Eduardo Schiaffino was an Argentine painter, art critic and historian. A member of a group known as the “Generation of the Eighties”, he founded the National Museum of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires and sparked the development of painting in the country.
Schiaffino was born in Buenos Aires where he studied with the Venetian Giuseppe Agujari (1840-1885). In 1876 when he was only 18, Schiaffino founded the Society to promote Fine Arts. In 1905 the institution would be renamed as the National Academy of Fine Arts. In 1884 Schiaffino received a Government grant to travel to Europe and he also acted as a foreign correspondent for the newspaper “El Diario”, publishing various articles on artistic themes under the pseudonym Zig Zag.
As from 1885 Schiaffino studies in Paris with Raphael Collin and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, the outstanding symbolist that would be recognized as a master by Cézanne, van Gogh, Seurat, Gauguin, Bonnard, Vuillard, Hodler and Picasso.
In 1891 Schiaffino returned to Buenos Aires and participated with another people in founding the Buenos Aires Athenaeum, a group dedicated to enhancing the Hispanic American culture through the participation of outstanding people like Ruben Darío and Leopoldo Lugones.
In 1895 when the government agreed to create the National Museum of Fine Arts, Schiaffino achieved a desired goal, this being a project for which he had long struggled. He acted as its first director until 1910. The trend in painting during that period was for symbolism, which he publicly and polemically criticized — but he hung the works in the Museum just the same.
After the Centennial International Exhibition, Schiaffino left his position as Director of the Museum and accepted another one as an Argentine diplomatic in different countries in Europe, but in 1933 he returned to Buenos Aires and published his most important book “Painting and Sculpture in Argentina.”
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