Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

The article points out the importance of the activity brought forth by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in “our milieu” as a “very valuable collaboration to the renovation movement,” started—long ago—by the group involved in the publication Mart [...]

The writer Monteiro Lobato serves up a conservative review of the Exposição de Pintura Moderna — Anita Malfatti in a heated attack on avant-garde art, describing the exhibition as being, in his opinion, the work of “people who see things [...]

Carlos Mérida affirms that Filippo Tommaso Martinetti launched futurism, a movement that was based on the principle of dynamism in its broadest conception. In [Mérida’s opinion, futurism and all artistic schools do not produce a definitive result [...]

This article contains images and commentary on the national exhibition of Futurism that took place in Milan in March of 1919. According to the founding father of the movement, the word “futurista” means “revolucionario, novador [sic], [...]

The Puerto Rican writer Olga Nolla writes in-depth about some of the works produced by the Puerto Rican artist Julio Tomás Martínez. According to her, Martínez was influenced by Symbolism, Surrealism, and Futurism, which set him apart from his [...]

From Madrid, the Spanish avant-garde poet Ramón Gómez de la Serna wrote a concise profile of Filippo Tomasso Marinetti that was taken up by the Mexican cultural press. De la Serna refers to a certain appeasement of spirit in his friend the Futurist [...]

In this text, José Carlos Mariátegui argues that no avant-garde artistic or literary movement has been “as significant historically or important as content as Surrealism.” He asserts that, while Futurism attempted to go beyond formal [...]

In this essay, Manuel Quintana Castillo identifies the formal assumptions upon which the Cubist aesthetic was constructed, and explains how Cubism influenced movements such as Futurism and Constructivism based on an intrinsic interest in geometry. In [...]

This article’s purpose is to welcome Marinetti to Buenos Aires on behalf of the journal Martín Fierro. In this sense, it describes the undertaking that made him famous and, given the rumors associated with his arrival to “these lands in America [...]

This article relates a conversation between Vicente Ruiz Huidobro and his Chilean countryman, Ángel Crughaga Santa María, in which the latter relates Huidobro’s literary activities in France after he founded the magazine Nord-Sud with Pierre [...]

Alberto Prebisch reports on the exhibition held at “Friends of Art” comprised of works by Emilio Pettoruti, Xul Solar, Norah Borges, as well as two projects by the architects, Ernesto Vautier and Alberto Prebisch, representatives of the “new [...]

This article recounts an interview of Filippo Tomasso Marinetti conducted by Rafael Lozano when he visited the Italian poet in Paris. The text provides an ample description of the new “tactile” aesthetic that the futurist promoted as well as some [...]

In 1936 the publishers of Frente a Frente [Face to Face], the journal of the Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios (LEAR) [League of Revolutionary Writers and Artists] published a belated futuristic manifesto by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti on [...]

Amado Nervo announces, in terms of a “literary school,” the emergence of futurism in Italy, whose manifesto he translates in order to place it, with no fear at all, at the reader’s disposal. And Nervo does it with the conviction that—in spite [...]

This article affirms the connection of the work of the Argentinean painter Emilio Pettoruti to distinct schools of the European vanguard; although, it is not possible to relegate his work to any one of them. On the contrary, the art of Pettoruti is, [...]

This article by Leoncio Martínez—identified here by one of his pseudonyms: “Santiago León”—is a critical review of a joint exhibition of works by two young painters, Antonio Alcántara and Ernesto Stelling, both of whom are involved in the [...]

José Cúneo’s text entitled “Arte Abstracto” was read at a lecture that he gave in Montevideo. Although the exact date when it was written is unknown, the lecture appears to have been given in 1956 or 1957 at the Escuela de Bellas Artes in [...]

In this text, Ricardo Güiraldes explains what he understands to be poetry: “I don’t believe in poetry that is produced according to a definition. Poetry is everything to which the poet inclines. This vagueness is, it seems to me, preferable over [...]

The author José Renau, exiled in Mexico, summarizes the principal avant-garde art trends of the 20th century, highlighting the contradiction between the works created and their artistic value in light of the few connections among the artists, [...]

This article is by Hans Platschek who was living in Montevideo between 1939 and 1953. The German artist makes a self- analysis on the resulting situation of postwar modernism, specifically the debated notion of “Art Nouveau or young art” both in [...]

In this essay, French intellectual Gilles Plazy places emphasis on the essential role played by the concepts of “time” and “space” in Jesús Rafael Soto’s art. Plazy examines how artists from different art movements such as Impressionism [...]

In this essay published in 1985, educator and literary critic Roberto de Espada describes the situation of the visual arts in Uruguay in the sixties. He analyzes how informalism was assimilated and internalized by important artists in the country and [...]