Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

Written in the form of a letter, this article discusses the composition of the Comisión Nacional de Bellas Artes, the agency charged with organizing and operating the first Salón Nacional de Artes Plásticas, which includes selecting jurors to [...]

On the occasion of a tribute to Mexico, Joaquín Torres García gives a talk at the Ateneo de Montevideo about the major Mexican artists. He mentions the group of artists who are commonly referred to as “Los Tres Grandes:” David Alfaro Siqueiros [...]

José María Podestá, the writer, art critic, and movie buff, reviews the artists who were part of the Primer Salón Independiente de Artes Plásticas that took place in August 1937 at the Ateneo de Montevideo. This event was, in fact, represented [...]

This is the public statement made by Uruguayan artists who rejected the invitation to submit their works to the Primer Salón Nacional de Bellas Artes and called for an exhibition that had nothing to do with the government. Their main argument was [...]

This review focuses on the harsh critiques leveled against the Uruguayan government and its arts institutions, which are considered to have failed in their attempts to create events that achieved the stated objectives. Some of those objectives are [...]

Visual artists who were members of the AIAPE produced a list of their demands that reflect the aspirations they had expressed some years earlier. These include a demand that juries selected to judge art competitions should include artists, an [...]

This article from the AIAPE’s magazine includes several critiques of the decisions taken by the Minister for Public Education, Eduardo Víctor Haedo and the Comisión Nacional de Bellas Artes. The decisions are considered highly inappropriate since [...]

This document reports on the founding of the FEPU (Federación de Estudiantes Plásticos del Uruguay). The report confirms the backing that the Federation enjoys from other visual artists and institutions such as the AIAPE (Agrupación de [...]

This exhibition was organized by a group of independent artists associated with the AIAPE (Agrupación de Artistas, Intelectuales, Periodistas y Escritores) working with a recently created State agency, the Comisión Municipal de Cultura. All parties [...]

The AIAPE’s magazine published this report on the activities of Olimpia Torres, Joaquín Torres García’s daughter. In late 1936, after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Olimpia was in Madrid with her husband, the Spanish sculptor Díaz [...]

This is a report on the founding of the new AAP (Asociación de Artistas Plásticos) del Uruguay, the association of artists who were involved in and supported the government’s Primer Salón Nacional de Bellas Artes (1937). The disagreement over [...]

The painter Carmelo de Arzadun wrote this critical review of the exhibitions held in Uruguay from 1936 to 1939, a period that was defined by effervescent creativity and a lively calendar of artistic events. The exhibition of works by French artists, [...]

This article reveals the bonds that existed between the two AIAPE organizations in the Río de la Plata region (in Montevideo and Buenos Aires). This relationship helped to foster gatherings and exhibitions of works by artists with similar aesthetic [...]

In the early twentieth century, Europe—which had, until that time, been Latin America’s cultural referent par excellence—was deeply immersed in a devastating socio-economic crisis brought about as a result of the First World War. Fascism and [...]

The article by Ibáñez, “La ética social del artista,” was part of a discussion between the author and Rodney Arismendi, another contributor to AIAPE magazine. They refer to literature to speak about such matters as the “quality,” “ [...]

The (unknown) author of this article reports and comments on the exhibition of works by the Argentinian painter, printmaker, and muralist Demetrio Urruchúa at the Ateneo de Montevideo. The article specifically mentions certain iconographic aspects [...]

This essay notes the bonds of friendship and ideological affinity that existed between the multifaceted Antonio Berni, whose paintings are steeped in realism and social awareness, and his fellow travelers in Uruguay. This friendship between the AIAPE [...]

In this article, written for the magazine published by the AIAPE (Agrupación de Intelectuales, Artistas, Periodistas, Escritores), Sofía Arzarello recalls the art historian and theorist Elie Faure’s influential work, shortly before his death. [...]

On the occasion of Bernabé Michelena’s exhibition at the Subte de Montevideo (1939), Emilio Oribe, the writer and co-founder of the AIAPE (Agrupación de Intelectuales, Artistas, Periodistas y Escritores), conducted a lecture in which he discussed [...]

Joaquín Torres García discusses the Uruguayan painter Carmelo de Arzadun’s change of course. Writing in a style that is rife with irony and veiled criticism of the local milieu, Torres García singles out Arzadun for having opted for [...]

The author discusses Arte simple, the recently published book by Cipriano Santiago Vitureira. The Uruguayan columnist notes Vitureira’s poetic sensitivity, and expresses his conviction that art can drive social change. Atahualpa del Cioppo does not [...]

In the 1930s the ideological frictions sparked in intellectual circles by the dictatorial government of Gabriel Terra were not just a local problem; they were a reflection of the global conflict presaged by the unstoppable advance of fascism, the [...]

This essay by Atahualpa Del Cioppo, the art critic and theater director, was written as a tribute to the Uruguayan printmaker Leandro Castellanos Balparda on the occasion of the latter’s exhibition at “Amigos del Arte” in Montevideo. [...]

The essay “Bernabé Michelena y la claridad solidaria” is the third chapter of the book Arte Simple, published in 1937 by the Uruguayan essayist Cipriano S. Vitureira. The author evaluates the sculptural work of Michelena at a time when the [...]

This critical essay by Cipriano Vitureira on the artist Pedro Figari and his relationship with the notion of the “native” in the context of Uruguay, digresses from the local critique that assessed his work as being made by one of the “first [...]

The critic Cipriano Vitureira analyzes the landscapes of the Lunas series by José Cuneo, highlighting his treatment of color, in particular the handling of light and glare. He mentions the Uruguayan European artistic development and his ability in [...]

This essay deals with the recurrent theme of Uruguayan art since the nineteenth century, which had continually developed different technical resolutions over time. This critical essay by Vitureira treats the landscape in the context of human [...]

Chapter five of the book Arte simple, published in Montevideo (1937) by Cipriano Santiago Vitureira, focuses on Constructivist art and the unquestionable contributions by Joaquín Torres García. The author values the multifaceted artist’s return [...]

The first chapter of the book Arte Simple (1937) by Cipriano Vitureira focuses on a period in the work of Rafael Barradas in which he concentrated on representations of archetypical country figures and/or workers. The series is known as Los Magní [...]

In this article, Luis Eduardo Pombo reveals himself as the first Uruguayan art critic to ideologically wrap himself in the aesthetics of David Alfaro Siqueiros. Generally, even the commentaries made by those intellectuals closest to the Mexican [...]

The declaration of principles of the Visual Arts Union were in fact taken and inscribed from the general declaration of the C.T.I.U. (Confederación de Trabajadores Intelectuales del Uruguay [Confederation of Intellectual Workers of Uruguay]). This [...]

The Union of Visual Artists was part of the structure of the C.T.I.U. (Confederación de Trabajadores Intelectuales del Uruguay [Confederation of Intellectual Workers of Uruguay]) federation created in Montevideo at the request of David Alfaro [...]

By illustrating the work of the Peruvian artist Cossio del Pomar, the author exposes his concept of the artist as “the laborer of the idea,” a cultural humanistic model and an agent in pursuit of new forms of social consciousness. In a way, this [...]

According to the Uruguayan artist Julio Verdié—a member of the board of directors of the C.T.I.U. (Confederación de Trabajadores Intelectuales delUruguay [Confederation of Intellectual Workers of Uruguay]) founded in Montevideo in 1933, the [...]

In this essay that originated from within the C.T.I.U. (Confederación de Trabajadores Intelectuales del Uruguay), the case was taken of a “sample of aspirants to artistic wages in 1933” with the intent to demonstrate the crisis in the quality of [...]

In this essay, the students at the Montevideo Círculo de Bellas Artes vilify the critical situation affecting the institution due to cuts in state subsidies. The publication Movimiento incited the students to fight for restoring quality in the [...]

In this article, Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros explains his vision of art history which, in his view, wavers between moments of socialization (or social integration) and moments of individualism (or decadence). It is on those grounds that [...]

In his famous “Manifiesto 1,” Joaquín Torres García repudiates the article published in the Confederación de Trabajadores Intelectuales del Uruguay’s journal Movimiento. Torres García’s text, in turn, occasioned “Contestando a Torres [...]

In 1933, Norberto Berdía compared David Alfaro Siqueiros’s visit to Montevideo with the return to Uruguay, in 1934, of artist Joaquín Torres García. In Berdía’s view, the two men represent diametrical positions: Torres García personifies “ [...]

“En la sociedad burguesa ganan los banqueros y pierden los artistas” (In Bourgeois Society, Bankers Win and Artists Lose) is the name of an article by Norberto Berdía on painter Joaquín Torres García. More specifically, the text discusses how [...]

This document invites the Unión de Artistas Plásticos (UAP), a division of the Confederación de Trabajadores Intelectuales del Uruguay (C.T.I.U.), to the Exposición Internacional de Artes Plásticas Revolucionarias, an event organized by the [...]

This article discusses the rise of universities of popular education in a situation of political and social crisis in the Oriental Republic of Uruguay. The idea of the popular university looks to experiences in Latin America starting in the late [...]

This document is a letter from a group of Uruguayan intellectuals—among them eminent visual artists like Guillermo Laborde, Bernabé Michelena, Domingo Bazzurro, and Carlos Prevosti— to President Franklin D. Roosevelt joining in the international [...]

Entitled “La función social del arte,” this article discusses one of the final lectures given by philosopher Carlos Vaz Ferreira. In the lecture, Vaz Ferreira describes the figure of an intellectual not committed to the social and political [...]

This article advocates “social art” in Uruguay in the framework of the ideological battle between capitalist society and the Soviet Communist regime. The author clearly supports the latter position when he asserts that not even the members of the [...]

This article by Francisco R. Pintos is a response to the one by Juvenal Ortiz Saralegui published in the previous issue of Movimiento journal. Whereas Ortiz Saralegui was conciliatory in his approach to the problem of the relationship between “pure [...]

This article by Juvenal Ortiz Saralegui formed part of the early debates in the leftist press in Uruguay on the relationship between art and politics, debates that largely ensued in the publication of the Confederación de Trabajadores Intelectuales [...]

This essay analyzes the posture taken by the Uruguayan intellectuals when faced with the dictatorship of Gabriel Terra (1931−38). This 1933 coup d’état provoked a shift in the political stance of the intellectuals and particularly of the [...]

A manifesto of sorts, this article expands on the statement of principles voiced by the Confederación de Trabajadores Intelectuales del Uruguay (CTIU) in its first publication, the journal Aportación. The text is an extended exposition of the [...]

This article by Juvenal Ortiz Saralegui formed part of a series published in Movimiento journal—the publication of the Confederación de Trabajadores Intelectuales del Uruguay (CTIU)—that attempted to formulate a “revolutionary art” that did [...]