Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

This is an editorial note appearing in the magazine NÚMERO written in 1949 on occasion of the death of Joaquín Torres García that same year and in commemoration of the bicentennial of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s death. The note stressed the [...]

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. [...]

This unsigned article is an editorial for the magazine El Mate, published by the Grupo Toledo Chico. It commemorates the February 1929 death of Rafael Barradas, an artist who lived in Spain for years. The article points out the merits of the [...]

This essay describes the merits of Chilean-Uruguayan artist Felipe Seade, an advocate of social realism, and harshly criticizes all of those who hindered his career. The frictions between practitioners of social realism and those who disdained it on [...]

This article has a title as well as a subtitle: “Gego: The Great Weaver is Gone. The Winner of the National Visual Arts Prize 1979 Died Yesterday in Caracas.” The writer and arts journalist Eloi Yagüe Jarque made this written tribute to Gego [...]

In this newspaper article, Winston Orrillo announces the death of the painter Alicia Bustamante, and above all, acknowledges her contributions to a greater appreciation for traditional Peruvian art. She traveled all over the country collecting work [...]

This article by Colombian cultural journalist José Hernández reports the unexpected death of Colombian painter Antonio Barrera. It includes sections of an unpublished interview with Barrera that Hernández had written after visiting his apartment [...]

This brief obituary was written by the historian Daniel Arias Argáez following the death of the artist Ricardo Moros Urbina. It includes a short but detailed biographical profile that mentions Moros Urbina’s art studies at the Escuela de Bellas [...]

This one-page article addresses the recent death of Colombian artist Francisco Antonio Cano. Although it is an obituary, the text presents keys to understanding Cano’s final years and how the myth surrounding his figure as an academic artist was [...]

This document, published on Thursday, May 26, 1998, in the Bogotá newspaper El Tiempo, is a short article lamenting the death (two days earlier) of the artist Álvaro Herazo, at forty-six years of age as a result of a diabetic coma. At the time of [...]

In a letter to his Puerto Rican colleague Lorenzo Homar, Colombian artist Pedro Alcántara expresses his outrage at the death of Chilean President Salvador Allende during the attack on the Palacio de La Moneda by military forces staging a coup d'é [...]

In this essay, art historian Sybil Venegas traces the history of the Day of the Dead rituals from their roots in ancient Mexico to the twentieth-century revival and reinvention in Aztlan, the southwestern part of the United States. The evolution of [...]

In this article, the author Icleia Borsa Cattani discusses her opinion that a particular artistic process is an intrinsic aspect of modernity: repetition. She analyzes the portrayal of the human body in the works of Frida Kahlo, Ismael Nery, and [...]

This article, dated October 14, 1981, describes the death and burial of Antonio Berni, the artist, and mentions the official visitors at his funeral service [...]

In this article, the painter Gabriel Fernández Ledesma traces the history of European funerary traditions during the colonial period. He explores “The Triumph of Death” and its portrayal on playing cards and in the theater, discussing its [...]

According to Max Aub, by the time Remedios Varo died she had become one of the most surprising painters of her time, whose work was distinguished by a timeless quality. In Aub’s opinion, Varo’s painting expressed a struggle between good and evil [...]

Alfonso de Neuvillate reviews the life and work of Remedios Varo, in a tribute to the Spanish painter who had died a few days earlier. Neuvillate believed that Varo, an exponent of Surrealism, had long since staked out an important space in the [...]

In this article, Luis Cardoza y Aragón reviews the events of 1957, and laments the deaths of Diego Rivera and Miguel Covarrubias. He lists the various exhibitions taking place in Mexico City, including different murals, such as the Fanny Ravel in [...]

The critic Antonio Rodríguez sings praise for the life and work of Frida Kahlo in this posthumous tribute. He reviews the salient events of her career, stressing the martyrdom that haunted her work with a mood of constant struggle. Rodríguez refers [...]

On the occasion of Frances Toor’s death, Diego Rivera, who was a friend and collaborator of Toor’s, dedicated an article in remembrance of the fundamental role that the American writer and editor played in the dissemination of Mexican art, in [...]

This article conveys the opinions expressed by a variety of institutions in response to José Vasconcelos’ resignation in late 1923 as a result of the crimes committed a few days earlier, particularly the death of Francisco Field Jurado, the [...]

In this obituary from September 1959, the critic Aldo Pellegrini makes known the suicide of Wolfgang Paalen in Mexico City. Pellegrini bitterly laments the obscurity of this artist’s work and remembers with admiration not only his artistic career, [...]