This biography is republished in full with kind permission from The Art Story – Débora Arango.
Born: 11 November 1907, Colombia
Died: 4 December 2005
Country most active: Colombia
Also known as: Débora Arango Pérez
Débora Arango was one of Colombia’s most original and fearless 20th century artists. With a single-mindedness that saw her reject all expectations for a well-educated middle-class Catholic, she pursued a career, not only as a female artist, but one who produced works that presented a blunt challenged to Colombian culture and its artistic traditions. Struggling against censor and defamation, her work ignited sharp criticism from conservative and religious bodies. Her art examined issues related to sexuality, class, political corruption, religious hypocrisy, and the struggles facing vulnerable Colombian women. Her expressionistic treatment of these topics was unflinching and unapologetic. Like Frida Kahlo, her more famous Mexican counterpart, Arango helped her country come to terms with its rapid modernization.
Childhood
Débora Arango Pérez was born in Medellín, Colombia’s second-largest city. Located in the central region of the Andes Mountains, it is commonly referred to as the “City of the Eternal Spring” due to its mild climate. The daughter of Castor María Arango, a successful merchant, and Elvira Pérez Débora, she was the seventh of 11 siblings. The family were devout Catholics and, like most of her local community, she attending daily mass. In spite of her strict religious upbringing, Arango developed a rebellious side. Encouraged by relatives, she would disguise herself as a boy and go horse riding (an activity then prohibited to girls) and her father even allowed her to take the wheel of the family car (“In those times in Medellín”, Arango later recalled, “there were three women who drove: a foreigner, the daughter of a trucker and me”). Having free reign of her aunt’s library, she also discovered philosophers and writers, and through her brothers’ text books (they were medical students), she was able to study human anatomy.
Arango followed a strict religious education, as was expected of a girl of a good Catholic upbringing. She first attended school with the sisters of La Presentación (an international Catholic network committed to the education of “young ladies”) before continuing her education at the María Auxiliadora School. The female curriculum mainly focused on tasks that would qualify women for motherhood and domestic life, such as dressmaking and the culinary arts, with some emphasis on music and painting. However, one sister, María Rabaccia, identified Arango’s artistic abilities and encouraged her to pursue a career as an artist. Her sex excluded her from the qualification a bachelor’s degree in art, and Arango left education instead with a general “certificate of studies”.
Early Training and Work
Arango pursued her interest in painting in 1931 through private training with the Columbian painter Eladio Vélez who had recently returned to Medellín from a tour of Europe. Her time with Vélez allowed Arango to develop her watercolor technique through classes mainly focused on portraiture and still lifes. However, Arango soon outgrew Velez’s academic leanings.
After seeing his frescos, La República (1937), at the Municipal Palace of Medellín, Arango contacted the artist Pedro Nel Gómez and soon joined a working group of women artists studying under his guidance. She felt in tune with Gómez and embraced his style, which was itself strongly influenced by Mexican Muralism. Her time with Gómez allowed her to learn about compositional dynamics and the vitality that can be achieved in painting through movement and color. Arango continued to develop her own practice and explored various themes in her work, adding urban scenes to her still-lifes and portraiture.
In 1937, Gómez’s students put on a successful group exhibition, and soon after, their mentor dared them to begin painting the female nude. It was a transgressive suggestion and Arango was the only one of the group to accept Gómez’s challenge. Having ceased to study with Gómez in 1938, she continued to explore the female nude genre independently.
Mature Period
In 1939, Arango was invited to take part in the “Professional Artists Salon” at Club Unión, the most prestigious social center in Medellín, by the Society of Friends of Art. Of the 15 invited exhibitors, at least 13 were considered professional artists. Arango selected nine paintings for the exhibition, including two recent life-size nude watercolors: Cantarina de La Rosa (Singer of the Rose) (1939) and La Amiga (The Friend) (1939). They attracted instant controversy. Nevertheless, the three-man jury decided to award the first prize to Arango, choosing the more benign, The Sisters of Charity (1939), for the prize to offset the outrage. The scandal of her nudes would not go away, however.
On the day the prize was announced, an article signed with the initials “L. P.” was published in the conservative newspaper La Defensa calling Arango’s work a “shameless work signed by a lady that not even a man should exhibit”. The article also refers to the artwork La Amiga as being only “appropriate for hanging in a brothel”. The liberal newspaper El Diario defended Arango, however, and publishing her first interview in November 1939. In the article, she defended her right to paint nudes, stating, “I am convinced that art as a cultural manifestation does not have to have anything to do with moral codes. Art is neither amoral nor immoral. Its orbit simply does not intersect any ethical principle”.
In the spring of 1940, Arango was invited by the Liberal Education Minister, Jorge Elicer Gaitán, to exhibit her paintings in Bogotá in her first solo exhibition. The exhibition opened in October at the foyer of the prestigious Teatro Colón and was comprised of thirteen watercolors, six of which were life-size female nudes. Once more, the nudes – that featured pubic hair and bare nipples – caused a backlash, but this time the controversy was elevated to a national level. The newspaper, El Siglo, directed by the politician, and future president, Laureano Gómez, published an anonymous article describing the exhibition as a “challenge to good taste”. It described Arango, indeed, as “a young woman without artistic taste, who shows that she does not even have elementary notions of drawing and that she does not know the technique of watercolor”. (It was reported in the paper that the exhibition had been shut down when in fact it had remained open to the public.)
After the exhibition, Arango’s art took a critical shift as she started addressing social themes, particularly those that affected lower-class Colombian women. This renewed approach to her art (which seemed to contradict her earlier declaration that art should not concern itself with matters of morality) made her the first Colombian artist to depict scenes of prisons, bars, brothels and asylums (to which she gained access through her brothers’ connections). Her frank treatment of her subjects – images of the harassment faced by prostitutes at the hands of the police, mental illness in prison, and even a prisoner giving birth unaided – had never been seen in Colombian art. During this period, her art also became more expressionistic too.
Arango’s art had caused such a scandal that, around 1945, her father received a direct phone call from the parish priest informing him the archbishop would ex-communicate his daughter if she continued to exhibit her work. In response, Arango left Colombia for Mexico where she lived for at least three months. While there, she enrolled at the National School of Fine Arts. Arango studied fresco, and became strongly influenced by the work of José Clemente Orozco. In 1947 she was compelled to return to Medellín to take care of her father, who had recently fallen ill.
Late Period
Following the assassination of the liberal presidential candidate, Jorge Elicer Gaitán, in 1948, Arango’s art took another thematic shift. Her painting Masacre del 9 de Abril (Massacre of April 9) (1948) documents the 10 hours of violence and riots that erupted in Bogotá after the assassination of Gaitán, and which became known as El Bogotazo. After this event, her art focused mainly on political satire, documenting different events of the period known as La Violencia (The Violence), and challenging corruption in the Colombian government. These works would remain hidden from the public for two decades by the Colombian authorities.
In 1954 Arango traveled to Europe and stayed in a pension guesthouse in Madrid for almost two years. Here she focused on studying movement and the human figure and the mural paintings at The Academy of San Fernando. In February 1955, Arango opened an exhibition with thirty of her works at the Institute of Hispanic Culture. However, it was shut down the next day by order of the Francoist regime. Having returned to Colombia, Arango exhibited a series of ceramics (which she had worked on while caring for her father) at the Centro Colombo-Americano de Medellín. Two years later, she displayed 37 paintings at the Marian Congregation, but the political climate made her fear for the safety of her work, and she removed the paintings from display. After the premature ending of the exhibition, Arango did not display her work for many years and, by 1960, she had abandoned participation in public events altogether.
In 1975, Arango reemerged in public life when the Biblioteca Pública Piloto in Medellín hosted a retrospective of her art, exhibiting approximately a hundred works. Art Historian Fernández Uribe noted that while the retrospective did not receive the attention it deserved, “it had the unquestionable merit of reminding critics and artists of the painter’s existence”. Galvanized by the exhibition, Arango returned to painting for two years and produced various new satirical oil paintings and watercolors of topics related to the human condition and social customs.
1984 marked a late career turning point for Arango when the recently founded Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín presented a retrospective featuring 205 works, ranging from oil painting to watercolor and ceramics. Three years later, Arango donated 233 of her works to the museum, which today makes up the most important part of the museum’s collection, and the most extensive public collection of her art. In 1997, and then again in 2003, she received the Cruz de Bocayá, the most important peacetime honor from the government of Colombia. Art critic, Juan Forero wrote, “In old age, she continued to work, her paintings climbing the walls of her beloved house in the town of Envigado. She delighted in having visitors, surprising them with her sharp wit”. She created her last painting, Portrait of a Friend, her best friend and apprentice, Mateo Blanco, in 2003. Arango died on December 4, 2005, aged 98.
The Legacy of Débora Arango
In September 2017, the Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín inaugurated a new five-story building with a section dedicated to Arango including samples of her ceramic work, her drawings, watercolors, and oil paintings.
Throughout her eight decade career, Arango produced art that tested the conservative mindset of Colombia’s art establishment. Her art celebrated the naked female; it spoke up for the subaltern women who had never been represented in Columbian art before; and later she dared to criticize the violence and political corruption that stained daily Colombian life. Her art was transgressive and satirical, and it put down a marker for those female Colombian artists that followed, including Beatriz González, Doris Salcedo, and Karen Paulina Biswell.
Forero notes that “As Colombia opened itself up to the world and produced celebrated artists like Mr. [Fernando] Botero and writers like Gabriel García Márquez, Ms. Arango’s work eventually found acceptance and critical acclaim”. He adds that, although she held successful exhibitions in Spain and the United States, “Arango never sought fame and was reluctant to have her paintings shown”. Today, however, her work forms part of the bigger narrative on 20th century Latin-American women artists. Indeed, she joins the company of Frida Kahlo, María Izquierdo and Tarsila do Amaral as modernist pioneers amongst female Hispanic artists.