In this text, Raúl María Pereira rejects the notion of sincerity—a value as arbitrary as it is ungraspable—as privileged category in artistic creation. He upholds, rather, the duty born of “today’s agonizing mindset”—the search for the unobtainable, an inevitable and perhaps irresolvable vital problem that stands in opposition to supposedly “insincere imitators” like Diego Rivera or Pablo Picasso. The work of both consists largely of disseminating, with undeniable and formulaic academicism, outdated canons irrelevant to current concerns, canons in relation to which no “sincere imitation” would matter in the slightest. The term “pompier art” refers to the use of a “pictorial formula” with no artistic evolution or curiosity. The terrain of drawing with its “photographic” quality is different, Pereira asserts; he observes that mechanical reproduction has liberated art from what was once one of its functions. And, in reference to Mercedes Gallagher de Parks’s comment that contemporary art may perhaps be decadent, he cites Romantic musician Gabriel Fauré to argue that “decadences ferment” and that “the fermentation of decadences edifies the future.”

This article by Peruvian critic, painter, and diplomat Raúl María Pereira published in Lima-based newspaper La Prensa is a response to the comments by Mercedes Gallagher de Parks published in that same paper on November 4, 1943. [See in the ICAA digital archive her article entitled “Verano limeño y arte” (doc. no. 1289858)].

In 1943, after a period when there was almost no governmental support for the arts, the I Salón Municipal de Lima was launched as an attempt to remedy that situation. A great many artists abstained from participating in the event, however, due to the largely conservative jurors, among them Enrique Domingo Barreda, an influential academic painter. Although Barreda’s critical reflection on the salon was based on an attack on Indianism, the reigning tendency in Peruvian painting at the time, his critiques encompassed as well the academic criteria used to allocate awards. Supporters of modern art like Juan Ríos and Raúl María Pereira (1916–2007) criticized the triumph of the “photographic” style of José Gutiérrez Infantas (1897–1997), who was defended by conservative intellectual Mercedes Gallagher de Parks (1883–1950). Pereira’s rebuttal cast doubt on the legitimacy of the academicism of the day; he tacitly intended to bind art and modernism. Paradoxically, the academic bent of the salon evidenced the final retreat of that tendency from the Peruvian scene, though Indianist critics and artists had played a role, albeit a minor one, in the previous decade. The modernist advance had considerable influence on the withdrawal of government support for pictorial Indianism; the founder of that movement, José Sabogal (1888–1956), was soon removed from his post as director of the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes.