In the museum or in the church? In search of a local discourse for colonial art in New Granada, 1920-1942

Abstract

This paper seeks to understand the complex implications of the nostalgia for the colonial characteristic of the arts in Colombia between the decades of 1920 and 1940. Although this yearning would hinder the arrival of modernity in Colombian art, it opened up spaces where local discourses about art took shape, especially through debates regarding the paintings produced between 1638 and 1711 by the painter Gregorio Vásquez de Arce y Ceballos from Santa Fe de Bogotá. The creation of institutional spaces for learning, collecting and exhibiting the national arts, the emergence of a literature around Vásquez and particular events such as the expropriation and secularization of the monastic orders after 1861, were all critical factors in the emergence of ideals that upheld links with Spain and pointed back to Vásquez as the nation’s great painter and paradigmatic artist.