Academia de San Carlos

Academia de San Carlos, the first art academy in the New World and the principal Mexican artistic institution of the nineteenth century. Through the Academia de San Carlos, formally opened in 1785, the Bourbon administration implanted academic neoclassicism and dealt a definitive blow to the guild system of artistic production in New Spain. Teachers and materials, particularly an important collection of plaster casts of classical works, were sent from Spain. Closed between 1821 and 1824, the academy functioned fully again only after 1843, when it was reorganized. There were European teachers, annual exhibitions, scholarships to send the best students to Europe, and new plaster casts. In addition, a permanent collection of both Mexican and foreign paintings was formed. Under various names (Academia Imperial, Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes, Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes) the academy continued; it promoted art with nationalist themes and, in the early twentieth century, assimilated artistic renewal. A student strike in 1911–1913 and an experiment in painting outdoors (escuelas al aire libre) accompanied the entry of the academy into the modernist movement. In 1929, with Diego Rivera as director, the academy became part of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México with the name of Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas. As such, it continues today.

See alsoArt: The Nineteenth Century; Rivera, Diego; Universities: The Modern Era.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Justino Fernández, El arte del siglo XIX en México (1967).

Jean Charlot, Mexican Art and the Academy of San Carlos, 1785–1915 (1962).

Additional Bibliography

Bailey, Gauvin A. Art of Colonial Latin America. New York: Phaidon, 2005.

Carrera, Magali M. Imagining Identity in New Spain: Race, Lineage, and the Colonial Body in Portraiture and Casta Paintings. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003.

Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge. Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007.

                                        Clara Bargellini