Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

This article about the Museo del Hospital Psiquiátrico Víctor Larco Herrera [Museum of the Victor Larco Herrera Psychiatric Hospital] (in Peru’s capital city) was written by Ernesto More, under the pseudonym “Jerome,” as part of a series on [...]

In this text, art critic Carlos Raygada asserts that, though Mario Urteaga has never before shown his painting in the capital, his work is not that of a beginner. Raygada describes Urteaga as a self-taught artist who, because he began painting in the [...]

This review, by the Peruvian essayist and art critic Mercedes Gallagher de Parks, is about the exhibition of work by José Sabogal at the Lima Country Club in 1940. The reviewer reproaches the artist, saying that “though he can paint magnificently [...]

After happening upon drawings used to decorate the walls of fishermen’s houses in Praia Formosa (Fortaleza, capital of the state of Ceará), Jean-Pierre Chabloz went out in search of the artist. Elementary, but genuine, was his opinion about the [...]

While researching feminine strokes in Anita Malfatti’s painting, Mário de Andrade discerns her impetuous nature, the masculine strength of her colors, and the tragic energy of her subjects, though he also glimpses hints of humor and sadness. He [...]

In this lecture, given at the Seminário de Tropicologia de la Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Recife, in 1967, the art critic Mário Barata explores the connection between painting and certain tropical areas as one possible way of determining [...]

The Brazilian artist Vicente do Rego Monteiro, who spent long periods living in France, establishes a difference between historical and modern art, mainly due to their “spiritual quality.” In his opinion, works such as the altarpiece in the [...]

In this text, Aracy Amaral considers the strong negative responses provoked by a work entitled Etsedrón in the 1975 (XIII) São Paulo Biennial. She argues that this work provoked such responses because of its visceral power and because it is [...]

In this text, Carlos Enríquez responds to the question that the editors of revista de avance posed to their readers: “What should American art be?” He specifically addresses each of the four sub-questions grouped under this larger question. In [...]

This essay, written by Francisco Díaz de León, director of the Escuela de Pintura al Aire Libre [Open-Air Schools of Painting] in Tlalpan, explains that the Schools favor an aesthetic education and individual expression over technical education. He [...]

Mário de Andrade reviews Amérique Latine, the book by the French sociologist André Siegfried, criticizing the author’s method which, in de Andrade’s view, takes a far too general approach that fails to grasp the complexities of this particular [...]

Cinema Novo director Glauber Rocha forcefully presents this article about “hunger” as the “nerve” of Latin American society. The fact of its strong sentiment makes it seem less inevitable. In Europe, cultural work that emerges from the [...]

In this essay published in the exhibition catalog, Remerica! Amerika, artists Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Peña contend that the origins of dada events and performance art date back to the 1500s when native peoples from Africa and the Americas [...]

Based in a progressive perspective, in a future with an “increasingly superior” art, the declaration that David Alfaro Siqueiros wrote in Barcelona sought to facilitate the incorporation of certain elements of the American continent into avant- [...]

Gilberto Freyre describes his visit to the visual artist Vicente do Rego Monteiro’s studio in Paris. Freyre acknowledges the artist’s talent and independence, and disagrees with the “Futurist” label with which he has been tagged by the [...]

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 communiqué-style essay written in Rio de Janeiro, Oswald de Andrade calls for the axiological rehabilitation of primitive man—understood as the communities or people that lived on this continent before the Eurocentrically-named & [...]

Questioning the exhaustion of Western civilization (specifically the European version), and basing his arguments on the psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud—who wrote about the social life of primitive peoples in his book Totem and Taboo— Plí [...]

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 [...]

This document is a reply by Mário de Andrade to the poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade, dated November 22, 1924. In it, de Andrade voices his opposition to what he considers to be the false binomial that distinguishes national from universal criteria, [...]

The Brazilian art critic Mário de Andrade reviews São Paulo and Morro da Favela [Shanty Town Hill], two of the paintings that were presented at the first solo exhibition of work by Tarsila do Amaral (in São Paulo, 1929). In de Andrade’s opinion [...]

In this essay, the writer and researcher in the field of Brazilian music and folklore Mário de Andrade discusses the confusion surrounding the term “primitive” which, in his opinion, is being incorrectly used by art critics. He therefore “only [...]

This manifesto by Oswald de Andrade suggests that Brazilian art and literature should take positions vis-à-vis European culture that would privilege the cultivation of invention and an illogical, “agile and candid” attitude. The duty of the [...]

A manifesto in which the writer Oswald de Andrade proposes the notion of anthropophagy as a possible paradigm on which to build a Brazilian cultural identy. From that point of view, he emphasizes a “pre-logical mindset” and a return to “natural [...]

Nelly Richard ponders the state of contemporary art in Latin American cultures, both in terms of its circulation and regarding its frame of references. She wonders whether international themes and subjects are repeated at a local level or whether new [...]

An analytical piece in which Carmelo Arden Quin uses dialectical materialism to explain the transition from representation to the phase of “invention” and pure creation in art [...]