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

MURACE, GIULIA

San Pablo

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

CIHA Brasil

Between the last 19th and the early 20th century a huge 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 the society caused particular feelings of concern for the preservation of a national spirit. Even in artistic discourses, cosmopolitanism represented a danger for the formation of an ?Argentine soul? and, consequently, for a national artistic language. ?Nationality is the homeland?, wrote Arturo Reynal O?Connor about the Argentine poets and the risks of the immigration for the ?Argentine race?. By a metaphor, he warned ?the empty house remains, converted into a simple building that foreigners occupy turning it into a conventillo?. However, 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. In addition, part of them, who got to know some kind of success, remained abroad or, if they returned, traveled frequently to Europe becoming ?swallow-artists? (?artistas golondrinas? as Pallas magazine called them in 1913 alluding to the seasonal migration), something discouraged from the homeland governments. This paper proposes to analyze the multiple dimensions (artistic, political, social) of the Argentine artistic field between the late 19th and the early 20th century focusing in some artistas viajeros, 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 (in specific, Pio Collivadino and Pedro Zonza Briano), 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. The proposal intends to examine to what extent their nationality was an aid or an obstacle to the construction of a temporary home in the city that hosted them, putting in relation some works of art executed there and the literature raised around them.