Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

Uruguayan essayist, historian, and critic Alberto Zum Felde sums up his position on the possible origin of a culture unique to the South American continent. He looks to two major influences: Spanish culture since the time of colonization and French [...]

Nicolás Olivari puts forward that for them, members of the N. S. [the new sensibility] of Argentina, the young vanguard, Spain does not entail any intellectual interest. In his opinion, it’s not even possible to match the works by the new [...]

“Máscara” [Mask] was the inspired piece about Julio Ruelas written by the poet Amado Nervo, who informed the readers of Revista Moderna [Modern Magazine] that ever since the periodical had been publishing vignettes and illustrations by Ruelas, [...]

In this brief essay, Gabriela Mistral makes a cultural reconstruction of the images of America, a “terrestrial Valkyrie,” that includes the social conflicts at the time, the responsibility of its inhabitants to see about the future of their [...]

In this final part of his lengthy essay, Juan Larrea acknowledges the reality of the Americas as the high point of the Surrealist movement. He states: “as the West flounders in the gloom, the tides of history [have] carried several representative [...]

Luis Mario Schneider carried out the first documented study on Etridentismo; he interviewed the members of the group and thoroughly examined the archives of this 1920s avant-garde movement. Although the group left some accounts to history, this was [...]

Rubén Darío kept in close contact with the Mexican artists settled in Paris, such as Alfredo Ramos Martínez, Roberto Montenegro, Ángel Zárraga, Diego Rivera, and Dr. Atl. This statement by Ernesto Mejía Sánchez documents the exchanges with the [...]

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 [...]

This text extols the Ultraist aesthetic above that of the current literature; represented by the Rubenists on one side, who “only occupy themselves by organizing and reorganizing ornamental junk […] that they inherited from Góngora,” and “ [...]

Jorge Luis Borges declared that the “newest aesthetic,” Ultraism, is the poetic alternative to “the prevailing Rubenism and Anecdotalism.” He remarked that one of the harbingers of these previous movements’ terminal state is that their own [...]

In this essay, Leopoldo Lugones defines what he understands to be poetry: “love”, “verse”, “rhyme”, “[expression] of beauty”, and at the same time criticizes the Ultraist aesthetic [...]