Image: Norah Borges
The artist’s older brother, Jorge Luis Borges, wrote that Norah was the fearless one in the family and “I the slow, timid, submissive one. She climbed to the top of the roof, traipsed through the trees, and I followed along with more fear than enthusiasm.”
How many women in the arts have been overshadowed by the men in their families? Countless. Just the other day I was surprised to hear some work by Fanny Mendelssohn — composer of more than 480 pieces of music — that was pretty impressive.
Maria Popova at Brain Pickings wrote recently of another female artist who was new to me: “Few people know that literary titan Jorge Luis Borges had a sister, and even fewer that Leonor Fanny Borges Acevedo (1901–1998), better-known under the pseudonym Norah Borges, was an acclaimed artist in her own right, who emerged in the 1920s as one of the female pioneers of modern art. …
“During her lifetime, Borges illustrated close to eighty books, including some of her brother’s, in addition to editorial illustrations for a number of avant-garde magazines belonging to ultraísmo — the first major avant-garde movement in Spain, comprising an eclectic group of writers and artists influenced by Italian futurism.
“Her soulful paintings and drawings, the earliest of which is collected in the out-of-print Spanish-language volume Norah Borges: Obra Gráfica, … spans more than seven decades and is nothing short of breathtaking.” See examples of that oeuvre here, at Brain Pickings.
For details on the life of Norah Borges, go to Wikipedia, here.
Photo: Wikipedia
Norah Borges, Argentinian artist, 1901-1998
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