Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

In this introductory essay, which appeared in the catalogue for the paradigmatic exhibition Projeto Construtivo Brasileiro na Arte, Aracy Amaral describes the “revelation” she experienced as she researched the period in question: “ [...]

This is Luis Camnitzer’s essay about his involvement in the NYGW (New York Graphic Workshop) presentation of prints inspired by the FANDSO [Free Assemblable Non-Functional Disposable Serial Object] Manifesto. Camnitzer’s goal is to re-define the [...]

In this essay, the visual artist Manuel Quintana Castillo suggests that early twentieth century art represents the demise of the art that preceded it. He explains that modern art promotes communication, encourages personal choice as the basis of [...]

This document is an excerpt from the first chapter of Curso de historia del arte [Art History Course] (broadcast by Radiotelevisora Nacional de Colombia [Colombian National Radio Television], 1957–58), the television series that was directed and [...]

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 study, Ladjane Bandeira argues that the movement for artistic independence in the state of Pernambuco in northeastern Brazil was an attempt to counter the influence of the European experience as “filtered” through São Paulo and other [...]

This document includes poetic notes on the work of art by Flávio Motta. In his notes, he speculates on the development of processes that could be used to create an unusual situation and how long it would take for it to be understood. Motta is [...]

In Sheila Leirner’s opinion, “reductive art” is an important factor in the moral compass of contemporary international artwork. In order to have its effect, the reductive approach would have to bring about a radical change in Brazilian art and [...]

In this article, the critic Sheila Leirner seeks to differentiate between marginal art, marginalized art, and art that is understood as marginalized by the artist who created it. In her opinion, there is a tendency to regard marginal art and artists [...]

Sheila Leirner discusses feminine and feminist art in Europe, the United States and Brazil. In her opinion, movements of this kind proliferated in 1980s art, which also served as a vehicle for reporting on the situation of the woman in the [...]

Here, Sheila Leirner discusses the exhibition Interior Reliefs, by the U.S. artist Mary Dritschel, held at the Luisa Strina gallery in São Paulo. To this critic, the works exhibited have almost the same impact as the artist’s first exhibition in [...]

The Brazilian art critic Sheila Leirner considers the scope of the exhibition by Mary Dritschel, the U.S. artist with a show at the Luisa Strina gallery in São Paulo: Da Caixa à Flor. The artist’s work was a contemporary example of “ [...]

In this text, Icleia Borsa Cattani discusses the implications of globalization in contemporary art and its practice of separation, mentioning in passing the cultural consensus, the crisis in art, and the neutralization of criticism. Under such [...]

Rubens Mano analyzes the relation between artists and urban spaces during the 1960s and 1970s, both of which introduced into the visual arts a key discussion of the implications of their entry into the core of urban life. The making of art becomes an [...]

This interview with art dealer Thomas Cohn took place on the occasion of the fifth anniversary celebration of the opening of his gallery in Rio de Janeiro. The background of those first five years is the pictorial axiology of the Geração 80, [...]

Icleia Borsa Cattani discusses in this document the possibility of egalitarian, respectful cultural exchanges in Latin America, especially in the current context of social inequality aggravated by globalization. In her opinion, events that take place [...]

This text is an introduction to the iconography addressed in O Brasil dos Viajantes, a project that encompassed research and an exhibition of Brazilian images made by European travelers to that country from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. [...]

This text is an interview by art critic Lisette Lagnado with Sheila Leirner, the curator of the XVIII and XIX São Paulo Biennials. Leirner asserts that she believes that the tasks of art criticism and curating are of equal importance. Her education [...]

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” [...]

In this article, artist Raúl Hausmann proposes a revision of the work of Ukrainian painter and musician Jefim Golyscheff within Dadaism, a movement he had participated in. In Hausmann’s opinion, he was a born Dadaist who created an unprecedented [...]

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 [...]

Aracy Amaral scrutinizes Tarsila do Amaral’s body of work in search of traces of Surrealism; she also explains that the artist’s thematic and formal universe was conditioned by spending her childhood at her family’s coffee plantation in the [...]

Professor Flávio Motta points out the connection (in Portuguese) between the words desenho (drawing) and desígnio [design], thereby proposing the re-establishment of a humanistic culture in which man directly influences the course of his life. He [...]

In this brief essay, Arlindo Daibert asserts that Western art is patently masculine. In a few lines, he expresses the idea that there is a gender division in art whereby “the masculine” governs the field of production and “the feminine” the [...]

In this text, Nelson Brissac discusses aspects of current art interventions in what have been called “megacities.” Specifically, he presents as an example the fourth edition of the Arte/Cidade project (2002), which he curated. The event consisted [...]

Fernando Cocchiarale wrote a brief overview with some information he considered essential for an understanding of Brazilian art. The writer talks about its search to define itself—condensed in the concept of cultural cannibalism—and about [...]

In this text, French sociologist Roger Bastide, who resided in Brazil, provides a biographical sketch of Carlos [Frederico] Bastos. He explains that, as part of a movement in the forties to renovate the art scene in Bahia, Bastos acted as a [...]

This is the leaflet produced for the exhibition of works by the German printmaker Hansen-Bahia that was shown in the cities of Salvador, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Belo Horizonte, and Porto Alegre. In addition to reproductions of the artist’s [...]

This text by architect Lina Bo Bardi describes the difficulties she faced as the head of the Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahia (MAMB) and of the Museu de Arte Popular (MAP), both of which were located in the Solar do Unhão (since 1963), a seventeenth- [...]

This document is the cooperation agreement between the government of the State of Bahia, the Museu de Arte Moderno da Bahia (MAMB), and the Universidade da Bahia that establishes joint efforts in the sphere of culture and efforts to work on the [...]

This essay, by the landscape designer Roberto Burle Marx, appeared in the publicity brochure for his exhibition at the MAMB (Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahia, 1960). He suggests that a garden should express a desire for a better life, and should [...]

This is an article by the Italian architect Lina Bo Bardi, who lived in Brazil, about the first exhibition held at the MAP (Museu de Arte Popular) in 1963 in Salvador, the capital of the state of Bahia. The exhibit included everyday items handcrafted [...]

In this interview with architect Lina Bo Bardi by philosophy students at the Diretório Acadêmico Rocha Pombo do Paraná in Curitiba, Bo Bardi speaks of the need for a true socioeconomic and cultural revolution in Brazil. She discusses the role to [...]

This text by sociologist Roger Bastide discusses drawings by Carybé, an Argentine artist who lived in the city of Salvador, Brazil. Bastide underscores the faithfulness of the iconography in Carybé’s illustrations and the connections between his [...]

In this letter to Lomanto Júnior, the governor of the State of Bahia at the time, architect Lina Bo Bardi requests public support for the Plano de Artesanato Popular, a project geared to encouraging craft production in northeastern Brazil. In a way [...]

This is a letter from Lívio Xavier—who, at the time, was the director of the MAUC (Museu de Arte da Universidade do Ceará)—to the architect Lina Bo Bardi, who was the director of both the MAMB (Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahia) and the MAP (Museu [...]

This text was to be placed on the main wall of the exhibition on Brazilian painting organized by the Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahia (MAMB) in 1960. The text asserts that the true innovating power of a culture is found by delving into its popular [...]

This is a short unsigned article about the opening of the Museu de Arte Popular (MAP) in 1963 in Salvador (Bahia). The writer refers to more than 200 art and craft works by more than twenty artists and artisans. Regarding the exhibition held along [...]

Lina Bo Bardi, director of the Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahia (MAMB), explains the title of the exhibition Desenho concreto [Concrete Design], which featured airplane engines and electronic parts. She provides a historical perspective on the [...]

Architect Lina Bo Bardi explains the structural concepts underlying the creation of the Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahia. She asserts that because the institution she heads does not have an art collection, it should not be called a museum, but rather a [...]

In this text, filmmaker Glauber Rocha describes architect Lina Bo Bardi’s tenure as director of the Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahia (MAMB). He points out the polemic, rather than provincial or anti-academic, nature of her work and proposals, as well [...]

Wall text for the exhibition Formas como escultura, held at the Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahia (MAMB) in 1960, when Lina Bo Bardi—the possible author of this text—was the director of that institution. The exhibition set out to emphasize the forms [...]

Through this commentary, critic José Geraldo Vieira introduces the folk figure of the cangaceiro [“farmhand guerilla” in northeastern Brazil, a bandit and a fugitive from the law who is heavily armed] as a theme in the works of writers and [...]

In this text, critic Wilson Rocha discusses the development of José Pancetti’s painting which, in his view, is of historical importance. Rocha considers Pancetti one of the greatest landscape painters in Brazilian history. He also asserts that [...]

This text by Wilson Rocha discusses the retrospective of printmaker Henrique Oswald that took place in the context of the Primeira Bienal Nacional de Artes Plásticas held in the city of Salvador, state of Bahia, in 1966 and 1967. Rocha considers [...]

Beginning at the end of the 1940s, writer Riolan Metzker Coutinho traces a history of wood engraving in the state of Bahia, which in his judgment, is a privileged endeavor in which engravers such as Oswaldo Goeldi, Poty Lazzarotto and Carl Hansen ( [...]

José Valladares comments on the issues debated at the Congrès International des Critiques d’Art, (Paris, 1948). At that crucial time just after World War II, the discussion revolved around the formation of an international association of art [...]