Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

In his prologue to the catalogue for a show of the Taller Libre de Arte (TLA), Luis Berroterán asserts that the Liceo Fermín Toro played an important role in the origin of the TLA. He explains that the members of the TLA aspire to work with other [...]

This text underscores the originality, expression and strength of the works created at the Escuelas de Pintura al Aire Libre [Open-Air Schools of Painting], arguing that these qualities are the product of racial purity and that as mestizaje [racial [...]

This article challenges the arts teachings offered by Professor Cecilia Marcovich. In it, Hlito reproaches her not only for her reactionary revisionism but also for teaching that modern art ended with Cubism [...]

This text by Fermín Revueltas, the director of the Escuela al Aire Libre de Guadalupe Hidalgo [Open-Air School of Guadalupe Hidalgo], is very concise. He states that the school he directs teaches art methods so that works can be created to be both [...]

This text presents the Escuelas de Pintura al Aire Libre [Open-Air Schools of Painting] and its creative production as evidence that Mexican children have a natural artistic disposition. It also associates this disposition with their indigenous blood [...]

Critic Juan Calzadilla wrote this text on Venezuelan artist Braulio Salazar on the fiftieth anniversary of his first solo show. That exhibition, Calzadilla explains, took place at a moment when Salazar’s efforts as an artist and as an educator were [...]

Gego—who was an art teacher as well as an artist—wrote “The History of Art Schools” by hand in Spanish in around 1964. In it, she claims that that history is parallel to the creative development of an individual and of his specific works. [...]

This essay, written by Francisco Díaz de León, director of the Escuela de Pintura al Aire Libre [Open-Air Schools of Painting] in Tlalpan, explains that the Schools favor an aesthetic education and individual expression over technical education. He [...]

As the director of the Círculo de Bellas Artes School in Montevideo, painter Carlos María Herrera wrote this letter to Martín Lasala, the president of that institution’s board, with a number of proposals, chief among them was the elimination of [...]

This letter by Mariano Ibérico was written at the request of painter Antonino Espinosa Saldaña. More specifically, Ibérico was asked to share his opinion on the polemic surrounding the course on Incan art given at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas [...]

In this letter, the painter [and writer] Roubaix de l’Abrie Richey, known by the pseudonym, “Robo,” the husband of the Italian artist and photographer, Tina Modotti, writes to Edward Weston from Mexico City. The writer is visiting Mexico in [...]

Statement by a group of professors of their concern about the events that took place at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes Prilidiano Pueyrredón [Prilidiano Pueyrredón National School of Fine Arts] [ENBAPP] and the Escuela Nacional de Bellas [...]

This is the fourth chapter of En blanco y negro: Marta Traba en la televisión colombiana, 1954–1958 [In Black and White: Marta Traba on Colombian Television, 1954–1958], in which the author, the artist and researcher Nicolás Gómez Echeverri, [...]

The third treinta-treintista manifesto is a flyer written in opposition to the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes, its instruction methods, and the works produced at the school. Subdivided into eight points, the group’s statement describes the basic [...]

This manifesto from the Treinta-treintistas [¡30-30! mouvement] discusses the incorporation of new elements and announces the group’s purging and expulsion of old members, either for being neo-academics or for attempting to eliminate the [...]

The Venezuelan critic Roberto Guevara introduces the exhibition of works by the first group of artists to have graduated from CEGRA (Centro de Enseñanza Gráfica, Caracas). In his article, Guevara discusses art instruction and describes CEGRA as an [...]

The artist and Professor Tomás Maldonado detects positive qualities in popular design and mass communications, which he considers useful because they are the only means available that can satisfy the aesthetic needs of the people. In his opinion, an [...]

This text speaks of the evolution of sensorial perception and its relation to artistic expression. It proposes that the method of Adolfo Best Maugard be used in arts education because it would permit greater development and personal satisfaction [...]

The author, Augusto Aguirre Morales, questions the stance of painter Antonino Espinosa Saldaña, who does not believe Peruvian precolonial art is “art.” He challenges Espinosa’s premise that cultural differences among men are an obstacle to the [...]

The author, Antonino Espinosa Saldaña, proposes to replace the course name “Arte incaico” [Incan Art]—used by the ENBA beginning in 1930, with “Arqueología pre-incaica y su aplicación a las artes decorativas” [pre-Incan archeology and [...]

Emma McCall adapted Adolfo Best Maugard’s Método de Dibujo [Method of Drawing] to the U.S. cultural and educational milieu in order to take advantage of this art instruction system with U.S. children and young adults. As in the method proposed by [...]

This document analyzes the national repercussions that the Sindicato de Obreros Técnicos, Pintores y Escultores [SOTPE, Union of Technical Workers, Painters and Sculptors] had on an art scene that was then dominated by individualism. Siqueiros [...]

The synopsis and the annotations in English are coming soon.                                However, our bilingual readers can click on “Español” to access this information in Spanish [...]

According to this article, David Alfaro Siqueiros had just founded the Centro de Arte Realista [Center for Realist Art] that was intended to function as a “school” or “institute” in which research into techniques, pedagogical theory, geometry [...]

The article written by the researcher Pilar García de Germenos presents the cultural biography of Alfredo Ramos Martínez from 1910 to 1920, to help our understanding of the changes he implemented at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes. During [...]

The journalist Lenelina Delgado interviews the artist Alirio Palacios on the occasion of the crisis at the Centro INCE (Instituto Nacional de Cooperación Educativa) de Diseño (Caracas). As the instructor at the print shop at INCE, Palacios [...]

The Uruguayan painter Pedro Figari highlights the methods of teaching art to children in Mexico and its results, while appreciating the paintings exhibited at the Salón Amigos del Arte [Friends of Art] exhibition [...]

This text chronologically summarizes the conception, development and implementation of Best’s drafting method that culminated in a publication of it. The publication places it within the context of American ideas, celebrating its good judgment to [...]

This interesting article by the critic Okusai (the pseudonym of José Juan Tablada) reports on the two important art exhibitions held in Mexico in 1906: that of the magazine Savia Moderna [Modern Sap] and another of artists sponsored by the Mexican [...]

After criticizing the painters of the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria (ENP), the newspaper El Demócrata speaks of the triumphs Mexico achieved abroad, through singers, writers, and the architects during the Río de Janeiro Expo. These are our [...]

This essay is about the proposal of the author Gilberto Freyre about the need for teaching the sociology of art within a planned fine art curriculum, highlighting the importance of this and anthropology. In his opinion, one must try to understand a [...]

This article centers on two events: Orozco’s participation in the student exhibition at the Academia de Bellas Artes de San Carlos during the critical year of 1910 and his start as a caricaturist for opposition newspapers. The government planned a [...]

In this document, Ermilo Abreu Gómez reviews a book written by Antonio Luna Arroyo on the educational and cultural work of Narciso Bassols, who served as minister of Public Education at SEP (Secretaría de Educación Pública). In agreement with the [...]

In a brief speech, Antonio Caso, president of the Universidad Nacional de México, calls upon all men, from wherever they hail, to unite so that they can achieve the highest purposes of the Nation [...]

This is a letter published in the newspaper O Estado by the art critic Mário Baratta, written posthumously to the modernist poet Mário de Andrade, a year after his death. Baratta wanted to convey to the reader a hypothetical letter that he would [...]

This is an open letter written by David Alfaro Siqueiros to the Minister of Education Jaime Torres Bodet that explains the discrepancy between his humanistic, revolutionary discourse on the one hand, and the function of the Dirección de Educación [...]

The Cartilla de dibujo [Drawing Handbook], published in Bogotá in 1935 by the artist Miguel Díaz Vargas, was essentially created for teaching drawing in elementary school. The book’s structure is clearly pedagogical. It has a brief introduction [...]

In this text, Colombian writer Darío Jaramillo Agudelo voices his assessment of works included in an exhibition held at the Museo de Arte Moderno of Medellín in 1983. In his view, these works represent a new form of academicism in Colombia, one [...]

This article denounces the director of the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria, Ángel Vallarino, for suspending, by order of the Secretario de Educación Pública [Minister of Public Education], a group of students. The students were suspended for [...]

This article, written by Rafael Vera de Córdoba, director of the Escuela al Aire Libre [Open-Air School] in Xochimilco, provides a detailed description of the School’s teaching method. He refers to the students as children with no prior experience [...]

Article written by Ernesto More, signed with the pseudonym Jerome, in which he criticizes the direction adopted by the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes (ENBA), based in Lima, Peru. The author affirms that ENBA was created by an oligarchic government [...]

The book Conferencias sobre perspectiva y otros asuntos de dibujo, dictadas en el Colegio de San Bartolomé was published in 1881 by the artist and arts promoter Alberto Urdaneta. The publication begins with a quotation from Leonardo Da Vinci on [...]

Adolfo Best Maugard describes the nature of “authentic” Mexican art in order to define the essential features of the aesthetic idea based on a “grammar of drawing” that he proposes as the formula for what he sees as “current national art [...]

Carlos Mérida reviews the 1926 Exhibition of the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes. He comments that what stands out for its pictorial values, is the group of works presented by the Escuelas de Pintura al Aires Libre [Open-Air Painting Schools], but [...]

This text is a transcription of the letter that José Luis Cuevas sent to the Novedades editorial director, Fernando Benítez, and signed in New York on March 20, 1958. Here, the artist says he wished to respond to the “ire” that his previous [...]

Antonio Berni analyzes the educational system and technical instruction and discusses the creation of an art academy in Rosario; he relates those general matters to the specific characteristics of Rosario [...]

This decree issued by Francisco Javier Zaldúa (1811–1882), president of the United States of Colombia, enacts Law 67 of 1882, which authorizes the creation of the publically funded Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes in Bogotá. This government [...]

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 early 1929, García Moroto left Spain for New York, and later embarked for Cuba. Once in Cuba, he gave a lecture at the Spanish Embassy in Havana on November 6, 1929, on the occasion of the fifth exhibition of Cuba’s Escuelas de Acción Artí [...]

This text explains the theoretical basis for Best Maugard’s drafting method prior to the development of his manual explained in the following section. The theory is based on a platonic and universal perspective of art that expresses universal [...]