ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes two key moments of Mexico’s Museo de Artes Plásticas, its foundation (1934) and its first refoundation (1947), episodes that until now have not been studied as divergent projects of normative, national, and museological identity. The museum’s transcendence lies in that fact that it was destined to be an indispensable symbolic instrument of state policies—given the monopoly on culture that the government held during late modernity—and a sounding board for the official formation of collective identities in transit to a type of nationalism that sought hegemony in the middle of the twentieth century. The goal was reached after a necessary process of museological adaptation. The space founded in 1934 was insensitive to the nationalistic and culturally representative requirements of the political class in power. Its curatorial program was based on colonial conceptions that emphasized points of contact between the local and the European. Given its subordination to the state agenda, this substantial deficit made the museum a failure. In 1947, it was refounded as the Museo Nacional de Artes Plásticas (MNAP), an institution that legitimized nationalist positions—populist and indigenist—that had been consolidated during World War II. From the MNAP, Mexico was presented as a successful model of development and modernity, flaunting contemporary visual art as the official art of an institutionalized government. Exhibiting opposing conceptions of the artistic past implied imagining distinct possible futures. From this ground, Mexico negotiated the tensions between tradition and modernity and nationalism and universalism as experienced by Latin America.
