Art, History and Memory in the Mundo Nuevo magazine (1966-1968)

Abstract

Cultural magazines, understood as objects of study of historical research, allow to study the battles and directions of thought in modern societies and to map the lines of sensitivity of a culture at a given moment. The purpose of the article is to analyze the first stage of the magazine Mundo Nuevo (1966-1968) from the artistic perspective (format, design, periodicity, programs, collaborators, distribution channels and subscription) to unravel the intersection of art, history and memory in the cultural life of those years. Illustrations, drawings and photographs are types of cultural interventions that affirm, contradict and ironize about issues addressed in the magazine, establishing dialogues (intertextual) with the time that hosts it. The responsible editor - the Uruguayan literary critic Emir Rodríguez Monegal (1921-1985)- incorporated the images as ‘legitimate’ constituent expressions of the Latin American cultural field marked by convergences and divergences with world events crossed by confrontations derived from the Cold War. The conversation between texts and artistic productions offered performative readings in the sense of overcoming the immediacy of the political-ideological conjunctures and, at the same time, establishing a network of ‘creative’ resistances interacting with the context, that is, with the cultural traditions of the time.