Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

In this article Alejandro Romualdo questions the “esoteric” label that is placed on “primitive” and pre-Colombian art. The author rejects the idea that it has an “impregnable, supernatural nature,” promoted by intellectuals that [...]

French Surrealist poet Benjamin Péret wrote this text on African religions after visiting Brazil. He establishes a counterpoint between Macumba and Candomblé rituals, which he considers “almost revelatory” poetic practices of “primitive and [...]

This essay was written about the concept of “primitive drawing,” due to the imprecision of that expression. The writer Gilda de Mello e Souza bases her text on certain fundamental ideas of the sociologist Raymond Firth. His definition of “ [...]

This is the third chapter of the book by Lourival Gomes Machado that analyzes the development of modern art in Brazil, in which the author includes a reference to the contribution made to contemporary painting by the “spontaneous” artists (whose [...]

This article discusses the artwork of José Antonio da Silva, which was deemed as primitive; it comments on the reception of his paintings during the transition from the 1940s into the 1950s. The writer, Theon Spanudis, points out its initial [...]

This is an illustrated text in which José Geraldo Vieira defines the characteristics of “naïve” or “primitive art” at a time which coincided with Brazilian art critics’ growing interest in the trend. In his judgment, it is an instinctive [...]

Among the triumphs of modern art were the rediscovery of an emotional dimension and artistic sentiment in all their purity; something which becomes evident in the work of anonymous “primitive” artists and of the people who still live on a tribal [...]

In this essay, the artist Flávio de Carvalho describes himself as a researcher into the “egocentric behavior of the world,” claiming that each social class usually wants to see itself portrayed in a straightforward manner. De Carvalho discusses [...]

In this text, Shifra Goldman examines the problematic homogenization of the idea of “Hispanic” art and culture that was promoted by the exhibition Hispanic Art in the United States: Thirty Contemporary Painters and Sculptors organized by The [...]

This text explains the theoretical basis for Best Maugard’s drafting method prior to the development of his manual explained in the following section. The theory is based on a platonic and universal perspective of art that expresses universal [...]

The French art critic Maurice Raynal believes there is an innovative school of art in Brazil that is based on an intellectual aesthetic. The painter Vicente do Rego Monteiro is a member of that group. Raynal explains that Rego Monteiro, an artist [...]

This is an excerpt from the text of the lecture given by the Lithuanian-born artist Lasar Segall in June 1924 at the Vila Kyrial in São Paulo, on the occasion of one of the meetings between Senator Freitas Valle and a group of modernist artists and [...]

In his critique, Mário Pedrosa states there has been a “deepening of meaning” since the forms of expression belonging to children and primitive peoples have been incorporated into modern art. In his words, he affirms that through this inclusion [...]

Here, the well-known ethnologist Herbert Baldüs presents [what was then considered] the strange concept of “ethnology” as the science that studies the phenomenal and total form of people and its links with the phenomenal for­ms of other people [...]