Exploring Indigenism and the Avant-Garde

Beverly Adams: We’re standing in front of David Alfaro Siqueiros’s Ethnography, from 1939. It was shown in New York the year it was made, and purchased shortly thereafter by MoMA. To me it’s an incredibly forceful image; it speaks to the Mexican Revolution and its goals, but also to its discontents.

Natalia Majluf: Yes, and it also condenses a lot of the ideas that framed what in the visual arts has been called Indigenism—both an exaltation of the Indigenous population and an evocation of the pre-Columbian past. The man in this image is dressed in peasant garb and wears an emblematic sombrero, but his face is covered by a pre-Columbian mask. And it is very interesting, because while Indigenism was trying to affirm and vindicate marginalized Indigenous populations, what it effectively also did was to create stereotyped images of anonymous figures that represented the greater collective.

BA: We know this mask was discovered in the 1930s. It was photographed, taken out of Mexico, and is now in a New York museum. It is actually a wooden mask, though in the painting it looks like it’s made of metal or stone. It’s very possible that Siqueiros may have seen a photograph of this image.

Can you talk more about the issue of stereotypes and portraiture? I think that’s a really important issue in this gallery, because we have all of these beautiful images of people but very few portraits.

NM: Look, for example, at the way Tina Modotti uses the representation of the worker’s hands in her photograph. She’s stressing the issue of labor, the collective—not the person. Modotti was associated with the Communist Party and was a very militant political figure. She also contributed many of these photographs to radical journals, including New Masses here in New York. So the idea of collective struggle was important politically. Take Worker’s Parade. It is an image of hats, of people whose faces cannot be seen. What matters here is the notion of a social class. Essentially what you see are masks.

BA: Masks are everywhere, like the pre-Columbian one suggested in Jean Charlot's Women Lifting Rebozo. Also, sometimes categories, not masks, serve to hide individuality. Take this Modotti photograph. When it was published, it was given titles like Aztec Mother. With Modotti’s images there is always some uncertainty because we don’t know whether she actually titled her photographs or if we are seeing a caption that was added by an editor. This one is really interesting to me because of who is in the picture. The woman is Luz Jiménez, who was an important model for artists working in Mexico in the 1920s, including Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and for Modotti, among others. Jiménez modeled for the newly established open-air schools which were devoted to educating children, workers, and people who didn’t have access to art education. But her name is very rarely associated with these images so she becomes a representation of a type—that of the Indigenous woman. In this gallery, which deals with the Indigenous, it makes a big difference to be able to include her name.

NM: In Peru, where there was no comparable political revolution, Indigenist painters sought to vindicate Indigenous peoples. José Sabogal was a leading figure in this movement and this painting is a good example of the visibility he sought to give the marginalized Indigenous population. Land tenure was a crucial topic also in Peruvian debates. Pictorial Indigenism tended to focus on a more general social and cultural vindication of the marginalized Indigenous population. Take this striking image by José Sabogal: while its title speaks to an ethnic category, it is also a compelling portrait, because of the way the woman gazes out questioningly at us. Sabogal became a leading figure in Peru in the first half of the 20th century, and was involved in the National School of Fine Arts and in the establishment of some of the country’s first museums. In the 1920s, he was also a key figure in one of the most important radical movements of the 20th century, led by Socialist intellectual José Carlos Mariátegui, with whom he collaborated on the journal Amauta. This movement attempted to create an avant-garde tied to local issues and concerns. And Sabogal became one of the first painters to depict Indigenous subjects positively.

BA: Let’s talk about Martín Chambi, a photographer from Peru. He was first exposed to photography as a teenager, when he worked for a British mining company in the Andes; which is where he first saw photographers at work and became fascinated with the medium.

NM: Chambi was born to a peasant family in the highlands of southern Andean region and became a key figure in the intellectual circles of Cuzco in the 1920s and 1930s. He was also instrumental in bringing the images of Indigenous populations to the newly expanding illustrated press of the period. And while he was very aware of his own indigenous identity, he was also engaged as a prominent urban intellectual. Even though he had no formal higher education, he became a decisive player in shaping Cuzco’s cultural institutions, and in the promotion of regional folklore and history.

BA: Can you talk about Chambi’s self-portrait, which is such a moving picture?

NM: This is an early self-portrait, probably made in the early to mid-1920s in his Cuzco studio. He is dressed in a suit and a tie and poses himself looking at a glass plate of an earlier portrait of himself. I think this shows the degree of self-consciousness he has about his status and identity as an artist. Everywhere in Latin America, and especially in Peru at that time, genres like painting and sculpture were not very developed in many provincial capitals, so photography studios took on an important role as spaces for intellectual and artistic encounters. I think this isn’t always clear when we look at early 20th-century photography. Chambi was a studio photographer, but created a distinction between the works made as art and those he made as part of his commercial studio work.

NM: Artists began looking toward traditions that had not been previously valued, like pre-Columbian art. In 1924, Elena Izcue produced a book called Peruvian Art in Schools. It’s a drawing manual inspired by her exhaustive study of pre-Columbian design in ceramics and textiles in Peruvian museums. She later became a textile designer in Paris and used these motifs in her art. There were, of course, other artists looking to traditional craft as a way of recovering cultural forms that had not been adequately valued. So this moment marks a major shift in the perspective on the region.

It’s important to mention that many of these artists were connected. Even if they did not know each other directly, they shared an ethos and a mission that was regional. They enthusiastically circulated journals and shared a political stance in the face of growing North American expansion and political interventions in the region. It was also a response to the greater participation by Latin American countries in the global economy. So, there are a number of layers in what we have called Indigenism—a social, cultural, and political vindication of local traditions. These movements were also, at once, and outcome and a response to the advances of modernity, as Latin America became increasingly incorporated into the global economy.