Journal clipping about the international crisis found in the artist’s archive

Berni was director and teacher at the Mutualidad Popular de Estudiantes y Artistas Plásticos de Rosario. Paintings like Manifestación and Desocupación, known today as Desocupados, initiated the New Realism cycle. With these works, besides, Berni replied to Siqueiros, who sustained that mural painting was the sole form to develop a revolutionary art. Berni understood the politic conditions of his country were different from those in Mexico, were the triumphant revolution could count on public buildings to display its ideological discourse. In order to put his own concepts in action, he produced these large pictures whose technique –temple on burlap–, monumental composition and subject of a powerful social contents, turned out to be an ingenious substitute which transformed mural painting in movable objects.

The spirit of the Italian Novecento’s painting impregnates all of this period, but in Self Portrait with cactus (1933-34), which links Berni’s surrealist stage with his realistic period, the elements deriving from metaphysic painting become more evident.