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The National Academy of Fine Arts (ANBA) was created in Buenos Aires in 1905. The date is relatively recent if we compare it with other parallel institutions in Latin America. Buenos Aires was a remote and impoverished viceroyalty of the south of the continent. During the colonial period, there did not develop any institutional artistic tradition comparable to those in cities such as Mexico, Lima, or Rio de Janeiro. The transition from a colonial to independent Argentine nation witnessed the creation of the first drawing schools and the creation of a chair with an eminently technical profile, in the newly founded University of Buenos Aires (1821). However, these initiatives had a precarious existence in the fractured institutions of those years. The establishment of more stable and lasting cultural institutions became a project carried out by the liberal and culturally enlightened oligarchic elite of the last decades of the century that assumed the leadership of shaping the nation-state. It is in the last quarter of the century that the most important private patronage societies emerged. The Society for the Stimulus of the Fine Arts (hereon SEBA) was a key player in the promotion of the arts and training of artists; as such, it was an important step in the formation of the National Academy. This private association, created in 1876 by a group of artists and amateurs, aimed at “fostering the development and advancement [in Argentina] of Drawing, Painting, Sculpture, Architecture and the other arts that emanate from them.” Local training was complemented with an emergent system of scholarships abroad, which allowed those who aspired to be professional artists, at least for a few, to come into contact with extant traditions and models of artistic life. Those European traditions, brought with them by students returning to their home country, had to be adapted to the local realities. Nevertheless, they were not only central as an approach to new aesthetics but would also have an impact on local training because many of the scholarship holders would take up central positions within the country’s arts education. The aim of this chapter is to reconstruct aspects of the institutionalization of art education that took place in Buenos Aires between the last quarter of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. I argue that private arts association initiatives were crucial for the development of a National Academy of Fine Arts and that this process allowed a greater number of young people to aspire to an artistic career. The pensioner system, and Europe as a model, would be at the center of their career-building education.
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