Luis Felipe Noé writes that a show of drawings by Swiss children at the Pestalozzi Museum in Zurich presents the dilemma between reality and spontaneity at work within chlldren’s drawings; he also maintains that the evolution of adult art can be found in an embryonic stage in the art of children. In considering the work of ceramicist Carlos Bartoloni, Noé affirms that the elaboration process of his vessels is a form of abstraction, and thus, reaches the level of artistry. Given the exhibition held at the Museo Nacional de Arte Decorativo of 100 engravings from the Pennel Collection at the United States Library of Congress, Noé suggests that an interesting pairing of expressionism and abstraction may be expected in American art. The exhibition encompassed all the contemporary artistic currents.

Luis Felipe Noé (Buenos Aires, 1933) began his studies with the painter Horacio Butler at the beginning of the 1950s, mounting his first exhibition in 1959.  In 1961 he had a group exhibition as Otra Figuración [Another Figuration] at the Galería Peuser in conjunction with Ernesto Deira, Rómulo Macció and Jorge de la Vega. The group exhibited together until 1965. Noé stood out among the group due to his theoretical reflections on art in contemporary society. Among his central tenets was the idea of “chaos as structure” of an artwork. Notable among his publications are Antiestética [Anti-aesthetic] (Buenos Aires: Editorial Van Riel, 1965) and Una sociedad colonial avanzada [An Advanced Colonial Society] (Buenos Aires: Editorial La Flor, 1971). 

A substantial renewal in the visual arts took place in Argentina during the second half of the 1950s. This process mandated an update of the understanding of visual language within art criticism. The present document is part of a series that reassembles the body of art criticism written by Noé in 1956. The documents were published in the newspaper El Mundo [The World] (published between 1928 and 1967, it was the first newspaper presented in tabloid format in Argentina, and enjoyed popularity due to its illustrated stories). Noé’s visual arts education took place, from the beginning of the 1950s, in the workshop of figurative artist Horacio Butler, who himself had been a member of the transformative group of Paris in the 1930s. 

This document is a good example of how Noé first elaborated ideas that would later find application in his analysis of the 1960s. In this case he points out the dilemma between reality and spontaneity, as well as the pairing of expressionism and abstraction.