Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

In this text, writer Juan Ríos remarks on the Surrealist exhibition held at the Galería de Lima in July 1954. In his view, Surrealism is outdated. Initially an iconoclastic movement, it has, over the course of several decades that witnessed a [...]

In this text, Luis Miró Quesada Garland enumerates the main formal virtues of the works in the exhibition of Surrealism held at the Galería de Lima in July 1954. In his view, the show reflects none of the movement’s initial aggressiveness in [...]

In his weekly column in the El Comercio newspaper, Luis Miró Quesada Garland discusses the relationship between ethics and art as part of the debate prompted by the survey about “classical” painting and “modern” painting that was sponsored [...]

In this article, the Colombian writer and critic Luis Vidales evaluates aesthetic methods based on spiritual causality, as distinct from positivist doctrines that seek causality in external phenomena. He suggests that style—that is, the technical [...]

Poet and occasional art critic Jorge Gaitán Durán asserts that the show Pintores colombianos jóvenes [Young Colombian Painters] was historically significant because it was the first salon of young artists held in Colombia. He states that the event [...]

In this article César Rengifo explains why the art world is disappointed in abstract formalism, and notes a resurgence of the realist movement. He refers to statements made or positions taken by artists such as Salvador Dalí, Giorgio de Chirico, [...]

This essay examines the impact of Roberto Matta’s presence in the United States during 1939–1948, when, as part of a Surrealist cohort of émigrés, he established temporary residence in New York to escape the war in Europe. The authors [...]

In this long, interesting article, José Revueltas ponders the nature of words, how they are used and how, over time, their meaning changes. As an example, he mentions the expression “épater le bourgeois” [to frighten the bourgeois] that was in [...]

Antonio Berni writes about developments in modern art and of formalism in art. He analyzes the artists who adhere to Nuevo Realismo [New Realism] and discusses the meaning of that movement [...]

This article reviews and analyzes the collection of the Museum of Modern Art [MoMA] in New York, the Whitney Museum and three exhibitions: Salvador Dalí, Roberto Matta and Jean Dubuffet, all of them simultaneously presented in the same city. With [...]

This article deals with the work of the different Spanish artists that Damián Bayón had the opportunity to analyze during his stay in Barcelona, where he was reporting for Ver y estimar. He covered the sets and costumes that Salvador Dalí designed [...]

Oswald de Andrade was invited by the American Contemporary Arts to give this lecture in São Paulo in 1944, in which he discusses the two characters he created for a series of novels (that was never completed) entitled Marco Zero. He used these [...]

Un chien andalou [Un perro andaluz (1929) [An Andalusian Dog]—a film directed by Luis Buñuel, with a script written by Buñuel and Salvador Dalí—was presented in Mexico nine years after it was shot. Efraín Huerta, a writer by trade and an [...]

Letras de México, the magazine directed by Octavio G. Barreda, devoted its May 1938 issue to André Breton and Surrealism. It published several of his essays: an excerpt of “Les vases communicantes” [Communicating Vessels], “Le merveilleux [...]

According to Rafael Heliodoro Valle, the distinguishing feature of the Surrealist movement is that it has “old roots” that set it apart from the rest of the avant-garde. And that, “Mexico, [which] is not a myth,” but has a mythical past has [...]

A short article by the Mexican poet Xavier Villaurrutia in which he announces the opening of a film club, “16 mm Cinema,” and the projection of the “sobrerrealista” [over-realist] film by Luis Buñuel, Un chien andalou [UnPerro Andaluz /An [...]

Juan Larrea, the Spanish writer living in exile in Mexico, refers to an article by André Breton (“Situación del surrealismo entre las dos guerras” [The State of Surrealism between the Two Wars]), in which the leader of the movement outlines a [...]

This valiant text discusses the inauguration of the Exposición Bienal Hispanoamericana (1951) [Hispano-American Biennial Exhibition] in Francisco Franco’s Madrid. It was organized by the Fascist government of the Caudillo por la Gracia de Dios to [...]

In this article, divided into eight sections, Wolfgang Paalen identifies the most representative image from a number of different periods, reviewing the Middle-Ages period, the Renaissance, and Modern times. He notes that, when faced with a radical [...]