2 - Landscape and Maternity Painting: Boundary Markers, Biopower and Birth

Summary

After independence, and in the first half of the twentieth century, attempts to imagine and consolidate national identity were prominent in artistic output in Colombia. The late nineteenth century saw a predominance of landscape painting, the calm and serenity of which both evoked a rural ideal for the urban consumers of art in cities undergoing processes of modernization, and smoothed over the violent political, economic and social upheavals which actually characterized life in the countryside (Londoño Vélez, Arte colombiano, 199–201). In the early part of the twentieth century, the important Bogotá-based Bachué movement favoured a return to the images of pre-Columbian myth. Members included Rómulo Rozo, Ramón Barba (1894–1964), Josefina Albarracín (1910–97) and Hena Rodríguez (1904–97). Of this period – the late 1920s and early 1930s – Álvaro Medina writes that:

La idea de la tierra como elemento determinante del carácter y de la cultura logró hacer carrera. En Colombia, el planteamiento de [Franz] Tamayo1 se convirtió en bandera de nuevas inquietudes a la hora de fundar, en 1930, el grupo Bachué. Hemos oído la llamada de la tierra y trepados sobre el anillo de nuestro meridiano, pregonamos su excelencia, proclamaron los seis fundadores del movimiento que tomó por nombre el de una diosa de los chibchas.

(‘Arte latinoamericano’, p. 120)