This 1920 article by Sebastián Viviani was published in Trabajo, a periodical that was a vehicle for the Consejo Superior de la Enseñanza Industrial in Uruguay. The text is a summary of the lecture given by sculptor Antonio Pena—who taught drawing at the Escuela de Enseñanza Industrial—on the importance of ornamental design to daily life in general and, in particular, of the objects produced at the Escuela de Enseñanza Industrial. Despite the somewhat naive and kitschy tone that the draftsman Viviani assumes as he interprets Pena, in describing the task of ornamentation as “gladdening” objects, the concepts he expresses are tied to the ideas of “art” and “crafts” and to the relationship between them at industrial schools in Uruguay around 1920. There was interest in equating the two, and in understanding “good taste” and “style” in relation to the “decorative arts.” Significantly, Pena’s lecture was given to female students; after Pedro Figari left the post of director of the Escuela Industrial in 1917, instruction in design of the “decorative arts” was limited to the sphere of “female toils.”

Draftsman Sebastián Viviani (1883–1968) was the librarian at the Escuela Industrial in 1920 before becoming secretary of the Círculo de Bellas Artes in 1925. In this article, Viviani reviews the most important points of a lecture on “decorative arts” that sculptor Antonio Pena had given to female students. One year after giving that lecture, Pena went to Vienna to participate in the studio of sculptor Anton Hanak. In 1920, he had finished his studies at the Círculo de Bellas Artes, where he had worked with Catalan painter Vicente Puig; from 1916 to 1918, he had come into direct contact with Pedro Figari. Owing to those experiences, Pena was immersed in the “positivist (naturalist)” spirit pervasive in instruction at both the Círculo and the Escuela Industrial. At the Círculo, that spirit was ushered in by painter Carlos María Herrera, and at the Escuela de Industrias by Figari. Pursuant to Figari’s forced resignation as director of that institution in 1917, the concept of “ornamentation,” understood as a constituent component of object design, was relegated, at the school, to the sphere of “female toils.” In other words, it came to be envisioned as a minor “pastime,” whereas Figari had envisioned it as an essential part of the production of distinctive furniture, implements, and household objects with “regional” character. Around 1920, a number of important artists were members of the faculty of the Escuela Industrial, such as Carmelo de Arzadun, Domingo Bazurro, and Antonio Pena, who taught drawing at the Escuela Femenina; Guillermo Rodríguez and Vicente Puig taught drawing and “decorative painting” at the Escuela Industrial Nº1. According to Viviani, Pena’s lecture addressed the tendency to overcome the distinction between “higher” and “lower” arts, a vision that Figari had worked toward in 1901 and that was, to a degree, manifested in the Círculo de Bellas Artes curriculum starting in 1905. Pena also attempted to define “style”—distinctive design, as opposed to “stylization” as geometric abstraction applied to a real model. The lecture laid out categories within the notion of “taste,” defining “good taste” as rejection of any exotic or irrational fantasy outside the functional logic of objects.