Marta Traba argues in her paper that in the last five years, Latin American art “has suffered from a visible process of depersonalization” and “mimesis.” She points out the principal causes of the phenomenon, among them: artists who move permanently out of their country, the reaction against a nationalistic aesthetic as dictated by Mexican muralism, which also includes a disdain for “local color,” and the growing internationalism in art. She discusses some exceptions, as well as the case of artists who have yielded to this “mimesis.” Traba concludes that due to the crisis of aesthetics (an axiological component of art) in this century, the majority of Latin American artists have become “little people” and “fools” of the Grand Apocalypse … and that America is in “limbo.”

The essay “El arte latinoamericano: un falso apocalipsis,” by Marta Traba (1923–83), the Argentinean critic based in Colombia, was published in the literary supplement of El Nacional newspaper, on May 2, 1965. This article was the impetus for a controversy regarding “the identity of Latin American art” that took place in Caracas between May and September of that year. The heated debate played out in the aforementioned newspaper and in the Revista Nacional de Cultura. The latter invited Traba to give three talks at the Museo de Bellas Artes de Caracas; there was also radio and television coverage, as well as a final debate in the Ateneo de Caracas.

Prominent participants in addition to Traba included philosophers J. R. Guillent Pérez and Ludovico Silva, painters Alirio Rodríguez and Alejandro Otero, as well as art critics Roberto Guevara and Perán Erminy.

This is a key text within the criticism of the 1960s, not only because it is representative of Traba’s ideas, but also because it represents a trend in art and criticism, which at that time, and in many places in Latin America, believed artists should look to their national traditions for inspiration, specifically from regionalisms. The principal opponents to Traba’s thesis were Guillent Pérez and Otero. The concept of “apocalypse,” (which Traba considered negative and destructive), would be duly refuted by Guillent Pérez on philosophical grounds based on the concept of “nihilism”—which emanated existentially from the postwar era—as a “positive” response to the Western crisis derived from the recent horrific war. Otero, who was supported by critics like Guevara, also questions the thesis of the “depersonalization” and “mimesis” of artists; including the affirmation that artists—with few exceptions like Fernando de Szyszlo in Perú and Alejandro Obregón in Colombia—are excessively eager to join already existing groups and trends in New York and Paris.

The articles that appeared in the literary supplement of El Nacional were recompiled in the Colección Delta Solar as Modernidad y postmodernidad. Espacios y tiempos dentro del arte latinoamericano (Caracas: Museo Alejandro Otero, 2000). A selection of those texts that appeared in the Revista Nacional de Cultura was published in Roldán Esteva-Grillet, compiler, Fuentes documentales y críticas de las artes plásticas venezolanas. Siglos XIX y XX (Caracas: CDCH/UCV, Vol. II, 2001).

For more on this controversy, see by Otero “Carta a Guillent Pérez, a propósito de limbos y apocalipsis” [doc. no. 798998], and the critique offered by Guevara “Rigor y autenticidad” [doc. no. 799462].