In this text, Carlos Solari (alias “Don Quijote”) discusses articles on Peruvian painter Sabogal that appeared in the most important Buenos Aires-based newspapers (three of them in particular). The article in La Prensa speaks of the “modern sentiment” and “sound sense of structure” in works whose creator “experiences a different love and looks with different eyes at the life of the ancient indigenous races.” The review in La Nación newspaper describes Sabogal as “a strong painter of characters,” but questions calling his work “Peruvian art” since it is tied to a “modernity,” which in the reviewer’s opinion, has been “developed for many centuries beyond the confines of the Americas.” The article celebrates the purchase of one of his canvases by the Argentinean Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes. Solari asserts that the review by Víctor Délhez published in Le Courrier de la Plata is the one that “gets closest to the essence of Sabogal’s value,” stating that “his technique is of a primordially pictorial simplicity in which there is no room for drawing or extras.” Despite reservations about the “limits of his agenda,” Délhez considers Sabogal “a painter of great value and interest for his country.”

This article by Peruvian art critic Carlos Solari (alias “Don Quijote”) compiles remarks on the work of José Sabogal, founder of Peruvian pictorial Indianism, on the occasion of his exhibition at the Sociedad Amigos del Arte in Buenos Aires in 1928. With varying nuances, all of the reviews place emphasis on the quality of the woodcuts, and not only the paintings, included in the show.

Pictorial Indianism, which peaked in Peru in the twenties, thirties, and forties, was part of a wider movement in Peruvian society that attempted to redefine national identity in terms of native elements. While, at a certain moment, the chief concern of Indianism was the revalorization of “the indigenous” and of an Incan past seen as glorious, the movement also defended a mestizo identity that brought together “the native” and “the Hispanic.” José Sabogal (1888–1956) was indisputably the leader and intellect behind Indianism in the visual arts. His deep sense of “rootedness” was influenced by regionalist tendencies evident in art from Spain (the work of Ignacio Zuloaga [1870–1945], among others) and in Argentina (Jorge Bermúdez [1883–1926], to name just one artist)—countries where Sabogal spent a number of years studying. When he returned to Peru in late 1918, he settled in Cusco, where he produced almost forty oil paintings of local characters and views of the city that were exhibited in Lima in 1919. That exhibition is considered the formal beginning of pictorial Indianism in Peru. His second solo exhibition in Lima—the one that enabled him to consolidate prestige—was held in the galleries of the Casino Español in 1921. In 1920, Sabogal joined the faculty of the new Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes, which he directed from 1932 to 1943. The following painters, all of whom formed part of the Indianist movement, studied at that institution: Julia Codesido, Alicia Bustamante (1905–68), Teresa Carvallo (1895–1988), Enrique Camino Brent (1909–60), and Camilo Blas (1903–85).

Sabogal would return to Cusco to draw inspiration for his work at different points in his career. He spent a number of months there in 1925, making sketches for a major group of works that would not be exhibited until 1928—the year when a show of seventy-six oil paintings and prints was held in Montevideo and in Buenos Aires. In Lima, there were great expectations about the response to Sabogal’s work in the Río de la Plata region; articles originally published in the press there, like this article, were reproduced. Two days after this article was published, the Lima-based newspaper La Razón transcribed comments originally published in El Diario. 

[Of the many texts in the ICAA digital archive pertinent to Sabogal, the following were written by the artist himself: “Arquitectura peruana: la casona arequipeña (doc. no. 1173340); “La cúpula en América” (doc. no. 1125912); “Mariano Flórez, artista burilador de ‘mates’ peruanos, murió en Huancayo: José Sabogal su admirador y amigo, le rinde homenaje” (doc. no. 1136695); “Los mates burilados y las estampas del pintor criollo Pancho Fierro” (doc. no. 1173400); “Los ‘mates’ y el yaraví” (doc. no. 1126008); “La pintura mexicana moderna” (doc. no. 1051636); and “Sala de arte popular peruano en el Museo de la Cultura: selecciones de arte” (doc. no. 1173418)].