Julio Rinaldini criticizes the exhibition of modern artists in Amigos del Arte [Friends of Art] and maintains that it conceals a disturbing situation under a pleasant tone: modern painting is not liberty without control, he states. The critic defends the need for rigorous discipline, for the meticulous discrimination of the artwork’s elements, and for a systematic weighing of the outcome. Rinaldini defines the artists participating in this exhibition as unrealistic and affected because they do not understand the slow process of renewal of modern painting. This is a process that, in his judgment, should not have deliberate purpose, albeit the evolution of the work itself. He understands such an affectation as an empty rhetoric lacking meaning. In this manner, he analyzes—in most cases negatively—the works presented to the Salon, although he recognizes that there are some talented painters, which produces greater unease about the situation of the time. The artists included are Raquel Forner, Pedro Domínguez Neira, Juan Del Prete, Horacio Butler, Raúl Soldi, Ernesto Scotti, Emilio Pettoruti, Antonio Berni, Onofrio Pacenza, Victor Pissarro, Laura Muhall de Girondo, Stella Morra de Cárcano, and Miguel Carlos Victorica.

The modernization of art forms in Argentina had one of its main periods in the 1920s. Following the artists linked to the Martín Fierro journal—Emilio Pettoruti (1892–1971), Xul Solar (1887–1963) and Norah Borges (1901–98)—toward the end of the decade, Alfredo Guttero’s (1882–1932) activities came to light in addition to that of the Artistas del Pueblo [Artists of the Town] involved with social political engraving, and the local activity of the artists who trained in Paris: Aquiles Badi (1894–1976), Horacio Butler (1897–1983), Héctor Basaldúa (1895–1976), Raquel Forner (1902–88), Alfredo Bigati (1898–1964), Antonio Berni (1905–81) and Lino Enea Spilimbergo (1896–1964).

Julio Rinaldini (1890–1968), distinguished art critic and essayist of the first half of the 20th century, who wrote for the main journalistic media of Argentina, such as La Nación [The Nation] and El Mundo [The World]. He participated in the debates about modern art and, in a broader context, about culture versus totalitarianism. In this sense, he was a collaborator in the publications Argentina Libre [Free Argentina], Cabalgata [Cavalcade], and Saber Vivir [Knowing How to Live]. 

In the early 1930s, there was a confrontation between two poles. On the one hand, the artists who defended political art, driven in 1933 by the arrival of Mexican painter David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896–1974); its key figures were Berni and Spilimbergo. On the other hand, those who proposed the formal renewal of pure art, among them Emilio Pettoruti, Butler, and most of the artists trained at the so-called School of Paris. However, both circles shared an awareness of being modern artists in overt opposition with academic Naturalism.

The emergence of Nationalism during the 1930s changed the confrontational policies of Communism with the liberal, socialist, and democratic sectors in order to form antifascist and antimilitaristic alliances. This document presents the growing activity of the “modern artists” at the beginning of 1935, in a modern salon that was autonomous of the National Salon, as a follow-up of the policy initiated by Guttero. In his text, Rinaldini is critical of the development of modern art.  

For the manifesto of the modern artists, see document no. 733845; for the exhibition catalog, see document no. 733857; for the critique of the manifesto by Julio Rinaldini, see document no. 733926.

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