This text is Sebastián Salazar Bondy’s response to the criticism of artistic nationalism voiced by architect Luis Miró Quesada Garland in El Comercio newspaper (Lima, September 18, 1955) [see in the ICAA digital archive “En blanca y negra” (doc. no. 1138718)]. For Salazar Bondy, a country cannot be reduced to political terms, let alone to the concept of the “State,” since it entails “a series of deeper and more spiritual categories.” Citing historian Jorge Basadre, he describes Peru as a human community with “continuity in time and totality in space.” “It is,” then, “above all else a feeling,” one in which history, tradition, and culture are operative forces that give shape to an “original and distinct piece of that great body that is Western culture.” Like the family, the country forges spiritual ties in man shaped by lasting and far-reaching patrimonies. The author argues for the specificity of “the Peruvian” (its landscape, art, etc.), which he compares to the notion of France and its “School of Paris” in painting. In his defense of nationalism, he rejects cosmopolitanism, which he accuses of creating automatons of their own volition, as well as indistinctive literature and art.

This document is the first contribution made by Sebastián Salazar Bondy (1924–65) to one of the culminating debates between the faction of Peruvian modernists known as “artepuristas” and supporters of “socially committed art.” Here, the issue of nationalism in painting is addressed from the perspective of a writer.

Writer Sebastián Salazar Bondy even projected the tensions between “the visual arts” and “nationalism” onto the past. He gave a lecture entitled “Cómo la pintura ha buscado al Perú” that constructed a systematic history on the basis of the “Peru-painting” equation (Lima, September 12, 1955). The lecture was later published in three parts: [“El arte colonial entendido como represión” (doc. no. 1138058), “Los que intentan vencer el complejo” (doc. no. 1138075), and “Hallazgo de la realidad perdida: siglo XX” (doc. no. 1138092)]. That lecture suggests Salazar Bondy’s negative opinions of Peruvian colonial art, opinions he would later voice in no uncertain terms in his Lima la horrible (1964)—a book pivotal to the sixties generation. This column by Miró Quesada Garland—a major framer of modern art and architecture in Peru—is one of the most acute questionings of the nationalist discourse. In it, he makes ironic reference to the “Peru-painting” equation as a contradictory comparison of terms political and artistic. Salazar Bondy’s response led to an extensive exchange of articles between the two men [for additional information, see “En blanca y negra” (doc. no. 1138753) and (doc. no. 1138772)].

In the modernist debates over this issue—debates that began in June 1951 with statements by painter Fernando de Szyszlo (b. 1925)—critic Samuel Pérez Barreto (1921–2003) defended earthly abstraction as the only possible means to devise art both “Peruvian” and modern. Despite Pérez Barreto’s position, the terms of the debate that ensued over the course of the fifties pitted programmatic and figurative nationalism against an abstract language committed solely to art. Indeed, Miró Quesada Garland and Salazar Bondy had clashed in the debate on nationalism in art in mid-1954.

[For further reading on the debates between Peruvian modernists and advocates of socially committed art, see the following articles in the ICAA digital archive: by Fernando de Szyszlo “Dice Fernando Syszlo que no hay pintores en el Perú ni América: el joven pintor peruano declara sentir su pintura y la de los demás pero no puede explicarla” (doc. no. 1137793); and by critic Samuel Pérez Barreto “Pintura: la guerra de los pintores: plumas por pinceles” (doc. no. 1137839), “Arte: la guerra de los pintores” (doc. no. 1137856), and “Polémica: ‘polémica Espacio’” (doc. no. 1137916). Other texts by Salazar Bondy pertinent to the debate on nationalism include “En torno al desarraigo” (doc. no. 1138565), “Artes plásticas” (doc. no. 1138582), and “Punto final” (doc. no. 1138231). On the other side of the debate, see the column written by Miró Quesada Garland, the primary framer of modern art in Peru, entitled “En blanca y negra” (doc. no. 1138599), (doc. no. 1138620), and (doc. no. 1138248)].