Though using a moderate tone–and even an admiring one when he refers to the continuity, sense of color and form, knowledge of the avant-garde, and diversity in the work—García Maroto was part of the debate, discussion, or situation regarding the emergence of concepts such as “literature of the Revolution” or “the canonization of muralism.” Most particularly he points out that Diego Rivera had transferred “the brilliant artistic history of the West” to Mexico. Maroto believes that the painter rarely achieved the purity of the artist due to his trivial, faithless style, but instead turned art into a “mechanized political-social instrument” which translated into “hurried” murals lacking high fidelity. Yet, such works managed to bring reality to the realm of artistic expression given that Rivera celebrates in his murals “the public friendship, animosity and indifference of Mexico,” a country that “multiplies, with each passing moment, its gestures and attitudes in an urgent need to seize the law of its destiny.” In this article, the eight prints that illustrate the essay (he analyzes the frescoes of the Anfiteatro Simón Bolívar (ENP), the Ministry of Public Education (SEP), and the Escuela de Agronomía de Chapingo) are subjected to judgments such as “Renaissance baroque-ism,” “elephantiasis,” “confused composition,” “systematization very much reflective of the taste and neglect of Rivera,” “cold, external distribution of a virtue that is merely superficial and with few pure aesthetic values.” He also notes an “ambition to discover elemental psychology through precise paths that are in fact clumsy.” At the end of the article, Maroto points out that by “carefully adding up all the elements that are gathered here, one may identify the exact sum of Rivera’s values.” In other words, just like the group Los Contemporáneos, Maroto acknowledged the important achievements of the revolution though he also considered the problems of falling into a culture oriented toward a project of national construction.

The “group without a group” (as Xavier Villaurrutia called them) or the “group of solitudes” (as Jaime Torres Bodet called them), a generation seemingly more prone to poetry, more essayist and less novelistic, inserted within an age marked by the consolidation of identities, the search for cultural alternatives and nationalist proposals, had already published six issues of the magazine Ulises. The group’s significance, however, only became apparent later with the publication Contemporáneos. Revista de cultura mexicana [Contemporaries: Magazine of Mexican Culture], comprised of 43 monthly issues (June 1928–December 1931), and edited by Bernardo J. Gastélum, Jaime Torres Bodet (1902–1974), Bernardo Ortiz de Montellano (1899–1949), and Enrique González Rojo. The inclusion of French authors such as Guillaume Apollinaire, Jean Cocteau, Paul Éluard, André Gide, Jules Supervielle, and Jules Romain gave the magazine a notable sense of universalism, and it also included work by Latin Americans such as Jorge Luis Borges, Vicente Huidobro, Juana de Ibarbourou, and Juan Marinello; English-language writers such as T.S. Eliot and Langston Hughes; and Spanish writers like Rafael Alberti, Manuel Altolaguirre, Sebastián Gasch, Benjamín Jàrnes, León Felipe [Camino], Gerardo Diego, and Gabriel García Maroto. Diego Rivera (1886–1957) was deeply bothered by García Maroto’s article: following a visit to the Soviet Union, Rivera attacked it ferociously in a lecture he gave at the Anfiteatro Simón Bolívar at the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria. Ermilo Abreu Gómez tells the story: “Innocent or foolish, Bernardo Ortiz de Montellano and I went to listen to it and we sat in the front row. Suddenly we saw Diego walk out with a copy of Contemporáneos. Good lord, what he said to us! He responded to García Maroto, added everything he could think of in defense of his work and then started in on us.”