You are in the temporary exhibition Destino Argentina (“Destination Argentina”). This part of the audio tour is dedicated to one of the exhibition’s main artists, the Argentine artist Norah Borges.
Leonor Fanny Borges was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1901. She was nicknamed Norah by her brother Jorge Luis, and she herself later adopted the name.
At the age of 12 she moved with her family to Switzerland, where she studied at the Geneva Academy of Fine Arts. She was to receive her classical training there, whilst making contact with European avant-garde movements and being particularly influenced by German expressionism.
The first stage of Borges’s work was closely linked to avant-garde literary publications. She was involved with the ultraist movement that emerged in Spain in 1919, precisely when she moved to the country with her family, collaborating as an illustrator on magazines like Baleares, Reflector, Grecia, Ultra and Litoral. On her return to Buenos Aires in 1924, the avant-garde movement accompanied her and her brother, and the pair continued to develop it there. She continued working with magazines like Prisma, Proa, Martín Fierro and Sur, making her a benchmark for avant-garde art in 1920s’ Argentina.
During this period, Norah Borges developed a style of art influenced by German expressionism and cubism, with her own language that has come to be identified as the artistic language of ultraism due to her role in the movement.
This was followed by a period when she developed more individual and personal art, in which avant-garde languages and theories continued to be seen, but this time applied to her own concept of painting. After the publication of A Synoptic Table of Painting in the magazine Martín Fierro in 1926, Borges started producing work linked to the “return to order”.
Here, we see Borges’s taste for the art of the Pre-Raphaelites, 13th-century Flemish painting, archaic Greek art and Romanesque art, and the paintings of Fra Filippo Lippi, Fra Angélico, Giotto and Botticelli, as well as those by de Chirico and El Greco.
Works like Tobías y el ángel (“Tobias and the Angel”), Urbano y Simona (“Urbano and Simona”), La anunciación (“The Annunciation”) and Las moradas (“The Mansions”) are key examples of this stage and these influences.
Throughout her artistic career, Norah Borges was an active part of the avant-garde artistic scene of Argentina and Spain, exhibiting individually in both countries over the years, as well as being invited to display her work at Spanish and international collective exhibitions.
Norah Borges died in Buenos Aires in 1998.
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Tobías y el ángel, 1925Tobias and the Angel
Norah Borges
Oil on wood
54 x 70 cmRalli Collection
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Urbano y Simona, 1930
Urbano and Simona
Norah Borges
Oil on duraboard
54 x 60 cmRalli Collection
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La anunciación, 1955
The Annunciation
Norah Borges
Oil on cardboard
70 x 70 cmRalli Collection
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Las moradas, 1956
The Mansions
Norah Borges
Oil on duraboard
100 x 100 cmRalli Collection
Silvia Sánchez Ruiz
Curator
CASTELANELLI, Mercedes and HERNA?N SOSA, Carlos, “Los colores de las palabras. (Sobre Manuel J. Castilla y las artes plásticas)”, in Anales de Literatura Hispanoamericana, vol. 37. Complutense University of Madrid, 2008, pp. 227-238. Available at: https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=2877369&orden=0&info=link [Date of access: 16/08/2022]
NEUMAN, Mauricio and GILLAND, Julianne, Gertrudis Chale: Painter in the Andean World / Una pintura en el Mundo Andino: years / años 1934-1954. (coord.) James Judd. Latin American Art. Buenos Aires, 2009.
