QUITO, Ecuador – Before the Museo Camilo Egas became a museum, it was a Spanish colonial-style house, with a courtyard and white stucco walls to dampen the summer heat. If you look at the floor, you will see pieces of animal bones sticking out of the stone floor. These were believed to ward off evil spirits – a local custom that the colonizers adopted from the colonized.
The history of the museum itself provides a fitting introduction to the works of art stored within. Camilo Egas, born a few streets away in 1889, is an important but increasingly controversial painter who has been both praised and despised for his attempt to transform the struggles of indigenous peoples – ignored and underserved – into works of art. ‘art.
Egas is considered an early champion of Indigenismo, an art movement that emerged in Latin America in the 1920s when artists drew inspiration from their pre-Columbian heritage. Coinciding with the Bolshevik revolution in Russia and the spread of revolutionary parties on the South American continent, indigenism promoted socialism and condemned imperialism. Native painters rarely painted for the pleasure of painting; their work reframed national identity and exposed the reality of European colonization.
Indigenous minorities were their favorite subject, and images of indigenous Ecuadorians – their bodies, their way of life and their place in society – can be found throughout the Museo Camilo Egas. Many, especially those dealing with backbreaking work, exert an oppressive aura. Having studied Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism in France and later Italy, Egas was able to communicate the poverty and despair he encountered on the streets of his home country in a visual language that the Western elite could understand and appreciate.
The Ecuadorian government, fearing that this unflattering depiction of indigenous life could cause the country to lose a bad reputation abroad, was less enthusiastic. “The Indians painted by Egas in all their dramatic expression are not the delicate and beautiful Indians necessary for national propaganda [designed to] attract tourism,” reads a review from the magazine Mar Pacifico published in 1941. “But, unfortunately, these are the real Indians, the ones we know around here.”
Not that Egas’ work is completely devoid of beauty or delicacy. His paintings of rituals and celebrations – including “El san juanito” (1917), of a traditional dance performed during the Saint John festival, and “Grupo de Indios: danza ceremonial” (1922) – are bright and vibrant, even if they are slightly melancholy.
“Ecuador,” Egas once said, “is eternally serious with its mountains and its politics. Only the colors are cheerful.
Retrospectives on Camilo Egas cast his contributions to Indigenismo in a different light. Juan Cabrera of the University of Pennsylvania argue the artist portrayed Indigenous peoples in a “colonizing manner”, treating them as objects of curiosity rather than thinking, feeling human beings. Unlike indigenous artists Martín Chambi or Graciela Iturbide, who always strove to capture the uniqueness of their subjects, Egas specialized in producing nameless and faceless symbols of an exploited nation.
Inspired by the different meanings of the word “we” in the Quechua Andean language family, Cabrera distinguishes between indigenist artists who represented indigenous communities from within and those who observed them from without. Martin Chambi and Graciela Iturbide are classified in the first category. Egas, a member of the Ecuadorian upper class who would also serve as director of the artistic department of the New School of New York, in the latter. Adopting the “Western gaze” of his colleagues, Egas painted indigenous Ecuadorians not as they were, but as they existed in his own imagination, namely “oppressed but courageous”, to quote Cabrera.
By emphasizing the stoicism and resilience of indigenous Ecuadorians in the face of adversity on the material conditions of their impoverishment, Egas mystifies more than it humanizes. The result is an art that poses as anti-colonial without actually being anti-colonial, that commands respect from a marginalized group without also advocating for their rights and restitution.
The complicated legacy of Egas and his particular brand of Indigenismo raises an interesting question about the ethics of art criticism. When his paintings were first unveiled, they were recognized as great art – and for good reason. From a purely technical point of view, it is difficult to call them anything else. His striking use of form and color – as iconic as that of fellow indigenist artist Diego Rivera – is the first thing you notice when you enter the Museo de Quito.
However, just as the floors of an otherwise lovely villa are littered with bones, Egas’ aesthetic paintings also tell an unpleasant story about the corrosive influence of colonialism.
