Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

This document includes the expert appraisal report of the eleven murals that artist Pedro Nel Gómez painted from 1935 to 1937 at the new Medellín City Hall. The Medellín City Council had commissioned Colombian writers Efe Gómez and Antonio J. [...]

Jean Charlot thanks, ironically, the fact that José Clemente Orozco has not studied in Europe, since the United States offered him the mechanical elements of his œuvre, and Mexico the dramatic elements. Orozco, in Charlot’s opinion, lives within [...]

This article reviews the activities of Roberto Cueva del Río, a painter from Puebla, at the Mexican Embassy in Washington where he worked under orders from the Department of Foreign Affairs. Cueva del Río painted the walls of that hall with popular [...]

This article discusses the mural that Diego Rivera recently had painted at the Hospital de La Raza del IMSS (Instituto Mexicano del Seguro Social) [Mexican Social Security Institute], in which he represented the medical culture of Mexico’s past in [...]

Oscar Leblanc interviews Diego Rivera about the destruction of the mural that Rivera painted at the Rockefeller Center in New York. Leblanc asks Rivera about his reaction to the news, and questions him about the terms of the contract, since it had [...]

The author of this article contemplates Diego Rivera and refers to an essay written by Alejo Carpentier, “El Renacimiento del fresco en México” [The Renaissance of the Fresco in Mexico] published in Le Cahier in Paris. According to this writer, [...]

When he first became involved in the muralist movement, José Clemente Orozco appeared hesitant and unaware of the basic principles of al fresco painting. In this article, however, Antonio Rodríguez reveals that Orozco possessed a sort of innermost [...]

The poet Carlos Pellicer writes about a pair of Diego Rivera’s important works: the mural in the Auditorium at the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria, and the frescoes in the courtyard at the Palacio de Educación Pública. Rather than describe the [...]

This document includes an article in which José Clemente Orozco vents his negative opinion regarding symposia. He remarks that instead of wasting money on the artificial and pedantic speeches regarding the relationship between art and the academy, [...]

This article is one of the few that describes the murals painted in several primary schools in Mexico, thus it allows us to know what it was like before its total or partial destruction. The title of this mural by Pablo O’Higgins was Vida y [...]

This anonymous article published in the Colombian newspaper El Tiempo reports the decision of the Bogotá City Council to “condemn” the frescos by Ignacio Gómez Jaramillo in the Colombian Capitol. The column asserts that, while the controversial [...]

This is a letter of complaint sent by Julio C. Nájera to El Universal. His subject is the paintings of Jorge González Camarena, which the sender judges “immoral” due to the enormous nudes rendered in the paintings. Nájera believes that certain [...]

Sponsored by the government of the state of Jalisco, José Clemente Orozco worked on a series of frescoes for several public buildings in Guadalajara. Orozco was considered to have reached the full maturity of his creative talent, and these works [...]

This forty-eight page catalogue consists of the following sections: “Manifiesto de los artistas independientes a los artistas de las Américas” [Manifesto Dedicated by Independent Artists to the Artists of the Americas] (two pages); “La [...]

This document details the activities of the two American sisters, Marion and Grace Greenwood, in Morelia (Michoacán). It offers, in addition, a rough description of the murals shown at the Museo Regional de Michoacán [Regional Museum of Michoacán [...]

In the course of an interview, Rufino Tamayo talks about the polemic that arose regarding his mural at the Conservatorio Nacional with the topics of song and music. Tamayo took advantage of this forum to disqualify the students of the “little [...]

Carlos Mérida quotes José Clemente Orozco at length in this article. Orozco had been invited to paint a fresco to accompany the show 20 Siglos de Arte Mexicano [20 Centuries of Mexican Art], presented at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1940 [...]

When he turned fifty, the painter Pedro Nel Gómez was interviewed by an unnamed journalist from the magazine Semana, which published an article on his life and work. He spent his childhood in Anorí (Antioquia), and later began his training as an [...]

In El Machete, number 13 (September 11-18, 1924), Siqueiros rails against the recent desecration of Orozco and Rivera’s murals. He accuses as false revolutionaries those who minimize the problem and complains that reactionaries have free rein at [...]

This article describes a great portion of the murals painted by the North American painter Grace Greenwood in Mexico, including her frescoes in the Aberlardo L. Rodríguez market and the Museo Michoacano, commissioned by the Universidad de San Nicol [...]

Luis Lara Pardo, who was close to Ángel Zárraga, comments about a fresco called Playa [Beach] that Zárraga created at the beginning of the 1930s in Paris, Said fresco was on loan for the International Fine Arts Exhibition in Baltimore. The author [...]

This interview was conducted in 1961 on the occasion of an exhibition of the work of the painter Carlos Correa in Medellín. The interviewer describes Correa as an “authentically Colombian figurative artist” and a “fortunate harvester of the [...]

This article reprints a report published in Yucatán Gráfico magazine that describes recent activities of the local visual arts milieu. Following the creation of the Escuela de Bellas Artes [School of Fine Arts] in the state of Yucatán by the [...]