Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

Samuel Cherson, a Cuban living in exile in Puerto Rico, gives a brief account of the history of the Bienal de San Juan del Grabado Latinoamericano y del Caribe [San Juan Biennial of Latin American and Caribbean Graphic Art]. He concludes that the 8th [...]

This article tells the story of the first exhibition of women’s art held under the name, Frida Kahlo Salon, at the gallery directed by Lola Álvarez Bravo. The show brought together the works of 40 artists as dissimilar as Remedios Varo, Machila [...]

The way Crespo de la Serna sees Leonora Carrington is that, in spite of being English-born, her artistic temperament is not of a kind to be circumscribed or limited by a specific geographic environment. Hence, “the world in which she breathes has [...]

Critic Jorge Juan Crespo de la Serna reviews the content of the newly opened Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes at the Palacio de Bellas Artes. After several visits to take in the breadth of the collection, he concludes that the Mexican painting section [...]

This is a review of the exhibition of modern Mexican art that the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes [INBA, National Institute of Fine Arts] sent to Bordeaux, France; it was subsequently shown in Paris and Milan, Italy. Jaime Torres Bodet, the [...]

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 [...]

According to Max Aub, by the time Remedios Varo died she had become one of the most surprising painters of her time, whose work was distinguished by a timeless quality. In Aub’s opinion, Varo’s painting expressed a struggle between good and evil [...]

According to Carlos Fuentes, Leonora Carrington’s painting belongs in the “secret realm” of magic—a place where opposites interact and fill the pictorial space with mythical figures, where the “logic of dreams vanquishes the madness of [...]

Elena Poniatowska spent time gathering opinions on the Inter-American Biennial of Painting and Printmaking. According to Octavio Paz, the four great masters of painting were Carlos Mérida, Rufino Tamayo, Wilfredo Lam, and Roberto Matta; he felt that [...]

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 [...]

In the writer’s view, Leonora Carrington’s work expresses different parts of a whole that complement each other perfectly: life and death, wakefulness and sleep, reality and imagination. These all express an alternate side of reality; which is [...]

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 [...]