Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

In this essay, Joaquín Torres García attempts to link this sociopolitical doctrine with that of modern art after presenting a succinct historical review starting from “primitive communism” up through the Marxist doctrine. He does so by [...]

This essay is about the article describing the opening of the Primer Salón de Pintura General Electric [The First General Electric Art Exhibition Hall] in October of 1963, highlighting the work of IGE (Instituto General Electric [General Electric [...]

This essay is on the informative publication by the newspaper El Plata on the II Salón de Pintura Moderna [Second Hall of Modern Art], organized in Montevideo by the IGE (Instituto General Electric [General Electric Institute]). It is with regard to [...]

In this text, José Sabogal states that, upon their arrival, the Spanish were impressed by the architecture and art they found in America. They understood that “their fortunate victory could not be maintained if they did not consolidate it through [...]

The critic Carlos Silva wrote a study of the work of the Venezuelan sculptor Edgar Guinand, pointing out two fundamental periods in his life in art. The first is defined by the writer in the visual arts context that follows the Latin American Post- [...]

This essay by the curator Julieta González is a preface to a book published by the Museo Alejandro Otero (2000) that collected articles related to the debate about “identity” in Latin America in 1965. The debate arose as a response to an article [...]

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 [...]

In his essay, “Reverón y el arte moderno,” Luis Pérez-Oramas suggests that Reverón found his own way to modernism in his painting as a result of the exhaustion of Figuration, independently of the most noted modern artists of the twentieth [...]

In this critical piece, Samuel Pérez Barreto ventures an interpretation of the relationship between contemporary art and historical time. In the author’s view, every work of art is determined by its historical-chronological period, which [...]

In this essay, Gustavo Buntinx analyzes emerging Peruvian art, seeing it as part of a process that began twenty or twenty-five years earlier. He speculates on “what were or claimed to be alternatives in Peruvian high art during Fernando Belaúnde [...]

In this text, Luis Miró Quesada Garland responds to the letter from journalist Jorge Mejía published in El Comercio newspaper (Lima, August 20, 1950). Miró Quesada Garland rejects degree of representation as basis for artistic classification, [...]

This open letter from journalist Jorge Mejía to architect Luis Miró Quesada Garland indicates, to some extent, the terms in which abstract art was questioned when it first emerged in Peru. Mejía ventures a classification of forms of artistic [...]

Focusing on the issue of the “significance” of art, the author indicates that he agrees with his polemicist in making a distinction between two types of significance: “artistic or apparent” and “logical or associative.” Garland rather [...]

On the matter of the existential “obligations” mentioned by Francisco Miró Quesada Cantuarias, the author challenges the idea that “in order to ‘be’ one has to act.” Believing in an “essential nature of ‘being,’” his relative, [...]

Referring to the connotations implicit in several phrases that both he and Francisco Miró Quesada Cantuarias have used, Luis Miró Quesada Garland underscores the difference between “the spiritual mood,” which he used, and the idea of “cosmo- [...]

The author rejects the idea—proposed by Francisco Miró Quesada Cantuarias—of renaming figurative art as “significant art,” thus emphasizing the differences between formalism and abstraction. In the author’s opinion, the ambiguity of the [...]

Several European intellectuals responded to the final question in the survey about “classical” painting and “modern” painting that was published in the Lima newspaper El Comercio. Paul Linder states that, in the course of history, there are [...]

Luis Miró Quesada Garland believes it is necessary to address the questions concerning “art as a product and a form of social expression” posed by the painter Alfredo Ruiz Rosas and the poet Alejandro Romualdo Valle (whom Garland does not [...]

In response to the question in the survey published by the Lima newspaper El Comercio as to whether “modern” painting is an improvement on “classical” painting or a step back, the various respondents agreed that different styles from [...]

The question in the El Comercio newspaper’s survey, “Which do you prefer, classical painting or modern painting?” prompted replies from two painters, one attorney, one journalist, and an art dealer. All the responses were similar, claiming that [...]

This is the general introduction to the survey about “classical” painting and “modern” painting that was published over the course of several weeks in the “Cátedra Libre” section of the Sunday supplement of El Comercio, a Lima newspaper [...]

This article, written by the Spanish art critic Francisco Gil Tovar, discusses the Banco de la República Art Collection three years after it was founded. The article is divided into five brief sections, as follows: an introductory paragraph, “La [...]

The text “Entrance” serves as the introduction to the book, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity, by Mexico-based Argentinean academic and anthropologist Néstor García Canclini. Written in 1995, the work rapidly became [...]

In this short newspaper article, written on the occasion of the Extraordinary International Congress of AICA (International Association of Art Critics) held in Brazil in 1959, the chief advocate of Brazilian Modernism, critic Mário Pedrosa, [...]

Aníbal Machado writes about the printmaker Oswaldo Goeldi, noting his “moral profile,” his “impetuous temperament,” his humble, melancholy nature, and his “artistic solitude.” Machado describes Goeldi’s childhood in Belém (in the [...]

In this tribute published in 1991, the painter and art critic Quirino Campofiorito recalls the work of Bruno Lechowski, done by the Polish painter who was living in Rio de Janeiro in the1930s. The writer believes Lechowski was responsible for [...]

This article compares the complex and contradictory movements in Brazilian visual arts between the late 1950s and the early 1990s. To the well-known Brazilian critic Rodrigo Naves, the disruption took place just when the work created by the most [...]

In this text, professor, art historian, and critic Quirino Campofiorito offers an overview of Brazilian sculpture from the 1930s through the 1960s. In passing, he comments on the modernization process undertaken by Brazilian art, generally in open [...]

This text by Sônia Salzstein is an analysis of the changes in the appearance of Brazilian art starting in the 1950s. She believes that the cultural modernization launched in that decade had a utopian dimension, which lost ground to an [...]

In this article, Salzstein discusses how contemporary art takes its place on the international art stage, while analyzing the contradictions implicit in a state of peripheral modernity. She explores the connections between the factors involved in the [...]

The journalist Angela Prysthon clearly differentiates modern from postmodern cosmopolitanism. In the modern form, the center/periphery dialectic prevails, and there are tensions between traditional reality and internationalist aspirations; the [...]

The texts gathered for the exhibition Tradição e Ruptura: síntese de arte e cultura brasileiras (1984) are introduced by the curator, João Marino. Marino is an advocate of the purposes of the exhibition: to assemble artworks along with [...]

Looking to her background in philosophy, Otília Arantes analyzes the transformations that have ensued in the relationship between the viewer and the work of art. Structural changes in museums, she argues, have given rise to “new museums” [...]

The author of this anonymous article on the sculptural work of Brazilian artist Maria Martins places emphasis on its innovative nature and asserts that that is why it is acclaimed abroad but largely ignored in Brazil. Like Tarsila do Amaral in the [...]

This article relies on photographs and captions to describe the cultural environment at the time that the Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahia (MAMB) was founded. Prompted by the military coup of 1964, the Italian architect Lina Bo Bardi assessed the [...]

In this article, the Italian architect Lina Bo Bardi shares the announcement of the founding and operation of the MAMB (Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahia) that was published in the magazine Mirante das Artes. She refers to the “disastrous” state of [...]

In this article, the architect Lina Bo Bardi describes the ten years it took to design and build the MASP (Museu de Arte de São Paulo) on the Avenida Paulista in São Paulo. She mentions her first visits to the site in 1957, the political [...]

The Italian journalist and art dealer Pietro Maria Bardi describes the organization and construction of the MASP (Museu de Arte de São Paulo) during the first two decades of its existence, from 1947 to 1967. This was no easy task in the provincial [...]

This is an article about an exhibition of contemporary artists from Pernambuco to be held at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo (MAC-USP), directed by the professor Walter Zanini. Zanini had visited Pernambuco to select [...]

This essay by Orlando Maneschy emphasizes the importance of Gratuliano Bibas to photography from the Brazilian state of Pará. Maneschy places Bibas’s work in historical context in relation to the presence of North American photographer Charles [...]

This was the first press review to be published in Porto Alegre, the capital of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, about a group of local “modernist” artists that became the Grupo de Bagé, later known as the Clube da Gravura [Printmakers’ Club] [...]

This is a satirical article about the Salão de ’31, in which Henrique Pongetti expresses his support for the Brazilian Salon. In his opinion, what has happened is that the conservative (academic) faction has retaken power, a situation he praises [...]

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 text, painter Candido Portinari analyzes the Salão de 31 organized during the tenure of Lucio Costa as director of the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes in Rio de Janeiro. In Portinari’s view, Costa’s modernizing project as [...]

The painter Edson Motta comments on the innovations he sees at the 1949 Salão Nacional in the wake of the Estado Novo, the authoritarian government led by Getúlio Vargas (1930–45), which has now split into two sections—the general and the [...]

The poet from Recife, Manuel Bandeira, was the model for two portraits, one by Cândido Portinari, the other by Frederico Maron, both of which were exhibited at the Salão de 31 de la Escola Nacional de Belas Artes (Rio de Janeiro). He [Bandeira] [...]

In this text, Mário Pedrosa offers a critique of the Tiradentes mural by Candido Portinari, commenting on the event represented and the monumental nature of the work. He analyzes the form and composition of the mural, concluding that it lacks unity [...]

This text written by North American architect Frank Lloyd Wright is an account of the days in October 1930 that he spent in Rio de Janeiro, capital of Brazil at the time. Wright was invited to Brazil to participate in the jury to determine which [...]

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) [...]

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 [...]