Having been expelled from the United States, David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896–1974) traveled to Montevideo in February of 1933, and by the end of May in that same year, he had established himself in Buenos Aires. In the River Plate, Siqueiros experimented with technique and presented arguments based on the contents of his lecture Los vehículos de la pintura dialéctico-subversiva [The Vehicles of Dialectical-Subversive Painting], which he had developed while in the United States. In June he exhibited at Amigos del Arte [Friends of Art], a liberal and modernizing arts institution. He gave controversial lectures that polarized the arts field into the defenders of “arte puro” [“pure art”] and “arte político” [“political art”]. Siqueiros collaborated on the newspaper Crítica [Critique], run by Natalio Botana. Botana commissioned Siqueiros to paint a mural in the cellar of his house, Quinta Los Granados, in Don Torcuato, in the Province of Buenos Aires. The Equipo Poligráfico Ejecutor [Lead Polygraphic Team]—formed by Siqueiros, Antonio Berni, Lino Enea Spilimbergo, Juan Carlos Castagnino, and the Uruguyan set-designer Enrique Lázaro—created Ejericio Plástico [Visual Exercise], with distorted nudes over the curved surface of the vaulted ceiling, by means of photographic projection.
At that time, Argentinean right-wingers strongly attacked the Mexican Communist painter in its publications Bandera Argentina [Argentinean Flag] and Crisol [Melting pot], which were representative of the Catholic nationalism that had gained momentum since the military coup of 1930 [see documents 733206, 734077, and 733182, among others]. His defense is carried out by Contra. La revista de los francotiradores [Against: The Snipers’ Magazine] run by leftist writer Raúl González Tuñón, a communist who was not obedient to the cultural guidelines of the Communist Party [see documents 733230, 733314, and 733270, among others].
This document—a summons to the artistsfrom the River Plate area to join revolutionary art—reiterates the model of “call” carried out before by Siqueiros in his magazine Vida Americana no. 1 (1921), in Barcelona, and titled Tres llamamientos de orientación actual a los pintores y escultores de la nueva generación americana [Three Appeals for the Current Guidance of the New Generation of American Painters and Sculptors]. The publication appeared during Siqueiros's exhibition at Amigos del Arte.