Art and Diplomacy. Projects for a South American Academy in Rome (1896-1911)

MURACE, GIULIA

Florencia

Congreso; CIHA Florence Motion: Transformation, XXXV CIHA World Congress; 2019

CIHA/CIHA ITALIA

In this paper I propose to reflect on the interaction between art and politics through two episodes that reveal some dynamics of the process of construction and consolidation of the South American (and Argentine in particular) artistic system. Between 1896 and 1910, two projects were put forward for the foundation in Rome of an academy of fine arts for the South American pensioners. The first one was introduced by Enrique B. Moreno, Argentine plenipotentiary minister in Rome, with the fundamental support of the Italian sculptor Ettore Ximenes, who carried out an important propaganda activity. The second one was conceived by mutual agreement by the Argentine, Chilean and Brazilian ministers (Roque Saenz Peña, Santiago Aldunate, Alberto Fialho) and presented to their respective governments for implementation on the 1911 international exposition in Rome.Although both have remained unrealized, thanks to the presence of archives of diplomatic and artistic personalities involved in such projects, it is possible to hypothesize their development, the assumptions on which they were based and with what intentions they were proposed. On one hand, the study of the state of the art system in the South American countries towards the end of the Nineteenth century and, on the other, the analysis of the network of social relations of the main actors allow to support the importance of the movement of people and ideas across the Atlantic for the construction of a national identity increasingly tending towards a common Americanist feeling. In addition, in the early Twentieth century, foreign ministers and South American diplomats worked to establish a feeling of 'hermandad' among the states of the subcontinent that led to phenomena that Susana Zanetti called 'de religación' and that originated many artistic, literary and cultural movements that introduced the South American nations to 'modernity'. Expanding the notion of "marginal cosmopolitans" coined by Natalia Majluf, we wonder about how (and whether) the discussions that were simultaneously tackled in European artistic geopolitics operated on both individual and state decisions. The proposal wants to think about the process of consolidation of the South American artistic field in a transnational key, as suggested by Stuck, Ferris and Revel, constantly reflecting on the scales of analysis and interactions between individuals, social groups and institutions. At the same time, the case studied permit to highlight how the power games between different South American countries underlid this same process.