Article by Peruvian journalist César Guillermo Corzo on painter Mario Urteaga’s first exhibition in Lima (Sala Alcedo, 1934).
The indigenous art movement was at its peak in Peru between the 1920s and 1940s. It was part of a broader movement within Peruvian society: the redefining of the national identity through native elements. Although at times it focused on the revaluation of “the indigenous” and Incan past, which was considered glorious, it also took up the defense of a mestizo identity as the integration of “the native” and “the Hispanic.” The principal ideologue and undisputed leader of indigenous art was José Sabogal (1888–1956), who believed a deep sense of “roots” decisively influenced the regionalist trends of art in both Spain (Ignacio Zuloaga [1870–1945], among others) and Argentina (Jorge Bermúdez [1883–1926], to name just one); Sabogal spent his formative years in these countries. When he returned to Peru at the end of 1918, he settled in Cuzco, where he created nearly forty oil paintings about the persons and landscapes of that city, later exhibited in Lima (1919). This exhibition is considered the beginning of the indigenous art movement in Peru. His second individual show in Lima occurred at the Casino Español (1921), and it solidified his reputation. In 1920, Sabogal joined the faculty of the new Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes, later serving as its director (1932–43). He formed there a group of painters who adhered to the indigenous art movement, such as Julia Codesido, Alicia Bustamante (1905–68), Teresa Carvallo (1895–1988), Enrique Camino Brent (1909–60), and Camilo Blas (1903–85).
A fierce opposition to this trend arose in the mid-1930s—because it was perceived as official and exclusionary—, eventually resulting in Sabogal’s dismissal from the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes in 1943. The followers of the indigenous trend viewed it as unjust, and it produced a movement of solidarity with the painter that was expressed in letters, newspaper articles and social events.
Although Mario Urteaga did not belong to the indigenous art movement led by Sabogal, his work is classified within this trend; he began as a self-taught artist in Cajamarca, the city of his birth. Between 1903 and 1911 he was based in Lima, and when he returned to Cajamarca, he began working as a journalist for El Ferrocarril, a local newspaper that covered science, art, and politics. In 1920 he painted works with indigenous themes; and in 1923, encouraged by his nephew “Camilo Blas” (pseudonym of Alfonso Sánchez Urteaga, a well-known painter from Sabogal’s group), he expressed an interest in vernacular themes. During the 1920s he painted costumbrist works (featuring urban people of Cajamarca), and in the following decade his work dispensed with strictly criollo scenes, instead presenting images of indigenous protagonists within an idealized concept of landscape.
As a mature painter in 1934, Urteaga held his first exhibition in Lima (at the Academia Nacional de Música Alcedo), which was well-received by critics and the public given its country scenes that represented the ideals of indigenous art: the “classicist” nature of his compositions helped to emphasize the idea of an Andean cultural universe without contradictions and removed from the passage of time [see by Gustavo Buntinx and Luis Eduardo Wuffarden Mario Urteaga: nuevas miradas (Lima: Fundación Telefónica-MALI, 2003)].His work was also interpreted through the lens of international modernism because of its similarities to naïve art, and was even compared to its chief representative: Henri Rousseau. However, neither interpretation takes into account the complexity of his painting. As Buntinx points out (2003, p. 49), his work constitutes “a peripheral manifestation, but of his own sophistication, within which a certain classic inspiration prevails.”