Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

This is an analytical essay in which Edgar Bayley affirms the autonomy of the pictorial image. Based on that opinion, widely held among his generation, he champions “invention” over symbolism, expressionism, and romanticism [...]

Written in Paris on April 29, 1918, this letter from sculptor Marco Tobón Mejía to his friend Carlos E. Restrepo reveals the nature of the relationship between the Colombian artist and one of the most important representatives of Colombia’s [...]

An analytical piece in which Carmelo Arden Quin uses dialectical materialism to explain the transition from representation to the phase of “invention” and pure creation in art [...]

During the 1940s, Carlos Mérida’s reflections tend toward abstract art and its protagonists. In this article, the painter states that for those who are not familiar with abstract painting, a symbolic form of interpretation is the most logical. [...]

In this lengthy article, Fausto Ramírez discusses the importance of paying attention to the creative work of men of art and science as one contemplates the future of the world, as was done at the New School for Social Research (1930). This topic was [...]

In this essay Pedro Emilio Coll replies to Latin American critics who, “in the name of tradition and good sense” deplore what they describe as decadent representatives of the new movements that took root in the Americas in the early twentieth [...]

The essay “El drama de la pintura” is the first chapter of the book Teseo, Discusión estética y ejemplos, written by Eduardo Dieste, the Uruguayan essayist and playwright. In 1923, he helped to establish the group Teseo. In the before mentioned [...]

In this essay, Amalia Mesa-Bains provides an analysis of the sculptural works by Uruguayan-born artist, Rimer Cardillo. Her analysis insists on the coexistence of multiple meanings, while also attempting to identify the personal, cultural, and [...]

The Colombian curator and art critic Eduardo Serrano introduced the retrospective exhibition Manolo Vellojín. Dos décadas (1987) at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Bogotá. In this exhibition, the writer points out three “sources” of Abstract art [...]

In this document Fernán Feliz de Amadora, a writer from Argentina, writes about the possible association of painter Roberto Montenegro and the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío. To him, the painter follows one of the newest trends in the art field, that [...]

In connection with the exhibition Antología del desarraigo (1992), the curator Katherine Chacón writes about the career of the Venezuelan mixed-media artist, Ángel Vivas Arias. The writer highlights the duality of mysticism and nature evident [...]