Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

This lengthy article discusses the main doctrinaire questions that concerned Joaquín Torres García, stressing his personal view of the “American race” as a transplant with no roots, for which he proposes the development of a collective, “ [...]

This article is by Hans Platschek who was living in Montevideo between 1939 and 1953. The German artist makes a self- analysis on the resulting situation of postwar modernism, specifically the debated notion of “Art Nouveau or young art” both in [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

In this article, Miguel Otero Silva discusses the similar origins of abstraction in two painters who helped to inspire two major movements: the Russian (lyrical) artist Wassily Kandinsky and the Dutch (geometric) artist Piet Mondrian. Otero Silva [...]

While the first issue of Actual contained a directory of avant-garde artists, this third issue held an index of avant-garde books and magazines. Listings include: La vie des lettres, a French magazine begun in 1913 and headed by Nicolas Beauduin; an [...]

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 [...]

In this document Damián Bayón analyzes the different periods of the work and thought of Piet Mondrian. He believes that in his search for balance, this Dutch artist adopted the right angle as the only constant relation. At the same time, and so [...]

In this article, Martín Blaszko discusses the issue of angles in a composition and explains that, although Piet Mondrian used a 90-degree angle as his standard measure of control, it subsequently became necessary to do something else about the [...]

This is the text of a lecture given by Joaquín Torres-García at the School of Science and Humanities in Montevideo, Uruguay, in which he reflected on modern art and even analyzed a number of theories. Among other controversial views, he announced [...]

In this essay, Sarandy Cabrera focuses on modern art’s quest for originality when he criticizes the artists of the Madí group, blaming them for introducing a cold, mathematical, and cerebral kind of art. However,Cabrera also points out that, [...]

In this article, Sarandy Cabrera comments on the opinions expressed by Tomás Maldonado in his essay, “Torres-García against Modern Art,” published in the magazine [Bulletin of the Concrete Art and Invention Association]in December 1946. Cabrera [...]

In this review, Abraham Haber discusses the connections created by Mondrian, Le Corbusier, Gorin, and Max Bill between painting and architecture, in order to show how they differed from the ideas that were proposed by Perceptivism [...]

In this review, Abraham Haber discusses the evolution of the work of Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Piet Mondrian in order to establish, within those same parameters, its relationship to Concrete Art in Argentina and the proposals advanced by [...]

In the article, Tomás Maldonado discusses the concepts brought forth by Joaquín Torres-García and his followers against the Inventionist group postulates, published in issue number 2 of the Removedor [Thinner] journal. It refers to the following [...]