Martín Fierro (1924–27) obtained a distinguished position amid the avant-garde journals booming in the 1920s Argentina, more specifically in Buenos Aires. It was led by Evar Méndez, even though in 1925 Oliverio Girondo, Eduardo J. Bullrich, Sergio Piñero, and Alberto Prebisch also participated in its direction. Great Arentinean writers, such as Girondo himself, Ricardo Molinari, Leopoldo Marechal, and Jorge Luis Borges, among others, were contributors of its pages; and this include artists such as Emilio Pettoruti, Xul Solar, and Norah Borges. Martín Fierro ceased to exist when the managing group—upon facing the political candidacy of Hipólito Yrigoyen to the nation’s presidency—was split between those who proposed to introduce politics into the journal’s pages and those who refused. This internal bickering caused the folding of the publication. It should be noted that Martín Fierro was read in its time as the representative of the “avant-garde” in Argentina.
Xul Solar (Oscar Agustín Schulz Solari) and Emilio Pettoruti were two distinguished Argentinean artists, both of them linked to the aesthetical renewal of the 1920s. They met during their respective trips to Europe, initially in Zoagli (Italy).
In 1923, Pettoruti asks Xul Solar to write the foreword for his exhibition catalogue that would take place in May at the Sturm Gallery in Berlin. The text was never published; however, in three articles of that decade Xul focused on Pettoruti as a key figure: one of them—implying this document—was published in the Martín Fierro journal; the other two, “Pettoruti y Obras” [Pettoruti and His Works] (dated “Munich, June, 1923”), and “Pettoruti” (c. 1923–1924), were never published. Besides stressing Emilio Pettoruti’s importance, these three texts are relevant because of the way that Xul Solar explains the former’s aesthetic project. In it, Latin America, “from Mexico to Cabo de Hornos [Cape Horn],” is presented as the geographical space into which Xul surmises the birth of a new art, in overt opposition to the one in Europe which he considers in crisis. It is in Latin America, then, where the so-called “new man” according to Xul will rise as an expression of a “new race.” This concept is founded on the idea of an intellectual and religious syncretism recovering, among other elements, the beliefs of the pre-Columbian world as well as theosophy.