Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

Commentary by essayist Alejandro Lora Risco on the Mexican art show organized in Lima by La Crónica newspaper. From within the event’s massive audience, the author highlights the presence of the individuals most likely to read his text: Peruvian [...]

This document is an essay by Jacinto Quirarte outlining key moments in the history of modern Mexican and Mexican-American art in the United States. It begins with a discussion of the Mexican School, detailing central figures, sociopolitical [...]

In this document, Margarita Nieto details the influence of the School of Mexican Painting on the artistic production in the United States during the twenty-year period preceding World War II. She argues that contact between the two countries during [...]

In the prologue to the catalogue of the 1935 exhibition of contemporary Mexican art, Mexican artist Jorge Juan Crespo de la Serna provides a brief overview of Mexican art from the time of the Mayans until the present. He asserts that Mexican art, [...]

After discussing how busy Germán List Arzubide—the Estridentista from old times—kept in New York’s workers’ media, Ben Ossa mentions the ideas suggested to LEAR by the “Congreso de Artistas Americanos (de Estados Unidos)” [American [...]

The Sociedad de Arte Moderno [Society of Modern Art] names a long list of “associates,” including its president, Jorge Enciso, the avant-garde painter who subsequently devoted himself to historical and anthropological research and to public [...]

José Juan Tablada believes that art has become the “most powerful and effective” force, and is capable of finally securing Mexico’s well-being because it has been the single most influential factor in terms of strengthening political, cultural [...]

This “exclusive” interview with Mexican illustrator and painter Miguel Covarrubias took place on the occasion of a trip to Mexico City. During this conversation Covarrubias talked at length about a series of “impossible interviews” which had [...]

Tablada discusses the work of Miguel Covarrubias, the young cartoonist who was almost totally unknown in Mexico at the time but was making a name for himself as a magazine illustrator in the United States. Like Tablada, Covarrubias lived in New York [...]

The poet José Juan Tablada thought it was immensely important—politically, socially, and culturally—that Mexican painters should be gaining visibility in the United States. He reasoned that once the doors were open to Mexican art, Mexican [...]

In this article, Luis Cardoza y Aragón reviews the events of 1957, and laments the deaths of Diego Rivera and Miguel Covarrubias. He lists the various exhibitions taking place in Mexico City, including different murals, such as the Fanny Ravel 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 [...]

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 [...]