Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

Art historian Shifra M. Goldman writes with great acuity and depth about the traveling exhibition, Art of the Fantastic: Latin America, 1920–1987, which opened at the Indianapolis Museum of Art in 1987, and subsequently went to the Queens [...]

In this text written on the occasion of the exhibition L’Avant-Garde held at the Galería Colibrí (1965), Puerto Rican critic Ernesto Ruiz de la Mata discusses what he considers an interesting show of avant-garde prints by artists from different [...]

In this essay, written in 1988, Manuel Felguérez relates the beginnings of what is known as the Ruptura movement in the 1950s. Felguérez points out that the arrival of refugees from the Spanish Civil War and other European nations in the previous [...]

The critic Margarita Nelken analyzes the success of the show organized at Galería Excélsior under the title Arte y Libertad [Art and Freedom] by the Asociación Mexicana por la Libertad de la Cultura. “The key feature of this exhibition is the [...]

In this essay, Octavio Paz discusses the dreamy, surrealist nature of the work of Alberto Gironella. Paz points out that Gironella’s art is situated between the word and the image, and this is why he defines him as a poet of visual images: a & [...]

This text is a transcription of a series of interviews that Rita Eder conducted with a number of artists and intellectuals, all contemporaries of the painter Alberto Gironella [1929-1999], who debated the principal iconographic and literary elements [...]

In this essay Teresa del Conde analyzes the characteristics of what she calls the “young painting of Mexico,” meaning those national vanguard trends that had arisen in the 1950s and that developed fully during the 1960s. Members of this group [...]

This article reports that the Mexican artists Alberto Gironella and Rufino Tamayo decided to support the position adopted by David Alfaro Siqueiros, as regards his decision not to attend the São Paulo Biennial, in a show of repudiation to the regime [...]

The Argentine art critic, Raquel Tibol, interviewed three painters, asking them for their opinions about the organization of the first Bienal Interamericana de Pintura y Grabado [Inter-American Biennial of Painting and Printmaking]. In order to have [...]

To the critic Antonio Rodríguez, the decadence of Mexican painting was based on an abandoning of ideological stances and a distancing from the social problems of humanity. The blame could mainly be laid at the door of the abstract painters who had [...]

Elena Poniatowska spent time gathering opinions on the Inter-American Biennial of Painting and Printmaking. According to Octavio Paz, the four great masters of painting were Carlos Mérida, Rufino Tamayo, Wilfredo Lam, and Roberto Matta; he felt that [...]

In this interview, David Alfaro Siqueiros expressed his views on the Biennial. He began by critiquing the paintings exhibited by the United States, and warned Latin American painters against imitating hybrid ideas that made no sense, such as Tachisme [...]

In this book, Margarita Nelken, a Spanish critic based in Mexico, discusses the development of Expressionism in Mexican art. She argues that Mexican Expressionism has a native origin that, with the passage of time, has been enriched by the different [...]