Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

In the prologue to the catalogue of the 1935 exhibition of contemporary Mexican art, Mexican artist Jorge Juan Crespo de la Serna provides a brief overview of Mexican art from the time of the Mayans until the present. He asserts that Mexican art, [...]

This is the first of a four-part article on the technical nature of the Mexican painting movement. Violent aesthetic transformations had occurred in the last few years while art criticism against painters oscillated between grand praise and fury. [...]

Irradiador magazine—subtitled, “Avant-garde magazine: an international project devoted to the new aesthetic, directed by Manuel Maples Arce & Fermín Revueltas”—was published in Mexico City in 1923. El restorán [The Restaurant], a [...]

Ramón Alva de la Canal painted the first version of El Café de Nadie [No Man’s Café] in 1924. After it disappeared, he decided to paint the scene again, but this time he introduced some new elements. To illustrate it, he included the names of [...]

In Ciudad Victoria (Tamaulipas), Miguel Aguillón Guzmán issued a fourth Estridentista manifesto in which the delegates to the III Congreso Nacional de Estudiantes [3rd National Students’Conference] affirm their “support for the Mexican [...]

This article reviews the second exhibition of paintings by children at the Escuelas al Aire Libre [Open Air Schools] run by the Secretaría de Educación Pública [SEP, Ministry of Public Education]. The exhibition was held at the Palacio de Minería [...]

This article in the Excélsior newspaper reports on the visit Frances Flynn Paine, the American promoter of Mexican art, made to Mexico. She covered all the official institutions in the city in order to collect material for two shows on Mexican art [...]

In this article, art critic Jorge Juan Crespo de la Serna wrote about mural painting and its importance in the evolution of Mexican art. He believed the murals should be intimately connected to the life of the country that produces them given their [...]

According to Efraín Pérez Mendoza, the Grupos de “Acción de Arte” [Art Action Groups] exhibition is one of the most interesting, complete and “most tormented that has been mounted by Mexican artists,” because the works express the [...]

In this document José Gorostiza analyzes the works of eight artists who participated in the Pintores mexicanos modernos [Modern Mexican Painters] exhibition organized by Carlos Mérida and Carlos Orozco Romero for the brewery, Carta Blanca. He [...]

The writer of this article claims that there has never been a more anarchic art scene than the one he is currently witnessing. It is the most improvised of all the current movements and, therefore, the one most likely to be fruitful and to prosper. [...]

In “Los nuevos pintores veracruzanos” [The new painters of Veracruz], Ortega makes a collage about what artists happen to be painting or sculpting at the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria (ENP) and the Academy. He mentions the most representative [...]

In this piece, Febronio Ortega gathered a variety of opinions from the art world. Among them, he recalled Diego Rivera’s description of his visit to the “Museo de Mediocridades” [Museum of Mediocrities]—Rivera’s characterization of the [...]

In the Survey Section, the journalist Ortega decided to go to the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria to ask the painters there the following question: Who is the greatest painter in Mexico? The caricaturist Ernesto García Cabral ironically responds that [...]

Leopoldo Méndez not only contributed images for the magazine Horizonte, he also voiced his ideas, as in this text. In it he emphasizes the rebellious, antibourgeois, and anti-art for art’s sake aspect of mural art, describing it as that “ [...]

The article covers the initial stage of Máximo Pacheco’s career, emphasizing his “childlike sensibility,” “humble attitude,” and his role as Fermín Revueltas’ assistant in the “style of the Renaissance, in his humble work as a laborer [...]

This monograph about the artistic production by Ramón Alva de la Canal makes a general evaluation of his paintings. It starts with his didactic activities in cultural missions, his relationship with the Estridentista group, and above all his [...]

This book takes as its subject a series of lectures held in 2000. It constitutes the first documentary account of the contributions of the visual artists who were involved in the Estridentista movement avant-garde and its relation to the urban scene [...]

This magazine questionnaire on Mexican sculpture surveyed four sculptors, two painters, and an architect. The questions were as follows: (1) Is Mexican sculpture involved in our current period of revolutionary construction? (2) Given its admirable [...]

Five years after their first manifesto Actual [see doc. 737463 and doc. 754048], Germán List Arzubide recounted the early activity of the estridentista group. The author began with a description of the group’s leader, the poet Manuel Maples Arce. [...]

This is a summing up, by one key figure of the estridentista movement and of its impact, in spite of the small size of the group. Germán List Arzubide recounts, twenty years later, what Estridentismo consisted of, how the movement started as a [...]

Diego Rivera briefly reviews what he sees in the artists of the period and discusses the various trends in artistic expression in Mexico at the time, indicating his preference for murals with a nationalist theme. He claims that painters and the [...]

From Renato Molina Enríquez’s insight, Mexico is imbued with visual invention. Despite the collapse of the native cultures, the landowners of the colonial era did not succeed in eliminating the people’s artistic potential; nevertheless, academic [...]