After mentioning the decorative nature of Julia Codesido’s exhibition, the author of this review discusses her portrayal of the Andean mountains, calling it: “an exceptional vision rather than a straight idealization.” The decorative nature of her work facilitates her arbitrary gestures, colors, and underlying emotions; she excels in her use of color and her handling of perspective. Her work reveals a number of influences, including Mexican art, the decorations used in Andean engraved mate gourds, and the work of her teacher José Sabogal. The reviewer commends Codesido’s academic technique, but critiques the arbitrary solutions she voluntarily applies to certain positions. He draws attention to work that expresses “sincerity” and to her well-crafted urban interiors, highlighting three nudes that perplex him because they are mountain women. He ends his review by saying that despite the constant risk posed by a lack of sincerity, the artist’s evident positive attitude underpins her dominant axiology: her use of color.

The Peruvian painter and art critic Antonino Espinosa Saldaña reviews the second exhibition of work by Julia Codesido at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos (Lima, 1931). Indigenist painting flourished in Peru from the 1920s to the 1940s as part of a broader movement that sought to redefine Peruvian identity in terms of indigenous elements. Although at some points it was entirely focused on the “indigenous” story and the glorious Inca past that also championed a mestizo identity portrayed as a result of the integration of “native” and “Hispanic” cultures. The main ideologue and unchallenged leader of the Indigenist movement in the visual arts was José Sabogal (1888–1956), whose profound interpretation of the concept of “being rooted” was deeply influenced by regional art movements in Spain (exemplified by Ignacio Zuloaga [1870–1945], among others) and in Argentina (Jorge Bermúdez [1883–1926], to mention just one); Sabogal spent a great deal of time in these countries during his formative years. When he returned to Peru in late 1918, he settled in Cuzco where he produced about forty oil paintings of people and scenes of the city; these works were subsequently shown in Lima (1919) at an exhibition that is considered the formal beginning of Indigenist painting in Peru. Sabogal’s second solo exhibition at the Casino Español (1921), established his reputation. He joined the faculty at the new Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes in 1920, where he was eventually appointed director (1932–43). There he trained a group of painters who joined the Indigenist movement: Julia Codesido, Alicia Bustamante (1905–1968), Teresa Carvallo (1895–1988), Enrique Camino Brent (1909–1960), and Camilo Blas (1903–1985). Unlike her companions, Julia Codesido embraced indigenism as her point of departure on a journey of personal growth that took her—in her later years—to the very threshold of abstraction, combining a “visual discovery of the country with the inexorable influx of modernity” [Luis Eduardo Wuffarden, Julia Codesido (1938–1979): muestra antológica. (Lima: CCPUCP, 2004)]. Her development as an artist can be explained by the migration of her family to Europe in the early twentieth century, where she witnessed the evolution of the artistic avant-garde. Back in Lima, she first took classes at the painter Teófilo Castillo’s studio, and then attended the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes once it opened in 1919. When she had her first exhibition at the Academia Nacional de Música Alcedo (Lima, 1929), she was described as an artist with a “preference for the vernacular.” But she already stood out because of her artistic nature and her ability to use color and design in her expressive style. In 1931, she became a professor at ENBA, but when she presented her second solo exhibition based on paintings of much greater complexity, her artistic ambition prompted her to quit academia. Despite her interest in the living culture of Peru, her style does not quite fit in an ethnographic category. In 1935, as one of the first artists to have an exhibition at the opening of the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, she took her place on the international stage. The recognition her painting received from Mexican muralists has opened doors to the North American market, where she has exhibited at the Delphic Studios gallery in New York (1936) and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1937). The painter and art critic Antonino Espinosa Saldaña was extremely busy in Peru in the 1930s. He was a member of Los Duendes, but his modernist, intimate painting was rarely seen in public. Although his work could not be classified under the umbrella of the indigenist school, he was close to Sabogal and his students, whom he spoke of in glowing terms. The first retrospective exhibition of his work took place in 2010 at the Centro Cultural Británico in Lima.