Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

This is a letter written by Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar twelve days after his arrival in France in September 1950. The painter writes to his friend, the art critic Casimiro Eiger, who lived in Bogotá, describing his impressions of his first brief [...]

In September 15, 1998, graphic artist Antônio Maluf writes to art historian Aracy Amaral regarding her book Arte Construtiva no Brasil Coleção Adolpho Leirner. Even before its release, in his view, the book was considered an [...]

In this article Bruno Zevi discusses the crisis facing modern architecture as a result of its inability to strike a balance between the dynamics of urban structures on the one hand, and human and social structures on the other. In his opinion, [...]

In this article Pablo Oyarzún provides a critical review of the art produced over the course of three decades. He notes the lack of a tradition that could bear witness to and interpret art production in Chile. From the early twentieth century& [...]

Damián Bayón analyzes some of the reports by critics, both French and North American, on the Latin American exhibition that was held in Paris from August to September 1962 at the Musée de la Ville. In these reports he finds lines of reasoning that [...]

Kenneth Kemble writes about the dilemma of being simultaneously an art critic and an artist, mainly when one’s own work is being exhibited. The matter is worsened by having his wife, Silvia Torrás, included in the show as well. Also, Kemble [...]

In this letter to Gonzalo Ariza published in Bogotá-based newspaper El Tiempo, Austrian-born critic Walter Engel responds to statements by Ariza, a Colombian artist, published in the same newspaper a few days earlier. Engel asserts that the fact [...]

In this essay, Aracy Amaral discusses the career of the historian and art critic Damián Carlos Bayón, stressing the important role that he and Marta Traba played throughout the Americas by fostering a deeper understanding of Latin American art. [...]

In this article, Raquel Tibol, an Argentine journalist living in Mexico, interviews the person she considers to be the “maximum official authority” in the field of local art criticism: Justino Fernández, director of the Instituto de [...]

In “Destrucción, reconstrucción y desconstrucciones” (Destruction, Reconstruction, and Deconstructions), Nelly Richard critically reviews the cultural situation in Chile during the military dictatorship (1973–90). It was, in her [...]

This is Antonio Romera’s visual review of Luis Durand’s literary work. The first thing he notices is the sensual nature of Durand’s writing; his narrative style creates currents and movements that trace the outlines of objects and [...]

In this essay, the Cuban writer Juan Marinello discusses what he calls “the problem of the intellectual.” His subject is the dilemma of an ethical commitment to being a critic and the requirement of work to obtain necessities of subsistence. To [...]

This article deals with the work of the different Spanish artists that Damián Bayón had the opportunity to analyze during his stay in Barcelona, where he was reporting for Ver y estimar. He covered the sets and costumes that Salvador Dalí designed [...]

Among the interviews included in the book Nosotros: un trabajo sobre los artistas antioqueños, Félix Ángel interviewed himself through an essay and a collection of press clippings, along with a curriculum vitae that reflects his precocious [...]

In 2009, the journalist Iván Ordoñez interviewed the artist and critic Humberto Junca; this is the record of that interview, which appeared in Privado. Entrevistas con artistas [Private: Interviews with Artists], a website that publishes interviews [...]

In this article, Damián Bayón addresses some of Auguste Rodin’s ideas on creation and art. Bayón describes certain aspects of the French sculptor’s working method and personality, while also analyzing some specific works. Before doing so, the [...]

Damián Bayón begins with a brief characterization of the conflicting personalities of Van Gogh and Gauguin, and then characterizes their respective pictorial qualities—drawing, composition, color, impasto, and light—always examining them from a [...]

This document summarizes the proposals submitted by the participants at the Primer Encuentro Iberoamericano de Críticos de Arte y Artistas Plásticos who were sitting at work table number two. Referring to the subject “Criticism, Theory, and [...]

As its title suggests, this article is an introduction to Ver y estimar. Cuadernos de crítica artística. The text explains that these notebooks were created “so that a group of scholars might fill their pages . . . with the results of the [...]

In this article published in Revista Espiral in 1945, critic Luis Vidales Jaramillo responds to the missive that Basque sculptor Jorge de Oteiza addressed to artists from the Americas, published a few months earlier in Revista de la Universidad del [...]

In this article, the critic Jorge Juan Crespo de la Serna discusses the Asociación Internacional de Críticos de Arte (AICA) [International Association of Art Critics], that was founded in Paris in 1949. Prompted by his recent meeting in Mexico with [...]

In this essay, the Uruguayan poet and writer Ida Vitale interviews the Polish art critic Ryszard Stanilawski about his Latin American tour, during which he promoted contacts and artistic exchange with the People’s Republic of Poland. The article [...]

Kenneth Kemble responds to questions about art criticism. Among other thoughts, Kemble states that the critic is a public servant, an intermediary to the service of art, whose duty is to inform, elucidate, and describe. Criticism serves to educate [...]

The critic Juan Carlos Palenzuela reviews the acquisition by the Galería de Arte Nacional (GAN) of forty Leoncio Martínez drawings and caricatures. In addition to being a draftsman and caricaturist, this artist was also a poet and critic. The [...]

In this essay, Patricio Muñoz Zárate discusses his curatorial approach to the exhibition Subversiones/Imposturas organized for the IV Bienal de Arte. He describes a likely scene in which young artists try to change what is “ [...]