Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

Critic Roberto Montero Castro examines the roots of the modernist aesthetic, its evolution, and its characteristics up to the 1970s, which was marked by a rupture with the formalists and rationalists that preceded it. This gave birth to a new ( [...]

In this text, Carlos Solari (alias “Don Quijote”) discusses articles on Peruvian painter Sabogal that appeared in the most important Buenos Aires-based newspapers (three of them in particular). The article in La Prensa speaks of the “modern [...]

This manifesto is a call for (cultural) independence and was written from “a high Amazonian plateau,” in the state of Pará (where the author hailed from). The proclamation uses typical expressions and references the myths, customs, and [...]

In this report, the writer and journalist Salim Miguel describes (almost ten years after the fact) the movement formed by young artists and intellectuals in the state of Santa Catarina who started the magazine Sul in the late 1940s. The publication [...]

This article by the art critic Mário Baratta is about the Exposição Cearense dos Pintores: Antonio Bandeira, Inimá, Raimundo Feitosa, Jean-Pierre Chabloz e Francisco da Silva, the exhibition presented at the Askanasy gallery in Rio de Janeiro in [...]

In 1988 the art critic Mário Baratta described the origins and performance of the group of artists and writers who produced Clã [Clan] magazine and founded the SCAP (Sociedade Cearense de Artes Plásticas) in the mid-1940s in the state of Ceará. [...]

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 brief anonymous editorial, the editors of the first issue of Madrugada magazine, (a weekly devoted to literature, art, and social commentary) published in Porto Alegre (Rio Grande do Sul), apologize for the two-week delay in the magazine’s [...]

Walter Zanini offers a retrospective vision of the work of Vicente do Rêgo Monteiro, an artist from the state of Pernambuco, one year after his death. Professor Zanini’s far-reaching analysis provides context for a chronological understanding of a [...]

Antônio Franca distinguishes two great trends in his survey of Brazilian thought: traditionalism and “modernism.” He recognizes the continuity of these trends throughout the course of history, although in order to understand the Brazilian [...]

In this essay, author Gilberto Freyre examines the various phases of the life and artistic career of the painter Lula Cardoso Ayres, establishing a nexus between his art and origins from the social elite of the state of Pernambuco. He comments on the [...]

After the death of Flávio de Carvalho, Gilberto Freyre looks back on the ties he had with the visual artist, a relationship that began with his preface to the book Os Ossos do Mundo [The Bones of the World]. It was during the time when they both [...]

In this text, José Valladares discusses the transformations taking place in the art scene in the city of Salvador, capital of the state of Bahia, during the forties and fifties. He comments on the new importance of the Salões de Arte, the emergence [...]

In his testimony, the artist Abelardo da Hora (1924–2014) mixes autobiography with episodes that refer to the organization of the Sociedade de Arte Moderna (SAM) in Recife and the workshop known as the Atelier Coletivo as well as the Movimento de [...]

This is the report filed by the Meridional news agency about the attack on the paintings on display at the Exposição de Arte Moderna, the event sponsored in 1944 by the municipality of Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais. The report included statements [...]

In this lecture, Luis Martins discusses various aspects of modern Brazilian painting from the 1920s through the mid-1930s. He describes Brazil as a “country of reflections” that passively echoes the challenges faced by the visual arts in the rest [...]

In this excerpt from his book Pancetti (Rio de Janeiro: Ministério da Educação e Cultura, 1960), Medeiros Lima recounts José Pancetti’s first experiences with paintings when he was still a sailor. The section cited begins with the painting work [...]

In this text, Jorge Mautner looks at Brazilian artists working in different disciplines (in the visual arts, music, literature, film, and theater), and the parallels between their past and present work. His thesis is that there is a liberating [...]

This article describes the Núcleo Bernardelli, a group of young students at the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes (which operated in Rio de Janeiro from 1931 to 1942), who were interested in updating certain Brazilian art instruction methods. According [...]

This critical essay by João Luiz Lafetá examines Brazilian modernism by distinguishing the “aesthetic project” from the “ideological project” of the literary production during the 1920s and 1930s. The author creates a dialectical division [...]

In this essay the controversial Brazilian art theoretician Ferreira Gullar challenges the universality of the notion of an aesthetic avant-garde, as well as its relevance in underdeveloped countries. Particularly in Brazil, where the pursuit of avant [...]

This essay is about reaching a dead end in the nationalist project as well as the aesthetic requirements inherent in the avant-garde when modern art began to develop in Brazil. That development was launched with the 1917 exhibition by the painter [...]

In this article the painter Emiliano Di Cavalcanti seeks to clear up certain misunderstandings conveyed by the lecture he gave the previous year at the MASP (Museu de Arte de São Paulo), titled “The Myths of Modernism, with Criticisms of [...]

Written in Paris on April 29, 1918, this letter from sculptor Marco Tobón Mejía to his friend Carlos E. Restrepo reveals the nature of the relationship between the Colombian artist and one of the most important representatives of Colombia’s [...]

Abguar Bastos offers his interpretation of Brazilian modernism as a “yearning for the liberation of national thought.” The writer understands modern art as a “process” that takes on various forms throughout its course. In Brazil, for example [...]

This is Abílio Miller’s review of the exhibition of works by the Lithuanian-born (nationalized Brazilian) painter Lasar Segall in 1913, after his first visit to Brazil and two months after his one-man show at a salon on São Bento street in São [...]

This essay by historian and politician Indalecio Liévano Aguirre for the magazine Revista de las Indias contains three parts in addition to the brief and untitled introduction and conclusion. The first provides an overview of art from antiquity, [...]

This [text] is a “literary letter” sent by critic Joaquim Inojosa to the editors of Era Nova magazine in João Pessoa (in the state of Paraíba), which was later published as a book. It is considered a type of manifesto belonging to the Brazilian [...]

The introduction to this essay rejects the possibility of defining Brazilian art by clearly describing the parameters of such a process which, usually, refers to cultural policies based on folkloric and anecdotal visions of national reality. [...]

This manifesto was written by the sociologist Gilberto Freyre on behalf of the “rehabilitation of regional and traditional values” and in support of a “new organization” in Brazil. Stating his opposition to the administrative division of the [...]

In her essay, Professor Belluzzo discusses the intrinsic nature of modern Latin American avant-gardes. She explores the concept of “modernity” via the aesthetic reflection that inspired the historical avant-gardes in the early twentieth century. [...]

This essay by Professor Raúl Antelo addresses the issue of place in a theory concerning the marginalizing of Latin American culture, more specifically within South America. This culture has always been viewed through a prism of exclusion and [...]

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 [...]

Nicolás Olivari puts forward that for them, members of the N. S. [the new sensibility] of Argentina, the young vanguard, Spain does not entail any intellectual interest. In his opinion, it’s not even possible to match the works by the new [...]

Evar Méndez’s text brings about a critical balance of the Martin Fierro journal’s actions and what they meant to the Argentinean literary renewal throughout its entire publication span. He points out that the journal gathered, from its founding [...]

Writer Carlos Drummond de Andrade wrote this tribute to Oswald de Andrade, “the poet of anthropophagy,” shortly after his death in 1954. According to the author, Oswald’s cultural philosophy based on the notion of “anthropophagy” puts forth [...]

In this letter to fellow Brazilian Joaquim Inojosa (in Recife), the well-known poet Manuel [Carneiro de Sousa] Bandeira [Filho] (1886–1968) provides brief news about the modernist movement (then in full swing) in São Paulo. He emphasizes the “ [...]

Writer Clóvis Gusmão writes to Joaquim Inojosa about the Movimiento Antropofágico and takes the opportunity to clarify some parts of its agenda. Its principles include: the idea of establishing distance from European civilization by creating new [...]

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 [...]

Mário de Andrade addresses this open letter to the writer Alberto de Oliveira, and in principle, defends the literature produced by Brazilian Romanticism, a group associated with a primitive approach to art combined with social, religious, sexual, [...]

This [document] by Mário de Andrade is a reply, dated May 20, 1928, to the letter in which Augusto Meyer discussed the former’s controversial activity, conscience, and references to national subject matter. De Andrade outlines his intellectual [...]

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 [...]

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 text was originally published in German in the catalogue for a 1926 exhibition on [the work of] Lasar Segall at the Staatliche Kunstsamlungen Dresden. Paul Ferdinand Schmidt, the director of this municipal museum in Dresden at the time, compares [...]

The editorial in the first issue of Arco & Flexa magazine sets the tone for the publication, and endorses both “tradition” and the Brazilian “modernist” movement, essentially because the latter is steeped in a universalism that also seeks [...]

In the editorial published in this sixth edition of the magazine Festa, Tasso da Silveira claims to see a kind of “violence” in Brazilian modern art that wants to create an all-embracing future. In his opinion there are three modernist movements [...]

This is a review of “La psychanalyse et l'esthétique dynamiste,” the article that was originally published in French in Cahiers idéalistes, the French magazine, in May 1924. According to Charles Baudouin, the Franco-Swiss psychoanalyst, our own [...]

This is a summary of the author’s random thoughts about “[Sigmund] Freud’s doctrine or psychoanalysis.” Iago Pimentel interprets the Austrian psychoanalyst’s ideas from the perspective of a “dynamic conception of psychic life.” The text [...]

A Revista was a magazine that operated outside of the twin hegemonic centers of modernist culture in Brazil (São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro) in the 1920s. It published the transcript of a lecture given by Sigmund Freud (probably in the United States) [...]

In this interview Poty, the artist-illustrator, discusses recent exhibitions of contemporary French art and what was called “degenerate art” [Entartete Kunst] during the Nazi Third Reich in Germany.  He talks about the socio-political aspect of [...]