Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

In this long article, José Vasconcelos explains his theory of nationalism, patriotism, and Americanism. In sum, he outlines the law of the three stages, taking only its name from Auguste Comte. The first stage is the “materialist period” in [...]

When Louis E. Rowley interviewed President General Álvaro Obregón, he inquired about a matter of huge concern to North Americans: Bolshevism in Mexico and the imposition of socialism. Obregón, avoiding any reference to the Soviet Union, said that [...]

In an open letter to the newspaper, David Alfaro Siqueiros makes a number of statements about the article published in the same paper defending students’ rights in terms of the paintings at the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria (ENP). Siqueiros [...]

In this piece, Febronio Ortega gathered a variety of opinions from the art world. Among them, he recalled Diego Rivera’s description of his visit to the “Museo de Mediocridades” [Museum of Mediocrities]—Rivera’s characterization of the [...]

José Vasconcelos, the Minister of Public Education, discusses why he did not take advantage of architects or engineers for projects such as El Estadio [The Stadium] or La Escuela Benito Juárez, a model for schools not just in Mexico, albeit [...]

This article conveys the opinions expressed by a variety of institutions in response to José Vasconcelos’ resignation in late 1923 as a result of the crimes committed a few days earlier, particularly the death of Francisco Field Jurado, the [...]

Daniel Cosío Villegas wonders why the natural order of having better writers than artists—painters, to be more precise—has been inverted in Mexico. He concludes that there are many reasons: an intense nationalism in politics as well as in [...]

Along with a caricature by Miguel Covarrubias published in a special edition of El Universal Ilustrado, Renato Molina Enríquez focuses his article on the encaustic technique used by Diego Rivera. This allows Antonio Caso’s article to explain the [...]

Diego Rivera’s mural La Creación [The Creation] was unveiled during a showing at the amphitheater of the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria de México—with the assistance of the painter and the Minister of Public Education, José Vasconcelos. After [...]

The Consejo Cultural y Artístico of Mexico City held a banquet to honor the poet José Juan Tablada, who would leave for New York the next day to continue the promotion of Mexican art in that city. This article includes a series of caricatures [...]

In the Survey Section, the journalist Ortega decided to go to the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria to ask the painters there the following question: Who is the greatest painter in Mexico? The caricaturist Ernesto García Cabral ironically responds that [...]

In this interview Juan del Sena chats with Diego Rivera in the Anfiteatro Bolívar in Mexico City, where Rivera is starting work on the mural he calls La creación [Creation]. The painter describes both the method of using encaustic as well as the [...]

In a brief speech, Antonio Caso, president of the Universidad Nacional de México, calls upon all men, from wherever they hail, to unite so that they can achieve the highest purposes of the Nation [...]

The intention of the writer, José Corral Rigand, was to create a written portrait of Roberto Montenegro. He visited Montenegro accompanied by Juan José Tablada (a poet) and Juan Sánchez Azora. Right beside the artist was his painting, Hembra [...]

After outlining Mexican history from Independence in 1821 through Juárez Reformation and the Porfiriato [Porfirio Díaz regime], Diego Rivera asks why a day of national mourning should be observed on November 20th, the symbolic first day of the [...]

In this article, Diego Rivera affirms that he does not know Alvarado Rubio, an employee of the Embassy of Guatemala during the regime of dictator Carlos Castillo Armas, and that it is from there that the lies published in Impacto begin. Rivera also [...]

In the wake of the critical reactions to two exhibitions of Mexican art—at the 25th Venice Biennial in 1950 and the 1952 Paris Biennial —this long document offered readers a summary of events. The Venice Biennial was deemed a success while the [...]

In this 1925 letter, Ángel Zárraga acknowledges Manuel Rodríguez Lozano as a painter and a friend. After a brief introduction of indeterminate tone, Zárraga points to his discovery that “Race” and “People” are grandiose concepts that lead [...]

The poem Revolución [Revolution] by Manuel Maples Arce describes the negative aspects of war and his fascination with machines such as trains and airplanes. He tells how the wind of the iron-man dictator shudders and in the afternoons, there are [...]

In this article, Enrique Molina, President of the Universidad de Concepción in Chile, compares the negative impact of World War I with the educational reconstruction undertaken by José Vasconcelos in Mexico, which he refers to as a time of [...]

This article covers the discussion that took place in the Mexican House of Representatives regarding the university and the fine arts departments. After the debate, the Departamento de Bellas Artes [Fine Arts Department] was separated from the [...]

The Dirección General de Monumentos [Bureau of Monuments] will perform extensive oversight of all the art monuments distributed on sites throughout Mexico. To that end, it will appoint a number of inspectors in counties, the Federal District and the [...]

This article shows how the personalities in arts and politics are intimately linked. The long essay describes the defense that Dr. Atl made of a "seat" in the National Congress. It is about a lawmakers’ bench. In these elections, in spite of having [...]

This article is a short notice from a newspaper announcing that the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes was then manufacturing excellent paints for watercolors, pastels, oils, and tempera. The announcement came about due to a rise in prices for [...]

A pillar commemorating independence was planned to celebrate the centennial of Mexican independence. The jury for the competition was composed of three teachers from the Academy: Manuel Iturbe, architect; Arnulfo Domínguez Bello, sculptor; and [...]

In this broad essay, the educationist and philosopher José Vasconcelos reflects upon the concept of “progreso” [progress]. He asks himself what progress really is and thus provides various answers, in accordance with the times. For him, progress [...]

Diego Rivera considered pulquería painting [illustrations in agave sap bars] to be an example of the kind of popular art which—in his opinion and the opinion of other painters—helped to distinguish and differentiate the new genre of Mexican art [...]

Diego Rivera speaks at length to the newspaper Excélsior on learning that President Miguel Alemán’s administration has refused to send his mural to the 1952 Paris Exhibition. In the first place, Rivera claims that the government has ridden [...]

María Elena Sodi de Pallares discusses the inconsistency shown by the INBA (Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes) while sponsoring a mural by Diego Rivera to be displayed at the Paris exhibition, but then decided not to submit it after all when the [...]

An exhibition of gouaches by José Clemente Orozco at the photographer Lola Álvarez Bravo’s gallery on Amberes street inspires Margarita Nelken to discuss a number of subjects that were topical in artistic circles at that time. Among them: whether [...]

After seeing Celia Calderón’s exhibition in a Galería de Ventas Libres [at 154, calle de Puebla, [Mexico City] the art critic Jorge J. Crespo de la Serna reviews her work. The critic shares the opinion of Miguel Salas Anzures that, in spite of [...]

Diego Rivera lays the groundwork for his article about Frida Kahlo by tracing a path through the history of the founding cultures of the Pre-Hispanic and Spanish periods and the nineteenth-century. In his opinion, Mexico’s social evolution can be [...]

Diego Rivera enumerates his reasons for believing that the Estadio Olímpico [Olympic Stadium] of the Ciudad Universitaria [UNAM Campus] is the most salient example of the struggle for Mexican independence. To construct such a building, the most [...]

The Argentine art critic, Raquel Tibol, asked Diego Rivera 14 questions aimed at identifying his different impressions of the Soviet Union [today, in 1956,] as compared to 1927. The questions were focused on new art, the art market, and the disputes [...]

In this brief, moralizing article, Diego Rivera expresses his opinion about the art of José Clemente Orozco on the occasion of the latter’s death. In his painting, Orozco clearly defined the positives and negatives he saw in his country. And, he [...]

This article reports on the number of cultural missionaries sent by the Secretaría de Educación Pública [SEP, Ministry of Public Education], as well as the costs and duties of the teachers, and the differences between the rural teachers, [...]

Diego Rivera’s visual arts discourse echoes the ideas of José Vasconcelos in his mural La Creación [Creation], in which he expresses, within an abstract theme, a clear allusion to race through selected representative elements. These include the [...]

José Vasconcelos calls upon Mexican intellectuals to travel to the backlands to share the hardships of the poor in order to learn from the experience. His challenge extends to young and cultured teachers, writers, poets and artists. Vasconcelos also [...]

Jean Charlot thanks, ironically, the fact that José Clemente Orozco has not studied in Europe, since the United States offered him the mechanical elements of his œuvre, and Mexico the dramatic elements. Orozco, in Charlot’s opinion, lives within [...]

La exposición de la joven pintura mexicana [The Exhibition: The New Generation of Mexican Painting] was presented at three cities: Paris, Berlin and Madrid. The Spanish art critic Gabriel García Maroto gave a lecture in December 1926 when the show [...]

From Renato Molina Enríquez’s insight, Mexico is imbued with visual invention. Despite the collapse of the native cultures, the landowners of the colonial era did not succeed in eliminating the people’s artistic potential; nevertheless, academic [...]

In this document, the magazine Forma reproduces an excerpt of the book by Dr. Atl (pseudonym of writer-painter Gerardo Murillo), Las Artes Populares en México [The Folk Arts of Mexico]. The article is a summary of the introduction. Furthermore, even [...]

In this document Miguel Covarrubias analyzes masks from both an aesthetic and ritualistic point of view. He asserts that the ritualistic masks are the intensification of an idea born of the imagination. In this way, given that culture is more pure, [...]

Forma magazine conducted a survey on painting and sculpture. Based on the results, Diego Rivera wrote about the major differences among those who considered themselves to be sculptors, saying that all that a sculptor really needed was a quarry and a [...]

Diego Rivera begins his article on how children draw in Mexico by saying that he hates the instruction provided by the Academy, which starts by teaching children how to draw illustrations, then sculpture, and finally the nude model. Rivera criticizes [...]

In this review of Mexican architecture, the painter Diego Rivera criticizes the aesthetic taste that gave rise to the abominable architecture of the Porfiriato (the Porfirio Díaz regime, before 1910) and to most of the architectural work of the post [...]

Furthering his theories about popular art, and referring to the paintings on the walls of certain pulquerías [agave sap bars] in Mexico City, Diego Rivera once again discusses the art of the proletariat. He restates his contempt for bourgeois [...]

Diego Rivera painted two different murals at the National School of Agronomy in Chapingo [now named Universidad Autónoma Chapingo, located near the Mexico City airport]. One was in the school’s offices, where Rivera explains that he was able to [...]