Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

In “The Pachuco and Other Extremes,” the Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat Octavio Paz grapples with the issues related to the search for the national identity in post-revolutionary Mexico and, more broadly, the existential relationship [...]

In this essay, Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat Octavio Paz analyzes Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo’s relationship with Mexican popular art and Pre-Columbian art. According to Tamayo, popular art should not be seen as art but as a functional [...]

In “Voluntad de forma,” Octavio Paz, who was a Mexican poet, essayist, and diplomat examines Mexican art and culture as a product of the “voluntad de forma,” or the will to give form to the fleeting, which he associates with [...]

In this text, Octavio Paz contemplates the characteristics of “Hispanic” art in the United States. In a section entitled “Names and Constitutions,” he begins by describing what he argues is an archetype of all societies: the [...]

In this article, “La unidad de Latinoamérica. Batalla diplomática en San Francisco” that appeared in Mañana [(Mexico City), no. 92 (June 2, 1945), pp. 12–13, 15], Mexican poet and Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz ( [...]

After reviewing Orozco’s early work (drawings, prints, caricatures, and watercolors) and mentioning the influence of El Greco, Giotto, Goya, and Toulouse-Lautrec, Octavio Paz refers to a "hermetic or symbolic" trend to which the [...]

In this essay, Octavio Paz discusses the dreamy, surrealist nature of the work of Alberto Gironella. Paz points out that Gironella’s art is situated between the word and the image, and this is why he defines him as a poet of visual images: a & [...]

In this essay, along with posthumous praise for the figure, André Breton, Octavio Paz establishes a new approach to surrealism, automatic writing and the concept of revelation: “The critics are saying that surrealism is no longer the [...]

This is a dense re-telling of Octavio Paz’s nexus to surrealism and particular link to André Breton. It tells of the role played by the poet Benjamín Péret in this long relationship, which the Mexican writer sums up as a [...]