This newspaper article reports that Carlos Cruz-Diez has arrived in Caracas from Paris to receive the Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas (National Visual Arts Prize) awarded by the INCIBA (Instituto Nacional de Cultura y Bellas Artes). The prize will be presented by the president of Venezuela, Rafael Caldera, in early January 1971. The Institute is organizing a special event to honor Cruz-Diez that will be attended by friends, critics, and artists of his generation, as well as officials from Venezuelan educational and cultural institutions. During his fifteen-day visit, Cruz-Diez will work on a personal project of his, the creation of what is known as the Taller Experimental de Arte para el Espacio Colectivo, an experimental workshop for training young painters. The article includes a black-and-white photograph of the artist, the president of INCIBA, Alfredo Tarre Murzi, the art critic Angel Ramos Giugni, and the artist Oswaldo Vigas. 

This article appeared in El Nacional, the newspaper where Cruz-Diez started out as an illustrator and graphic designer of the cultural page. The text helps to explain why people (especially those in the left-wing intellectual media) came to believe that Kinetic artists had become “official” artists, sponsored by “right wing” military and/or democratic governments. In this case because the Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas, an establishment award, was presented by the president of the Republic, Rafael Caldera (1969–74), a founding member of the Partido Socialcristiano (COPEI), unquestionably one of the country’s most conservative parties.   

It is surprising to see Cruz-Diez with Oswaldo Vigas (shown on the right in the newspaper photo), one of the artists who most fiercely opposed him, a passionate champion of national art and identity theories that clearly conflicted with Geometric Abstraction and the universalism it embodied. As Cruz-Diez stands with arms folded, the distance between the two men speaks volumes in body language for those who were aware of the hostility between them: Vigas was constantly attacking Cruz-Diez for his internationalism and Cruz-Diez called Vigas a local, reactionary artist.  

The article mentions one of the educational projects that was a constant for Cruz-Diez, the creation of a teaching center for visual artists where the Venezuelan Academy’s aesthetic rules were replaced with standards of aesthetic effectiveness and rigorous technical training. It was called the Taller Experimental de Arte and, according to Cruz-Diez, it was always intended as a center for aesthetic studies where graphic and industrial design would be an integral part of the curriculum. He believed that, because of its considerable technical demands, graphic and industrial design was more suited to the challenge of shaking up the dusty academic aestheticism that he saw as a major obstacle to the development of any kind of truly creative artistic activity. In his opinion, a really creative artist does not respond to “beauty” (which was always considered the product of inherited aesthetic conventions), but to the incessant visual problems for which he must find effective solutions. This project could provide a historically valid solution, thus generating its own aesthetic that was representative of its time.