Signed by the editorial staff of the magazine 8 de junio whose editor-in-chief at the time was Miguel Ángel Gaitán, this interview provides firsthand information on the cultural scene in Europe in the late 1920s. Colombian poet and critic Luis Vidales (1900–1990) had just returned from Europe after a three-year stay: first he had studied in Paris and then had been a diplomat in Genoa. It is striking that Vidales—the only avant-garde poet in Colombia at the time—was the first to speak of the “retour à l’ordre” [return to order] reigning in Europe after World War I. Indeed, in his thesis cultural development is closely tied to economic development. (In Paris, Vidales had studied economics and statistics.)
This interview evidences the tendency to use foreign debates to construct supposedly Colombian notions, a tendency that would be asserted more and more in the following decades. This text also attests to the complex relationships between aesthetics, politics, and economics in the twenties. In this discussion, Vidales does not limit himself to describing foreign theories, but also attempts to apply them to Colombia’s own debates, which was by no means common in the country at the time and, as such, constituted an advance for professional criticism.