Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

Leobardo Reynoso, the representative for the Partido Revolucionario Mexicano (PRM) [Mexican Revolutionary Party], questions the president concerning any Communist influence in the government. President Lázaro Cárdenas replies that there is not and [...]

David Alfaro Siqueiros writes a letter to Teresa León from a military command post in Spain during the Civil War, telling her of his combat experiences at the front and comparing procedures there with artistic work. He sees that in both there are [...]

David Alfaro Siqueiros sent a letter to the Minister of Public Education, José Manuel Puig Cassauranc, when he was dismissed from his ministry job as professor of drawing and manual works, for which he was paid three pesos a day. His dismissal was [...]

In 1944, David Alfaro Siqueiros wrote an open letter to José Clemente Orozco in which he admitted that he could identify the different stages of his work. Siqueiros begins by saying that an artist’s work is not an individual creation but the [...]

This is an open letter written by David Alfaro Siqueiros to the Minister of Education Jaime Torres Bodet that explains the discrepancy between his humanistic, revolutionary discourse on the one hand, and the function of the Dirección de Educación [...]

The Río Lerma embankment project gave Diego Rivera, as he acknowledges in this article, the chance to combine painting with sculpture by making both coexist under water, an environment that would endow his forms and figures with movement. This [...]

Diego Rivera writes a biography of Mardonio Magaña, who arrived in Mexico City at age 52. Magaña started to carve wood and stone while he worked as a waiter at La Casa del Artista, a branch establishment, part of the Escuela Nacional de Bellas [...]

In this article Ricardo Gómez Robelo takes us through the evolution of Roberto Montenegro’s work. He shows an artist who was interested in knowledge and research. Because Montenegro was an excellent designer, the critic refers to Goya, Beardsley, [...]

Manuel Toussaint states that Dr. Atl was now beginning to express himself in his work. The exhibition of his paintings could teach art students how the great visionaries expressed their emotions. But the personal life of this painter could not be [...]

Fernando Leal’s article talks about the dearth of art criticism, which uses different names to describe the movement: “al fresco decorations,” “national art,” “Cubism,” “revolutionary art,” “academic art,” and “Renaissance [...]

This article describes Diego Rivera’s lecture in the library at the Academia de Bellas Artes [Academy of Fine Arts], which was well attended. There was a great deal of interest in his presentation, particularly in artistic and intellectual circles [...]

Diego Rivera denied being a “static painter” responding to a statement David Alfaro Siqueiros had made about him at a press conference. Speaking from his studio in San Ángel, Rivera replied that it was wrong to say that he considered form and [...]

David Alfaro Siqueiros attempts to answer the question: “If you were nominated by the El Colegio Nacional to replace José Clemente Orozco, what would you say?” He replies in a long, complex, four-page essay. He eschews a yes or a no answer and [...]

This is an illustration by the cartoonist Rafael Freyre Flores, in which he casts Carlos Chávez as the Director of the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes (INBA) and Fernando Gamboa as the person in charge of taking an exhibition of Mexican art to [...]

During the construction of Mexico City’s UNAM campus, which was begun in 1950, architects and artists worked together to create buildings with murals on exterior walls. In this lengthy lecture, David Alfaro Siqueiros outlines the history of [...]

In 1964, journalist Julio Scherer García received the manuscript of David Alfaro Siqueiros’s autobiography. Three years earlier, in 1961, Scherer García had gone to Lecumberri Prison and managed to obtain some 387 pages. Siqueiros asked him to [...]

Once the Centro de Arte Realista was founded, David Alfaro Siqueiros refers to the successes of the last 40 days. He awaits the response from the opposition to the proposals made about “La Pintura Mexicana Moderna”. The Centro’s first success [...]

In this brief letter, David Alfaro Siqueiros advises Jackson Pollock and his team that the studio in New York will be closed during the day while he prepares for his forthcoming exhibition in Manhattan. Siqueiros explains that he needs to be alone to [...]

In El Machete, number 13 (September 11-18, 1924), Siqueiros rails against the recent desecration of Orozco and Rivera’s murals. He accuses as false revolutionaries those who minimize the problem and complains that reactionaries have free rein at [...]

David Alfaro Siqueiros, writing in El Machete, invites the proletariat to discuss their problems. His goal is to counter the middle-class press, where the disenfranchised are unrepresented. The article explains that the walls of public buildings have [...]

The Manifesto of the Sindicato de Obreros Técnicos Pintores y Escultores (SOTPE) [Technical Workers, Painters, and Sculptors Union] was published in El Machete toward the end of June 1924. It was an attempt to warn the proletariat and the indigenous [...]

This document shows an engraving of the preliminary design for the Monument to the Revolution of 1910-1917, in the Plaza de Armas [Main Square] of Mexico City. The equestrian sculpture of Francisco I. Madero will be the main figure that stands out at [...]

The article reports on the creation of the Asociación de Pintores y Escultores Independientes located at the Calle Reloj, 6 in Mexico City. Its members included the artists José Clemente Orozco, José María. Fernández Urbina, David Alfaro [...]

This document states that the “free” students at the Academia de San Carlos yesterday received from the Director General of Bellas Artes, Luis Manuel Rojas, the approved request that the students had submitted to him in order to make changes to [...]

Gerardo Murillo (Dr. Atl) is accused of pretending that General Esteban Cantú, an ardent supporter of President Venustiano Carranza, should rebel against the established government. By denouncing this “attempt” of coup d’état, the General [...]

This article describes in detail the more than 20 castings made at the ateliers of the Museo Nacional, with the stated purpose of sending them to different Mexican embassies in France, Argentina, and Chile as ornaments for the national [...]

This article, written anonymously, points out the importance of the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes for the teaching of drawing and observation perspective for 500 Mexican workers registered in evening classes at the school. The brief report [...]

On February 26, 1952, Diego Rivera was advised via communiqué number 2578 that his mural could not be shown in Paris because it contained serious political accusations against foreign countries with which Mexico cultivated friendly relations. The [...]

Diego Rivera writes a long letter to the Seminario de Cultura Mexicana [Mexican Cultural Seminary] in which he challenges the statements made by the Spanish writer José Bergamín about landscape painter José María Velasco and José Clemente Orozco [...]

In this document Fernán Feliz de Amadora, a writer from Argentina, writes about the possible association of painter Roberto Montenegro and the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío. To him, the painter follows one of the newest trends in the art field, that [...]

In 1945 Diego Rivera wrote an article in which he looked back approvingly at the Open-Air Schools that were founded in the 1920s. He disagrees with David Alfaro Siqueiros (who attended one of them), and José Clemente Orozco, who spoke disdainfully [...]

Diego Rivera reaches out to photography, including it as one more technique within the field of plastic creation. In his view, it was photography that liberated painting from the need to express an objective reality. He also equates the technical [...]

Justino Fernández attributes to the œuvre of José Clemente Orozco, the liveliest awareness regarding our world, artistically expressed in a long series of meditations. He refers to his most recent mural work at the Escuela Nacional de Maestros, [...]

The art critic Luis Cardoza y Aragón talks about the transformation undergone by José Clemente Orozco over a 15-year period, as he compares the murals at the University of Guadalajara with those at the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria in Mexico City, [...]

The writer Alejandro Núñez Alonso ironically comments on the restrictions imposed by the Secretaría de Educación Pública [Ministry of Public Education or SEP]. According to his comments, the visual artists will no longer receive a salary, nor [...]

Churchill Lathrop, Assistant Professor at Dartmouth College, believes that José Clemente Orozco is a modern painter whose sharp and tormented gaze represents the changing times we live in. With the available technology, Orozco makes a superior [...]

This document includes an article in which José Clemente Orozco vents his negative opinion regarding symposia. He remarks that instead of wasting money on the artificial and pedantic speeches regarding the relationship between art and the [...]

David Alfaro Siqueiros describes and simultaneously defines the four positions or trends in the visual arts existing in the world. He wonders if the theoretical proposals coincide with the work of art, and chooses to explain only two: the non-realism [...]

This text, attributed to Fernando Gamboa, defines how Mexican Art is to be classified in the coming decades: Pre-Hispanic, colonial, nineteenth-century, popular, and contemporary art. His department’s fundamental goal was to create a Museo Diná [...]

Diego Rivera addresses certain architectural issues that complicated the installation of his murals at the Ministry of Public Education building (SEP), obliging him to resort to geometric solutions on some of the floors. He provides a somewhat [...]

Diego Rivera describes the liberties he took when painting his mural La Creación [Creation], which expressed man’s relationship with the elements as a means of telling the prime history of Mankind. Rivera explains how he adapted his work to the [...]

In the spirit of the post-revolutionary mood, Manuel Amabilis [an influential Mexican architect] encourages Mexican artists to commit to a collective mission to transform their country. He believes that Mexico faces the dawn of a new day in which a [...]