The Flight of Color. Some Uses and Effects of Chromolithography in Buenos Aires: La Cotorra (1879-1880)

Abstract

At the end of the 1870s, the Brazilian cartoonist Cándido Aragonés de Faría settled in Buenos Aires and launched a new political-satire illustrated weekly: La Cotorra. This new publication marked a milestone in his career as a graphic artist, since La Cotorra –at least according to its director– was the first South American weekly to introduce chromolithography as its main attraction. A coincidence stressed unexpectedly that singular experience offered to the local public. As soon as the first issues were in the streets, a violent revolution raised in Buenos Aires: its cause was the fight for the city's federalization. Because of that, graphic world workers of the magazine –graphic artists, operators, writers– were faced to the new challenge of managing, from their diverse spaces and abilities, both technical and expressive resources of a novel technique at a particularly critical informative moment. This work proposes to explore that tension between the expressive and informative uses of printed color and to analyze its effects and technical and discursive limitations chromolithography impose but also the possibilities opened up by it in that particular context.