Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

This introductory text for Guilio Carlo Argan’s exhibition analyzes the relationship between ideology and technique in order to inquire into the position and destiny of art within that context of ideas. Keeping in mind the self-directed nature and [...]

In this text, artist Ricardo Basbaum reflects on specific aspects of his production in order to investigate the broader issues underlying his Novas Bases para a Personalidade (NBP) project. By means of the oral style of the text, the artist engages [...]

In this text, experimental artist Abraham Palatnik discusses the questions of information and technology in relation to human evolution. In Palatnik’s view, evolution is key to the dynamic of culture as man adapts to the world at large and to his [...]

This text was to be placed on the main wall of the exhibition on Brazilian painting organized by the Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahia (MAMB) in 1960. The text asserts that the true innovating power of a culture is found by delving into its popular [...]

In this essay, the well-known Argentinean critic Jorge Romero Brest attempts to assess national problems as they were understood by the most famous Brazilian artists, touching on a raw nerve concerning the differences between the art produced in [...]

As President of the Artistic Solidarity Committee with Chile, Mário Pedrosa addresses then President Salvador Allende Gossens during the reception ceremony for the works that would make up the collection of the Museo de la Solidaridad in Santiago. [...]

In this letter to the painter Tarsila do Amaral, the writer Mário de Andrade urges her, Sérgio Milliet, and Oswald de Andrade—the “country folk” who have become futurists during their stay in Paris—to return to the “virgin jungle,” to [...]

In the judgment of the author, Mário Pedrosa, Brasilia is not “a synthesis of the arts,” it is a simple promise. For him, synthesis cannot be achieved through occasional collaborations but rather through a prominent practice that creates a “ [...]

This document claims that one of the fundamental tenets of the so-called Movimento Antropófago is a return to a “natural state” (understood as a kind of “beauty with natural features” that is ugly, rough, barbaric, and [...]

The art critic Mário Barata believes that architecture should be seen as art, rather than being viewed purely in terms of its technical aspect, which would tend to group it with engineering rather than with art and, in fact, condemn it to be taught [...]

This speech by Mário Pedrosa regards the city of Brasilia, which he examines as a work of collective art, believing it presents an experimental and practical problem. He defends the connection it represents between utopia and planning, a profound ( [...]

Assis Chateaubriand, the businessman and owner of the newspaper chain Diários Associados, devotes the first section of his article to what he refers to as two “great deeds” performed by the visual artist and engineer Flávio de Carvalho. One of [...]

In this essay, Annateresa Fabris addresses the issue of identity and its connections to the visual arts in Latin America. She refers to the concept of a “sense of place” in the development of the symbolic system that posits the idea of a “ [...]

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; [...]

This is a critique by Mário Pedrosa’s of the Primeira Missa no Brasil by Candido Portinari. Pedrosa compares this work to one by Victor Meirelles painted nearly one century earlier on the same topic. He writes that Portinari opts for a visual [...]

This is a news item about an exhibition of work by the artist Frans Krajcberg, held at the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro (MAM-Rio) in 1992. It also covers other similar exhibitions held in connection with the international event Eco-92 - [...]

In this essay about Frans Krajcberg—the Polish-born artist who lives in Brazil—the critic Roberto Pontual notes that an essential element in the artist’s work is the connection he makes between nature and art. Pontual, who wrote this essay on [...]

This document is a technical description of the architectural solution put into effect by the implementation team working on the Ministério da Educação e Saúde (MES) project designed by Lucio Costa, Oscar Niemeyer, Affonso [...]

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 essay, the art critic Frederico Morais takes a new approach to Latin American Constructive art, describing the influence it has had on European and North American art as well as its relationship to Latin American culture and society. The term [...]

The author reflects on a comparison between abstraction and realism, presenting it as a grave problem of the era. For José Renau, the main trend of the “bourgeois” culture is based on the abstract and trivial aspect of intellectual creation. He [...]

The text poses several key starting points drawn up by the work group involved in the II Encuentro de Intelectuales por la soberanía de los pueblos de nuestra América  [Second Encounter of Intellectuals for the Sovereignty of the Peoples of Our [...]

In 1900, Revista Moderna [Modern Magazine]— the bastion of modernismo in the Spanish-speaking world—published two important essays by José Juan Tablada on Japanese art, both of which positioned him as a prominent authority on that subject. The [...]

The curatorial message of this exhibition is that the cultural patronage and aesthetic rejection of Latin American art (as a whole) no longer apply. As a historical-cultural construct, Latin America is an amalgam. The cultural miscegenation that took [...]

This is a scathing critique of the 1st Latin American Biennial held in São Paulo in November and December 1978, which featured exhibitions and symposia on “myth and magic.” Frederico Morais reports, “All the negative predictions concerning [...]

This text by Nelson Brissac questions the ongoing interest in national roots in the age of globalization. Due to the current impossibility of defining any “identity,” what is at stake, in the author’s view, is the ability to take full advantage [...]

This essay by art critic and physicist Mário Schenberg is one of the first works written in Brazil on the impact of technology on artistic expression. His analysis looks back to the 18th-century industrial revolution, when the invention of the [...]

In this article, the critic Sheila Leirner seeks to differentiate between marginal art, marginalized art, and art that is understood as marginalized by the artist who created it. In her opinion, there is a tendency to regard marginal art and artists [...]

Orlando Teruz, a little-known painter, seeks to clarify a couple of terms and subjects that are frequently mentioned in discussions about current events: modern art and Brazilian art. As defined by Teruz, a work of modern art respects the traditional [...]

Poet and critic José Juan Tablada points out that for the first time contemporary art from Mexico had been fully recognized in the United States through the œuvre of José Clemente Orozco, an artist “whose psychological power and highly tragic [...]

In this text, Maria Alice Milliet argues that the curatorial vision of Jean Hubert Martin in the exhibition Magiciens de la terre (Centre Georges Pompidou/Parc de la Villette, Paris) reflects a thoroughly neocolonial position on art produced in the [...]

This address by Mário Pedrosa was entitled “Käthe Kollwitz e seu modo vermelho de perceber a vida” [Käthe Kollwitz and her red perception of life]; it was delivered at the CAM (Clube dos Artistas Modernos) in June 1933 during the show [...]

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 [...]

This is an interview with Mário de Andrade, who is referred to here as the “Daddy” of the new art movement that the newspaper calls “futuristic,” and that the São Paulo writer calls “modernist.” De Andrade prefers to reply to the [...]

In this article the art critic Stella Teixeira de Barros outlines the history of the various visual arts associations that were founded in the city of São Paulo between the Brazilian modernist period and the 1980s. Teixeira de Barros uses the term [...]

The manifesto that launched Rex Gallery & Sons in the city of São Paulo addresses in passing issues facing the visual arts in Brazil such as the paucity of galleries that support the production of artists, the lack of specialized art criticism, [...]

This account of the disbandment of the Grupo Rex asserts that the primordial aim of the São Paulo-based group was to say things that had never been said before, to criticize attitudes beset with bad faith, and to encourage the work of young [...]

Waldemar Cordeiro, one of the major figures in Brazilian visual arts, provides a broad overview of events in that field in the early 1950s, a key decade in the history of the arts in Brazil. Cordeiro lists the exhibitions, courses, and conferences [...]

This article is an attempt to address what is known as “Realismo Mágico” [Magic Realism], which the author asserts, is not a movement, school, or philosophy, but quite simply “Rex”—that is, the artist Wesley Duke Lee, his character “ [...]

The fall of the Berlin Wall, the spread of social democracy and liberalism as political, economic, and ideological models, the “westernizing” of Asia, and other facets of the process of globalization are mentioned here, among the many changes [...]

In this essay, Nelson Aguilar expresses his conviction that the question of “origin” has become a crucial issue for Latin American nations. The organization of an actual art exhibition—as in the 2003 Bienal do Mercosul in Porto Alegre, for [...]

According to the poet and critic Ferreira Gullar, the essential problem concerning the “national” nature of art is directly related to the cultural dependence of the country. By way of explanation, he suggests that this question would not arise [...]

The exhibition of works by the painter Lasar Segall at the Museu Nacional de Belas Artes in Rio de Janeiro (1943), under the auspices of the recently-opened Ministério da Educação e Saúde, was the largest show the Lithuanian-born artist had ever [...]

In this text, author Gilberto Freyre recognized the integrative potential of art for its ability to gather disagreements. He points to the constant fusion of antagonistic elements in the music of Heitor Villa-Lobos, in which the erudite and the [...]

This is a description of the Curso de Composição, the composition course for seven classes that the architect Jacob Ruchti taught at the IAC (Instituto de Arte Contemporânea) at the MASP (Museu de Arte de São Paulo). The professor explains that [...]

This document is a press release announcing the first exhibition of the MSA (Manifestación Sintetista Actualizada) group, which operated out of a two-floor space (fourth and fifth floors) on San Francisco Street in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico. In [...]

This text by Lucio Costa discusses the “unpredictable” nature of Brazilian architecture. In it, Costa develops a far-reaching theory of modern art and architecture to which the visual form is the sine qua non. The visual-formal component [...]

The artist Cícero Dias was the subject of this article that includes a combination of first-hand accounts on his artistic career. The text was originally published due to an exhibition on abstract art by the artist in Recife (Faculdade de Direito) [...]

According to Mário Pedrosa contemporary art is characterized by “objectivism” or by a rejection of self-expression. In this essay he refers to the symbolic objects suggested by Salvador Dalí and to “the crisis of the object” identified in [...]

In her essay, María Angélica Melendi discusses how Latin America fits into artistic and cultural grand narratives (grand-récits). In her opinion, the art produced in Latin America seeks to insert itself into these narratives in two different ways [...]