Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

[This article is] a debate between the German Marxist intellectual Iring Fetscher and the writer Mirko Lauer for the Peruvian magazine U-tópicos Entornoalovisual, moderated by Gustavo Buntinx, the editor of the magazine. This issue of the magazine [...]

His extensive preaching in favor of spiritual rectitude led Joaquin Torres García to reject the “superfluous” in art and keep the fundamental elements that make up the concept and structure of Constructivist art. The resulting logic of this [...]

Juvenal Ortiz Saralegui discusses Vicente Basso Maglio’s ideas about what the literary critic describes as “heroic expression,” with oblique references to the painting of another Uruguayan, Rafael Barradas. Based on literary ideas in particular [...]

In this article, Luis Eduardo Pombo reveals himself as the first Uruguayan art critic to ideologically wrap himself in the aesthetics of David Alfaro Siqueiros. Generally, even the commentaries made by those intellectuals closest to the Mexican [...]

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 ( [...]

Carmen Saco, who studied at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes (ENBA) in the 1920s, was one of the first professional women sculptors in Peru. The time she spent at the ENBA proved decisive to the nationalist bent of a body of work characterized by [...]

This is the first article by the writer César Miró about efforts to create an official image of Túpac Amaru II, the indigenous hero of Peruvian independence, to be used as an icon during the first phase of the self-styled Gobierno Revolucionario [...]

This critical review suggests that “art” is not an expression of the human spirit—as philosophical idealism would have us believe—but something created by culture and class; it is therefore a historically determined phenomenon that is [...]

Susan Best, the North American researcher and art critic, suggests that Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological reflections on perception and aesthetic experience are especially well suited to interpreting (non-representational) contemporary works [...]

In discussing the underlying theory that connects the essays in his book Los rostros de Medusa [Medusa’s Faces], Carlos Jiménez describes photography in terms of the question of mechanical time in the modern era. According to Jiménez, photography [...]

This article by Alberto Gerchunoff, a Russian writer and journalist based in Buenos Aires, criticizes “los predicadores del americanismo, (…) a la vez nacionalistas y continentalistas” [the preachers of Latin Americanism, (…) who are both [...]

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 introduction, Eduardo Kac shows that the artists known as “Geração Brasil High-Tech” (including Otávio Donasci, Mario Ramiro, and Paulo Bruscky) represent a type of work that refers back to both Waldemar Cordeiro and Abraham Palatnik. [...]

In this text, professor Gilda Mello e Souza discusses the contribution that the work of Jean Maugüé, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Roger Bastide—three French academics—made to the early stages of the Universidade de São Paulo (USP) founded in 1934 [...]

The five lectures given by Gilberto Freyre in his city of Recife and in São Paulo comprise this book. The one theme that tied all five lectures together was the imperative need to instill a tropical equatorial Portuguese Brazilian lifestyle. In a [...]

Ismael Xavier refers to Glauber Rocha’s essay “Uma Estética da Fome” [An Aesthetic of Hunger] in which he sees a connection to Frantz Fanon’s theory concerning an intellectual response to the consequences of colonialism. In so doing, Xavier [...]

In this essay, Roberto Schwarz discusses the growing prevalence of leftist politics in Brazilian cultural circles after the military coup of 1964 (which kept its grip on power for two decades). He confirms that, the right wing military dictatorship [...]

This article describes Tropicalism as an enigmatic and ambiguous movement. It emerged from a fusion of a number of cultural expressions and forms in the wake of the rivalry that pitted the Jovem Guarda (who were fans of British Yeah-Yeah-Yeah and [...]

Theorist Gillo Dorfles underscores his belief that cities could emerge from industrial production that included everything from domestic gadgets to buildings. In his judgment, the industrial aesthetic plays an important role in the formation of [...]

In this article, Marta Traba maintains that the German artists Guillermo Wiedemann and Leopoldo Richter achieved an understanding of, and transmitted the essence and spirit of “the black race and the Indian race, and the ambience characteristic of [...]

“Fotografía y sociedad” [Photography and Society], is the title of the first chapter of the book by the same name by the Colombian researcher and photographer Edward Goyeneche Gómez. The text includes a well-reasoned [...]

In this article, Daniel Arango criticizes the poetics (or theory of composition) underlying Modern art, which he calls “the new aesthetic.” He argues that there is a void innate to a conception of art at the margin of history, an art that eschews [...]

The text “Reflexiones sobre arte: el intelectualismo y la evolución estética en Colombia” [Reflections on Art: Intellectualism and the Aesthetic Evolution in Colombia] proclaims that the fine arts in Colombia have failed. According to painter [...]

In this article, the writer Luis Cardoza y Aragón reviews the Tratado de Estética [Aesthetics Treatise] by Luis Vidales Jaramillo, a few months after it was published. The Guatemalan author contextualizes Vidales Jaramillo’s work, describing its [...]

In this article, Luis Vidales explains and critiques the aesthetics of Italian idealist philosopher Benedetto Croce. Vidales starts out with an introduction to Croce, emphasizing his importance to European aesthetics of the time. He then mentions the [...]

On the basis of a critical discussion of Colombian poet Rafael Maya, Luis Vidales states that he does not consider the times mundane or individualistic, but rather he thinks we are facing major changes including the bold emergence of a new aesthetic [...]

In this text, art critic Mário Pedrosa argues that reason and logic can interfere with appreciation of a work of art or, even, a work of architecture. Citing architecture critic Geoffrey Scott, Pedrosa advocates “simple and immediate perception [...]

In this article, critic Fernando Guillén Martínez reflects on the relationship between the artist and the environment surrounding the creative process. To that end, he starts out by explaining the universal law of symmetry that maintains the [...]

In this bilingual essay, Cuban poet and art critic Ricardo Pau-Llosa argues that Latin American painting and photography are inextricably linked by the presence of thematic similarities and shared motifs, despite their obvious formal differences. [...]

After defining aesthetics as “the study of the causes of beauty” and beauty as a synonym of perfection, Colombian priest and critic Juan Crisóstomo García explains his conception of art. “Beautiful” art is an ideal since the existence of [...]

In this prologue to Tratado de Estética [Aesthetic Treatise], Colombian poet and critic Luis Vidales outlines the tenets of his theory and the framework of his research. In essence, his treatise attempts to refute “aesthetic systems” that [...]

In this text, writer Luis Vidales compares an aesthetic method grounded on spiritual causality to positivist formulations that see causality as residing in external phenomena. Vidales maintains that style (defined as technical aspects of the work of [...]

Mário de Andrade begins this text by questioning the term “architecture” and its meaning. In his view, architectural laws obey both the laws of nature and the laws of humans that lead to arbitrary personal impulses. He establishes a difference [...]

In this text, Manuel Felguérez considers the problems associated with identifying and defining a Latin American aesthetic within contemporary artistic production. He begins by explaining that the Brazilian government’s display of aspects of [...]

In this text, Juan Acha responds to Aracy A. Amaral’s article arguing that the installation entitled Etsedrón, which appeared at the 1975 (XIII) São Paulo Biennial (October 17-December 14), constituted a promising new direction for Latin [...]

In this text, Juan Acha poses the question, “Does present-day Latin American art exist as a distinct expression?”, that is, as a way of examining the broader and more fundamental question of what constitutes an original aesthetic expression. He [...]

This article by the critic Víctor Guédez was written at the time of Carlos Cruz-Diez en la arquitectura, the exhibition at the Centro Cultural Consolidado (Caracas, 1991). In Guédez’s opinion, there are two facets to Cruz-Diez’s Kine-chromatic [...]

This tenth anniversary article, written by Nuyorican poet Americo Casiano, recounts the origins of Taller Boricua [Puerto Rican Workshop] as a visual arts organization born from the need to decentralize the dissemination of art from major New York [...]

In this article, the well-known art historian, Marta Traba, summarizes the content of the three lectures she gave at the Museo de Bellas Artes [Museum of Fine Arts] in Caracas in 1965. The purpose of the lectures, Traba explains, was to provide the [...]

This document claims that one of the fundamental tenets of the so-called Movimento Antropófago is a return to a “natural state” (understood as a kind of “beauty with natural features” that is ugly, rough, barbaric, and [...]

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 [...]

In this paean to modern urban life, written by the well-known modernist poet Menotti del Picchia, the highways, the media, and the industrial sector all work together in perfect harmony to consolidate “new values.” He bemoans “our obsolete [...]

[Literary critic and intellectual] Nicolás Rosa presented this text for discussion at the Primer Encuentro Nacional del Arte de Vanguardia [First National Encounter of Avant-garde Art] (Rosario, Argentina, 1968). It appeals to the communications [...]

The text presented by Juan Pablo Renzi at the Primer Encuentro Nacional de Arte de Vanguardia [First National Encounter of Vanguard Art] is defined as an “attempt to bring about the grounds for the proposed agenda” and presents a framework for [...]

Introductory text to the book Nuevas tendencias en la pintura [New Tendencies in Painting] in which Aldo Pellegrini points out some aspects that will affect the treatment of the different stages of Argentine painting. Among others, he mentions the [...]

This text reflects on the power of words, keeping in mind that each human being includes a little of himself or herself into the words that he or she uses. Avoiding to discuss the usefulness of language, Aldo Pellegrini raises two points: its [...]

In this text, Mario Pellegrini, the Argentinean critic, reflects about the different understandings of reality. Pellegrini states that, while common man takes sensory perception as a source of learning, the Surrealists do not get rid of any aspect [...]

In response to a series of overwhelming news published in the press that month, not having enough time to reflect upon it and adopt a position, Mathias Goeritz wonders what type of art should correspond to these, our times. He insists on placing the [...]

With this essay, Mathias Goeritz introduces the Art Section of the magazine Arquitectura México. In this first “Warning,” the author affirms that once visual education and abstract design are officially accepted, no “avant-garde” will exist [...]

Atilio Chiappori writes about the current time in Argentinean painting from his authority as the director of Argentina’s Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes [National Museum of Fine Arts] in order to critique the development of modern art. And this in [...]