This document introduces the Colombian artist Ignacio Gómez Jaramillo (1910–1970) and discusses his thoughts on the art of his time. Gómez Jaramillo is known for his oil paintings and murals, as well as for his involvement in local efforts to teach and promote art. Ever since his early nonacademic training in Europe from 1929 to 1934, and his later experience in Mexico during 1938 and 1939, he has maintained his loyalty to modern art as defined by its autonomy, in which the problem of the surface is above all an artistic challenge. According to Gómez Jaramillo, the modern artist cannot ignore the present moment or the public. He believed that modern art had taken its time to come to Colombia, compared to Europe and the rest of Latin America, because it can only flourish when certain factors are present, such as the free training for young artists available in Europe, the emergence of a specialized cadre of art critics, the opening of private art galleries, the segmentation of the public, and access to modern art books and reproductions.
Gómez Jaramillo quoted from this article when he was a panelist discussing Colombian art on the program created by the Argentine critic Marta Traba (1923–1983), with whom he would quarrel a year later, after which time the two became estranged. In the spirit of training a modern public to appreciate modern art, the text stressed the difference between current art and the academic art of the first three decades of the twentieth century that strictly adhered to the canons of the Spanish Academy, which Gómez Jaramillo rejects out of hand. He also criticizes and demystifies the dearth of works of art in official museums. He then goes on to mention the taste among the Colombian elite for literary and classical art in the early years of the century. As an example of modern art, Gómez Jaramillo refers to the muralism of the 1950s, which in his opinion, was an expression of thematic art with modern artistic values. He describes the emergence of religious muralism as a modern expression of the “integration of the arts.”