Buen Gusto and Classicism in the Visual Cultures of Latin America, 1780-1910

12: Buen Gusto and Classicism in the Late Nineteenth Century: An Appraisal in the Context of the 1881 Centennial of Mexico’s Academy of San Carlos

255 Chapter Twelve Buen Gusto and Classicism in the Late Nineteenth Century An Appraisal in the Context of the 1881 Centennial of Mexico’s Academy of San Carlos Stacie G. Widdifield The majority of the essays in this volume shape the problems of buen gusto (good taste) and classicism in Latin America from the perspective of the late eighteenth-century initiation of the Bourbon Reforms and their aftereffects, as well as the initiation of nation building in the first half of the nineteenth century. They also demonstrate that classicism and its apparent correlates of good taste and the academy did not effect a totalizing trauma to the late colonial artistic body politic. Certainly classicism was deployed to serve the late eighteenth-century reformist agenda of the Bourbon regime across Latin America. To use the lexicon of multiple essays, however, it circulated simultaneously with, and did not necessarily supersede, local and especially baroque idioms. We learn that the articulation of classicism and good taste is most apparent in the arena of urban transformation across the long nineteenth century. Monumental architecture and sculpture exert a very strong gravitational pull in these essays. In this realm are investigated a range of stylistic accommodations to local needs, a dynamic hybridity as made visible in both exterior and interior spaces. Attendant to this is what we might think of as an arithmetic of the original wherein operates a presumed standard grounded in architectural treatises such as the works of Vitruvius or 256 Chapter twelve Palladio or models such as plaster casts of ancient and Renaissance sculptures or, ironically, even an ancient Andean ruin. Deviations from these standards are calculated as meaningful operations in the broader process of accommodation and adaptation of classicism in the process of its Americanization. This group of essays does not share the historical scholarly perception that neoclassicism is merely a phenomenon of foreign imposition consumed by an elite. They foreground the flexibility of neoclassicism in responding to national and local exigencies in Latin America, ranging from late eighteenth-century public government buildings in Lima to plantations in mid-nineteenth-century Cuba to centennial projects in 1910 Colombia. A number of essays highlight the critical role of an emerging mass media in the dissemination of classicism and good taste. Strongly inflected by Benedict Anderson’s propositions regarding the formation of communities and nations, these essays show how print culture commands a leading role in guiding the public to see images as well as to acquire them. Looking or reading publics are enjoined to bring themselves properly into alignment with good taste as well as with the nation. In this process, good taste may or may not be understood as classicism, much less as always and everywhere articulated by the academy. Print culture is, effectively, a visual technology that makes its impress on behaviors, both imagined and performed. Ultimately, the engines of political and artistic confrontations of the late eighteenth century (neoclassicism/baroque, academy/guild) and the complexities of the projects of citizen formation of the first half of the nineteenth century have compelled a significant amount of attention. What of good taste in the late nineteenth century, when the nation is more or less built and the academy a relatively stable institution whose dismantling of guilds has been long since achieved and in which the marketplace as well as new technologies may play an increasing role in the arbitration of good taste? This is the situation in late nineteenth-century Mexico, just at the moment when the National School of Fine Arts celebrated its centennial in 1881.1 The 1881 centennial celebration of the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City presents an opportunity to direct our interrogation of good taste away from particular monuments and the impact of traditions of scholarship. The centennial generated an opportunity for looking back to the institution’s foundation as well as to assess its performance and evaluate contemporary expectations of the school. Thus, in these two ways the 1881 centennial exhibition operates in sync with what are now very well-known Porfirian practices 257 Stacie G. Widdifield designed to formulate Mexico’s heroic history and to produce its modern future . I would like to initially examine the operation of good taste in the context of the centennial through a cluster of primary-source documents of the period. These include: the 1881 speech delivered by the director of the school, correspondence written by the...