The Diffusion of Andean Visual Imaginaries during Martín Noel's Tenure at the National Commission of Fine Arts of Argentina (1920–1930)

Pablo Fasce, Ph.D.

The purpose of this project is to study the actions, ideas and images promoted during the tenure of the architect Martín Noel as president of the National Commission of Fine Arts in Argentina, linked to the creation and dissemination of visual and aesthetic imaginaries about the Andean world. In the context of the cultural crisis triggered by World War I, the expansion of the notions of beauty and form in Art History promoted by the theories of Heinrich Wollflin and Alois Riegl and the emergence of an incipient cultural nationalism at the local level, a considerable number of artists and intellectuals (among whom Noel stood out as a politician and historian) found in the "Andean world" an archaeological, ethnographic and architectural heritage that could be thought as the substratum of an aesthetic identity capable that could be seen as an alternative to European models. The problem will be approached within the framework of the various discourses on aesthetic modernity and its links with the identity debates that circulated in Latin America during the decades of the twentieth century.