This is one of the series of five articles published by Marta Traba (1923–83), the Argentinean art critic, who lived in Colombia, as part of the debate about the identity of Latin American art that was prompted in 1965 by the publication of her article “El arte latinoamericano: un falso apocalipsis” on May 2 in the Papel Literario supplement of El Nacional, the Caracas newspaper. This debate dragged on until September, with dueling articles appearing in this Sunday supplement and in the Revista Nacional de Cultura. As a result, Traba was invited to give three lectures at the Museo de Bellas Artes de Caracas, the controversy was featured on radio and television programs, and there was a final debate held at the Ateneo in Caracas. In addition to Traba, the other main participants in the debate were the painters Alirio Rodríguez and Alejandro Otero, the critics Roberto Guevara and Perán Erminy, and J. R. Guillent Pérez and Ludovico Silva, both of whom had trained as philosophers.
The articles that appeared in the Papel Literario supplement El Nacional newspaper were assembled into the Colección Delta Solar as Modernidad y postmodernidad. Espacios y tiempos dentro del arte latinoamericano (Caracas: Museo Alejandro Otero, 2000). A selection of the articles that appeared in the Revista Nacional de Cultura was published in Roldán Esteva-Grillet’s (Compiler) Fuentes documentales y críticas de las artes plásticas venezolanas. Siglos XIX y XX (Caracas, CDCH/UCV, Vol. II, 2001).
What Traba considered her “final response” to the writers who argued with her at the above-mentioned debate was not, in fact her final word. The controversy dragged on and she continued to respond. Here she summarizes and reiterates her main arguments about the “mimicry” and “depersonalization” of Latin American art. She also briefly lists the premises of her thesis, sketching a quick diagnosis of the state of the visual arts in Latin America. It should be noted that, in this article, Traba addresses her opponents’ arguments, stripping them of their complementary or additional ideas and, with a stroke of the pen, reducing them to the “universalist dimension” they advocate versus the nationalist approach to Latin American art that she champions. Traba reveals, as though she were making a simple accusation, her opponents’ preference for a form of universal art which, in her opinion, is the essence of the debate. It is also important to point out that Traba describes this type of exchange of opinions as a “polemic of truth” in order to maintain profound, unyielding disagreements with the other participants.