Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

The dispute begun by Luis Cardoza y Aragón against the frente único [single front] policy of the Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios (LEAR) [League of Revolutionary Writers and Artists] culminated with this declaration in El Machete. The [...]

This issue contains more than 400 engravings by José Guadalupe Posada, with a preface by Diego Rivera, in which he redefines the engraver as a “worker,” “warrior of leaflets,” the “greatest artist” produced by the people, and the [...]

This print by Leopoldo Méndez was used for the cover of the first issue of Frente a Frente [Face to Face], in which the inauguration of the Palacio de Bellas Artes was satirized as an act of cultural exclusion. At the bottom of the page, a policeman [...]

The Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP) [People’s Graphic Workshop] explained its working plan for graphic propaganda in a flyer that specified the following: it could be incorporated into wall newspapers, mailed as if it were postal correspondence, [...]

While the first issue of Actual contained a directory of avant-garde artists, this third issue held an index of avant-garde books and magazines. Listings include: La vie des lettres, a French magazine begun in 1913 and headed by Nicolas Beauduin; an [...]

Letras de México, the magazine directed by Octavio G. Barreda, devoted its May 1938 issue to André Breton and Surrealism. It published several of his essays: an excerpt of “Les vases communicantes” [Communicating Vessels], “Le merveilleux [...]

Choque [Shock], the publication of the Alianza de Trabajadores del Arte Plásticas (ATAP) [Alliance of Visual Arts Workers] sets forth the opinions of Diego Rivera regarding art for art’s sake, which he considers “sandez sentimental [...]

According to Luis Cardoza y Aragón, poetry enjoyed greater development in Mexico than the visual arts because the former was situated on the margins of the national-pictorial movement. The proof of this can be found in the confluence of the Mexican [...]

In the 1990s, the magazine Memoria reported on a controversy that led to the great 1936 exhibition organized by the Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios (LEAR) [League of Revolutionary Writers and Artists]. The article explains that the [...]

This article is a self-critique of the Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios (LEAR) [League of Revolutionary Writers and Artists], which also touches on the group’s diversity. It mentions the disorder created by incorporating other [...]

Roberto Reyes Pérez, a member of the editorial board of Choque [Shock], was responsible for the editorial policy of the fortnightly journal of the Alianza de Trabajadores del Arte Plásticas (ATAP) [Visual Art Workers Alliance], which was described [...]

Diego Rivera denounces the “sordid sabotage” that the French poet André Breton has been subjected to at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de México: as an action driven by a network of intellectuals controlled by the Soviet [...]

This text contains the lyrics to the song, Corrido de Don Chapulín, [Song of Don Chapulín] that was illustrated by four graphic options so that the reader could select his or her preference. The corrido [Mexican folk song] first defines the [...]

In its official publication Llamada [The Call], the Lucha Intelectual Proletaria (LIP) [Intellectual Proletarian Struggle] declares that Mexican intellectuals who are members of this group should make their work serve the proletariat in its war on [...]

According to Rafael Heliodoro Valle, the distinguishing feature of the Surrealist movement is that it has “old roots” that set it apart from the rest of the avant-garde. And that, “Mexico, [which] is not a myth,” but has a mythical past has [...]

David Alfaro Siqueiros attacks the implacable enemy of the Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios (LEAR) [League of Revolutionary Writers and Artists], the Trotskyite Diego Rivera, “leader and supporter of the Fourth International in Mexico [...]

This article places Diego Rivera’s Trotskyist period within his phase of painting murals in the United States and in Mexico. It reveals affinities and differences he had with various intellectuals and artists’ organizations, as well as his [...]

Golpe, the journal of the Federación de Escritores y Artistas Proletarios (FEAP) [Federation of Proletarian Writers and Artists] published an editorial in which members of the Federation expressed their opinions on the issue of socialist education. [...]

Given the circumstances of the time, David Alfaro Siqueiros advocated that art should be transparent and dedicated to the struggle; it should be a tool for propaganda that was also open to technical innovation. In his opinion, pure art should wait [...]

After denying the existence of “Estridentista art,” the writer Arqueles Vela indicates his group’s affinity with Abstractionism and with “pure art,” which in his view was considered a condensed expression of modern life, a way of overcoming [...]

Based on a negative report regarding the state of collections of academic art kept in the galleries of the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes, the journal Forma is adamant in promoting the establishment of a “Museo de arte moderno americano” [ [...]

The National Theater was a major architectural project during the Porfirio Díaz administration, but it was never completed due to the outbreak of the revolution in 1910. Later worked on by several post-revolutionary governments, it was transformed [...]

In this article, the painter Gabriel Fernández Ledesma traces the history of European funerary traditions during the colonial period. He explores “The Triumph of Death” and its portrayal on playing cards and in the theater, discussing its [...]

Leopoldo Méndez made seven lithographs to commemorate the systematic murder of teachers that took place between 1936 and 1938. There was a large print run of these lithographs done in a booklet printed on cheap paper. Following each succinct [...]

The Estatutos [Statutes] of the Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP) [Peoples’ Graphics Workshop] were written a year after it was founded. They describe it as a workshop devoted to the art of agitation and propaganda, united by a commitment to two [...]

The art historian Francisco Reyes Palma briefly describes the construction of an image of 1930s Mexico in accordance with the aesthetic/political strategy of Surrealism. He starts by talking about the relationships that arose among the painter Diego [...]

“I believe that the LEAR is on the completely wrong path . . . , it is the only organization in Mexico that is against art.” With these terms, the writer Luis Cardoza y Aragón stated his disagreement with the selection of works presented by the [...]

In spite of showing his work in solo photography exhibitions, Carlos Mérida’s favorite subject to write about was Emilio Amero’s cinematographic work. Specifically, he focuses on 3-3-3 shorts, whose balance surprises him, since the medium works [...]

The Guatemalan writer established in Mexico, Luis Cardoza y Aragón, focuses Emilio Amero’s work from a lyrical perspective. In fact, Amero weaves the “snapshot of the word” (poetry), with the photogram (a short space of light and emotion). To [...]

This is the cover for the magazine Frente a Frente [Front to Front] (Mexico City January 1938) published by the LEAR (Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios) [League of Revolutionary Writers and Artists]; it included a photomontage by Lola Á [...]

In its desire to present the latest news without necessarily taking on a specific stance, the Mexican magazine published an essay by Ramón Vinyes who was from Cataluña. Revista de Revistas broadened its coverage of new art by publishing Guillaume [...]

Ermilo Abreu Gómez interviews Cuban Juan Marinello for Frente a Frente [Face to Face], the journal of the Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios (LEAR) [League of Revolutionary Writers and Artists]. In the interview, the key issue of artistic [...]

Hernán Laborde establishes the defense of human rights and peace as a point of agreement among all the intellectual groups gathered there. With regard to art, he begins with a premise of Joseph Stalin according to which writers, and by extension [...]

Leopoldo Méndez not only contributed images for the magazine Horizonte, he also voiced his ideas, as in this text. In it he emphasizes the rebellious, antibourgeois, and anti-art for art’s sake aspect of mural art, describing it as that “ [...]

It had been a month since El Machete reported the end of a dispute between Luis Cardoza y Aragón and the defenders of the single cultural front promoted in the magazine Frente a Frente [Face to Face]. In this article, the Estridentista and active [...]

In this document Juan de la Cabada responds to Luis Cardoza y Aragón’s criticism of the first art exhibition organized by the Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios (LEAR) [League of Revolutionary Writers and Artists]. At the same time de [...]

This document contains a composition for piano and chorus from the original score of Llamadas. Sinfonía proletaria [The Call. Proletariat Symphony], composed by Carlos Chávez and edited by the cultural officials of Mexico. It includes 17 [...]

This document is a flyer produced by the Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP) [The People’s Graphic Workshop], with an engraving by Leopoldo Méndez that denounces the isolation and lack of teachers due to the reactionary wave of violence against them [...]

Meant as a wakeup call for the Lázaro Cárdenas’ administration (1934-40) in Mexico, Diego Rivera launches an attack against the police intelligentsia, including some agents of the Soviet GPU that, in his judgment, had infiltrated [...]

While living in exile on the Turkish island of Büyükada, Leon Trotsky writes to Diego Rivera, “a close friend of the left wing opposition,” in Mexico. In his letter, the Russian revolutionary recalls his first exposure to reproductions of [...]

This is a collection of articles by David Alfaro Siqueiros in which he restates the principles of an art about war, linking it to the great artistic traditions expressed in the work of artists such as Dr. Atl, José Clemente Orozco, and Diego Rivera [...]

In 1936 the publishers of Frente a Frente [Face to Face], the journal of the Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios (LEAR) [League of Revolutionary Writers and Artists] published a belated futuristic manifesto by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti on [...]

Amado Nervo announces, in terms of a “literary school,” the emergence of futurism in Italy, whose manifesto he translates in order to place it, with no fear at all, at the reader’s disposal. And Nervo does it with the conviction that—in spite [...]

The statements by Pablo Picasso are a highlight of the catalog assembled for a late exhibition held in Picasso’s honor in Mexico City in 1944. The texts for the catalog were assigned to four other artists: Carlos Mérida, the painter and muralist [...]

In Mexico, the Lucha Intelectual Proletaria (LIP) [Intellectual Proletarian Struggle] establishes four principles. These are the same principles that required this group of artists and intellectuals, who were ready to serve the proletariat with their [...]

The fourteen tenets upheld by Luis Cardoza y Aragón—those that were to be debated among the members of the Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios (LEAR) [League of Revolutionary Writers and Artists]—proposed an art movement free of [...]

This analysis of the meaning of the Cubist rupture—that was published in Frente a Frente [Face to Face], the journal of the Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios (LEAR) [League of Revolutionary Writers and Artists]—considers the fact that [...]

In this document, Diego Rivera discusses the details of his conflict with David Alfaro Siqueiros; that is, the international campaign orchestrated by the Stalinist leadership to discredit Rivera for his Trotskyite militancy and for his financial [...]

This is a summary of a lecture on El realismo socialista en la pintura [Socialist Realism in Painting] given by David Alfaro Siqueiros at a union hall (packed with six hundred attendees), in which he shared an instrumental vision of art. He presented [...]

This extensive document covers the various phases of the Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios [LEAR, League of Revolutionary Writers and Artists] and the international causes the organization supported. Despite being billed as a “Congreso [...]