In Buen Gusto and Classicism in the Visual Cultures of Latin America, 1780–1910, Paul B. Niell and Stacie G. Widdifield have collected twelve essays that explore the variations and limits of the stylistic-cultural term “neoclassicism” and how the social-aesthetic concept of good taste intertwined with and inflected upon it. To a certain extent, this book treads a lengthy investigative path walked by earlier generations of art historians, such as Josef Strzygowski, Alois Riegl, or George Kubler, scholars who analyzed the transformation of stylistic forms across time and borders. The difference is that Niell and Widdifield are less interested in lengthy diachronic schemas than in the reception and function of forms in specific locales. By adding the concept of “good taste” and turning their gaze west and southward, the editors have introduced “important continuities, inconsistencies, and reconfigurations” to their theme (xxv). While neoclassicism and the concept of taste have been examined individually and in depth for various instances in Europe, they have been given scant attention in the case of Latin American countries, making this volume a worthwhile contribution to the study of these subjects.

The dozen essays presented in the anthology have been organized into three sections, each coalesced mostly around media and problems arising from these: “Redefining Urban Space and the Promotion of Classicism”; “Imprinting Classicism and its Consumption”; and “Dividing Lines: Practices and Problems,” with this later final section addressing the adaptation and understanding of classical forms within local traditions.

Battling what the editors Niell and Widdifield call the continued “Mexico-centric” viceregal and national focus of Latin American art history (xviii), their anthology examines different countries across Ibero-America, from Mexico to Argentina, and from Peru to Cuba. The essays take the form of case studies whose objects extend in time from the late eighteenth century—the period of the commissioning and reception of Manuel Tolsá’s bronze Equestrian Portrait of Charles IV (1796–1803) in Mexico City (essay by Susan Deans-Smith) and the curious calligraphic portrait of the viceroy Bernardo de Gálvez (essay by Ray Hernández-Durán)—to the early independence era (essays by Maya Stanfield-Mazzi and Magali Carrera). Another essay details the modern historiography and tourism of the pre-Hispanic Tiwanaku of Bolivia (by Robert Bradley), and still another investigates early twentieth-century uses of antiquity in public monuments in Cartagena, Colombia (by Carla Bocchetti).

Among the themes that the authors repeatedly emphasize in their essays, and which help distinguish this volume from previous treatments of neoclassicism in Europe, is the varied uses and interpretations of classical elements and their relation to social-aesthetic norms of “good taste”; that is, the ways visual classicism appeared as a “multivalent and multi-vocal phenomena,” and produced significations for differing audiences (Niell, “Introduction,” xiv). Deans-Smith, for example, argues that contemporary writings about the equestrian statue of Charles IV in Mexico City (a work mirroring that of the second-century CE Marcus Aurelius statue) exposed readers to not only neoclassicism as “the embodiment of good taste but also the concept’s more capacious and contested interpretations” (18). Isaac Sáenz, in his essay on “Gothic Taste vs. Buen Gusto: Creolism, Urban Space, and Aesthetic Discourse in Late Colonial Peru,” contends that the “common people negotiated and interpreted buen gusto in their own ways, challenging its univocal character” (26). The authors and editors, therefore, see the monuments and productions of classicist aesthetics as expressions that “constructed multiple narratives” (50). These are, of course, quite familiar positions of present-day scholars working on the arts of other geographic and historical periods. However, these strategies have only more recently come to be employed in the study of colonial and early independence Latin America visual cultures.

The destabilizing of mythic and singular authoritative voices of neoclassicism is not without its own difficulties. The notion of multivariate voices and meanings is so uniformly promoted across the essays that readers at times may have a sense that, with regard to neoclassicism and its supporting concept of good taste, the thread of any continuity with Europe has snapped under the weight of so many competing interpretations in the Americas. The authors understand neoclassical forms to be “metaphors for the victory of Christian civilization over the barbarism of indigenous America” (Niell, “Introduction,” xiv); as a way of coalescing class identities; of being a mode of racial and caste resistance; a vehicle for administrations’ reformist control; and as a tool for bourgeoning nations’ constructions of new traditions and histories. In short, neoclassicism, now paired in a dialogue with buen gusto, has been charged with the work of examining current concerns over race, class, and national identities within local, colonial issues (the volume has been less attentive to issues of gender). The ambiguity of the meanings of buen gusto and neoclassicism in Latin America, which according to Niell is part of a nascent modernity of emerging republics, is one of the most strongly developed points in this volume.

Troubling the volume’s subject is the question of the very applicability of the term neoclassicism to local productions. Already, more than twenty-five years ago, David Freedberg observed, “No one, any longer, can doubt the laxity of the conventional and traditional usage of terms like ‘classic,’ ‘classical,’ and ‘classicism’”(“The Problem of Classicism: Ideology and Power,” Art Journal 47, no. 1 [Spring 1988]: 7). More recently Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann argued that stylistic labels “do not describe the same phenomena when they are applied to Central Europe or Latin America and when they are used to account for supposedly similar phenomena in Italy, in regard to which such terms were originally derived” (“Periodization and Its Discontents,” Journal of Art Historiography 2 [June 2010]: 3–4). Fortunately the majority of scholars in this volume have circumvented the traps of stylistic periodization, preferring instead to focus on investigating the complexities of synchronic individual instances. Yet the authors clearly show the tensions of today’s scholarship on Latin American art as it wrestles with lingering older European categories and formal structures. Niell and others admit there was no “clear rupture between baroque and neoclassical in Latin America” and see the transition from one to another as “far more complex than” earlier narratives suggest (xviii). Charles Burroughs, in his examination of the representation of plantation haciendas in Cuba, underscores that point for architectural classicism, arguing that it was “by no means homogenous” (115). Niell, again, challenges earlier scholars (including David Irwin, Manuel Toussaint, Jean Charlot, and Kubler) for having understood the stylistic term as a homogeneous product, neither allowing for chronological nor geographic variations. He adds that the “notion of an internally coherent style named ‘neoclassicism’” did not exist in Spain or Spanish America at the time (xviii). Readers are left wondering, therefore, whether these stylistic/period labels have any useful function at all? Kelly Donahue-Wallace pointed to problems of stylistic terms for colonial Latin American art but warned that “avoiding stylistic labels entirely means removing Latin American viceregal art from Western Art History” (Art and Architecture of Viceregal Latin America, 1521–1821, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008, xvi, 102). It is because of these very questions that the volume’s format of individual case studies, and the authors’ turn toward the reception and uses of the phrase “good taste,” serve as useful platforms for problematizing “neoclassicism” in Latin America. For many of them, it seems that neoclassicism was the epitome of good taste, but, that good taste, conversely, implied the ideals of classicism (3–4; 25).

Although “buen gusto” is the first phrase of the book’s title, the editors and authors have preferred to focus less on the philosophical, philological, and academic theory bases of the term—such as done by Vernon Hyde Minor for Italy (The Death of the Baroque and the Rhetoric of Good Taste, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006) or Helmut C. Jacobs for Spain (Belleza y buen gusto: las teorías de las artes en la literatura española del siglo XVIII, Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2001)—than more on the significance of taste in terms of ideology and power structures, as had done Terry Eagleton generally for aesthetics (The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). In this light, the editors and a few of the authors build on Pierre Bourdieu’s notions in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (trans. Richard Nice, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984) and Amanda Vickery and John Styles on “taste communities” (Gender, Taste, and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700–1830, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). They see that neoclassicism, coexisting with other styles, was associated with good taste which, in turn, defined and was “intimately bound up” with social distinction. Neoclassicism and buen gusto were means of—in the words of Minor for the context of seventeenth-century Italy—“exclusivity, power, class and insider knowledge” that were “used for persuasion and control” (27). Emily Engel, in her essay discussing viceregal taste in late colonial Lima and Buenos Aires, reminds readers that “The viceroys were not completely colonizing royal agents nor were they colonized Spanish American subjects” (208). Insisting on contingencies and “the agency of local actors,” the authors impress upon us that anything called neoclassicism in the Americas must be understood not as a top-down phenomenon nor merely “as a one-way process, a mere transfer” from Spain or Portugal to the Americas (Sáenz, 26). The result was a domestic development that appropriated a variety of both native and European traditional forms.

Classicizing languages could help signal differences in not only class, but also race and ethnicity, through the incorporation of local techniques or motifs. Niell asks readers to consider how race may have inflected the local understandings of particular productions, such as in the paintings and the monument of El Templete in Havana. In this regard, an interesting perspective on how race may enter into the question of buen gusto is offered by Burroughs’s investigation of the representations (lithographs and paintings) of plantation buildings, and their references to classical motifs. For him, buen gusto is best understood in the context of “honor” and “shame,” two of the more influential social constructs of colonial Latin America. The modernization of ingenios (plantations) in an increasingly prosperous Cuba, along with allusions to a classical paradigm, helped in the formation of social hierarchies. Further, revealing or hiding the slave quarters on the haciendas could be, in some instances, a sign of economic prosperity, and hence, honor, or in others, the “inevitable violence” (and hence shame) of “an idealized coercive and productive order” (128–29).

The question of local agency, and the extent of the power of administrators, viceroys, and patrons, becomes crucial in the construction of emerging stylistic trends that parallel how classical orders and good taste were received and understood on American versus European soil. The book’s authors insist upon multiple audiences and varying receptions of buen gusto as a socializing vehicle of class distinction and other forms of difference. Yet, the editors are also careful to alert readers that neither classicism nor buen gusto were totalizing constructs, in spite of any formal connections they may have shared with eighteenth-century administrative reforms from Bourbon Spain or nation-building projects of post-independence Latin America. What the question of buen gusto does do in relation to anything that might problematically be called neoclassicism in Latin America is make us rethink these categories; the volume’s essays do this by acknowledging the dynamics and hybridities of regional productions, now set against the tensions of Western European modernity (18).