Critical Inquiry

Summer 1997
Volume 23, Number 4

Excerpt from
'Ce n'est pas le Pérou,' or, the Failure of Authenticity: Marginal Cosmopolitans at the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1855
by Natalia Majluf
A reading of the reviews of any international exhibition of Latin American art within the past two centuries would reveal the presence of the discourse of authenticity as the primary frame of critical reference. Here, however, I want to focus on the criticism of the first showing of art from Latin America in an international context: the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1855. At that time, Latin America as a term to designate the region did not even exist, but its cultural production had already been categorized as derivative and its cosmopolitanism denied. 7 The Universal Exhibition of 1855 is also a particularly appropriate case to study because it took place at a moment quite similar to the present. Just as a stereotypical and hegemonic modernism has recently come under attack, so too the mid-nineteenth century saw the gradual displacement of the classical paradigm from its central position of authority. It was also a time, like today, when a diverse array of stylistic possiblities was being explored. Critics saw everywhere the signs of a pervasive eclecticism and framed and discussed it in a manner similar to the present pluralism. And it took place in a world that, through increased communications and an expanding capitalism, was percieved as moving towards an inevitable globalization.

7. See Arturo Ardao's history of the term Latin America in his Amèica Latina y la latinidad (Mexico City, 1993).

Natalia Majluf is head curator of the Museo d'Arte de Lima. She is working on a book on the paintings of Francisco Laso and the emergence of a Creole identity in nineteenth-century Peru.

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