Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

Guy Brett analyzes the relief carvings on wood done by Sérgio [de] Camargo in the 1960s, and comments on the materials, light, and surface. He mentions the artist’s use of wooden cylinders in a geometric as well as an organic sense, relating them [...]

British critic Guy Brett sets forth an approximate chronology of his personal contact with Brazilian art between the 1964 and 2005, and considers the importance of that contact with Brazilian creators. During the earlier years, his contacts were with [...]

This text dealing with the exhibition O Brasil dos Viajantes analyzes the possibility of conceiving of Brazilian identity from a foreign perspective. According to the text, the aim of the exhibition is to compose history from diverse points of view [...]

The introduction/preface written by Ricardo Basbaum explains the collection of texts with a range of perspectives, from critics, artists, art researchers, and historians (many published earlier, and some out of circulation). His purpose was to [...]

While this analysis of contemporary Brazilian art by Otília Arantes focuses on the period that spans from 1965 to 1969, it comments as well on the fifties, seventies, and eighties. For the sixties generation, Arantes argues, making art meant [...]

According to Sônia Salzstein, the author of this review, Carlos Fajardo alternates between working [in the media of] painting and sculpture. The fundamental concerns of the work revolve around the surface and the tension between matter and time. [...]

Writer and essayist Benedito Nunes, who was associated with the Universidade Federal do Pará (UFPa), wrote this text about an exhibition of work by Emmanuel Nassar. In it, he argues that twentieth-century painting entails two major gestures: a [...]

According to Ivo Mesquita, it is due to political-economic changes and social crises in Brazil—the results of a colonial project—that the country is influenced by the non-optimistic perspectives that have taken hold in the rest of the world with [...]

To the critic and curator Ivo Mesquita, the theme of Mônica Nador’s paintings on exhibit at the Galeria Luisa Strina, in São Paulo (1994), includes both a decorative and a spiritual component. Her works comment on “The obsolescence of the [...]

Art critic Paulo Herkenhoff argues that Adriana Varejão’s painting references historical frameworks that contain indelible traits of Brazilian colonial culture and art. Her work is bound to the baroque of Minas Gerais, and to the rococo, not by [...]

In this essay, the poet Haroldo de Campos—the pillar of the Concrete poetry movement—writes on the work of the painter José Roberto Aguilar. In a text written in poetic prose, he establishes the comparison between his pictorial perception to [...]

In this text, Guy Brett discusses work by Mira Schendel. Brett focuses on her drawings from the sixties, including the 1966 series entitled Droguinhas—a word made up by the artist’s daughter, Ada, to refer to “little nothings” or worthless [...]

Guy Brett provides an analysis of the Droguinhas series by Mira Schendel. The name of the series is a word that the artist’s daughter, Ada, made up to refer to “little nothings” or worthless things. Brett considers the work a challenge to the [...]

In this 1967 text, the French art critic and writer Jean Clay analyzes the work of the sculptor Sérgio Camargo. He suggests two ways of interpreting the work of the Brazilian artist: on the one hand, that of surfaces and volume as modulations, and, [...]

In 1961, the magazine ARTnews sent critic Harold Rosenberg to São Paulo to cover the opening of the VI São Paulo Biennial, which had been postponed due to the sudden resignation of Brazilian President Jânio Quadros a few months earlier. In this [...]

The writers set forth a range of photographic work produced in the north-Brazilian State of Pará. They describe photographs starting with the early records taken by 19th century travelers (undoubtedly a highly important research source), through [...]

In this text, art critic Radha Abramo takes stock of realism and metaphor in relation to wretchedness in the work of Brazilian visual artist Gontran Guanaes Netto. She underscores the link between Guanaes Netto’s production and a national type, a [...]

This text by the art critic Aracy Amaral (b. 1930) describes an exhibition of work by Latin American artists living in Paris, which she curated at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo (MAC-USP) in 1985. The objective of this [...]

In this text, curator Edna Prometheu explains that Sala Escura da Tortura is a new staging of the exhibition that took place at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1973—at a time when a large number of Brazilian exiles from the [...]

This article describes Sala Negra da Tortura, the 1973 exhibition presented by the Grupo Denúncia at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris; the exhibition then traveled to other European cities where Amnesty International was organizing sessions on [...]

This essay is about a conversation [in French] between the artists Henri Cueco and Gontran Guanaes Netto, in which Cueco analyzes Guanaes Netto’s drawing, describing its testimonial nature as the result of an unspoken agreement between his painting [...]

Kinetic artist Julio Le Parc considers the work of Gontran [Guanaes] Netto, from Paris, the city where he resides. He begins with an analysis of a context in which artists seek individual recognition, which in Le Parc’s view is a situation that [...]

Curator Agnaldo Farias makes use of the image suggested in the story “A terceira margem do rio,” by João Guimarães Rosa. He applies this image to a discussion of the issues that affected the selection of works to represent Brazil in the [...]

The artist Samson Flexor, after mentioning a few of the participants of the third Bienal do Museu de Arte Moderna (1955) who up until then were considered figurative artists, maintains that they have already joined a new movement that represents “a [...]

The curators of the twentieth São Paulo Biennial who wrote this text look to Susan Sontag’s essay “Against Interpretation” to illustrate the continuity of modernism in the work of major artists from a number of countries. The aim of this [...]

Using her personal annotations written during a tour of the First São Paulo Biennial (1951) as a starting point, the author transcribes some of the opinions of art critics of diverse nationalities regarding the definitions of “abstraction” and [...]

Adriano Pedrosa, curator of the segment “Arte Contemporânea Brasileira” in the 24th International Biennial of São Paulo (1998), states that the name of the exhibition he is curating raises the following question: “What art is (not) [...]

In this text, professor Gilda Mello e Souza discusses the contribution that the work of Jean Maugüé, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Roger Bastide—three French academics—made to the early stages of the Universidade de São Paulo (USP) founded in 1934 [...]

Mário de Andrade was a staunch supporter of “Brazilianizing literature and music with injections of the art of the people,” a strategy he thought would narrow the gap between high and popular art by incorporating oral literature into the written [...]

Pietro Maria Bardi lists four factors that should be considered as part of a complete overhaul that would make the Bienal de São Paulo comparable to the Biennale di Venezia: 1) Do not send an official invitation to the governments of the various [...]

Mário Schenberg praised the organization of the Ninth São Paulo Biennial [1967] for understanding “this moment of extraordinary activity and profound renewal in Brazilian art.” His praise was based on the priority given to innovative works, [...]

This was the official introduction to the Fourteenth São Paulo International Biennial, an exhibition that paid tribute with great fanfare to the founder, Francisco Matarazzo Sobrinho. As of the formation of a Conselho de Arte e Cultura (CAC), the [...]

This newspaper article remarks on the performance of art critic Mário Pedrosa from the time he was named the director of the Museu de Arte Moderna (MAM) and of the VI São Paulo Biennial. Pedrosa had returned from a long trip to Europe and the [...]

This commentary by Mário Pedrosa centers on the large audiences that admired and interacted with the works exhibited at the IX São Paulo Biennial (1969). He states that: “art has ceased to be that distant and humorless thing, that terribly [...]

Sheila Leirner, the curator of the Eighteenth São Paulo International Biennial [1985], introduced her curatorial model based on “a universalist vision and the abolition of borders in time and space.” She expected that as well as the new media [...]

The controversial author Décio Pignatari visited the IX International Biennial of São Paulo in 1967, which inspired him to write a brief overview on the subject of “anti-art.” In one of his brazen statements he claims that “the Biennale is [...]

Undermining the guidelines of the exhibition Universalis: a desmaterialização da arte (XXIII São Paulo Biennial, 1996), Puerto Rican curator Mari Carmen Ramírez explains the contrarian concept of the “re-materialização” of art which, in her [...]

In this text, Nelson Aguilar, chief curator of the XXIII São Paulo Biennial (1996), justifies his choice of the theme Universalis: a desmaterialização da arte for the event. He argues that the perseverance of art at the end of the second [...]

Curator Nelson Aguilar asserts that the 22nd São Paulo Biennial (1994) would place emphasis on the question of the support. Since the fifties, he claims, Brazilian artists “increasingly showed reluctance to limit themselves to […] that [...]

In this essay, the chief curator of the twenty-first Bienal de São Paulo, João Cândido Galvão, explains the very ambiguous criteria he used for the selection of works: “man.” In his opinion, art does not exist without “man” at its center [...]

In this critical overview of the work of Farnese de Andrade—an artist from Minas Gerais—Arlindo Daibert examines the origins and sources of production that ceaselessly attempt to combine opposing elements. In his text, Daibert pays particular [...]

In this presentation of an exhibition of work by Rosana Paulino held in 1997, art critic Aracy Amaral places emphasis on innovative features of Paulino’s work that mark a break with the Brazilian art scene of the time. She specifically mentions [...]

Jacob Klintowitz, the author of this text, mocks the boycott of the São Paulo Biennial since many of the countries participating in it have committed countless “international sins” in his view. He states that he does not support any form of [...]

The curator Walter Zanini presents a proposal for the XVI Bienal de São Paulo that calls for significant changes in how the event is organized, suggesting that artists should be grouped in terms of artistic languages instead of perpetuating the [...]

Geraldo Ferraz comments on the fact that art critics were impatient to know whether or not the seventh Bienal de São Paulo (1963) had brought figurative art “back.” According to the critic Jacô Klintowitz, the question of whether their art will [...]

The writer and art critic Geraldo Ferraz discusses the boycott of the tenth Bienal de São Paulo (1969), noting that the artists’ refusal to participate in the international exhibition would cause irreparable damage to the event. He calls the [...]

In this article, the journalist Arnaldo Pedroso d’Horta describes the boycott against the tenth Bienal de São Paulo (1969), sparked by the Brazilian military regime’s rejection of one of the curators in the French delegation, followed by the [...]

As artistic director of the sixth biennial, Mário Pedrosa presents his general idea about the exhibition, commenting on the practice started in the second biennial (1953−54) to hold exhibitions “with a historical and curatorial stamp.” As this [...]

In this text, curator Moacir dos Anjos analyzes the global conditions transforming contemporary artistic production. Mondialisation, he argues, entails rupture in the traditional associations between place, culture, and identity, ushering in [...]

This account of the disbandment of the Grupo Rex asserts that the primordial aim of the São Paulo-based group was to say things that had never been said before, to criticize attitudes beset with bad faith, and to encourage the work of young [...]