It has been said that Argentina's artistic creativity was not decolonized until the 1920s , when it finally ceased, albeit hesitantly, to draw its inspiration exclusively from France, Spain, Italy and other European countries. While a relatively progressive president, Marcelo T. de Alvear, was in power from 1922 to 1928, bringing about a relaxed climate of creativity and prosperity, key figures Xul Solar and Emilio Pettoruti came back to Argentina after long peregrinations in Europe, and the Martín Fierro magazine, a vaguely patriotic publication interested in criollo and neocriollo culture as a means of achieving a non-chauvinistic brand of "Argentinidad", in all fields of artistic creation, first went on sale in 1924; Borges was one of its contributors. Of all the early "post-colonial" artists, Xul Solar , born Oscar Agustín Alejandro Schulz Solari (1887-1963), stands out, both technically and for his originality; he is one of the few artists in Argentina to have a museum all to himself, the fantastic - in both senses of the word - Museo Xul Solar in Recoleta, Buenos Aires. Solar was an eccentric polymath, born just outside Buenos Aires to a German-speaking Latvian father and a Genoese mother. After abandoning his architectural studies in the capital he set sail for Hong Kong but jumped ship in London, stayed in Europe for twelve years, and began working there as an artist. Back in Buenos Aires he experimented with new styles and influences but in 1939, fascinated in particular by astrology and Buddhism, he founded the Pan Klub , a group of artists and intellectuals sharing his Utopian pacifist credo. Some of his more disturbing pictures evoke the ruins left by World War II. Xul Solar worked mainly with watercolour and tempera, preferring their fluidity and pastel colours to the relative rigidity of oils. While many influences are visible, his closest soul-mate, both artistically and philosophically, is undoubtedly Klee, though artists as varied as Bosch, Braque, Chagall and Dalí evidently provided inspiration too. His beguiling paintings essentially work on two levels: a magical, almost infantile universe of fantasy, depicted in fresh, bright colours and immediately appealing forms, and a far more complex philosophy of erudite symbolism and allegory, in which the zodiac and cabalistic signs predominate, along with a repetition of snake and ladder motifs. His adopted name is not only a deformation of his real surnames but also "Lux" (light) backwards, while "solar" suggests his obsession with the planets. Octavio Paz's maxim "painting has one foot in architecture and the other in dreams" has often been quoted in his connection and the artist's early architectural training unmistakeably comes across in his paintings, in which buildings and futuristic urban plans predominate. You can see a particularly fine watercolour, Pupo , one of Xul Solar's earlier works (1918), at Buenos Aires' Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes or MNBA, the country's biggest and richest collection of nineteenth- and twentieth-century painting and sculpture. In the same museum you can see a very fine painting - Arlequín , 1928 - by Solar's friend and contemporary, Emilio Pettoruti (1892-1971), whose major exhibition in 1924 sent ripples of scandal and excitement across the conservative capital. This event is widely interpreted as the beginning of the modern era in Argentine painting. Pettoruti transferred into painting and collage his personal and, for some, very Argentine vision of Cubism. The MNBA not only houses a beautiful collection of art, but it also traces in a concrete form the very history of the country's painting and sculpture since independence in the early nineteenth century. In colonial times Argentina had relied on two main sources to satisfy the growing demand for artwork: the craftsmen of Peru and Bolivia, especially those of the Cusco School , who churned out mostly religious paintings and objects that added a mestizo touch to European baroque themes and styles; and artisans and artists from Brazil, whose slightly different techniques and inspiration provided some variety among the objects on offer. As a gaucho identity began to emerge and benefit from economic prosperity a more specific creativity appeared, in the form of mostly silver and leather " motivos " - mate vessels, saddles, knives, guns - of the kind displayed at museums right across the country. A major collection of these objects is housed at the Museo Hernández , in Palermo, Buenos Aires. But as a middle class and wealthy land-owning aristocracy became firmly established, they heaped scorn upon this "vulgar sub-culture" and would have nothing in their homes but fashionable European and European-style art. Not until 1799 did Buenos Aires have its own art school , the Escuela de Dibujo, but it was shut down upon the orders of King Carlos IV only three years later. After independence, an academy of fine art was founded, but all the teachers came from Europe and it too was closed down for lack of funding in the 1830s. Carlos Morel (1813-94), one of the first recognized Argentine artists, had been trained there; firmly entrenched in the Romantic tradition of early nineteenth-century France, his oils of urban and rural scenes and military episodes were exquisitely executed and you can see a particularly fine example, Carga de Caballería del Ejército Federal (exact date unknown) on display at the MNBA.