Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

In the judgment of the author, Mário Pedrosa, Brasilia is not “a synthesis of the arts,” it is a simple promise. For him, synthesis cannot be achieved through occasional collaborations but rather through a prominent practice that creates a “ [...]

In this text, Francisco Macêdo upholds collaboration between painters and sculptors in architectural projects, even though it is rare. Few resources are allocated to such projects because of real estate speculation or scant public resources. Macêdo [...]

The art critic Mário Barata believes that architecture should be seen as art, rather than being viewed purely in terms of its technical aspect, which would tend to group it with engineering rather than with art and, in fact, condemn it to be taught [...]

This speech by Mário Pedrosa regards the city of Brasilia, which he examines as a work of collective art, believing it presents an experimental and practical problem. He defends the connection it represents between utopia and planning, a profound ( [...]

Waldemar Cordeiro, one of the major figures in Brazilian visual arts, provides a broad overview of events in that field in the early 1950s, a key decade in the history of the arts in Brazil. Cordeiro lists the exhibitions, courses, and conferences [...]

This text discusses the artistic career of Luiz Sacilotto, beginning with his Expressionist works from the first years following World War II through his participation as a concrete artist in the XXVI Venice biennial in 1952. He is considered one of [...]

Mário Pedrosa analyzes the relationship that the works of Alexander Calder and other modern artists (especially Fernand Léger) have with industrial production. In his judgment, for Léger, machines are like an incomprehensible and frightening god; [...]

This text on the Fotoformas series created by Geraldo de Barros describes the inherent process of the “de-naturalization” of images proposed by the artist based on his photographic experiments. The author, Waldemar Cordeiro, states the proposal [...]

In this essay, the artist Flávio de Carvalho describes himself as a researcher into the “egocentric behavior of the world,” claiming that each social class usually wants to see itself portrayed in a straightforward manner. De Carvalho discusses [...]

This essay, written by Manuel Bandeira, is an assessment of the “Salão de 31” exhibition which also had been disparagingly tainted as the “Salão dos Tenentes” by another journalist, parodying the then Lieutenant Getúlio Vargas whom had [...]

In this essay, the poet and writer Manuel Bandeira writes a critical review of the Salão de 1928 exhibition organized by the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes. The review was written to declare his rejection of the academic painters and the faculty of [...]

This is a critique by Mário Pedrosa’s of the Primeira Missa no Brasil by Candido Portinari. Pedrosa compares this work to one by Victor Meirelles painted nearly one century earlier on the same topic. He writes that Portinari opts for a visual [...]

According to the Brazilian sociologist, Gilberto Freyre, Franciscan nominalism constituted the scientific training of Europeans, especially the Portuguese. This was particularly true with reference to the fifteenth-century discoveries that led to the [...]

According to the Brazilian sociologist, Gilberto Freyre, Franciscan nominalism constituted the scientific training of Europeans, especially the Portuguese. This was particularly true with reference to the fifteenth-century discoveries that led to the [...]

Orlando Teruz, a little-known painter, seeks to clarify a couple of terms and subjects that are frequently mentioned in discussions about current events: modern art and Brazilian art. As defined by Teruz, a work of modern art respects the traditional [...]

This document is a pamphlet promoting an event organized by the MSA (Manifestación Sintetista Actualizada) group. The stamp with the logo of the Café de Vicente suggests that the event would take place at that venue. The pamphlet includes the names [...]

This document is a press release announcing the first exhibition of the MSA (Manifestación Sintetista Actualizada) group, which operated out of a two-floor space (fourth and fifth floors) on San Francisco Street in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico. In [...]

In her essay, Professor Belluzzo discusses the intrinsic nature of modern Latin American avant-gardes. She explores the concept of “modernity” via the aesthetic reflection that inspired the historical avant-gardes in the early twentieth century. [...]

This essay suggests a reading of the works of Joaquín Torres García (1875–1949) and the contemporary Brazilian artist Anna Bella Geiger through the lens of their compositional approaches, both of which were related to the field of cartography. [...]

This text by British critic Guy Brett analyzes Latin American art movements of the fifties and sixties, specifically Kinetic art, Op art, and Concretism. Brett argues that those movements formulated a radical change on the level of theory and of [...]

The curatorial message of this exhibition is that the cultural patronage and aesthetic rejection of Latin American art (as a whole) no longer apply. As a historical-cultural construct, Latin America is an amalgam. The cultural miscegenation that took [...]

In her essay, María Angélica Melendi discusses how Latin America fits into artistic and cultural grand narratives (grand-récits). In her opinion, the art produced in Latin America seeks to insert itself into these narratives in two different ways [...]

This article stresses the need to establish the parameters of Latin American art events and think about the criteria used to judge them. It also discusses a question that defines the idea of “regionality,” a concept that is closely associated [...]

This essay by Frederico [de] Morais accepts as a given that the stigma of Latin American marginalization is due to its absence from the field of universal art or to its exclusion from metropolitan history and criticism of art. At the same time, some [...]

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 [...]

In this essay, the art critic Frederico Morais takes a new approach to Latin American Constructive art, describing the influence it has had on European and North American art as well as its relationship to Latin American culture and society. The term [...]

In this essay, Nelson Aguilar expresses his conviction that the question of “origin” has become a crucial issue for Latin American nations. The organization of an actual art exhibition—as in the 2003 Bienal do Mercosul in Porto Alegre, for [...]

In this essay, Annateresa Fabris addresses the issue of identity and its connections to the visual arts in Latin America. She refers to the concept of a “sense of place” in the development of the symbolic system that posits the idea of a “ [...]

This is a collection of sarcastic, occasionally humorous “definitions” of terms that help to understand Latin American art. Some are taken from research conducted into methods used in art production in the region (such as “cannibalism,” “ [...]

This essay by the Uruguayan architect and researcher Gabriel Peluffo Linari seeks to explain how aesthetic spaces (understood as symbolic construction zones) and political power spaces are connected in Latin American societies. The author sees a need [...]

In this essay, Mônica Zielinsky looks at the state of art at the end of the twentieth century, trying to identify the subjects that artists are using; that is, what they are looking for in their work, especially in Latin America. Her reflections are [...]

In the introduction to their anthology of essays, María Amalia Bulhões and Maria Lúcia Kern explain their goal of assembling works by thinkers who suggested alternatives to the problem of territorializing art practices in Latin America. This [...]

In this essay, the well-known Argentinean critic Jorge Romero Brest attempts to assess national problems as they were understood by the most famous Brazilian artists, touching on a raw nerve concerning the differences between the art produced in [...]

This article considers the work produced by the Lithuanian-born painter Lasar Segall as it explores the question of how “Africanism” became part of the local identity in Latin America following the emergence of modernism. Jorge Schwartz [...]

Pedrosa offers a proposal for future art biennials in Latin America, affirming that the continent’s unity is manifest through the misery of its peoples, in the mixture of cultures, and in oppression. In light of the dynamism of contemporary times, [...]

As President of the Artistic Solidarity Committee with Chile, Mário Pedrosa addresses then President Salvador Allende Gossens during the reception ceremony for the works that would make up the collection of the Museo de la Solidaridad in Santiago. [...]

Gaudêncio Fidelis sounds the alarm concerning the inadequacy of lectures that suggest that so-called “postcolonial societies” absolutely must take the necessary steps to catch up with modernity. Given the impossibility of shoehorning the [...]

According to the poet and critic Ferreira Gullar, the essential problem concerning the “national” nature of art is directly related to the cultural dependence of the country. By way of explanation, he suggests that this question would not arise [...]

In this article, Roberto Pontual ponders the concept of “discovery,” and discusses the development of a Latin American awareness that has been imposed from elsewhere. This external view establishes a sense of foreign domination that sees the [...]

In the words of Diego Rivera, certain artists made use of the concepts of jingoism and patriotism in a manner that led to the creation of a completely bourgeois art form. He sees, as an example, the ghost of Nazism and the persecution of the Jews in [...]

This is a book of poetry by the painter and draftsman Vicente do Rego Monteiro, a Brazilian who lived in France for years and produced work in a variety of fields. The theme of the book Quelques visages de Paris [Some Parisian Faces] takes the [...]

This book of poetry was published a year after the 1924 Pau-Brasil manifesto. The book is divided into several sections: “História do Brasil,” a parodic version of the discovery of the country; “Roteiro de Minas” [ [...]

Writer Carlos Drummond de Andrade wrote this tribute to Oswald de Andrade, “the poet of anthropophagy,” shortly after his death in 1954. According to the author, Oswald’s cultural philosophy based on the notion of “anthropophagy” puts forth [...]

This document claims that one of the fundamental tenets of the so-called Movimento Antropófago is a return to a “natural state” (understood as a kind of “beauty with natural features” that is ugly, rough, barbaric, and [...]

This is an interview with Mário de Andrade, who is referred to here as the “Daddy” of the new art movement that the newspaper calls “futuristic,” and that the São Paulo writer calls “modernist.” De Andrade prefers to reply to the [...]

In this letter to the painter Tarsila do Amaral, the writer Mário de Andrade urges her, Sérgio Milliet, and Oswald de Andrade—the “country folk” who have become futurists during their stay in Paris—to return to the “virgin jungle,” to [...]

This is a speech given by writer Aníbal Machado at the close of the Exposição de Arte Social, which he jointly organized with poet Álvaro Moreyra and artist Tomás Santa Rosa at the Clube de Cultura Moderna in Rio de Janeiro in 1935. Machado [...]

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 [...]

In this article, the artist and engineer Flávio de Carvalho outlines his thoughts on a “city of the future” inhabited by “naked men,” members of a society that has “stripped” itself of western taboos, and is finally, “free from [...]

When the painter Lasar Segall was interviewed by a São Paulo newspaper, he reviewed the SPAM (Sociedade Pró-Arte Moderna) association’s program to create an “environment [to foster] modern art” in the city of São Paulo. Segall discussed the [...]