The editorial categories are research topics that have guided researchers during the recovery phase and continue to be the impetus behind the Documents Project’s digital archive and the Critical Documents book series. Developed by the project’s Editorial Board, each of the teams analyzed this framework and adapted it to their local contexts in developing their research objectives and work plans during the Recovery Phase. Learn more on the Editorial Framework page.
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This analysis of the meaning of the Cubist rupture—that was published in Frente a Frente [Face to Face], the journal of the Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios (LEAR) [League of Revolutionary Writers and Artists]—considers the fact that this radical aesthetic rupture cannot be grasped without an understanding of Paul Cézanne’s constructive synthesis. And such a synthetic focus was indeed a sort of art of ideas coined by either the poet Guillaume Apollinaire or the painter Pablo Picasso. The article discusses the economic backdrop inherent in all artistic production and, though it does not aim to reduce the material analysis of art to this single factor, it does acknowledge the totalitarian sense of avant-garde abstraction, most particularly as regards imperial expansion and capitalist decomposition. Hence the possibility of taking advantage of Cubist discoveries for revolutionary ends as well as the indication of Picasso’s influence on the Mexican movement: anti-imperialist and agrarian.
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) became a problematic figure for the militant artistic left in Mexico, a fact that was not infrequently denied by his dabbling in purist art, as it was called at the time. It is therefore important to consider the approach taken by the journal of the Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios (LEAR) [League of Revolutionary Writers and Artists], and how it sustained the vivid discussion concerning the contributions of certain avant-garde artists, most notably Picasso.