Letra y Línea. Revista de cultura contemporánea. Artes plásticas. Literatura. Teatro. Cine. Música. Crítica. [Letter and Line. Magazine of Contemporary Culture. Visual Arts. Literature. Drama. Cinema. Music. Criticism] was a contemporary culture publication edited by Aldo Pellegrini (1903-1973) whose four issues appeared between October 1953 and July 1954. Its collaborators included Edgar Bayley (1919-1990), Osvaldo Svanascini (1920), Oliverio Girondo (1891-1967), Mario Trejo (1926), Enrique Molina (1910-97), Juan Carlos Paz (1897-1972), and Norah Lange (1906-1972), among many others. The survey’s agenda was based on the following questions: 1) What is the fundamental [nature] of painting in your opinion?; 2) Where is modern painting headed?; 3) Is there such a thing as Argentinean painting?; 4) Do you believe in the previous generation? Tomás Maldonado (1922) Sarah Grilo (1921-2007), José Manuel Moraña (1917-2005), Fernández Muro (1920), Juan Cerdá Carretero, Ideal Sánchez (1916-1988), Lidy Prati (1921), Víctor Magariños “D” (1924-1993), and Miguel Ocampo (1922) responded to the survey.
Born in 1920, José Antonio Fernández Muro is a Spanish artist who exiled himself to Argentina because of the Spanish Civil War. There he had begun his studies in the workshop of Catalonian painter Vicente Puig and, at the beginning of the 1950s, he became a member of the Grupo de Artistas Modernos de la Argentina [Modern Artists Group of Argentina]. After having lived in Paris and New York, Fernández Muro returned to Spain.
This article was selected because it documents a young artist’s opinion regarding the debates that were then mobilizing the Argentinean artistic field at the moment abstraction was being consolidated.
