Academies and Schools of Art in Latin America

Oscar E. Vázquez, Oscar E. Vázquez

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351187534
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art général

This edited volume's chief aim is to bring together, in an English-language source, the principal histories and narratives of some of the most significant academies and national schools of art in South America, Mexico, and the Caribbean, from the late 18th to the early 20th centuries.

The book highlights not only issues shared by Latin American academies of art but also those that differentiate them from their European counterparts. Authors examine issues including statutes, the influence of workshops and guilds, the importance of patronage, discourses of race and ethnicity in visual pedagogy, and European models versus the quest for national schools. It also offers first-time English translations of many foundational documents from several significant academies and schools.

This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, Latin American and Hispanic studies, and modern visual cultures.

Part I
Introduction

Oscar E. Vázquez

Academies and schools of art, since their foundations in the 16th through 18th centuries, were centers for the debate, control, dissemination, and legitimization of the theories, teaching, and practice of the “fine” and of “applied” arts in Europe. The proliferation of European academies and schools of art across the Western hemisphere over the last 300 years—almost a hundred in the mid-18th century alone—indicates a radical, purposeful trend toward the institutionalization of artists’ training. That fact begs multiple questions: Why were such arts institutions needed? What functions did they serve? And how were they the same or different in the places where they arose?

This collection of essays examines art institutions in the Spanish and Portuguese Americas that, on the surface, appear closely related and similarly structured in terms of pedagogy and curriculum. Their structures are strikingly similar, suggesting that institutions for arts pedagogy were created for analogous purposes, not only to underpin the project of nation building but also, as the following chapters will show, for the organization of the advancement of industry, the political needs of various power regimes, the idealism of patrons, and the competitive mercantile needs of artists.

General histories of academies and schools of art have largely dealt with Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States, such as those written by Carl Goldstein (1996), Anton Boschloo, editor (1986–1987), or Nikolas Pevsner (1940). More recent conferences have ventured to examine academies comparatively within a larger global context.¹ For the colonies of the former Spanish and Portuguese empires of the Americas and the Caribbean, and the subsequent independent nations of Latin America, there are studies focusing on individual academies of art, especially the many publications for those in Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, and Buenos Aires. But questions of how the diverse Latin American academies emerged from their colonial foundations and what their relationship is to each other are those that have not been explored. This volume takes up several of these issues from comparative perspectives for the first time.

Beyond filling a large lacuna, a comparative study of academies of art in the nations comprising the geopolitical regions understood as Latin America is significant. The nations of these regions had the most significant number of schools that were born during and out of the colonial period, in comparison to other colonial-imperial powers that also extended their pedagogical systems far and wide (the most significant being India under the British and northern Africa under the French).² Indeed, the long colonial histories of Spain’s and Portugal’s empires point to a difference of several hundred years of varied religious and social educational systems (before the royal academies and independent national academies of the late 18th and 19th centuries), in comparison to France’s and England’s colonial regimes.

The extended length of Latin America’s colonial history—a problem manifest in debates across multiple fields and that touches upon dependency theories and structural issues of continuities of unequal developments and exchange³—produced differences that included the survival of certain characteristics of family-based artisanal shops and structural elements of the guild system that would in the case of several countries be transformed into aspects of artistic training in later schools of art. The racial, ethnic, and class-based differences of creole societies—in short, many of the elements that both tie and distinguish Latin America’s nations in general from other postcolonial nations—also led to differences among their academies and schools of art.

One of this book’s chief aims is to highlight issues of importance common to many Latin American academies of art, while pointing to others that are specific to schools of individual countries. A second aim is to shed light on some of the similarities and differences in the genealogies and historical foundations of New World schools and academic institutions. It does so by examining and juxtaposing the number of scenarios of foundations of Latin American academies of art that form the individual case studies of this collection. Among the different academies and schools it is evident that several processes are repeated across the nations and continents: some academies or schools were born out of the impulses of artist ateliers; other academies were born from royal decrees; some arose out of the exigencies of economic patronage societies; some emerged within the meeting rooms of professional artists’ circles; still further, there are historical examples of schools whose origins point to two or more of these overlapping currents. Finally, the volume illuminates how various forms of documentation reveal the particular functions and political demands of academy patrons and creators. This book’s Appendices are the first to collect and translate several important foundational documents and decrees that record not only the authority, rules, and regulations of the schools but the actual practices that were intended to take place therein. In collecting such documents from the 18th through early 20th centuries, this book has been inspired by, and builds on, the continuing work of Dr. Mari Carmen Ramírez and her research group of the International Center for the Arts of the Americas (ICAA) at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, which has gathered countless 20th-century and contemporary documents. This anthological volume has concentrated on an earlier period.⁴

Academies and Schools of Art in Latin America focuses on the late 18th through the early 20th centuries (with some forays into the later transformations of the institutions in question) because the late 18th and early 19th century is the period of the birth of the earliest of the Latin American academies (or their precursor patronage societies). In that period, royal and national institutions born of the Enlightenment’s taxonomic obsessions as well as administrative and economic reforms were implanted upon Spain’s American colonies during the reign of the Bourbons and were later adopted as useful tools in nation building and mercantile apparatuses. The late 19th and early 20th century, for its part, saw the appearance of several national schools arise in the period of high capitalism.

This volume stops with the first quarter of the 20th century because the decades thereafter were markedly different, with the emergence of Mexico’s open-air schools and the mid-century US government-supported workshops in Puerto Rico and later by Havana’s School of Plastic Arts, which was part of the unfinished project of the Escuelas Nacionales de Arte.⁵ Even admitting the practical limitations of space, several national cases were regrettably left out due to a lack of documentation, because their schools were founded in much later periods, or because their historical narratives duplicated issues already covered by other institutions examined herein.⁶ Moreover, a larger (if not multi-volume) project would have had to deal with many other types of arts education sites not discussed here, namely, an investigation of instruction in private ateliers, the comparative study of the teaching of the arts in technical schools, and an in-depth study of workers’ unions or the associations and literary artistic patronage societies which offered art instruction and occasional exhibitions. Many of these latter associations, as several of the authors in this book point out, were crucial for the advancement of arts training in their respective countries. For example, the national schools of Argentina, Colombia, Cuba, and Ecuador all emerged from the foundations of various patronage or specialized societies. On both sides of the Atlantic, these types of organizations played strategic roles in the democratization of the arts.

Because of these various origins, the terms “academies” or “schools” will be employed here in a broader organizational sense to indicate institutions for the training of artists at advanced levels. While many of the government initiatives for arts education occurred at the primary and secondary school levels, this volume touches on those general, public-education grade school levels only when chapter authors mention specific national laws governing the organization and incorporation of arts training into wider educational policies and practices. For these reasons, those notable personages most strongly associated with European and US systems of common school pedagogy—namely Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, Hermann Krusi, Horace Mann—and the introduction of drawing into public schools, while certainly bearing upon the types of 19th-century reforms that gave way to the incorporation of professional art training at more advanced levels, must await further comparative studies, beyond individual national histories, for the case of Latin America.⁷ One chapter in this volume has pointed the way, with the case study of Chile.

Brief Overview of Earlier Training Sites and Centers

Workshops, guilds, and informal academies existed before the westward impulsion of royally sanctioned academies and state-funded institutions of art. Artisan guilds have existed since antiquity, from whence their formal organizations are derived, and continued through what might be referred to as the golden age of their expansion during the late medieval and Renaissance periods. Their proliferation is partially explained by their service as necessary agencies for the training and efficient control of labor in the developing cities of Europe. These guild structures and some of the artisans would eventually be carried to the Americas during the age of global contact.

Even before the arrival and founding of artisanal guilds in the New World, there were European-styled artisanal schools. Among these training grounds in the Americas were the artisanal schools founded largely by Franciscan priests in the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru (regions equivalent to present-day Mexico and the Caribbean, and Ecuador, Chile and Peru). In the city of Quito, the Flemish Franciscan missionaries Pedro Gosseal (or Gocial) and Jodoco Ricke founded at the convent church of San Francisco and Colegio de San Andrés (1534 and 1556 respectively) schools and workshops to train artisans in varied skills, including painting, wrought iron, ceramic, carpentry, and gilding. The Spanish sculptor Diego de Robles and Spanish painter Luis de Ribera also opened workshops in that city in the later part of the 16th century.⁸ The histories of such artisanal workshops in New Spain reveal appropriations of Aztec and other pre-Hispanic cultural training sites and organizations by Franciscan missionaries. In Mexico City, the Franciscans began to train artisans in the newly founded College of Santa Cruz (Holy Cross) at the Church of Santiago Tlatelolco (1536). However, possibly the first European arts training site in the Americas was the monastery of San Jose de Naturales in Mexico City (1526). There, a Flemish lay brother from Ghent, named Pedro de Gante, operated a school of artes y oficios (arts and trades) where he trained Nahuatl-speaking indigenous artisans in European formal pictorial techniques that included chiaroscuro and perspective.⁹ He probably made use of individuals already trained at the Aztec calmecac, that is, schools for priests and the nobility, as opposed to the training of telpochcalli, schools for Mexican young men, generally but not restricted to lower social rank.¹⁰

These very early workshops for training artisans were sponsored by the church and convents, and they have typically been examined by scholars either in anthropological terms or as colonial vehicles for control. The former mode is exemplified by case studies of Bernadino de Sahagún, the Franciscan missionary to New Spain, whose workshops helped produce the Codex Florentino (part of his Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva España, 1577), and by his unofficial title as the “father of field anthropological research.” The production of visual culture as a mode of colonial control has been described by Serge Gruzinski as a battle of images between contact societies and in which art was as powerful a force as speech and writing.¹¹

As might be surmised from these early examples, much of the production and training of artisans and image makers in the New World was handled by religious orders and by later cofradías (confraternities based on the veneration and care of images and materials of the cult of particular patron saints or deities). While the Council of Trent’s edicts of 1562 had underscored the Roman Catholic Church’s authority over the production and distribution of religious imagery, several later official documents, such as the 1680 Recopilación de Leyes de los Reynos de las Indias (Recompilation of laws), unequivocally reiterated that even later cofradías could not be formed without royal sanction.¹²

Not surprisingly, it was the European guild system’s structure for arts training and production that was exported and implanted onto the colonies. Guilds (gremios) from Spain arrived shortly after the conquest of American territories and the establishment of colonial viceroyalties. Some of the earliest ordenanzas—that is, the decrees handed down by the viceroys or Reales Audiencias controlling guilds—are those for Guatemala (pertaining to blacksmiths and tailors, 1530), Peru (pertaining to metalsmiths, 1552, and tailors, 1557), and Mexico (pertaining to gilders and painters, 1557). The bibliography on these New World guilds and confraternities—beyond the scope of this volume—is extensive (I point readers to works by Verdi Webster, Quiroz, and Pérez Toledo, among a rich field of scholars).¹³ Nonetheless, there are a few points that are relevant for the later academies. The guild system organized the various skill levels of aprendíz (apprentice), oficial (journeyman), and maestro (master guilds person). However, in the colonies the positions of veedor (guild examiner) and alarife/alarife mayor (city official inspectors) would become increasingly important for the control of image making. While guild levels cannot be precisely mapped ont...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations Permissions
• Acknowledgments
• List of Contributors
• Part I Introduction
• Part II The Academies and Schools
• Part III Appendices
• Part IV Bibliography
• Index