Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

The author of this document, Edgar Varèse, criticizes the exploitation of folklore by “highbrow music.” He agrees that the indigenous spirit of ancient cultures can certainly be a source of inspiration for artists, but considers its manipulation [...]

The first Bienal Internacional de São Paulo at the Museu de Arte Moderna en São Paulo (MAM-SP) was presented in 1951; it was a groundbreaking event outside of Europe, attracting the sort of attention usually reserved for the Venice [...]

This manifesto is a call for (cultural) independence and was written from “a high Amazonian plateau,” in the state of Pará (where the author hailed from). The proclamation uses typical expressions and references the myths, customs, and [...]

This article compares the complex and contradictory movements in Brazilian visual arts between the late 1950s and the early 1990s. To the well-known Brazilian critic Rodrigo Naves, the disruption took place just when the work created by the most [...]

This is the introduction to a book that analyzes the formation of the arts system in Brazil from the late nineteenth century until the 1980s. In principle it discusses the development of the Brazilian art world from the country’s independence [...]

This is a news item about an exhibition of work by the artist Frans Krajcberg, held at the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro (MAM-Rio) in 1992. It also covers other similar exhibitions held in connection with the international event Eco-92 - [...]

In Sheila Leirner’s opinion, “reductive art” is an important factor in the moral compass of contemporary international artwork. In order to have its effect, the reductive approach would have to bring about a radical change in Brazilian art and [...]

In this article, the critic Sheila Leirner seeks to differentiate between marginal art, marginalized art, and art that is understood as marginalized by the artist who created it. In her opinion, there is a tendency to regard marginal art and artists [...]

In this essay about Frans Krajcberg—the Polish-born artist who lives in Brazil—the critic Roberto Pontual notes that an essential element in the artist’s work is the connection he makes between nature and art. Pontual, who wrote this essay on [...]

This text investigates several meanings of the concept “place” in art: space/representation, interval of meaning, installation space, institutional space, and sociocultural space, emotional, symbolic or utopian (where the artwork is executed and [...]

In this text, Icleia Borsa Cattani discusses the implications of globalization in contemporary art and its practice of separation, mentioning in passing the cultural consensus, the crisis in art, and the neutralization of criticism. Under such [...]

This text by Sônia Salzstein is an analysis of the changes in the appearance of Brazilian art starting in the 1950s. She believes that the cultural modernization launched in that decade had a utopian dimension, which lost ground to an [...]

In this article, Salzstein discusses how contemporary art takes its place on the international art stage, while analyzing the contradictions implicit in a state of peripheral modernity. She explores the connections between the factors involved in the [...]

This text by Nelson Brissac questions the ongoing interest in national roots in the age of globalization. Due to the current impossibility of defining any “identity,” what is at stake, in the author’s view, is the ability to take full advantage [...]

In this text, Maria Alice Milliet argues that the curatorial vision of Jean Hubert Martin in the exhibition Magiciens de la terre (Centre Georges Pompidou/Parc de la Villette, Paris) reflects a thoroughly neocolonial position on art produced in the [...]

The texts gathered for the exhibition Tradição e Ruptura: síntese de arte e cultura brasileiras (1984) are introduced by the curator, João Marino. Marino is an advocate of the purposes of the exhibition: to assemble artworks along with [...]

This anthology presents the first results of the research undertaken by the Núcleo de Tecnologia da Imagem at the EC-UFRJ (Escola de Comunicação da Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro), as well as that by the Centre for Advanced Inquiry at the [...]

In this introduction, Eduardo Kac shows that the artists known as “Geração Brasil High-Tech” (including Otávio Donasci, Mario Ramiro, and Paulo Bruscky) represent a type of work that refers back to both Waldemar Cordeiro and Abraham Palatnik. [...]

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 [...]

In this text, experimental artist Abraham Palatnik discusses the questions of information and technology in relation to human evolution. In Palatnik’s view, evolution is key to the dynamic of culture as man adapts to the world at large and to his [...]

On the occasion of the XI Salão Arte-Pará held in 1992, Paulo Herkenhoff provides an overview of photography from the Equator region of northern Brazil. He compares the production from the state of Pará and its capital city Belém to that of the [...]

In this article, Fredric M. Litto sounds a warning concerning the rigorous standards that should apply in the selection of projects for research that focus on the overlap between art and technology. He stresses that the arrival of the computer has [...]

This essay by art critic and physicist Mário Schenberg is one of the first works written in Brazil on the impact of technology on artistic expression. His analysis looks back to the 18th-century industrial revolution, when the invention of the [...]

On the basis of a reading of Carl Jung, Annateresa Fabris argues that there are two distinct types of artists: introverts and extroverts. She places Brazilian Wesley Duke Lee in the second category, which includes artists that lose themselves in [...]

This article is an attempt to address what is known as “Realismo Mágico” [Magic Realism], which the author asserts, is not a movement, school, or philosophy, but quite simply “Rex”—that is, the artist Wesley Duke Lee, his character “ [...]

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 [...]

The manifesto that launched Rex Gallery & Sons in the city of São Paulo addresses in passing issues facing the visual arts in Brazil such as the paucity of galleries that support the production of artists, the lack of specialized art criticism, [...]

This is a satirical article about the Salão de ’31, in which Henrique Pongetti expresses his support for the Brazilian Salon. In his opinion, what has happened is that the conservative (academic) faction has retaken power, a situation he praises [...]

This document is a technical description of the architectural solution put into effect by the implementation team working on the Ministério da Educação e Saúde (MES) project designed by Lucio Costa, Oscar Niemeyer, Affonso [...]

In this text, painter Candido Portinari analyzes the Salão de 31 organized during the tenure of Lucio Costa as director of the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes in Rio de Janeiro. In Portinari’s view, Costa’s modernizing project as [...]

The painter Edson Motta comments on the innovations he sees at the 1949 Salão Nacional in the wake of the Estado Novo, the authoritarian government led by Getúlio Vargas (1930–45), which has now split into two sections—the general and the [...]

The poet from Recife, Manuel Bandeira, was the model for two portraits, one by Cândido Portinari, the other by Frederico Maron, both of which were exhibited at the Salão de 31 de la Escola Nacional de Belas Artes (Rio de Janeiro). He [Bandeira] [...]

In this text, Mário Pedrosa offers a critique of the Tiradentes mural by Candido Portinari, commenting on the event represented and the monumental nature of the work. He analyzes the form and composition of the mural, concluding that it lacks unity [...]

This text written by North American architect Frank Lloyd Wright is an account of the days in October 1930 that he spent in Rio de Janeiro, capital of Brazil at the time. Wright was invited to Brazil to participate in the jury to determine which [...]

The artist Cícero Dias was the subject of this article that includes a combination of first-hand accounts on his artistic career. The text was originally published due to an exhibition on abstract art by the artist in Recife (Faculdade de Direito) [...]

This text by Lucio Costa discusses the “unpredictable” nature of Brazilian architecture. In it, Costa develops a far-reaching theory of modern art and architecture to which the visual form is the sine qua non. The visual-formal component [...]

In this text, artist Ricardo Basbaum reflects on specific aspects of his production in order to investigate the broader issues underlying his Novas Bases para a Personalidade (NBP) project. By means of the oral style of the text, the artist engages [...]

In his essay “O instrumento do fotógrafo ou o fotógrafo do instrumento?,” Vilém Flusser sets out to show that it is no longer possible to conceive of the photographic machine as just another instrument of production and to refuse to recognize [...]

This text was to be placed on the main wall of the exhibition on Brazilian painting organized by the Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahia (MAMB) in 1960. The text asserts that the true innovating power of a culture is found by delving into its popular [...]

In this overview of the national art scene, Marcelo Santos notes that art in the state of Pernambuco is facing a difficult time, partly as a result of the migration of artists from northeastern to southern Brazil (mainly to São Paulo and Rio de [...]

In this text, author Gilberto Freyre recognized the integrative potential of art for its ability to gather disagreements. He points to the constant fusion of antagonistic elements in the music of Heitor Villa-Lobos, in which the erudite and the [...]

In this article the art critic Stella Teixeira de Barros outlines the history of the various visual arts associations that were founded in the city of São Paulo between the Brazilian modernist period and the 1980s. Teixeira de Barros uses the term [...]

The fall of the Berlin Wall, the spread of social democracy and liberalism as political, economic, and ideological models, the “westernizing” of Asia, and other facets of the process of globalization are mentioned here, among the many changes [...]

This interview with Hélio Oiticica was conducted by the anthropologist Carlos Alberto Pereira and the literary critic Heloísa Buarque de Hollanda in Rio de Janeiro on October 15, 1979. Here the artist makes a clear distinction between political [...]

The aim of this text by Mário Pedrosa is to discuss the situation of the artist in a modern society oriented to mass production—an essential consideration in current artistic expression. Pedrosa provides a historical overview that begins with the [...]

According to Mário Pedrosa contemporary art is characterized by “objectivism” or by a rejection of self-expression. In this essay he refers to the symbolic objects suggested by Salvador Dalí and to “the crisis of the object” identified in [...]

In this text, critic Prudente de Moraes Neto discusses an article by French writer Benjamin Crémieux published in the Nouvelle Revue Française. In his view, Crémieux fails to give due importance to the unconscious aspect of the artistic process, [...]

Prompted by the exhibition of work by the North American artist Minna Citron at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, Waldemar Cordeiro discusses the historical connection between art and society in the United States. In his opinion, when “ [...]

This is a report on the underlying reasons for the founding of the Instituto de Arte Contemporânea del Museu de Arte de São Paulo (IAC-MASP). The article highlights the pedagogical mission of the MASP under its director Pietro Maria Bardi. It also [...]

This is a description of the Curso de Composição, the composition course for seven classes that the architect Jacob Ruchti taught at the IAC (Instituto de Arte Contemporânea) at the MASP (Museu de Arte de São Paulo). The professor explains that [...]