Foreign Faces, Trusted Portraits: Carlos Baca-Flor’s Painted Faces between Paris and New York

Abstract

This article explores the work of the Peruvian painter Carlos Baca-Flor, who was the best-paid portraitist of his time and who painted over a hundred of New York’s most powerful people in the first few decades of the twentieth century. His most famous work is undoubtedly his portrait of James Pierpont Morgan, a painting whose careful, illusionistic precision was praised for the clarity with which it captured an essential truth about Morgan’s character. This portrait assumes greater complexity, however, when viewed alongside earlier works created by the artist in Paris. There, he navigated the pressures of his Latin American identity and adopted a Post-Impressionist approach to the face which seemed to detach the face from the personhood it represents. With this incongruity in mind, this article considers Baca-Flor’s Morgan portrait as part of a larger exploration of faces and what they can communicate about the racial and national identities of their subjects.

Keywords:

• Peru
• portraiture
• impressionism
• race
• finance
• epistemology
• face
• physiognomy
• mestizaje

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Acknowledgment of funding

Research for this article was enabled by a generous gift from the Stronach family to support travel within the U.C. Berkeley History of Art department.

Acknowledgments

Early versions of this paper were greatly improved by detailed suggestions from Lisa Trever, Lauren Kroiz and Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby. I extend my thanks to them, the anonymous reviewers of the manuscript, and to the editors of this journal, for their thoughtful and encouraging feedback.

Notes

1 Baca-Flor had arrived at the Accademia San Luca in Rome in 1889 on a scholarship from the Peruvian government. The Peruvian government hoped that the young painter would produce historical representations of Peru on an international stage and cultivate the budding tradition of Peruvian national painting. Baca-Flor’s responsibility to the Peruvian government is detailed most clearly in Kusunoki, Majluf and Wuffarden’s Carlos Baca-Flor: El último académico (2013, 42–69).

2 Most recently, the Museo de Arte de Lima has emphasised the “paradoxical heterodoxy” of the artist’s seemingly perverse return to academic, highly finished portraits like Morgan’s that reflect cohesive figuration “in a sense opposed to that of modernity” (Kusunoki, Majluf, Wuffarden 2013, 37).

3 Cathy Boeckmann (2000), for instance, has historicised the ways in which the fields of physiognomy and phrenology in the USA assisted the notion that “racial character” not only existed, but was visible. Boeckmann shows how scientific discourse between the years of 1892 and 1912 shifted towards an interiorised language of “character” in order to accommodate the failure of the visible in identifying racial passing, thus facilitating a keener differentiation not just between Black and white, but also between, say, Irish and Anglo-Saxon. By making character visible, physiognomy and phrenology also made racial character, and thus race itself, yet again something that could be detected on the surface.

4 Natalia Majluf’s Inventing Indigenism (2021) offers an excellent discussion of the unstable meanings of race brought up by early indigenism, told through an analysis of the Peruvian artist Francisco Laso. Majluf discusses the ways in which indigenism and the construction of Peruvian identity in general were constructed around the “Indian as ethnoracial concept”, a construct which both was and was not mapped onto a specific set of phenotypic features, and which also variably projected onto mestizo bodies like the one painted in Laso’s Inhabitant of the Cordilleras of Peru (1855).

5 Marisol de la Cadena (2000), for instance, has described the ways in which concepts of race have shifted in Peru throughout the twentieth century, underscoring the ways in which mestizo bodies might be understood as white or Indigenous, depending on the context.

6 It is difficult not to think of Clark’s (1985) reading of Manet’s barmaid in Un bar aux Folies Bergère (1882). Clark offers a resolution to her characteristically unreadable facial expression, arguing that Manet substitutes the absence of identity of the face for what he calls “the face of fashion” to obscure an earlier notion of class identity as inseparable from one’s character.

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Notes on contributors

Grace Kuipers

Grace Kuipers is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton’s High Meadows Environmental Institute. Her research interests converge around issues of race and imperialism in the twentieth-century art of the Americas.