The editorial categories are research topics that have guided researchers during the recovery phase and continue to be the impetus behind the Documents Project’s digital archive and the Critical Documents book series. Developed by the project’s Editorial Board, each of the teams analyzed this framework and adapted it to their local contexts in developing their research objectives and work plans during the Recovery Phase. Learn more on the Editorial Framework page.
According to Luis Cardoza y Aragón, poetry enjoyed greater development in Mexico than the visual arts because the former was situated on the margins of the national-pictorial movement. The proof of this can be found in the confluence of the Mexican artistic renaissance with the revolutionary movement, which would bring about its subsequent takeover. The writer believes “there is no art for the majority, nor for the minority, there is only: art.” He then declares his opposition to either “proletarian art” or “bureaucratic socialism” supporting it. Cardoza y Aragón extends his criticism to the rest of the continent when he refers to that “mediocre technique in America”: the official art protected and patronized by the dogmatic state; this new lay church interferes with “aesthetic freedom.”
In “Arte y revolución,” Luis Cardoza y Aragón (1901–1992), the Mexico-based Guatemalan intellectual traces an evolution of art history and undertakes an accurate diagnosis of the period in which he writes. The text discusses many of the proposals that months later would unleash a bitter controversy within the ranks of the Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios (LEAR) [League of Revolutionary Writers and Artists]. This was meant to serve as an introductory chapter to one of his books, La nube y el reloj [The Cloud and the Clock], published five years later. Nevertheless, this article is of interest because it is linked to the debates of the time, in a Mexico where “everything is socialism” and in which “art trends” dominate. His book, La nube y el reloj, would be more unequivocal, adding seminal phrases such as “Simple reflection on the possibilities in painting underscore the uselessness of the majority of mural works in Mexico.”The text was published in the magazine Memoria in the 1990s. (See doc. no. 779873).