Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

According to Ceferino Palencia, the Spanish art critic living in exile in Mexico, Frida Kahlo’s pictorial art was an eloquent example of will in service to sensitivity. Palencia speaks of Frida’s lifelong rebellion against her mother’s violent [...]

The art critic Ceferino Palencia reviews the exhibition at the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana [Salon of Mexican Visual Arts], one of three events presented in Mexico City to celebrate Mother’s Day. Twenty-five “accredited” painters were [...]

The Taller de Gráfica Popular [TGP, People’s Print Workshop], with Leopoldo Méndez, Pablo O’Higgins, and Luis Arenal as founding fathers, had always intended to work together as a group on various types of printmaking and painting in the studio [...]

The Mexican paintings included at the Venice Biennale generated such unanimous excitement among the critics and the European public that a request was immediately submitted to the Venice board of directors and the director of the exhibition to ship [...]

This article includes a collection of remarks made by a number of Spanish and Mexican critics on the occasion of the exhibition of works by the caricaturist Eduardo Robles “Ras” at the Ateneo Español de México. The critic Margarita Nelken, who [...]

Art critic Ceferino Palencia identified the advantages of contests such as the one held within the context of the Inter-American Biennial of Painting and Printmaking. In the first place, he said, such contests gave painters the possibility of [...]

The critic airs his views on Leonora Carrington’s work on the occasion of her retrospective at the Palacio de Bellas Artes Museum. According to Palencia, at this point in Carrington’s career her œuvre is widely acknowledged and acclaimed; he [...]

According to Palencia, Leonora Carrington is unique among Surrealist painters because she knows how to harmonize, combine, and fuse the naïve aspects of primitive art with the modern expression of André Breton. The critic says that Carrington [...]

The author recreates the Madrid of the early twentieth century, so as to place the painter Diego Rivera in that context. Diego Rivera was then a student of Eduardo Chicharro through a recommendation from the Mexican painter Dr. Atl. The author [...]

The author of this text provides a detailed description of the mural—consisting of four panels painted by José Renau for the Casino de la Selva in Cuernavaca—and says that, "The project’s general theme is Spain and Mexico." Palencia then [...]

In Palencia’s view, Frida Kahlo is one of the best representatives of the oneiric or surrealist genre. Nevertheless, he believes she should be included within this group with certain restrictions and limits. The quote by André Bretón (“Frida [...]