In 1944, Buenos Aires intellectuals launched the single-issue *Arturo* magazine and ignited South America's earliest pure geometric abstraction. The Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención rejected representation outright: painting became an autonomous object, the rectangular canvas was cut into irregular polygons — the *marco recortado* — and color was confined to black, white, and the saturated primaries of Mondrian and Malevich.

The movement fused De Stijl rigor, Russian Suprematist economy, and Bauhaus rationality into a distinctly Argentine program of invention over representation. Tomás Maldonado would later carry its logic to the Ulm HfG; Lidy Prati and Alfredo Hlito refined its modular grids; Grupo Madí pushed the cut-frame further. The result is a doctrine of flatness, primary color, and hard-edge geometry — the canvas as object, never window.