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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After denying the existence of “Estridentista art,” the writer Arqueles Vela indicates his group’s affinity with Abstractionism and with “pure art,” which in his view was considered a condensed expression of modern life, a way of overcoming the fragmentation of experience through subjectivity and the expansion of the senses in a mechanical world. Vela defines Estridentismo, indeed, as a policy of sensitivity.
This text is one of the best definitions of the Estridentista movement in terms of its goal of formulating a new aesthetic. Arqueles Vela (1899–1977), the Guatemalan Marxist writer and theoretician, drew on his analytical skills to produce Historia materialista del arte [Materialist History of Art] in 1936, the first in a series of studies on literary aesthetics and theory. From the early days of Estridentismo, this writer’s abilities attracted the interest of critics such as Pablo González Casanova in his article, "Las metáforas de Arqueles Vela. La filología y la nueva estética" [Arqueles Vela’s Metaphors. Philology and the New Aesthetic], published in El Universal ilustrado, Mexico City, May 29, 1924.