"Nationality is the homeland", is it? Argentine artists in Rome between the late 19th and the early 20th century

MURACE, GIULIA

Congreso; 35th CIHA World Congress. Motion-Migration; 2022

CIHA Brasil

[LIBRO EN PRENSA, ISBN inventado] Between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century an important contingent of migrant people left Europe to go to America, mainly to find a better lifestyle. Italians represented a significant front, especially in South America. In Argentina, for example, their growing presence in society caused peculiar/particular feelings of concern. In artistic discourses, cosmopolitanism represented a danger for the formation of an “Argentine soul” and, consequently, for a national artistic language. In parallel, in this period the country was consolidating its national system of art and it was therefore necessary to encourage European stays for artistic education through government pensions. The artists who could travel were recognized in their country, but they were foreigners living in unknown geographies where with difficult they could emerge. “Nationality is the homeland”, wrote Arturo Reynal O’Connor about the Argentine poets and the risks of the immigration for the “Argentine race”.This paper proposes to consider the multiple dimensions (artistic, political, social) of the Argentine artistic field between the late 19th and the early 20th century focusing on some travelling artists, to discuss the feeling of belonging to a single place (coincident with their nationality). Through the case of Argentine painters and sculptors who lived in Rome, the goal is to present the networks of relations that they formed with other Ibero-American artists as a response to the marginalization that implied their status as foreigners.