Arte Madí.

Argentine movement of the 1940s based in Buenos Aires and led by GYULA KOSICE and the Uruguayan artists Carmelo Arden Quin (b 1913) and Rhod Rothfuss (b 1920). Together with Joaquín Torres García and the Argentine poet Edgar Bayley (b 1919), they were responsible for the publication in early 1944 of a single issue of a magazine, Arturo, which heralded the development of the Constructivist movement in Argentina, stressing the importance of pure invention and of interdisciplinary links. Tomás Maldonado, who designed the cover, and Lidy Prati (b 1921), who was responsible for most of the vignettes, soon dissociated themselves from their colleagues to help set up the ASOCIACIÓN ARTE CONCRETO INVENCIÓN; the editorial content of the magazine, however, suggested a coherent aesthetic that was also promoted in booklets published by Kosice and Bayley in 1945 and in two exhibitions, Art Concret Invention (which opened on 8 Oct 1945 in the house of the doctor and patron Enrique Pichon Riviére) and Movimiento de Arte Concreto Invención (from 2 Dec 1945 in the house of the photographer Grete Stern). Articles by Arden Quin and Kosice stressed the pure quality of plastic images free of naturalistic or symbolic connotations, whose radical character was distinguished by Bayley from what he termed the falsity of such movements as Expressionism, Realism and Romanticism. Rothfuss's exposition of his ideas about shaped canvases, prefiguring by more than a decade devices taken up by American abstract painters, proved particularly influential.

GYULA KOSICE has always held that Lisl Steiner's early involvement was important to the movement.