Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

The poet and art critic Xavier Villaurrutia believes José Clemente Orozco’s murals were his best works; then his drawings, lithographs, and engravings and, lastly, his oil paintings. Villaurrutia believes that oil painting was not the most [...]

The writer Xavier Villaurrutia comments on the town of Taxco (in the state of Guerrero) and its natural attraction. For him Taxco is like a flash of lightning that has now illuminated him, and he calls it a revelation. Taxco is synonymous with [...]

A short article by the Mexican poet Xavier Villaurrutia in which he announces the opening of a film club, “16 mm Cinema,” and the projection of the “sobrerrealista” [over-realist] film by Luis Buñuel, Un chien andalou [UnPerro Andaluz /An [...]

Xavier Villaurrutia conducts a retrospective of Mexican painting in the 1920s, the origin of which he ascribes to the revolutionary movement of the previous decade. In this context, the author criticizes those painters who continued to follow [...]

Xavier Villaurrutia reflects upon the artistic value of photography. He recalls that the poet Charles Baudelaire refused to consider photography among the fine arts or accept photographers as artists. According to Villaurrutia, the problem still [...]

In this essay, Xavier Villaurrutia examines José Clemente Orozco’s paintings through a prism of dread. The writer contends that this dread, this sense of horror, though not the only feeling present in Orozco’s work, is almost always the dominant [...]

In 1927, Xavier Villaurrutia attempted an assessment of the Mexican art movement using Diego Rivera’s career as a timeline, since he considered Rivera’s history to be the least boring. Villaurrutia claims that, although the genre of painting that [...]