At the time, the exhibition titled Arte Argentino del pasado y del presente held in 1943 at the headquarters of the National Commission of Fine Arts of Montevideo, and organized by the Asociación Estímulo de Bellas Artes de Buenos, the Uruguayan art critic José Pedro Argul was the association’s representative in the city of Montevideo. Meanwhile, the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Asociación Estímulo de Bellas Artes was the Argentinean artist Raúl Mazza. The same person, who would be named, the following year in 1944, director of the Museo de Arte Decorativo de Buenos Aires [Decorative Arts Museum of Buenos Aires].
The selective process of the exhibition clearly demonstrated conservative trends since none of the self -proclaimed “modern” artists were listed. The artists that were represented, however, were important artists of early modernism such as Malharro (1865–1911), De la Cárcova (1866– 1927), Collivadino (1869–1945) and Sívori (1847–1918) among others. The event, with one hundred and seven names and one hundred and fifty-two works, seemed be in discord with another exhibition that was simultaneously being presented in July 1943, in Montevideo by the art critic Jorge Romero Brest (1905–89), under the title Veintidós pintores argentinos contemporáneos [Twenty-Two Contemporary Argentinean Artists]. The coincidence was not inconsequential, since in the latter exhibition there was a clear representation of the “modern” artists, and when both exhibitions were being presented in Montevideo at a time of open controversy between figurative and abstract artists, post impressionists artists and geometric abstraction. The presence of Joaquín Torres García, to some extent, triggered the polemics.