Martí Casanovas summarizes a lecture he delivered at the closing session of the Primera exposición de arte nuevo, held in May 1927 at Havana’s Asociación de Pintores y Escultores. Organized by the editors of revista de avance, the exhibition launched the activities of the Cuban avant-garde, whose fundamental ideas Casanovas helped to synthesize and articulate before he was expelled from Cuba during the presidency of Gerardo Machado (in office 1925–33). Casanovas wrote that Latin American artists should be engaged in a “militant” activism on behalf of the people as opposed to trying to appeal to or “flatter the narcissism” of both avant-garde “minorities” and “elites.” This excerpt is from the original, published in revista de avance [“Arte Nuevo” (Havana), year 1, vol. 1, no. 7 (June 15, 1927), 158, and 175]; the translation by Julieta Fombona is from Ramírez and Olea’s Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America [(2004), 468–69; doc. 15].
. . .
THE ARTIST CANNOT LIVE AS A STRANGER TO SOCIETY, or to the problems and concerns of his time, and much less at this hour of active and passionate militancy in which humanity is engaged in a profound and difficult endeavor. The artist, as an integral part of society, must feel a passionate interest in the same problems that trouble every man and society as a whole. The artist must be a militant element in the battles that have to be fought, and if he thus feels the urgency, pain, and excitement in everyone, his art—pervaded by this spirit—will reflect the passions and emotions of his time in a fecund and magnified way. This human enthusiasm, generous and universal, and not the hyper-aesthetic cult of individuality, is the road to redemption, the suitable lodestar that would certainly lead to a renovation of the present hour. The throngs that fill the spaces of our exhibition will vehemently join in the effort.
What are our possibilities in the future? What does the future hold for us? What can we contribute to the renewal of the vitality of the artistic gist?
We are firmly convinced that in America this course and this struggle have been taken up much more forcibly than in Europe. On the Old Continent, art continues to be immersed in an unstoppable process whose fate is decadence; the new strident stances of this hour are mere symptoms of protest, of firm denial and angry rejoinder. Furthermore, they are a sterile Ultra-ism of the intellectual barricade that remains prisoner in the exhausting vicious circle of an irreducible individuality. In our republics, on the contrary, in Native Latin America, there is still a virgin reservoir of undeniable fecundity that constitutes the essential reality of the aboriginal ancestry common to all. A similar spirit and reality, a unique cultural and human feeling and longing for universality, is affirmed throughout the continent.
Mexico—the republic in charge of the continent’s glorious destiny—and Peru, in art as well as in all other cultural fields, have already paved the way to a superior and expansive formulation of an American civilization. Diego Rivera’s murals and the heroic work of the new generations contain a profound and human enthusiasm. Their works, enormously plastic, attest to a thriving and noble universal aspiration. A breath of immortality, which reaches us all and engages us, still holds the wonderful power to touch the innermost fibers of the Mexican Indian. It is he, after almost five centuries of humiliation and oppressive disregard, who feels anew the ancestral voices of the aboriginal culture, the fecund seeds for any enterprise that would encompass the whole continent.
As one more effort and one more contribution to this enterprise—in order to serve a high cultural ideal, not to flatter the narcissism of a selfish and apprehensive minority, that is, a few elitists—“1927” has organized and promoted this exhibition that today has come to an end. Though “1927” is indeed the endeavor of a minority, it is not an excluding one. Our aspiration is that our ideals and our banners, which proclaim a continental inclusiveness, an ambition to surpass the local, will soon become the triumphant principles of a solid majority.