Nineteenth-Century Spanish America by Christopher Conway

Author:Christopher Conway [Conway, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Latin America, General, Social History
ISBN: 9780826503718
Google: I7wpEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
Published: 2015-07-14T03:12:35+00:00

Figure 4.1. Miranda en La Carraca (Miranda in La Carraca Prison; 1896), by Julio Michelena, from Bulletin of the Pan American Union, 1920.

By and For the People

As indicated at the beginning of this chapter, the popular arts manufactured images that were in many ways antithetical to academic art. The popular image did not attend to the aesthetic values, techniques, and materials that were central to academic art, leading nineteenth- and twentieth-century art critics to call it primitive or naïve, as if its artists were children. Another important difference was that popular art did not circulate publicly as academic art did. The art of the elites wanted to be shown at national and international exhibits and public buildings, while popular art mostly hung at home, or as an offering at a church altar. Yet, the two kinds of image-making intersected through a shared interest in religion. The difference was that the Christian subject was one topic among others for academic artists whereas for popular artists the topic was dominant. For this reason, we may refer to the art available to people of modest means as primarily devotional, meaning that it was designed to be a part of a family’s spiritual relationship with God. Nothing was more intimate and personal than this relationship: God, the saints, and the Virgin Mary were not distant companions, but intimates who were bound up with the experience of joy and grief. The devotional image was a vital accessory in this sphere of religiosity. Naturally, middle- and upper-class people also deeply valued devotional imagery, but through education and access to magazines, books, and newspapers, they also cultivated an interest in a wide variety of secular imagery.

Who were the artists who made popular devotional art? Before Independence, artists were organized in guilds that regulated prices, trained apprentices, and supported their members in times of hardship. In the nineteenth century, the preeminence of the academic model of instruction in cities led to the creation of state-sponsored vocational schools for artisans called escuelas de artes y oficios, in which youngsters learned reading and writing, as well as illustration, ornamentation, or any other trade that they wanted. Although the guild system no longer existed, most artisans continued to learn through the apprenticeship system, often by practicing their family’s trade alongside their parents and grandparents, or by convincing an established artisan to take them on as a pupil. The artisans sold their devotional paintings and figurines from their modest workshops, or carted the products to plazas, loading them onto rudimentary tables or blankets to display them. They were not people of rank or prestige, as indicated by the fact that their salaries were comparable to those of blacksmiths, carpenters, shoemakers, tin workers, and bakers.19

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