Como nunca antes, las artistas entran en escena

Like never before, female artists take the stage

Prior to Margarita Nelken, art criticism in Mexico was practiced almost exclusively by men who, in general, directed the great majority of their attention to artists who were also men. This changed drastically with the author’s efforts, dedicated like no one before her to studying women artists with established careers (María Izquierdo); or to presenting the work of European artists who, like her, had been exiled in the country (Angelina Beloff) and, at the same time, promoting the careers of young female artists active in the 1950s and 1960s.

Without a doubt, Izquierdo was one of Nelken’s favoured artists. The writer saw in her work the updating of a local culture with multiple references and motifs, “the natural development, within an unmistakably popular feeling, of the vestiges of ancient cultures”. The author also found herself fascinated by her still lifes and her unique genre of painted shelves, which she described as “one of the most typically vernacular expressions of the contemporary Mexican school”. Another woman artist she appreciated highly was Lola Cueto. She valued her visual output and emphasized her progressive stance, evident in her activities in the field of public education in the arts, her interest in producing accessible work, as well as her social ideals. Nelken celebrated the way in which Cueto updated the popular arts, her solutions, techniques, accessibility and everyday character. These practices gave rise to the multiplicity of supports and techniques she used: lacquer, textiles and embroidery, papel picado, puppet design, engravings and paintings.

There were other women artists with whom Nelken maintained less severe critical relations, such as Olga Costa and Celia Calderón. Of the former, she appreciated her still lifes, which bring together strange juxtapositions of objects: these paintings “revealed at once her pressing creative curiosity and her interpretative finesse”. Meanwhile, she preferred the 1960s work of Calderón, such as La muñeca (1966), in which “the contrasts of the light areas with the shadows are presented with a very precise sense of expressiveness”. Nevertheless, Nelken was also critical of certain aspects or segments of the production of both artists, especially when they gave way to “ideological whims”. Such cases demonstrate her intention to articulate an impartial critical exercise, a position that was not well received by many of the artists who, at some point, found themselves on the sharp end of her articles. This happened to Costa, just as it did to the muralists Siqueiros and Rivera, who conspired against her career in response.