Marta Traba (1923–1983), the influential Argentinean art critic, wrote these two essays in the years after she relocated to Bogotá with her first husband, Colombian writer Alberto Zalamea. Returning to South America in 1954, after living for years in Paris, Traba’s initial critiques of Bogotá’s artistic milieu valued the individuality of the artist and emphasized the mastery of the formal aspects of painting, drawing, and even abstraction. This pair of documents is notable because they signal a refocusing of the critic’s gaze from European values—which originated for Traba in Buenos Aires a decade before as a student of Jorge Romero Brest—to a willingness to consider Latin American art on its own terms [SEE DOCUMENT IV.3.1]. Both texts illustrate her initial struggles and hesitancy with an idea that she warmed up to by 1960 as she embarked on her first extensive regional investigation of Latin American art, publishing La pintura nueva en Latinoamerica [(Bogotá: Ediciones Librería Central, 1961)]. The earliest of these texts—“¿Qué quiere decir ‘Un Arte Americano’?” [(Bogotá: Antares, 1955), reprinted in Mito (Bogota), no. 6 (February–March, 1956), 474–478]—warns against the wielding of folklore as an “identity” weapon and rejects naïve ideas about a homogeneous continental style.
“Problemas del arte en Latinoamérica” [Mito (Bogota), no. 18 (February–April, 1958), 428–436] cautions against blind nationalism and what she sees as the outright backwardness of Pan Americanism. Rather than act as social reformers or political emissaries, Traba writes, the artists in the Americas should be free to mirror universal aesthetic values. “Problemas del arte en Latinoamérica” also appeared in the anthology Marta Traba [Emma Araújo de Vallejo, ed., (Bogotá: Planeta Colombiana Editorial S.A., 1984), 208–209], the source for the present translation. “¿Qué quiere decir ‘Un Arte Americano’?” comes from the original publication.