo abstracto y lo concreto en el arte moderno” (doc. no. 731507); “Actualidad y porvenir del arte concreto” (doc. no. 730591); “¿Adónde va la pintura? : Contesta Tomás Maldonado” (doc. no. 731031); “Los artistas concretos, el ‘realismo’ y la realidad” (doc. no. 731518); “Encuesta realizada entre pintores argentinos de la nueva generación” (doc. no. 742104); and “Volumen y dirección en las artes del espacio” (doc. no. 730415), among others.]