Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

In his comments, Sebastián Salazar Bondy praises the early accomplishments of the painter Sigfrido Laske, especially given the local milieu, “where art training is not as comprehensive as desirable.” His evidence of the artist’s talent is [...]

This newspaper article remarks on the performance of art critic Mário Pedrosa from the time he was named the director of the Museu de Arte Moderna (MAM) and of the VI São Paulo Biennial. Pedrosa had returned from a long trip to Europe and the [...]

This essay examines the “proletarian” ambiguities to be found in questions of aesthetics and, more precisely, the risk involved in the production of arbitrary dogmatic statements concerning the connection between art and politics. The author [...]

In this newspaper article Mário Pedrosa challenges the definition of “Abstract art” provided by the French avant-garde theoretician and artist Michel Seuphor in his Dictionnaire de la peinture abstraite (Paris: Hazan, 1957). According to the [...]

This text by Elizam Escobar, a noted Puerto Rican nationalist, artist, and writer, is a largely autobiographical account of his artistic and political evolution in the island and the United States. Written in prison, the essay reflects on his [...]

In this letter, Mexican artist Albero Beltrán (1923–2002) informs Puerto Rican artist Lorenzo Homar that the course in poster design that Polish designer Wiktor Gorka was offering at the Academia de San Carlos (Mexico City) would continue until [...]

David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego Rivera, Xavier Guerrero and José Chávez Morado led the call for Mexican artists to orient their artistic production to the guidelines of social realism. They responded “. . .  by rejecting the theories and formalist [...]

In this long, interesting article, José Revueltas ponders the nature of words, how they are used and how, over time, their meaning changes. As an example, he mentions the expression “épater le bourgeois” [to frighten the bourgeois] that was in [...]

This is a summary of a lecture on El realismo socialista en la pintura [Socialist Realism in Painting] given by David Alfaro Siqueiros at a union hall (packed with six hundred attendees), in which he shared an instrumental vision of art. He presented [...]

This text introduces the conferences organized by Eduardo González Lanuza at Galería PROAR. His intention is not to speak from an aesthetic point of view on La Menesunda [Hodgepodge] but rather of Jorge Romero Brest’s [...]

The painter Manuel Rodríguez Lozano declared in the newspaper Excélsior that Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros were mistaken in believing that an attack on communist painting constituted an attack on Mexican art. Rodríguez Lozano maintained [...]

In this article, Tomás Maldonado considers how the conflicts arising both within and beyond the borders of the Soviet Union affect communist artists such as Picasso and Matisse. He refers to the editorial published in Pravda (Moscow, August 11, 1947 [...]