Clemencia Lucena, Colombian artist and activist in MOIR (Movimiento Obrero Independiente Revolucionario, founded in 1971) assesses the works exhibited at the XXII Salón de Artistas Nacionales (1971) on the basis of the Marxist theory of class struggle. Lucena places the work on display into three categories. First, she asserts, there is a “group of works that futilely attempts to distance itself from social issues and ideology. These include abstract, conceptual and figurative works, as well as paintings of objects and [works that partake of] other international trends.” This first category includes abstract painters like Omar Rayo and Carlos Rojas; figurative artists like Santiago Cárdenas and Darío Morales; and finally “what we could call the latest trend,” since these artists use nontraditional materials like boxes, reams of paper, and other “knickknacks.” Lucena’s second category consists of “a tendency that makes use of political language, but fails to stand in opposition to the earlier group. [These artists are] revolutionary in word and reactionary in deed, revisionists and right-wingers who hide behind a left-wing mask.” This group includes Carlos Granada Arango, Pedro Alcántara, Diego Arango, and Nirma Zárate. Their work is feeble both technically and conceptually because in Lucena’s view, it is limited to protest and to useless sentimentality without formulating revolutionary solutions. Finally, “in open opposition to all the aforementioned works is a group of progressive works that either points to the ultimate enemy or objectively shows the people’s struggle, formulating revolutionary alternatives.”Artists in this category include Alfonso Quijano, Fabio Rodríguez, and María Teresa Nieto.

This document is one of a series of texts by Colombian artist Clemencia Lucena (1945–1983) published in the press between 1970 and 1975, and then collected in her book, Anotaciones políticas sobre la pintura en Colombia (1975). Of the articles in that collection, this one stands out because of the clarity of its language and the map it provides of the plurality of artistic proposals that appeared at the turn of the decade (from the sixties to the seventies). The framework for this text is the debate on to what extent truly “Colombian art” was represented at the Salones de Artistas Nacionales in those years, since the work of some artists from the country was infused with strains of international avant-garde art. This appropriation of international trends was supported by privately funded events, like the Bienal de Coltejer (1968, 1970, 1972, and 1981 editions) held in Medellín. An activist in MOIR, a political movement influenced by the thinking of Mao Zedong and supporters of the Chinese Communist Party, Lucena’s political activism was consistent with her pictorial work. In her paintings and her words, she vehemently defended the aesthetic of Socialist Realism that MOIR, like Maoism, embraced as a strategy to spread its ideology. Lucena states in no uncertain terms the path that Colombian art should take. In the early seventies, after the breakup of the National Front, a coalition of Colombia’s two traditional political parties, the Liberal and the Conservative parties, ostensibly in order to diminish partisan hatred and put an end to the violence that ensued after the death of popular leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in 1948 (the coalition lasted from 1958 to 1974), the struggle between leftist factions and the establishment made itself felt in the public sphere. An incident that took place in 1968 at the Museo de Arte Moderno of Bogotá shows that the fact of the ideological conflict is by no means outside debates on art: two students at the Universidad Nacional, where the museum was housed, violently burst into the museum and left fliers opposing the exhibition Espacios Ambientales, display that included works demanding an art for the people. In her articles, Lucena also questions art at the service of bourgeois and imperialist ideology, which reflects the passive position of artists who embrace international influences.