Drawing on Tradition: Elena Izcue's Peruvian Art in the School

Summary

The 1930 course catalogue at Lima’s Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes (National School of Fine Arts) announced a new class that would spark months of fierce debate in the popular press. In an open letter published in the newspaper El Comercio, Antonino Espinosa Saldaña heavily criticized the school’s inclusion of a lecture series on Inca art, stating quite bluntly that such a thing did not exist. “It was not a civilization of aesthetes, cultivators of beauty, of line, of color, of form”, the painter wrote, and while Espinosa deemed the output of earlier cultures in the region more striking, applying even these motifs to contemporary works would produce only “annoying agglomerations of incomprehensible monsters”. The ENBA’s Inca art class — and the calumny it provoked — took place against the backdrop of the ascendent Indigenist aesthetic movement, which sought to anchor Peru’s artistic future in the pre-Columbian past, skipping over, as it did so, the gilt-bedecked products of Spanish colonial rule. Debates about something as innocuous as an art class, then, were shorthand for much larger and more fundamental questions about the nature of Peruvian national identity in the modern era and the position of Indigenous people in society.