Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

In this essay, the visual artist Manuel Quintana Castillo suggests that early twentieth century art represents the demise of the art that preceded it. He explains that modern art promotes communication, encourages personal choice as the basis of [...]

In his weekly column in the El Comercio newspaper, Luis Miró Quesada Garland discusses the relationship between ethics and art as part of the debate prompted by the survey about “classical” painting and “modern” painting that was sponsored [...]

Mário Pedrosa analyzes the relationship that the works of Alexander Calder and other modern artists (especially Fernand Léger) have with industrial production. In his judgment, for Léger, machines are like an incomprehensible and frightening god; [...]

Guillermo Meneses discusses the foreign artists invited by the architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva to work with him on his plan to incorporate art into the proposed Ciudad Universitaria in Caracas. Meneses begins by mentioning the artistic merits of [...]

This article by painter Emilio Goyburu contributes to debates on the meaning of abstraction, specifically in terms of the important role that color plays in the arts. Nature, in Goyburu’s view, strikes us by means of color and, as a result, all art [...]

Oswald de Andrade was invited by the American Contemporary Arts to give this lecture in São Paulo in 1944, in which he discusses the two characters he created for a series of novels (that was never completed) entitled Marco Zero. He used these [...]

SPAM (Sociedade Pró-Arte Moderna) was founded in December 1932 in São Paulo. Its stated goals were to create closer artistic ties, and relationships between artists and the public. The catalogue for the SPAM 1ª Exposição de Arte Moderna includes [...]

This article reports on the success of the exhibition of ancient and modern Mexican art that was presented in Paris and then shipped to Stockholm. In Fernando Gamboa’s opinion, the exhibition was a revelation. The Parisian press described it as the [...]

This document analyzes the exhibition “Arte Abstracto, del arte figurativo al arte abstracto” [Abstract Art: from figurative art to abstract art], organized by the Belgian critic Léon Degand and presented at the Instituto de Arte Moderno of [...]