Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

This catalogue was published by the Banco de la República of Colombia in February 1963 in conjunction with the exhibition of twenty-three paintings from the bank’s Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango art collection. The exhibition was held in the [...]

In this text, Colombian art critic Eduardo Serrano—curator of the Museo de Arte Moderno of Bogotá—presents the exhibition Arte y Política held at that institution in 1974. Serrano asserts that politics is more than a recurring theme in the work [...]

“El americanismo de los años 40 y la nueva vanguardia colombiana” [The Americanism of the 1940s and the New Colombian Avant-Garde], an essay by the historian Álvaro Medina, published in 1978, discusses the artistic languages inspired by the [...]

In this article, poet and art critic Jorge Gaitán Durán takes stock of the activities that took place on the Colombian art scene in 1946. He begins with a reflection on the overall state of the visual arts in the country. He asserts that 1946 [...]

In this article, critic Germán Rubiano Caballero introduces a group of Colombian artists born in the first half of the twentieth century. To place these artists in the international context of Western art history, Rubiano Caballero associates them [...]

In this text, Austrian historian and critic Walter Engel, who lived in Colombia starting in 1938, discusses the suspension of the Salón Anual de Artistas Colombianos from 1947 to 1949. He observes that during that period “historic” events took [...]

This document is the catalogue to the Exposición de Alipio Jaramillo held at the exhibition hall of the Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango in Bogotá in August 1958. In addition to information about the exhibition dates and the venue, the catalogue [...]

[This document includes] a four-page brochure whose first page reads: “Universidad Nacional de Colombia/ Museo Nacional/ Exposición de pintura/ contemporánea/ octubre 1948.” The other three pages contain the names of the artists participating [...]

In this article, the art critic Walter Engel, an Austrian based in Colombia, wrote an overview of how various contemporary artists represent the human figure. To Engel, regarding this genre, in concept “no period or country may claim [it] for [...]

The text by the art historian and critic, Álvaro Medina, published in the Semanario Cultural [Weekly Arts Section] of the newspaper, El Pueblo in the city of Cali, is the introduction to Graficario de la lucha popular en Colombia [Graphic Portfolio [...]

This article formulates the question of artistic freedom from the perspective of the dominance of abstract over figurative tendencies, which Colombian painter Gonzalo Ariza attributes to cultural agents, critics, and art dealers active in Colombia in [...]

The author of this document claims that Colombian painting has no past. According to the Argentine critic Marta Traba, the visual arts produced in Colombia from the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century are of no interest [...]

In this article, artist and critic Jorge Moreno Clavijo contemplates the question of whether Colombian art is at its height or in a state of decline. To answer that question, he calls on artists Erwin Kraus, Gonzalo Ariza, Alipio Jaramillo, Luis [...]

Poet and occasional art critic Jorge Gaitán Durán asserts that the show Pintores colombianos jóvenes [Young Colombian Painters] was historically significant because it was the first salon of young artists held in Colombia. He states that the event [...]

Art critic Walter Engel wrote five articles on exhibitions held in 1948, among them the solo show of artist Carlos Díaz Forero, sponsored by the Universidad Nacional of Bogotá and held at the Museo Nacional in that city in August; the exhibition of [...]