Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

This short article reviews the career of the artist from Jalisco, Roberto Montenegro. In Justino Fernández’s opinion, Montenegro is characterized by his “sensitivity to change, enticed by motion.” With these words, the historian celebrates the [...]

The young 24-year-old artist, Guillermo Meza, exhibits his imaginative pictorial artwork at the Galería de Arte Mexicano (GAM), and the critic and art historian Justino Fernández reviews it. The critic admires the artist, whom he finds “an [...]

In this essay, the historian Justino Fernández sets forth the two common opinions about photography: on the one hand, understanding photography as a form of expression apart from art and, on the other, considering it to be a unique form of art. [...]

Justino Fernández provides a roundup of the exhibitions going on in Paris at the same time as the Mexican exhibition in France. Comparing European painting with Mexican, he argues that from the beginning, Mexican painting developed its own language [...]

This article discusses the series called Los teules (la conquista de México) [The White Gods (The Conquest of Mexico)] that was created by José Clemente Orozco for his last exhibition at the Colegio Nacional. On the theme of the conquest, Justino [...]

In this article, Justino Fernández describes the commission and the composition of Jesús Guerrero Galván’s mural in Albuquerque, located at the College of Fine Arts at the University of New Mexico. Fernández reports that he was the one who [...]

In a retrospective article written in 1962, Justino Fernández discusses Roberto Montenegro, the man and the painter. As he reviews Montenegro’s art, he compares the latter’s studio to the portrait painter’s room where someone poses, someone [...]

Justino Fernández attempts to establish a concept of  “arte mexicano,” pointing out that no expression is more valid than any other when rating it as “Mexican.” The critic considers that a whole complex historical expression, which shows [...]

In this essay from 1937, Justino Fernández conducts a study on the evolution of Mexican art during the 1920s and 1930s. The text is organized in three large sections: mural painting, general painting and sculpture. Fernández characterizes mural [...]

Justino Fernández describes José Clemente Orozco’s work as “frivolous art,” which explains its limited appeal; but that doesn’t mean that it is not enjoyed, since Orozco documents human reality and, consequently, historic reality. Ferná [...]

Justino Fernández attributes to the œuvre of José Clemente Orozco, the liveliest awareness regarding our world, artistically expressed in a long series of meditations. He refers to his most recent mural work at the Escuela Nacional de Maestros, [...]