A Taste for the Local

Abstract

The artist, designer, and pedagogue Elena Izcue (1889–1970) was a pioneer in the field of Peruvian decorative arts and among the first to take inspiration from Peruvian pre-Hispanic motifs. Relying on those motifs, she designed an impressive collection of textiles for the famed House of Worth in Paris during the 1930s, to which she owes her international reputation. That can be considered the high point of her career; yet it nonetheless marked a retreat from the far more ambitious project that she undertook before her departure from Peru in 1927. This article aims to reconstruct that project. I argue that Izcue’s chief objective was to bring the appreciation of pre-Columbian themes and motifs out of the realm of public monumentality and into that of domestic consumption. Izcue sought, in other words, to produce decorative objects that might furnish the homes of a rising class of modest, urban, white-collar workers with both “national” designs and domestically produced materials. After analyzing Izcue’s approach to her sources of inspiration as well as the relatively limited opportunities that she had to present her vision, I discuss the prevailing social attitudes that prevented her project from being fully legible for her intended audience. In the article’s concluding section, I assess the significance of Izcue’s aesthetic recuperation of the pre-Columbian past against the backdrop of both the official and contestatory indigenisms that rose to prominence in Peru during the twenties.