The Anatomical Studies at Escuela Universitaria de Bellas Artes: A Mini-Essay

     In 1937, Felipe Cossío del Pomar, an exiled Peruvian artist, arrived in San Miguel with the hopes of establishing a Latin-American art school. With financial support from Mexico’s President, Lázaro Cárdenas, the artist utilized the partially demolished Convento de Concepción – a former nunnery and temporary camp for the Mexican army – as the site for his Escuela Universitaria de Bellas Artes. With the aid of Stirling Dickinson, an American Cossío had hired as the university’s art director, the institution flourished, drawing wealthy students from Mexico’s interior and featuring numerous distinguished speakers (including Pablo Neruda and Diego Rivera). Over time, the university’s global reputation grew and, as Kevin Delgado highlights, it gave birth to a notable community of artists in San Miguel. In 1945, as the Peruvian government demanded its exiles return, Cossío sold the school to two Italian brothers. The act, John Virtue stresses, led to the institution’s demise. Signing a contract with the United States government, the brothers began offering special rates to soldiers returning from World War II. This, coupled with a 1948 article in Life magazine which touted the university’s prestige and the cheap cost of living in San Miguel, spawned a flood of over 6,000 veterans and their families. The influx prompted a major shift in curriculum and sparked unrest with San Miguel's locals.
     While Cossío and his colleagues focused on traditional artwork and the preservation of ancestral crafts, the brothers, in an effort to boost attendance, incorporated more sensational courses, including nude portraiture and controversial still lifes utilizing the graves surrounding the former nunnery. If fact, the Life article prominently showcased the later, capturing student Loretta Hardesty standing amid the dilapidated graveyard as she sketched the discarded bones. As Scott Carney explains, the scene – for the magazine’s readers and those veterans flocking to San Miguel – was nothing more than an intriguing advertisement for the school that featured a beautiful young woman leisurely drawing the town’s neglected dead. As Carney states, “it doesn’t matter how the bones left their graves, only that they were good subjects for anatomical studies.” What these individuals failed to see, as both Carney and Virtue emphasize, was the flagrant disregard of the sacred: the bodies themselves, the hallowed ground in which they rested, and the reverence both held in Mexican society, particularly during la Dia de los Muertos. Indeed, for many citizens of San Miguel, the school’s new anatomical still lifes were not artistic exercises, but a gross disregard of the culture and its beliefs. For them, it made the dead and the societal veneration of them into a cold, inanimate subject. The villagers’ disdain, though, proved ephemeral. Toward the end of the 1940s, the United States government discovered the funds were being embezzled by the school’s new owners. The consequences were swift, but efficient: the doors to Escuela Universitaria de Bellas Artes were permanently closed; the faculty and students were reluctantly dispersed; the dreams of Cossío del Pomar were dismantled; and the bodies of the surrounding cemetery were allowed to slip solemnly back into their quiet slumber removed from lingering artists and charcoal-covered canvasses. 

Works Referenced

Carney, Scott. The Red Market: On the Trail of the World’s Organ Brokers, Bone Thieves, Blood Farmers, and Child Traffickers. New York: MJF Books, 2011.

Delgado, Kevin. Explorer’s Guide San Miguel de Allende and Guanajuato: A Great Destination. 2nd ed. Woodstock, VT: The Countryman Press, 2011.

“GI Paradise.” Life. January 1948: 56-58.

Virtue, John. Leonard and Reva Brooks: Artists in Exile in San Miguel de Allende. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001.