A Taste for the Local: Elena Izcue and the Making of a Peruvian Decorative Style

In February 1921, Philip Ainsworth Means, then director of the National Museum of Archaeology in Lima, wrote an open letter to the minister of public instruction suggesting that it was time for Peru to have a school of national arts that might give the young the opportunity to learn the country’s ancestral techniques of ceramics, textile production, and metalworking.³ The project envisioned by the US-born, Harvard-educated archaeologist was ambitious. To his mind, recent archaeological discoveries, like those of Nasca, Paracas, and Moche cultures (the latter then known as proto-Chimu), should not only elicit expressions of national pride; the artifacts made by the ancient inhabitants could in fact be used as sources of inspiration for the decorative arts and, in that capacity, contribute to the economic development of the country.

In preparation for the new school, Means proposed, a pilot program could be implemented involving both the museum and the ministry. The museum would grant a select group of students (presumably students from the recently created ENBA) access to its collections so that they could, in a rigorous but creative way, analyze pre-Columbian objects in terms of both their style and techniques of production. The ministry, for its part, would establish a number of technical schools that, relying on the research conducted at the museum, would adapt the ancient knowledge to the needs of modern life. For the project to be sustainable, local artisans should be involved. Working in close association with the government, Means argued, Indigenous weavers could become acquainted with recent technological developments that might help them improve their practice (for example, modern artisanal looms), combining them with a repertoire of motifs and patterns, some more than two thousand years old, that had long disappeared from collective memory. In addition to this, the project would equip the students with unique archaeological knowledge that might enable them to apply for handsomely paid jobs abroad, either as craftsmen or designers. It was therefore essential that the government launch an aggressive campaign to raise international awareness of the beauty of Peruvian pre-Columbian design. If concerted efforts were made to publicize the excellence of Peruvian craft, he believed, it might even be possible to export luxury goods—rugs, curtains, and even clothing—to the finest department stores abroad, like Harrods in London or Sloane in New York.

Means’s project would not come to fruition: he left the country shortly after, apparently unwilling to work with the museum’s modest budget. Yet his open letter predicted Izcue’s future career with remarkable prescience. Alongside her studies of painting and drawing at the academy, she pursued an independent strain of research into pre-Columbian objects. Over the course of several years, as her archive reveals, she studied hundreds of artifacts held in public and private collections throughout Peru: textiles and ceramics, above all, but also objects as diverse as mummy bundles, khipus, and instruments for spinning and plying yarn. Her initial output consisted of many hundreds of watercolor studies that were to provide her with an enormously useful basis for her future career as a designer in Europe. It is possible, however, that Means’s idea of opening the museum’s collection to a group of select art students had been inspired by Izcue in the first place; it was she in fact who, as Means himself would recall, approached him in October 1920 to ask permission to study the museum’s holdings.⁴

Whoever was the source of the initial spark, it is clear that Izcue’s own vision aligned with Means’s in several important respects. Like Means, Izcue was wholeheartedly committed to education, particularly technical education. She also seized on the idea that if pre-Columbian motifs were to be productively employed in the decorative arts, they would have to be adapted to modern standards of taste. But for all that they had in common, Izcue remained relatively indifferent to the ancient techniques of making that seemed to have captivated Means’s imagination; she focused rather exclusively on motif and pattern, leaving to the side, for example, the complex forms of weaving for which Andean textiles are famous.⁵ Moreover, she was interested neither in producing luxury goods nor in serving international markets, even though, rather paradoxically, she would eventually do just that. What she endeavored to accomplish prior to leaving for Paris in 1927 was to change patterns of consumption among the Peruvian middle classes toward an appreciation of the local. The local, in this case, had two distinct yet complementary aspects: first and foremost, the artistic legacy of pre-Columbian cultures; second, domestically produced materials, textiles above all, that the urban middle classes could afford.

But before examining how those two aspects converge in Izcue’s work, it is important to understand how she approached her sources of inspiration. From early on, her attention overwhelmingly focused on zoomorphic motifs. The bulk of her studies focus on cat, bird, and fish forms taken from Nasca pottery and textiles, as well as similar animal and vegetal designs drawn from Paracas, Chimu, and Chancay artifacts (figs. 3 and 4).⁶

She was also clearly drawn to the more abstract, geometrical step-fret and wave-and-step motifs ubiquitous in Andean textiles, which appear regularly in her studies (figs. 5 and 6). Few Inca artifacts, or even highland artifacts more generally, appear in her drawings. This absence of the pre-Hispanic culture most closely associated with Peruvian history might have had to do with the particular objects available to Izcue for study, but it is also possible that she found Inca art too spare for her decorative purposes.⁷ In general, though, Izcue followed her personal tastes. Whatever the ritual or symbolic meanings of the motifs she chose might have been, she did not take them into account; it was their formal qualities that mattered the most to her.⁸

Nor does she seem to have been particularly interested in anything like scientific accuracy. In principle, her work was modeled on both the tradition of archaeological drawing and that of the ornament book, both of which she would have certainly been familiar with.⁹ Yet it adhered to neither genre rigidly. Some of her drawings do indeed carefully chart the irregular borders of textile fragments and record the texture of their weave (see fig. 6), or even reproduce entire objects, like textile pouches or ceramic vessels. The vast majority of her watercolors, however, isolate motifs from the particular object on which they were found, at times simplifying, changing colors, or otherwise altering them (see figs. 4 and 5). That was a conscious decision on her part. According to Means, she had a talent for selecting the aesthetically significant elements from an intricate ancient design so as to create new patterns of great elegance, beauty, and simplicity.¹⁰ In this sense, she would deliberately soften or elide “all those parts which the modern mind would find to be merely grotesque.”¹¹ True, we do occasionally find some intimations of violence in her studies, such as trophy heads, but the explicit sexuality and violence that Izcue would have certainly come across in her research are rarely found within her watercolor archive. Last but not least, she would in general avoid depictions of a narrative kind, such as those commonly found in Moche ceramics.

Through this process of selection, abstraction, and reinterpretation, Izcue came to possess a vast repertoire of functional graphic units that she would deploy and arrange according to her aesthetic preferences and practical needs. One revealing source for the way she used those units is her two-volume drawing book, El arte peruano en la escuela (Peruvian Art in the Classroom), published in 1926 (vol. 1) and 1929 (vol. 2). Following a workbook format, this text was purported to be used for art instruction in Peruvian schools, offering select motifs in black across the top of gridded sheets as models that students were to replicate below (figs. 7 and 8).¹²

The second volume is of particular interest, as it includes a section with models—something like a craft manual—for how those motifs might be combined and applied to different objects. Thus we learn that a small canvas bag can be decorated with a simple bird drawn from a Nasca textile, either by doubling that figure to create a central symmetrical motif or, alternatively, by tessellating it into paired columns. In another telling example, Izcue invites the reader to arrange a decidedly more geometrized bird from a textile from Chimbote into repeated bands; that motif could also be iterated and inverted so as to create more complex symmetrical shapes to be painted or appliqued onto a variety of surfaces, shrunk or expanded to fit its object (fig. 9).

Izcue’s take on her sources of inspiration was, as we can see, quite liberal. Not only did she “reimagine,” as it were, ancient pre-Columbian motifs, she also sought to redeploy them using techniques that are inherently amenable to both craft and mass production. The ones that she favored—appliqué, embroidery, and block printing—allow for the pattern to be added onto an already finished piece of cloth. This in turn allows the process of making to be divided up into several distinct stages, flexibly catering to the needs of both the home seamstress and the factory. That is not the case, it should be noted, with artisanal weaving, a particularly time-consuming, labor-intensive, and complex method of making in which the production of the pattern is inseparable from the production of the textile itself. Instead of following (and struggling against) the severe logic imposed by the interlacing of warp and weft, she preferred the freer rein that surface-oriented techniques gave her to work out her designs. In this regard, her approach was diametrically opposed to that of the Bauhaus weaver Anni Albers, the other artist most dedicated to the study of pre-Columbian textiles during the twenties. For Albers, ancient Andean textiles represented the utmost example of how the interlocking of complex multi-ply structures could result in an indivisible unit of design and material.¹³ Izcue was rather driven by the beauty of the motif and its potential seriality. At the same time, she was seduced by the prospect of producing on a large scale all those furnishings—cushions and pillows, curtains and lamp shades—that had increasingly come to be regarded as indispensable for the decoration of the home of a middle-class family.

This vision first burst forth onto a very public stage surprisingly early in Izcue’s career. It took the form of a display interior that was exhibited in the halls of the National Museum of Archaeology—the very site where Means had given Izcue access to the collection for study some months before—on the occasion of the centennial celebration of Peru’s independence in July 1921. Dubbed the Salón incaico (“Inca salon”), this complete interior adhered to the Art Nouveau ideal of a unified Gesamtkunstwerk.¹⁴ According to descriptions from the time, it included wall decoration, painted baseboards, a ceiling frieze, stained glass, furniture, a rug, cushions and pillows, and a lamp.¹⁵ Though none of those objects has survived (the only pieces of visual evidence that we have are a few preparatory sketches [fig. 10] and some fragmented photographs of a later installation, more on which below), the ample press coverage that the display room received will help us get a sense of Izcue’s vision and, perhaps more important, of how challenging such a vision likely was for Peruvian audiences in the early twenties.

In principle, no place would have seemed more appropriate for Izcue to present her vision of a modern Peruvian interior than the National Museum, especially in the midst of a celebration of Peruvian culture. Interestingly, however, visitors seem to have felt inclined to see the Salón incaico not as the prototype of a modern Peruvian interior but as a room that contained authentic Inca objects, or as a period room recreating the interior of a pre-Columbian residence. Newspapers even referred to her interior as “the exhibition of Inca art at the National Museum.”¹⁶ This misperception was not completely unjustified. Her room, after all, was housed in an archaeology museum: the contiguity of other galleries in which authentic pre-Columbian objects were in fact on display might have thus conditioned the perception of the inattentive viewer. Izcue’s sketches, moreover, reveal that the room was meant to include a cabinet that might perhaps have contained objects from the museum’s own holdings—a conceit that, if actually realized, might have reinforced the impression that all the objects on display were pre-Columbian relics. But the main factor to take into consideration here, I think, is that the very idea that a modern Peruvian family could decorate their home with objects inspired by pre-Columbian motifs was too much of a novelty to be immediately apprehended by most audiences at the time.

Of all the attributes that could be conceivably assigned to pre-Columbian objects, the least obvious for Peruvians during the twenties was the one that Izcue valued the most—their beauty. They were objects that primordially functioned as symbols of Peru’s national identity. As such, they reminded Peruvians that the country’s highlands had been the cradle of the Inca Empire, the greatest in South America, and were therefore most appreciated when manifested on a monumental scale. Monumentality, indeed, was highly esteemed by President Leguía. During his eleven-year rule, Leguía advocated for, if not directly supported, the development of a new national style that revolved around pyramidal and stepped shapes, trapezoidal forms, stonework reminiscent of Inca and Tiwanaku constructions, and references to pre-Columbian iconography from cultures separated by hundreds or thousands of years. Among the best-known examples of this style is the building of the National Museum of Archaeology itself. Originally a private museum founded by the sugar industrialist Víctor Larco Herrera, it was acquired by the state in 1924 and today houses the National Museum of Peruvian Culture (fig. 11). Others include the statue of Manco Cápac, the mythical first Inca ruler, erected on the periphery of the historic center of Lima as a gift from the Japanese community in 1926 (later moved to the working-class district of La Victoria), and the “Neoperuvian” façade of the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes, designed by the Spanish architect Manuel Piqueras Cotolí (fig. 12).¹⁷

But in addition to bearing this public symbolism of nationalistic overtones, pre-Columbian objects, when privately owned, were recognized as markers of wealth, status, and good taste. Well established among the oligarchic families, the practice of collecting so-called “Peruvian antiquities” dated back to the late eighteenth century; yet by the mid-nineteenth century, as Stefanie Gänger has shown, it gradually began to draw the attention of a new class of professionals and entrepreneurs eager to raise their social status.¹⁸ What made pre-Columbian artifacts appealing, in this case, was their rarity and antiquity. They were regarded as signs of distinction. Wealthy families would exhibit them in a cabinet, much as Izcue had in her display room; but that cabinet, like the rest of their furnishings, still adhered to European styles and was preferably imported from Europe. Nobody among the comfortable classes, especially the new aspirational middle class, would have entertained the possibility of extracting pre-Columbian motifs from their fetishized material basis so as to apply them for decorative purposes.

Once the centennial celebrations had concluded, Izcue did something that, perhaps unwittingly, would help make her original vision more readily legible to the public: she transferred the contents of the Salón incaico to her own home in the historical center of Lima.¹⁹ Thus reinstalled, the interior acquired new functions and meanings (figs. 13 and 14). First and most obviously, it became inhabited. No longer tied to the institutional space of the museum, the objects that Izcue had designed for the centennial now revealed themselves to be either decorations or utilitarian items that belonged to her and with which she lived. Antiquities from the artist’s own modest collection, the majority of them ceramic vessels or huacos, were displayed in a cabinet. Those objects, housed as they were in a private home, evidently lacked the connotations of cultural patrimony with which the museum’s holdings were invested. Moreover, they shared a space with her own modern, indigenist paintings, which squarely rooted the ensemble in the present.

And yet, even in this new setting, the Salón incaico would continue to puzzle visitors, including one as learned as Óscar Miró Quesada de la Guerra, a noted science journalist. His remarks apropos the salon, written under his nom de plume “Racso” in June 1923, convey a sense of both profound admiration and utter confusion. Upon entering a small room, Racso writes, he “felt suddenly transported to the ancient Peru of the Incas: curtains, rugs, blinds, lamps, papers, tapestries, glass, furniture, and all kinds of decorations were of pure Inca style.”²⁰ Although Racso was evidently aware that none of those household items were used, let alone known, by the Inca (those objects, he rightly observes, were “of pure Inca style”), he candidly described his experience of the room as that of entering a time machine. Almost immediately, however, he brings his account into sharper focus. He observes, for example, that the chair on which he is sitting is “carved with ornamental themes taken from huacos” and that “the lamplight softly filtered its veiled clarity through paper cut out with motifs from the Nasca civilization.” More significantly, he also explains, reflecting on his initial confusion, why he felt transported to an Inca past that had never been: “That experience was unknown to me. Rooms with huacos, façades of houses decorated with Inca motifs can be found everywhere in Lima; but I had never been given the opportunity to contemplate the reincarnation of the Inca spirit in the totality of such a beautiful interior.”²¹

The visitor who perhaps best understood Izcue’s vision was José Otero, the art critic for Variedades, a popular illustrated magazine that offered a broad variety of reports, ranging from society happenings and sport news to archaeological discoveries and the latest technological developments abroad.²² In an article published in July 1923, Otero hailed Izcue’s invention of a “new decorative style,” outlining her systematic study of pre-Columbian artifacts as well as her modern stylization of ancient patterns and motifs.²³ Turning to the decorative objects themselves, Otero noted that they were handmade (which is unsurprising considering the fact that they had been created for a singular exhibition), but more importantly, he praised their simplicity: no gold or precious stone embellishments had been added, and there was no sign of pretense or false ostentation. Izcue’s creations, he stressed, had been crafted from “modest wood” and “vulgar cloth.”²⁴ And yet they were extraordinary because of the “good taste” of the artist. While we do not know what kind of impact this article might have had among the readers of Variedades, Otero certainly struck all the chords that, in theory at least, could have made Izcue’s vision appealing to a broad audience of middle-class Peruvians. Of special significance, in this respect, is Otero’s emphasis on how Izcue’s good taste was capable of transforming humble, even unappealing materials into refined and desirable consumer goods.

Key to understanding the considerable attention that Izcue garnered during the twenties and thirties is her reputation as a chic person in elite circles. The child of a noted diplomat, José Rafael de Izcue, Elena can indeed be said to have belonged to those circles, but only to some extent: she was born of an extramarital affair. Ideally, Elena Izcue should have been Elena de Izcue. Yet due to the circumstances of her birth, she was not legally entitled to use that preposition so charged with aristocratic connotations. It is not that don José Rafael had refused to recognize his daughter; he might have done so, but he passed away shortly after Elena and her twin sister, Victoria, were born. This means that they were likewise not entitled to inherit.²⁵ Even so, the Izcue sisters managed to get by; they received support from relatives and friends of their late father that prevented them from living in dire poverty and allowed them to receive an education. In subsequent years, moreover, their distinguished origins (even if tainted, we might guess, by some gossip) enabled them to travel in social circles well beyond their means. Thus they had the chance to befriend the Larco Herrera brothers, Víctor and Rafael, both captains of industry and antiquity collectors, who would patronize Elena’s work in different capacities. But the Izcues still fit imperfectly in that world of elegant salons. Unlike other bona fide upper-class women, they were compelled to do something uncommon and potentially embarrassing: work. Beginning in their teenage years, Elena and Victoria were both employed as primary school teachers. Still, they were widely acknowledged to come from a “good family,” as they lived in a highly stratified society in which hierarchy, rather than being straightforwardly defined in terms of wealth, involved other, more subjective factors such as family name, race, education, and manners.²⁶

What Elena lacked in economic resources, she compensated for with batteries of cultural capital. In sociological terms, she belonged in that liminal space that Pierre Bourdieu, in more general terms, has characterized as “the dominated fraction of the dominant class.”²⁷ Whether purposefully or not, she was capable of projecting an aura of desirability onto what she liked—one that was certainly perceived by the elite, but could also appeal to the middle classes, given their pronounced tendency to imitate the ways of the upper classes so as to look decent and reputable.

During the twenties, the conventional wisdom about what counted as “good taste” among the Limeño comfortable classes was dictated by European styles and trends. There existed, moreover, a strong preference for consumer goods made abroad—meaning Europe and the United States. Those goods included furniture and technology, but imported textiles were particularly desired. Domestic cottons and woolens, as noted by Benjamin Orlove, were generally avoided as they were considered, not necessarily without reason, to be of middling quality compared to their French and English counterparts.²⁸ Interestingly, however, the cotton textile industry had been registering a steady growth since the turn of the century. If in the late nineteenth century only 5 percent of the cotton textiles used in the country were locally produced, that figure grew to almost 50 percent during the twenties.²⁹ That was because there was a growing demand for domestic cloth among the lower social ranks: manual laborers, quite evidently, but also a petite bourgeoisie consisting of public servants, office clerks, and salespeople.

Much like the elites, these white-collar workers were deeply troubled by the prospect of failing to project an image of respectability; yet they lacked the economic resources to measure up. They struggled to send their children to the right schools, be seen at the right cafés, and wear the right clothes. They would therefore frequently complain about their salaries, arguing that because of the very nature of their jobs, they had to incur extra expenses that manual workers did not.³⁰ Faced with these difficulties, they would oftentimes try to add a touch of luxury to the cheap domestic cloth they could afford by hiring a skilled seamstress who, with her best efforts, would try to copy the latest European styles.

To all these conventional expectations and patterns of consumption Izcue offered a radically different alternative: instead of copying European designs, she decorated her objects with modernized pre-Columbian motifs (i.e. “national” motifs), and instead of resorting to foreign materials, she proudly used domestic, “vulgar cloth.” In short, her designs flew in the face of all prescriptions for what desirable decorative objects should be in Lima at the time. Nonetheless, as Otero’s praise reveals, Izcue’s objects could still been seen, at least in some circles, as exuding refinement and sophistication, as they bore the stamp of good taste.

Shortly after Otero’s article was published, in late 1923, Izcue was given the opportunity to test the commercial viability of her vision. Under the sponsorship of Víctor Larco Herrera, a small workshop was opened that promised to turn the singular objects of the Salón incaico into products of broader consumption. Appropriately housed within Larco Herrera’s archaeology museum, the workshop functioned in a manner that echoed Means’s proposal to the minister of public instruction. Like Means, Larco Herrera believed that the artistic richness of pre-Columbian cultures, if put to the service of the decorative arts, could spur the domestic household textile industry and even that of apparel. The recent archaeological findings, in other words, could strengthen the manufacturing sector of a country whose economy relied almost exclusively on the exportation of raw materials.³¹

So even if Izcue’s workshop favored artisanal production, it could nonetheless have an impact on other mechanized industries. It was, moreover, a center for both instruction and research. The young pupils Izcue worked with had access to her archive of stylized pre-Columbian motifs, but they could also pursue independent research and develop their own designs through study of the museum’s holdings. The photographs of the workshop that have survived show the artisans at work among hundreds of pre-Columbian ceramic vessels housed on open shelves (fig. 15). In modest quantities, they produced home furnishings like pillows and lamps along with personal accessories like portfolio cases and book holders, which were sold at the museum as well as the famous Casa Oeschle, perhaps the most important department store in the country, and the Palais Concert, a grand European-style café in the center of Lima frequented by artists and intellectuals.³²

Did these uncommon objects enthrall the middle classes as they had Racso and Otero? We have no definite answer, but given the fact that those goods were rather niche (at least based on the exclusive locations at which they were sold), we can imagine that they failed to address the broad audience at which Izcue had aimed.

Whatever promise this project may have had, it largely vanished upon Izcue’s relocation to Europe in 1927. Although she continued to pursue her design work based on the same pre-Columbian sources that she so greatly admired (and now to much acclaim), the ambitions that had originally sustained that work were irremissibly lost in the new context. In Europe, the prospect of creating a modern Peruvian decorative style that could be recognized as such by all Peruvians was lost. Lost too was the possibility of shaping the taste of the Limeño middle classes toward an appreciation of pre-Columbian art and, more generally, of all things Peruvian. And lost, finally, was the promise of stimulating the textile industry in Peru, as envisioned by all of the patrons that had supported her work.³³

In my discussion of Izcue’s project thus far, I have focused on the prevailing social attitudes and notions of good taste that conditioned its reception in Peru during the twenties. I want now to assess its artistic and historical significance by placing it within the larger context of other contemporary projects that similarly turned to the autochthonous as their subject.

In Peru, as mentioned earlier, the twenties were characterized by a renewed interest in the country’s autochthonous roots or, to borrow from an important chronicler of those years, “all things Indian Peruvian” (todo lo indio peruano).³⁴ In spite of its vagueness—or perhaps because of it—this phrase I think manages to capture the essence of the phenomenon that the writer in question, literary critic Luis Alberto Sánchez, purported to describe: indigenism.³⁵ An inescapable indeterminacy surrounds indigenism, a movement (and I might be already implying too much in using this term) that flourished, almost simultaneously, within different fields of artistic and intellectual production, not only in Peru but throughout Latin America.³⁶ There is an indigenist literature and an indigenist painting, there is an indigenist politics and an indigenist anthropology, and there is this single academic discipline—archaeology—that in a country such as Peru might be considered intrinsically indigenist. The time-honored image of the tree and the branches is not a good fit: indigenism was not a unified front nor did it have anything like a doctrinal basis. Indeed, given the fact that indigenism was channeled through such varied outlets, any attempt at turning Sánchez’s general remark into a more precise and robust definition may narrow the subject of discussion down to the point of making it only suitable for taxonomical purposes and only, perhaps more importantly, within a single area of study.

Through all its manifestations, however, indigenism can be said to have engaged with at least one of four related but separate issues: first, the Indigenous past; second, the customs of contemporary Indigenous peoples; third, the empowerment of Indigenous peoples; and fourth, the role that Indigenous culture—past or present—should play in the task of defining Peru’s national identity. That said, it is important to note that all of the arts, disciplines, or institutions that addressed those questions did so in ways particular to their own individual modes, conventions, and history. Therefore, indigenist endeavors cannot be easily encompassed within a single analytical framework.

In the case of literature (or perhaps more precisely, literary studies), for example, works that dealt with the pre-Columbian past do not readily fall into the category of indigenism, but rather that of Indianism: a subgenre of prose fiction that lavishly recreated, in a rather Westernized way, the life of the Inca nobility, offering its readers ample romance and exoticism.³⁷ Indigenist literature, in contrast, revolved around the lives of contemporary Indigenous peasants. But even in this latter case, those peoples were not necessarily presented in a favorable light: writers whose works are considered part of the indigenist canon, such as Enrique López Albújar or Ventura García Calderón, focused on what the white elite used to call the “corruptions of the indigenous race” (vicios de la raza indígena): ignorance, violence, resentment, alcoholism.³⁸ As the century dragged on, however, forms of indigenist literature that sought to convey the worldview of the Indigenous peoples of Peru in a more objective and sympathetic way would emerge. In some cases (most notably that of novelist José María Arguedas), those inquiries raised important questions about form and language: if indigenist literature, ideally, should represent the Indigenous peoples, could it possibly perform that task in a language, Spanish, that was ultimately alien to those peoples as it had been imposed by European invaders? To what extent was writing, in and of itself, an obstacle to conveying the thoughts and feelings of peoples that had historically lived their lives in an oral culture? How could a truly representative literature for those peoples be conceivably written in vernacular languages that had no standard written form?³⁹

The space of possibilities for indigenist visual artists was in a certain way wider. For a start, they did not have to abide by genre conventions in which the past and the present, the precolonial and the postcolonial, were segregated as a matter of principle. (Not insignificantly, scholars in art history—or visual culture, more generally—do not make as clear a distinction between Indianist and indigenist artists as literary scholars do.) In working with image and not with text, moreover, visual artists had in principle the chance to engage with the pre-Columbian past in stylistic terms. For a writer, or at any rate a prose writer, the autochthonous past could at best serve as a source of themes; a visual artist, on the other hand, could use it to develop a new visual language.

But in dealing with images, the visual arts were at the same time burdened with a duty to represent and produce national symbols that was not as strongly felt in the realm of literature. The visual arts, as President Leguía understood so well, could be effectively deployed so as to produce a national style that could be recognized as such both in Peru and abroad—a style that should ideally evoke past imperial glories and bolster his own legitimacy as a leader.⁴⁰ Images, however, could also serve to represent what the bulk of indigenist artists, ranging from Martín Chambi in photography to José Sabogal in painting, considered to be the true face of the Peruvian nation: the vast population of Indigenous peasants. To some extent, then, the distinction between Indianism and indigenism can be meaningfully applied in the case of the visual arts too, so long as one bears in mind that the question here is not primarily one of subject matter (both Chambi and Sabogal, it should be noted, occasionally dealt with pre-Columbian themes and motifs) but one of approach.

The Indianist approach, as crystallized in the neo-Inca style that flourished during Leguía’s presidency, was heavily indebted to archaeology both formally and conceptually: formally insofar as it deployed the findings of archaeological research for scenographic purposes; conceptually because it focused on the question of origins. To clarify this latter point, recall that in countries that can reasonably claim to have been the cradle of complex ancient civilizations, archaeology has played a distinctly central role in the development of a sense of national unity among the population, infusing the “soil” with powerful connotations of past grandeur and historical continuity. Moreover, in excavating and unearthing successive strata of material culture, archaeologists have provided nationalists everywhere with a persuasive image of the nation as a single entity—as if the fact that different civilizational layers were found in the same site offered sufficient proof of the existence of a single historical personality or “genius” that had inhabited the land since time immemorial.⁴¹

In the case of Peru, however, archaeology did not contribute to the creation of a sense of national unity in any straightforward way, in part because of the overabundance of sites of interest across the territory: the question of the “ur-culture”—that is, the original culture from which all others in the Peruvian territory would have presumably descended—rapidly came to the fore, channeling strong regionalist sentiments and boiling over into acrimonious professional rivalries. While one of the founders of Peruvian archaeology, Julio C. Tello, offered Chavín, a culture that flourished in the northern Andean highlands from 900 to 200 BCE, as the cradle of civilization in the territory that would become Peru, coastal elites (like the Larco Herrera family) felt more inclined to assign that role to coastal cultures such as Nasca or Paracas.⁴² Thus, even at the highest level of scholarship archaeological practice during this period oftentimes functioned as something of a screen onto which elite and middle-class nationalists would project their own views and agendas. The question of origins, in this sense, belonged in a symbolic order that was far removed from the needs of contemporary Indigenous peasants.

This was one reason to be suspicious of those who sought the essence of the nation in the pre-Columbian past. Another, and perhaps more insidious, entailed what can be called the “archaeologization” of the Indigenous peoples. This explains why the most influential of all indigenist artists in Peru, Sabogal, generally refrained from engaging with the Inca or pre-Inca past. Few of the easel paintings to which he devoted the bulk of his efforts address pre-Columbian themes; it is the contemporary Indian, whom he rendered in loose brushstrokes and bold unmodulated colors, that mattered the most to him (fig. 16). And while some of his most famous works in the realm of design do indeed rely on pre-Columbian motifs, he did not offer them as national archetypes. He was, in other words, very careful not to conflate the representation of Indians of his day with that of the ancient inhabitants of the Peruvian territory. He was alive to the danger of spreading the noxious idea that the present-day Indigenous masses were stuck in the pre-Columbian past and therefore had no present or future. In reality, however, those peoples (while still holding some ancestral beliefs) were not Inca, less so Moche or Nasca: they had been significantly shaped by the experience of a colonial rule the goal of which, over the course of three centuries, had been not only to attain economic and political power but to convert pagans to Christianity. To portray the Indigenous reality as it existed in contemporary Peru thus required engaging with the colonial past, which in turn entailed reckoning with complex processes of syncretism and hybridization, both racial and cultural, that had left an imprint on traditional Indigenous art.

It should come as no surprise, then, that throughout his collaboration with the essayist and Marxist thinker Mariátegui, Sabogal designed woodblock prints based on traditional engraved gourds from the central Andes (mates burilados) that would appear on the cover of the legendary magazine Amauta (fig. 17).⁴³ Nor is it strange that, in the decades to come, he would dedicate much of his time to studying and collecting vernacular craft from different regions of the country to the extent of establishing, almost single-handedly, the canon of what is now known as Peruvian popular art (arte popular peruano).⁴⁴ As Sabogal himself put it in an interview he gave in 1950, “popular art indicates that there exists a living plastic form in the entirety of Peru’s milieu and that such art is the most immediate, the most alive; whenever a country keeps that élan alive, that country is alive as well.”⁴⁵

Roughly speaking, then, the predominant attitudes toward the autochthonous in Peru fell into two camps that Mariátegui, in a characteristically eloquent piece, described as follows: on the one hand, a “platonic love for the Inca past” and, on the other, “an active and concrete solidarity with the present-day Indian.”⁴⁶ Elena Izcue did not fit neatly into either group. Her overall approach to the autochthonous, it is true, seems in principle to have been fully attuned with the neo-Inca sensibility of Leguía’s Oncenio, as she grounded her vision of a modern Peruvian style in the oldest manifestations of culture in Peru. Moreover, it is evident that her work lacked the strong element of social and political vindication for which Sabogal and Chambi’s oeuvres have been rightly recognized, as it corresponded to a choice—the decorative arts—so tainted with connotations of domesticity, femininity, and decadence. But if such political urgency was absent from her work, absent too was grandiosity—there was nothing that might resemble the monumentality of the neo-Inca style.

In a context in which the autochthonous was being recuperated, excavated, or otherwise mined in different quarters for its symbolic value, Izcue brought to the fore a decidedly novel understanding of culture as economic resource. It was not viewers she primarily addressed but rather users, consumers, and producers. And what Izcue offered to that public, as discussed earlier, was modern, affordable decor that yoked together domestic design and domestic production. With hindsight, then, Izcue can be said to have been a pioneer of that now ubiquitous heritage industry in virtue of which people across the world have increasingly come to regard their cultural patrimony, from craft to folklore to historical sites, as a commodity not unlike ore, crops, or cattle.⁴⁷ Traditionalists and purists might feel inclined to disallow such a view of local culture on charges of instrumentalization and commodification; yet, as cultural critic George Yúdice has convincingly argued, a strategic approach to culture as resource is not inherently at odds, and might indeed be congenial, with a sincere appreciation of one’s own heritage.⁴⁸

That such was the case with Izcue is confirmed by two passages that stand out among the few pieces of writing she ever published. The first comes from the second volume of her drawing book, the one that is most manifestly geared toward craft production:

The second appears in both the first and second volumes under the heading “To the teacher”:

The theme of richness, both material and cultural, recurs throughout these two passages, establishing a broad correlation between history and nature. In fact, Peru’s “very beautiful history” seems here to be yet another instance of the country’s prodigality “in the three kingdoms of Nature.” The link between those two orders, of course, is a subjective one: national pride (“nationalism,” “a love for national things”), which Izcue insistently describes as fruitful and productive, as if the appreciation of “our oldest and most admirable artistic heritage” carried the seeds of material prosperity for all Peruvians.

What are we to make of such an approach to the autochthonous? That it sat uneasily among the other dominant trends of its era is plain enough. Izcue’s project stood out because it engaged with that lesser thing—the decorative—of which academic painters, including Sabogal, were largely dismissive. It stood out because the value that it ascribed to pre-Columbian artifacts lay not in notions of monumentality or antiquity, but in a rather simple one—beauty. And her project stood out because, although driven by national pride, it did not turn to the pre-Columbian past in search of national symbols. In Izcue’s case, it all boiled down to a matter of taste.

That said, it should also be noted that, because of its far-reaching economic implications, Izcue’s project raised an issue of particular importance in a country as culturally and ethnically fractured as Peru: to whom did the pre-Columbian heritage belong? Whose past was that of pre-Hispanic Peru? For this artist, it was beyond question that all Peruvians, irrespective of race and class, could legitimately claim that past as theirs. That proposition, in this day and age, might strike us as problematic, as it arouses suspicion of what has come to be known as “cultural appropriation.” To raise that charge against her, however, would be both unfair and anachronistic. She cannot be said to have attempted to capitalize on Indigenous heritage for the simple reason that pre-Columbian art (pre-Inca art, to be more specific) did not have any aesthetic value in the eyes of the majority of the Peruvian population during the twenties, and indeed was unknown to them, due to its very recent excavation.

Izcue’s aim, in this context, was to create economic value for pre-Columbian patterns by making them appealing to a broad audience of middle-class customers who were in general more attuned to European fashions. Furthermore, she was keenly aware that a Peruvian national community was yet to be achieved, and that in order to forge it, all Peruvians should be given the opportunity to recognize themselves in a shared legacy, whether actual or imagined. If judged ungenerously, her project may thus come through as an early example of nation branding. Alternatively, however, it could be regarded as a very sincere effort to build a national community on the basis of something as seemingly banal as a shared taste.

I would like to thank Claudia Brittenham, Natalia Majluf, Martín Oyata, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful criticism of earlier drafts of this essay. Rosalyn Chávarry Aramburú, from the library and archive of the Museo de Arte de Lima, generously made available documents from the substantial Elena Izcue archive housed at that institution.