One Friday in 1838, Don Pedro de Angelis wrote an obituary to Juan María Gutiérrez, surveyor of the Topographic Department that the Province had established after the Mavo Revolution. At that time, the Neapolitan polygrapher was already publishing his Collection of Works and Documents relating to the Ancient and Modern History of the Provinces of the Río de la Plata, compiling unpublished works found here and there. In the letter to Gutiérrez he referred to borrowed manuscripts, shared readings and also dealt with the poet Esteban Echeverría and the Ligurian pilot Nicolás Descalzi, astronomer of the expedition to the Río Negro and the campaign against the Indians organized by Juan Manuel de Rosas in 1833. He was grateful to the first for his help and wanted to give him a work from his library. With the second, he had spoken the day before about the copy of that map of Uruguay that they both wanted to study.

As a prologue

The recent discipline on the History of Argentine photography, systematically initiated in the 1980s thanks to pioneering researchers, addressed in a first stage its evolution at the national level and throughout its first century or century and a half of existence. .

In those beginnings it was not possible to undertake the necessary biographies in any depth about hundreds and even thousands of precursors of the camera. However, the prestigious book collection of the Antorchas Foundation came to remedy this shortcoming thanks to the efforts of the renowned historian Luis Priamo; Detailed biographies of founding figures of photography were continuously published, a work expanded by the successful Congresses on the History of Photography that, starting in 1992 and through their Memoirs, have highlighted complete biographies.

In this line of research and publication, Alexander adds here his work on the talented German artist Jorge Sulzmann, of whom there were only a few isolated references.

In June 1967, at the Visual Arts Center of the Torcuato Di Tella Institute, the exhibition Surrealism in Argentina took place. Jorge Romero Brest, then director of said Center, summoned Aldo Pellegrini, who was curator of the exhibition and author of the introductory text of the catalog printed for the occasion. As if he had felt that the true nature of this avant-garde was still unknown, in that text Pellegrini once again explains, for example, that surrealism is not an artistic movement but an ideological one, which uses artistic expression as a mechanism of liberation; that surrealism has, at the same time, an affirming side that aspires to a world dominated by freedom, poetry and love, and a denying side, which challenges the hypocrisy of its time; that surrealism does not deny reality, but rather postulates a broader, absolute idea of reality, not only limited to the physical world but also the result of its union with the spiritual world; that surrealism is an art [...]

Travel almost always has a double quality, that of being an experience of discovery as well as an encounter with the known. We venture into the unknown while retracing the paths that have already been traveled in our minds. We contemplate the beauty of a monument, a sculpture or a building, while remembering how many times we have visited it before in novels, films, documentaries, history or art books, advertisements, family stories or in old posters. This is how it has always happened to me [...] I share with you two of these reunions, in these cases, with loves born years before, in reading.

The actions of this gauchesco vate attacking Rosas with various publications of his poetry in the language used in both the eastern and the River Plate campaigns are well known. When Justo José de Urquiza, governor of Entre Ríos, made a statement on May 1, 1851 against the political and economic hegemony of his Buenos Aires counterpart Juan Manuel de Rosas, many of his opponents soon approached him, including Hilario Ascasubi. .

It was a rainy and foggy day, one of those Buenos Aires winters that we don't like to walk down the street. Someone, I don't remember her name [excuse me, ma'am!] She called me because she wanted to donate to some institution a series of letters and papers from her family that she didn't quite understand what they were. It wasn't a last name that reminded me of anything, to the point that I forgot it, and in a modest apartment in the Belgrano neighborhood where she was moving, she gave me a crumpled envelope with several letters inside. I promised to look at what she was and see what could be done, she had no idea if that had value beyond the family memory that she wanted to get rid of, or where to send them so they wouldn't get lost, contradictorily. What I saw were papers and that I was soaked and I would surely end the day with old letters and pneumonia.

The Prilidiano Pueyrredón A painter at the origins of Argentine art exhibition remembers the Bicentennial of his birth and focuses on his central position in the history of Argentine art of the 19th century.

The exhibition [1], which mostly presents works from the National Museum of Fine Arts, also collaborates with the Emilio Pettoruti Provincial Museum of Fine Arts - from the city of La Plata - and the National Historical Museum, which lent paintings and drawings by their own collections. The nearly forty watercolors and oil paintings, on paper, canvas and copper, are a sample of different stages of his life: from his stays abroad to the scenes made in Buenos Aires.

On October 6, 2023, the exhibition Before America: original sources in modern culture was inaugurated at the March Foundation headquarters in Madrid, curated by guest curator Rodrigo Gutiérrez Viñuales, who was joined by those responsible for the Foundation team. , Manuel Fontán del Junco and María Toledo. I had the pleasure of being there that day and of being able to tour, in several visits, this magnificent and monumental exhibition dedicated to the ways in which modern and contemporary culture appropriated the legacy of the ancient indigenous cultures that populated the enormous territory that extends from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, before it was baptized with the name “America”.