Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

This is a satirical article about the Salão de ’31, in which Henrique Pongetti expresses his support for the Brazilian Salon. In his opinion, what has happened is that the conservative (academic) faction has retaken power, a situation he praises [...]

In this book the critic Lourival Gomes Machado discusses the origins and consequences in Brazil of the modernist movement, basing his arguments on the famous Semana de Arte Moderna of 1922 and the works of modernist artists. His goal is to ascertain [...]

This article is about the painter from Minas Gerais, Alberto da Veiga Guignard’s early years as an art professor in the city of Belo Horizonte. He taught a free course on painting and drawing, originally at the Parque Municipal and later at the [...]

In this essay, the well-known Argentinean critic Jorge Romero Brest attempts to assess national problems as they were understood by the most famous Brazilian artists, touching on a raw nerve concerning the differences between the art produced in [...]

According to the poet and critic Ferreira Gullar, the essential problem concerning the “national” nature of art is directly related to the cultural dependence of the country. By way of explanation, he suggests that this question would not arise [...]

This document is the response from a group of intellectuals who wrote a letter in support of a call by the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral—the pseudonym of the educator and diplomat Lucila Godoy Alcayaga—for a Continental Conference on Culture in [...]

This article is about the Salão Nacional de Belas Artes that was organized by the architect Lúcio Costa; it explains that the organizing committee decided that no submission would be rejected. This prompted the “old guard” artists to boycott [...]

This is a speech given by writer Aníbal Machado at the close of the Exposição de Arte Social, which he jointly organized with poet Álvaro Moreyra and artist Tomás Santa Rosa at the Clube de Cultura Moderna in Rio de Janeiro in 1935. Machado [...]

This essay was included in the catalogue for the Exposição de Pintura Brasileira held in London in 1944. Organized by the critic Rubén Navarra, the show presented a broad selection of Brazilian paintings that covered the transition from the 1930s [...]

In his essay, critic Sérgio Milliet analyzes the painting taking place in São Paulo at the end of the 1930s, with an eye toward two exhibitions: the first, at the II Salão de Maio and the other, at the Salão do Sindicato dos Artistas Plásticos ( [...]