ABSTRACT
Created through a September 1918 decree, the National School of Fine Arts of Peru (ENBA) was, perhaps, the government’s last important civil, political project in the development of Peruvian education. The birth of the institution is certainly linked to the founding figure of Daniel Hernández (1856–1932), a veteran academic painter repatriated from Europe after many years of absence and who was tasked with organizing and directing the Academy. It soon became known that the ENBA’s regulations were based directly on those that governed the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Everything suggested that the Peruvian School’s ultimate purpose would be to replicate locally the artistic tendencies developed in Old World academies. However, during its first years of activity, the ENBA became a dynamic center, attentive to the contemporary situations in Peru, and whose privileged link with the state decisively promoted the emergence of an art that was simultaneously national and modern.
That crucial turn toward an institution that was not simply replicative but sensitive to national concerns was the result of a set of historical circumstances. On an international level, the national art school project coincided with the diverse currents of ideological and social renewal that emerged forcefully at the end of the First World War. The growing surge of nationalism crossed several continents and had come to be a constant in politics and in culture, both in Europe and in America, during the hectic interwar period. In Peru, the ENBA would be a leading, mediating vehicle for the development of nationalism increasingly linked to varying definitions of indigenism. This chapter, therefore, will examine the battles during the first years of ENBA’s founding—coinciding with the government’s development of the political project of a Patria Nueva (New Nation)—and of the School’s exhibitions of works struggling with new definitions of “Peruvianness.” While indigenismo has been studied, the role of the ENBA within and as parallel development related to government-oriented projects of national identity needs further examination.
