Collecting Mexico: Museums, Monuments, and the Creation of National Identity

1. Fine Art and Demand: Debating the Mexican National Canon, 1876–1910

1 29 Fine Art and Demand: Debating the Mexican National Canon, 1876–1910 One of the primary arenas in which consumer demand had a marked impact on the shape and development of a national canon was the fine arts. Note the following patron’s perspective as he navigates his entrance into the Academia de San Carlos1 in 1891: I humbly gave my obolus—a ten cent coin that a person who was neither very kind nor very attractive demands at the doors of the Academia—and I entered the art sanctuary, desiring to experience at my ease, [although] confused among the motley crowd that invaded the salons, the aesthetic emotion of the beautiful.2 In this aficionado’s account, there is a particular tension that surfaces repeatedly to interrogate the status of national art in late-nineteenthcentury Mexico. The exchange of the coin for access to the public art exhibition introduces an uncomfortable economy of the sublime, a precept that underwrites the search for a national aesthetic with the problem of making it equivalent to a calculable abstract value. For the spectator cited earlier, the democratization of art undermines the experience of the sublime and confuses his ability to locate himself as a viewing subject.3 The public’s “invasion” of the salon compromises the aesthetic experience at the same time as the implied collective accumulation of entrance fees sustains its very possibility. Examining the contradictory impulses of sanctuary and marketplace that collide in the preceding description, this chapter centers on the commercial subtext that underlay a significant portion of the 30 · FINE ART AND DEMAND propaganda, the promotional and the critical rhetoric that surrounded the creation of a canon of national art in Mexico between 1867 and 1900. In the endeavor to create a national painterly canon during this time juncture, there are two opposing protagonists: first, the conservative scholars and painterly traditions that were imported to the Academia de San Carlos from Europe, and second, the emergent liberal art critic as represented by Ignacio Altamirano and José Martí. Though both sides are concerned with creating a national painterly tradition for Mexico, they conflict in terms of how to go about doing so. Each perspective invites foreign influence, although in ways that differ quite radically. Whereas the cultural administrators represented by the Academia look to the traditional European canon to imitate and maintain the lofty standards of the sublime as practiced there, the liberal art critics encourage painters to cater their productions to what the U.S. and European consumers should wish to buy: local representations of the exotic Mexican flora and fauna. History has confirmed the liberal point of view, as genre painters such as José Agustín Arrieta and Germán Gedovius, who produced works for private art patrons that were not then considered to be part of the high canon, have now been retroactively deemed to embody a specifically Mexican nineteenth-century aesthetic. When viewed in the larger context of national political consolidation and the reestablishment of diplomatic relations with Europe, the published debates around Mexican national painting during the late nineteenth century reveal a type of dynamic oscillation between the two contradictory types of value that form the backdrop of this study: the transcendent–sacred and the commercial–exchangeable. Born at the seam of national political consolidation and the infancy of commercial and cultural globalization, Mexican art wavered at the pens of its critics between two forces. On one hand was the idealistic drive to maintain an unqualified relationship to the sublime and, on the other, the practical needs dictated by popularity, circulation, and consumption. As a result, creating standards for a national painterly canon was complicated by flirtations with commercial enterprise. Given this conflation of national and international boundaries, it seems that the negotiations, dialogues, and conflicts around the creation of a Mexican painterly canon at the late-nineteenth-century time juncture in fact preface the dialogues that would reconfigure the FINE ART AND DEMAND · 31 administrative debates on patrimony in the context of globalizing economies and cultures one hundred years later. National culture consolidates through dialogues, intersections, and overlaps with the universal or global standard. Centripetal and centrifugal forces coincide. While the art that was produced during the second half of the nineteenth century in Mexico fails to attract the scale of international critical attention such as that inspired by the muralist paintings that follow the Mexican Revolution (1910–21), the...