While Mario Urteaga did not form part of the Indianist group led by José Sabogal, his work was, generally speaking, in keeping with that tendency. He began painting in Cajamarca, where he was born, before moving to Lima, where he lived from 1903 to 1911. When he returned to Cajamarca, he worked for the newspaper El Ferrocarril, writing about science, art, and politics. It was around 1920 that he started making paintings with indigenous themes and, in 1923—at the insistence of his nephew Camilo Blas (pseudonym of Alfonso Sánchez Urteaga)—his focus on vernacular themes intensified. While during the 1920s his costumbrist works featured characters from Cajamarca, the scenes he depicted in the thirties were without criollo elements; instead, indigenous themes figured centrally, with images of peasants in an idealized landscape. In 1934, Urteaga’s first exhibition in Lima was held in the galleries of the Academia Nacional de Música Alcedo. [See: G. Buntinx and L. E. Wuffarden. Mario Urteaga: nuevas miradas (Lima: Fundación Telefónica–MALI, 2003)]. A second show, held in 1937, consolidated his prestige. The scant attention given to his third exhibition (held in 1938) and the cancellation of another show he had been working on was undoubtedly due to increasing opposition of local artists to Indianism. Indeed, it was during the mid-thirties that a critical stance on Indianism—perceived as government-backed and exclusive—was articulated, which eventually (in 1943) led Sabogal to leave his post as director of the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes (ENBA). It was in a context marked by innovation and controversy with the introduction of abstract art that, in 1955, the tribute to Urteaga at the IAC—a newly founded institution dedicated to advocating modern art in Peru—took place. Partisans of abstraction and partisans of figuration reacted radically differently to the artist’s presence in Lima and to the widespread recognition of his work. This is evident in the divergent statements of Indianist painter Sabogal, abstract artist Fernando de Szyszlo, and muralist Teodoro Núñez Ureta. None of their readings took into account the complexity of Urteaga’s work, which Buntinx describes as “a peripheral expression with its own strains of sophistication, chief among them a certain classical inspiration: colonial traditions, as well as popular traditions and traditions of the republican era, seem, at times, to converge in Urteaga’s work as they are joined to a European and Renaissance canon.”