Arturo was published in Buenos Aires during the summer of 1944, with Carmelo Arden Quin, Rhod Rothfuss, Gyula Kosice, and Edgar Bayley on the editorial board. The original plan was to publish the magazine four times a year, at the end of each season but, as things turned out, the first issue was also the last. In addition to the articles contributed by the editorial staff, the single issue of Arturo also featured poems by Murilo Mendes (from Brazil), Vicente Huidobro (from Chile), and Joaquín Torres-García (from Uruguay). Carmelo Arden Quin (1913-2010) was a Uruguayan artist who, in 1935, made contact with Joaquín Torres-García and his constructive art project. Arden Quin settled in Buenos Aires in the early 1940s, helped create Arturo magazine, became involved with the Arte Concreto-Invención [Concrete Art and Invention] Movement, and was one of the founding members of the Arte Madí group. In 1948 he settled in Paris, where he showed his work at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles. Arden Quin lived and worked in France for many years. This particular text has been chosen because it highlights one of the key contributions made by Arturo magazine. It refers to the attempt at renewal that was made by a group in the Río de la Plata region in their desire to break with realism, symbolism, and primitivism and embrace an art of invention that laid the groundwork for the development of avant-garde Concrete art in that part of the world. This item also conveys the author’s support of Marxist ideology.
