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Magazines play an important role in the articulation and diffusion of cultural modernization programs in Latin America. From Martín Fierro, the 1920s Argentine magazine that became the avant-garde standard of excellence, to the emblematic Revista de Antropofagia Paulista, in which Oswald de Andrade’s “Manifiesto Antropófago” appears with vignettes and drawings by Tarsila, the vanguard of magazine publications projected Latin American artists’ aspirations to a transformed world.

Magazines had a key role in disseminating the aesthetic ideals of various artistic groups. For instance, there is a long list of magazines that could be deemed “constructivist” publications. A pioneering title, Círculo y Cuadrado, produced by Joaquín Torres-García (1874–1949) heralded a long series of publications that underscore the geometric universe and abstraction. Publications in this vein, espousing a particular ethos and style, were often short-lived. The paradigmatic case of this is Arturo: Revista de Artes Abstractas, which gathered artists and poets and brought about the debate about abstract art in Buenos Aires in the mid-1940s, even though it only produced a single issue, in ...

[Achillina]

(b Rome, Dec 5, 1914; d São Paulo, Mar 29, 1992).

Brazilian architect of Italian birth. She graduated in architecture (1939) from the University of Rome, where director Marcello Piacentini oversaw a curriculum dominated by the classicizing monumentality of Fascist Italy. In 1940 she moved to Milan and worked for publications seeking to modernize Italian architecture and interior design, including Lo Stile (1941–1943) and Domus (1943–1944). In 1945 she co-organized the critical rationalist architects’ group Movimento studi architettura, and participated in debates on postwar reconstruction at the Primo Convegno Nazionale per la Ricostruzione Edilizia, with Ernesto Nathan Rogers and others. In 1946 she worked with architect Bruno Zevi on the magazine A– Cultura della Vita, wrote for the revived Domus under editor Gio Ponti, and designed displays for a Milan commercial fair.

In September 1946 she moved to Brazil where her husband, Pietro Maria Bardi (1900–1999), was invited to establish and direct the ...

(b Veracruz, Mar 13, 1880; d Stamford, CT, Jan 10, 1961).

Mexican illustrator, writer, gallery owner, and publisher, active in the USA. He was the son of a wealthy Mexican lawyer and publisher. De Zayas started his career as an artist by providing drawings for his father’s newspaper in Veracruz. In 1906 he moved on to Mexico City’s leading newspaper, El Diario, but a year later, after the ascension of the dictator Porfirio Diaz, whom the newspaper had opposed, he fled to the USA. There he landed a position making caricatures for the New York Evening World. Shortly after his arrival in the USA, he came into contact with Alfred Stieglitz, who staged solo shows of De Zayas’s caricatures at his gallery Gallery 291 in 1909 and 1910, both of which proved to be huge popular successes.

In 1910 De Zayas traveled to Paris, where he stayed almost a year, scouting out adventurous forms of modern art for Stieglitz, notably the cubist work of Picasso and African sculpture. On his return, equipped with knowledge of European modern art and inspired by the work of the French modernist ...

(b Mexico City, Jun 27, 1943).

Mexican painter, printmaker, performance artist, writer, teacher, and publisher. He qualified as a printmaker at a very early age, then as a painter and engraver under the tutelage of several masters, among whom the most influential on his life was José Chávez Morado. Although he at first worked with traditional media, he possessed a constantly innovative and critical attitude and experimented with performances, installations, happenings, correspondence art, and media art, as well as writing, lecturing, and publishing on such themes as artistic experimentation, cultural promotion, professional management for artists, collective mural painting, and the publishing process. From 1968 to 1972 Ehrenberg lived in England where, with the architect Martha Hellion and the critic and historian David Mayor, he founded the Beau Geste Press/Libro Acción Libre in Devon, to propagate the work of artists involved with the Fluxus movement of the 1970s. He was also instrumental in the rise of many artistic groups, workshops and small publishing houses, such as ...

(b Buenos Aires, Apr 18, 1932).

Argentine photographer and publisher. She trained as a painter at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires (1947–1953), and took up photography only in the late 1950s. She studied in Buenos Aires first in the studio of Luis d’Amico and then in 1960 under Annemarie Heinrich. In 1960 she opened a studio in Buenos Aires with the Argentine photographer Alicia D’Amico (1933–2001). She contributed to La Nación and Autoclub, and in 1973, together with María Cristina Orive, she co-founded La Azotea, a publishing house specializing in Latin American photography. She was primarily a documentary photographer, whose reputation did not depend on the recording of sensational events. Her photographs were realistic portrayals of the Argentine way of life; they were taken using natural light and were not modified in the laboratory.

(b Nassau, Bahamas, Oct 28, 1925; d Dunsyre, Scotland, March 27, 2006).

Scottish sculptor, graphic artist and poet. Brought up in Scotland, he briefly attended Glasgow School of Art and first made his reputation as a writer, publishing short stories and plays in the 1950s. In 1961 he founded the Wild Hawthorn Press with Jessie McGuffie and within a few years had established himself internationally as Britain’s foremost concrete poet (see Concrete poetry). His publications also played an important role in the initial dissemination of his work as a visual artist. As a sculptor, he has worked collaboratively in a wide range of materials, having his designs executed as stone-carvings, as constructed objects and even in the form of neon lighting.

In 1966 Finlay and his wife, Sue, moved to the hillside farm of Stonypath, south-west of Edinburgh, and began to transform the surrounding acres into a unique garden, which he named Little Sparta. He revived the traditional notion of the poet’s garden, arranging ponds, trees and vegetation to provide a responsive environment for sundials, inscriptions, columns and garden temples. As the proponent of a rigorous classicism and as the defender of Little Sparta against the intrusions of local bureaucracy, he insisted on the role of the artist as a moralist who comments sharply on cultural affairs. The esteem won by Finlay’s artistic stance and style is attested by many important large-scale projects undertaken throughout the world. The ‘Sacred Grove’, created between ...

(b Mexico City, ?1820; d Mexico City, 1897).

Mexican illustrator and printmaker. He probably began his career in 1847 in the workshop of the Murguía publishing house. In 1854, in collaboration with Andrés Campillo, he created an outstanding series of illustrations for the book Los mexicanos pintados por sí mismos, in which he portrayed character types (e.g. Great Poet, lithograph) in the manner of Honoré Daumier. In 1855 he founded the firm Litografía de Iriarte y Compañía. The following year he published portraits of famous personalities in the weekly review El Panorama. He was a co-founder in 1861 of the political fortnightly La Orquesta, on which he worked for more than ten years as an illustrator and eventually as a caricaturist and as editor. Iriarte continued to contribute to a number of periodicals, including El Renacimiento, and his firm also published the weekly San Baltazar (1869–1870). He collaborated with Santiago Hernández on numerous illustrations for, among others, ...

(b Parma, 1790; d Tampico, Dec 11, 1832).

Italian lithographer, active in Mexico. He was a member of the Carbonari (a secret society dedicated to the unification of Italy) who used lithography and journalism to diffuse his revolutionary ideas. His revolutionary activism caused him to travel to Spain, Belgium, and Mexico.

In 1809 he completed his studies in Paris, but after returning to Italy he was sentenced to death in 1824 for revolutionary activities. He went to Mexico with his colleague Gaspar Franchini in 1825, apparently attracted by the idea of putting his revolutionary ideas into practice. After considerable bureaucratic problems, Linati and Franchini arrived in Veracruz on September 25, 1825 and were responsible for assembling the first lithographic workshop in Mexico City. Since his youth in Parma, Linati had belonged to the Sociedad del Sublime Maestro Perfecto, where he was initiated as a Carbonario. With his lithography machine, he founded the publication El Iris whose first issue was published on ...

Type of art that exaggerates the physical characteristics of its figures for comedic or critical effect. Caricature has been used throughout the world. For more on its practice in the Western world see Caricature.

The first periodical released in New Spain was La Gazeta de México y Noticias de la Nueva España, founded in 1722 and directed by Juan Ignacio Castorena y Ursúa, Bishop of Yucatán (1688–1733). Six issues were produced, but the publication was suspended due to unfair criticism. In 1784, Manuel Antonio Valdez Murguía (1742–1814) resumed the work previously done by the bishop of Yucatán and expanded it with scientific news, thus strengthening the publication. As a result, the Spanish Crown granted official support to Gazeta de México in 1784, though it did not have illustrations or caricatures. The caricatures appeared on flyers that were pasted in the city centers. It is important to notice though that the concept of caricature developed slowly, and in this period the term is used to refer to the drawings that demystified royal figures and authorities through irony. In ...

(b Lötzen, East Prussia [now Gizycko, Poland], Nov 20, 1879; d Mexico City, May 26, 1954).

German editor and writer. He grew up in Berlin, where he worked until 1933. After the Nazis came to power, he emigrated via Czechoslovakia, France and the USA to Mexico. Self-educated, he mixed with anarchist circles and in 1910 became editor of Der Demokrat. In 1911 he founded and edited Die Aktion, a weekly newspaper for politics and literature, which became his life’s work. From 1912 the masthead bore the extended title Wochenschrift für Politik, Literatur und Kunst and for the next six years the paper was at the forefront of revolutionary ideas in art, literature and society. Its most influential period coincided with early Expressionism. Die Aktion brought together journalists, poets and painters in an atmosphere of radical internationalism and left-wing pacifism. It regularly printed black-and-white drawings and woodcuts, including work by Paul Cézanne, Honoré Daumier, Eugène Delacroix, Raoul Dufy, Lyonel Feininger, Vincent van Gogh, Franz Marc, Ludwig Meidner, ...

[Gahona, Gabriel Vicente]

(b Mérida, Apr 5, 1828; d Mérida, Mar 1, 1899).

Mexican engraver. In 1846 he went to study painting in Europe, where he almost certainly encountered the widely published lithographs of Gustave Doré, Honoré Daumier, and Paul Gavarni, which probably inspired his own work. On returning from Europe he founded, with some friends in Mérida, the periodical Don Bullebulle (1847), which satirized with grace and irony social customs, politics, and contemporary fashion. During its year-long life he illustrated the periodical with a total of 86 wood-engravings that he signed with the pseudonym Picheta. He achieved a sharpness of line that emphasized his draughtsmanship (e.g. The Clerk, 1847; Mexico City, Mus. N. Est.). When Don Bullebulle’s critical attitude forced the periodical to close, Picheta’s artistic career came to an end. Nevertheless, his work is greatly admired for its historical significance, especially in view of the lack of successful wood-engravers in Mexico during the 19th century.

(b Recife, Dec 19, 1899; d Recife, Jun 5, 1970).

Brazilian painter, poet, and publisher. He became interested in painting while living in Paris between 1911 and 1914. On his return to Brazil he lived first in Rio de Janeiro and then, from 1918 onward, in Recife. There he prepared a series of watercolors based on indigenous themes, such as the Birth of Mani (1921; U. São Paulo, Mus. A. Contemp.), which were exhibited in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo in 1920–1921. His modernist reworking of indigenous aesthetics challenged Parisian avant-garde primitivism and Brazilian academic aesthetics. In 1922 he took part in the Semana de arte moderna in São Paulo and returned to Europe, establishing a studio in Paris, where he illustrated P. L. Duchartre’s Légendes, croyances, et talismans des indiens de l’Amazonie (Paris, 1923). From 1922 to 1957 he alternated his residency between Paris and Brazil. In 1930 he and the French poet and critic Géo-Charles (...

(b Santa Maria do Rio Grande do Sul, Jun 21, 1920; d Rio de Janeiro, Apr 28, 2001).

Brazilian draftsman, engraver, and painter. At the age of 15 he began publishing illustrations in the newspapers of his native state. In 1940 he went to live in São Paulo, where he began his career as a painter. He joined the Família Artística Paulista (a group founded in 1937, typical of the second phase of Brazilian Modernism) and allowed his work to be influenced by a vivid, socially committed Expressionism, often using drawing and engraving. Between 1944 and 1945 he fought in Italy as a soldier in the Brazilian Expeditionary Force and produced rapid but undramatic drawings of the war. During a subsequent stay in Paris from 1947 to 1950 he developed his characteristic style under the influence of late Cubism and afterwards of Giorgio Morandi. On his return to Brazil, from 1950 to 1956 he helped to create the local Engraving Club in Porto Alegre; in its artistic aims and political stance he promoted a polemical form of realism devoted to landscape, human types, and scenes of the still rural south. He returned to painting only on settling in Rio de Janeiro in ...

(b Veracruz, 1848; d Tacubaya, Mexico City, Feb 14, 1904).

Mexican illustrator and lithographer. He began his career in 1869, making prints for the weekly La ilustración potosina in San Luis Potosí. He collaborated with Alejandro Casarín and Jesús Alamilla on illustrations using engravings colored with pen for the novel Ensalada de pollos by José Tomás de Cuéllar. In these the use of a schematic design accentuated the appearance of the figures portrayed. He created caricatures (1872–1873) for La orquesta and other periodicals, but he established his reputation with caricatures (1874–1876) of government figures for the weekly Hijo Ahuizote. Villasana was a member of the political party of President Porfirio Díaz and in 1880 published ferocious caricatures of Díaz’s opponents in El coyote emplumado. He was co-publisher in 1883, with Ireneo Paz, of La patria ilustrada and in 1888 he founded his own weekly, México y sus costumbres; in both periodicals he published his own caricatures of public figures. In ...