Bolivian art in the twentieth century

Valeria Paz

In opposition to European academic models, a movement to restore a cultural presence to the indigenous population arose in Bolivia at the beginning of the twentieth century. This movement was prevalent in Bolivian literature and the country's first feature films, and in 1929 Cecilio Guzmán de Rojas proposed a 'national' visual art, defending and disseminating this argument from his position as Director of the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes de La Paz (National Academy of Fine Arts of La Paz). Searching for a visual style consistent with his theory, the artist took the indigenous culture of Tiwanaku as a model. Elsewhere, Indigenism took on an original form via murals produced by Mario Illanes at the rural school of Warisata (1931); this was one of the country's first examples of art used as an instrument of social change.

Coming into power in 1952, the Revolución Nacional (National Revolution) conceived of art as a tool of political transformation; the government therefore promoted cultural activity and was particularly supportive of the country's burgeoning muralist movement. Murals produced by Miguel Alandia Pantoja and Walter Solón Romero for the Monumento a la Revolución (Monument to the Revolution) are a strong example of the didactic stance taken by artists working in this medium and this approach was shared by the Anteo group, creating murals in the city of Sucre. Taking up an alternative position, an independent group of eight artists including sculptor Marina Núñez del Prado and painter María Luisa Pacheco upheld freedom and political neutrality as a the basis of artistic creation. Like the European avant-gardes, they were interested in art as a means of aesthetic investigation, but maintained reference to national themes and, despite their independence from the political motives of muralism, identified with the construction of a national art.

The artistic tendencies of the 1960s were diverse, oscillating between abstraction and fantastic realism. A specifically national current remained active: references to pre-Hispanic civilizations were joined by examinations of the Andean landscape and its inhabitants and depictions of the emerging urban mestizo class. A political current, with affinity to caricature and German expressionism, materialized in painting, engraving and drawing. Its artillery of metaphorical (and in some cases crude) imagery was directed toward dictatorships established during the 1970s, and later toward representatives of the neo-liberal economic model established in 1985.

Artists interested in formal investigation had opted, in the sixties and seventies, for experimental abstraction. Midway through the seventies a new current emerged: a disagreement with local tendencies and the universal values of modern art; this was particularly explicit in the work of Robert Valcárcel. Artists sharing this view appropriated their aesthetics and modes of reproduction from urban culture. In the nineties a new generation identified with this stance, demonstrating an attitude that was both irreverent and informal, working in new media, and carrying out urban architectural interventions and performance works.