Between New York and the Andes, Abstraction and Indigenismo: Camilo Egas's Paintings from the 1940s and 1950s

Abstract

Recent studies of Andean Indigenismo and Andean abstraction tend to overlook the intersections between these two artistic trends, as well as schematize the production of artists who experimented with both. The scholarship on Ecuadorian artist Camilo Egas, for example, only focuses on his role as a precursor of Indigenismo without delving into the diverse artistic styles that intertwine in his transnational career. Such selective interest in his Indigenist production, which tends to focus on his early works from the 1910s to the 1930s in Ecuador, Paris, and the first decade in New York, might be related to the fact that his oeuvre from those periods can be clearly connected to documented developments of modern nationalist painting in the Andean region. Yet, this gap in art historical studies ignores the compelling visual experimentations that Egas undertook in the 1940s and 1950s while residing in New York. Particularly interesting is an exhibition of these works organized in Quito in 1956 by the Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana, and Egas’s peculiar avant-gardist role in the country’s artistic milieu, at a time when Indigenismo, the country’s dominant aesthetic trend, was being challenged by other alternatives. In this thesis, I examine Egas’s position in-between two different contexts, cultures, and temporalities, which informed artistic experimentations and how these two contexts did not necessarily ascribe to the same ideas of modernism and art’s role in society. This thesis is based in archival research conducted both in Quito, Ecuador, and in New York. From May 2017 to February 2018 I visited several archives in public institutions and private holdings in both countries in search of the exhibited artworks, exhibition ephemera, written reviews of the work, relevant correspondence, Egas’s personal documentation of his work, and other existing academic material, to inform my research and writing.