In this prologue, Jorge Luis Borges defends his position that Pedro Figari’s work belongs to the lyrical genre in the way it paints Argentinean remembrance and memory: both the Criollo man and his world yielding before the “new man,” in whose sketching the nations of the world have been conjured. Even if the “new man” is “not one of us yet,”he adds that “we foresee that he will be an Argentinean, in order to get closer to that [sort of] hope.” Lastly, Borges lists the themes represented by the artist: the ombú [tree of the Pampas], the wrought-iron door, the Negro, the [centralized] Unitarians, and the [decentralized] Federals, among other subjects.

Pedro Figari (1868–1938), a Uruguayan painter that stood out also as an attorney-at-law and intellectual. In 1921, he settled in Buenos Aires and began rubbing elbows with important people in the city’s cultural milieu, Borges among them. He published various articles in several journals, such as Martín Fierro, Proa [Prow], and Valoraciones [Assessments](La Plata), as well as newspapers such as La Prensa and La Nación. In his texts, as well as in his lectures given at the Asociación Amigos del Arte [Friends of the Arts Association], he was committed to develop a way to look at Latin America’s kernel, to have a grasp of the reality, the urgent needs of its countries; and both his interest in the pre-Columbian world and his own research on educational programs. These aspects were not overlooked by the groups that represented the avant-garde in the 1920s. On the contrary, even if their modernizing project involved an attentive look in the direction of Europe—toward French culture above all—it also had an ongoing strife with their own historic-cultural reality. In this regard, the relevance of Figari’s thinking to the young “vanguardists” of that time should be understood.  

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986), a distinguished Argentinean writer, was one of the leading exponents of the 1920s Argentinean literary renewal. He participated in numerous avant-garde publications, such as Prisma [Prism], Revista Mural [Mural Journal], Proa, and Martín Fierro.  

This document is the prologue of the volume titled Figari (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Alfa, 1930). The first in the Nuevos Valores Plásticos en América series [New Plastic Values in America] and the only one that was published, as far as we know. Nevertheless, on its back cover, Volume no. 2—to be dedicated to Alfredo Bigatti—is mentioned as being in the printing process and that several numbers were being prepared for painters like Malharro, Falcini, Guttero, and Fioravanti. This introduction shows Pedro Figari’s chief figure totally integrated into to the Argentinean pictorial renewal.