Débora Arango

Biography

In February 1955 an exhibition of thirty works by Débora Arango opened at the Institute of Hispanic Culture in Madrid. The next day it was closed by order of Franco’s authorities. She counted it among the heaviest disappointments of her life.

She was forty-seven. It was not the first time she had been shut down.

She was born on 11 November 1907 in Medellín, the seventh of eleven children of the merchant Castor María Arango Díaz and Elvira Pérez. She was taught by the Sisters of the Presentation in La Estrella, then at the María Auxiliadora school in Medellín, where an Italian nun, Sister Maria Rabaccia, recognised the artist in her. In her aunt’s library she read philosophers of every persuasion, from her brothers, medical students, she borrowed anatomy books, and with the help of relatives she dressed as a man to go riding: that was not something girls were allowed to do. In 1931 the painter Eladio Vélez returned to Medellín and began giving private lessons; in 1932 he joined the staff of the Institute of Fine Arts, and Arango enrolled there: four years of drawing, watercolour, portraiture, plaster casts and still lifes. The casts bored her, she obtained permission to paint outdoors, and those watercolours already contain the tram, the cars and the crowds of a changing city. In 1935 Pedro Nel Gómez came back from Italy and began the frescoes of the Municipal Palace; she asked to join his workshop, and there she felt freer. From Gómez she took movement and colour.

In November 1939 the Society of Friends of Art invited her to the Salon of Professional Artists at the Club Unión. The jury gave her first prize for “Sisters of Charity”, and the choice, it seems, was an attempt to smother a scandal: hanging beside it were two watercolour nudes, “Cantarina de la rosa” and “La amiga”. The conservative paper La Defensa wrote of “an impudent work that not even a man should exhibit”, the liberal press took the artist under its protection, Father Miguel Giraldo, the priest of the church of San José, advised her to take down the nudes and paint no more of them; the same day she learned that the whole thing had been set up by Eladio Vélez. It was then that she said the sentence still quoted in Colombia: art, as a manifestation of culture, has nothing to do with moral codes; it is neither moral nor immoral. In 1940 the Minister of Education, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, invited her to exhibit in Bogotá; the newspaper El Siglo called the exhibition a challenge to good taste and the painter herself a young woman without taste and without the most elementary notions of drawing. In 1942 the municipal magazine of Medellín printed a laudatory article about her with illustrations, half of them nudes; Monsignor Joaquín García Benítez, newly installed in office, demanded that the issue be withdrawn, and the dispute reached the city council. That same year her watercolours went over entirely to social subjects: prostitutes, a woman in prison, the city at night.

In 1944 she joined the group of Independent Artists, who signed a manifesto on art for everyone on the model of the Mexican muralists, and took part in the National Exhibition in Medellín. In 1946 she went with her younger sister Elvira to the United States and Mexico and entered the National School of Fine Arts in Mexico City; none of her former teachers would give her a letter of recommendation, and she was admitted on the strength of her watercolours. There she studied fresco and looked at the muralists, above all Orozco. In 1947 she returned to Medellín. Her only large mural she painted in 1948, commissioned by the Packaging Company, on the harvesting of fique fibre. The same year her “Adolescence” at an exhibition in Medellín drew a complaint from the League of Decency.

From the late 1940s begins the political satire with its zoological metaphors: “The Departure of Laureano”, “The Massacre of 9 April”, “The Train of Death”, “The Cemetery of the Riffraff, or My Head” and “The Republic” (all 1950), “The Students’ Strike” and “Military Junta” (1957). In “The Train of Death” the bodies of the murdered are carried in a wagon at night, and the faces cannot be made out; in the “Cemetery” her own head lies among the graves, and above them sit vultures, which in the country were called “chulos”, as the police were. She was the first in Colombia to paint La Violencia while it was going on. In 1954 she left for Europe for about two years, lived in a Madrid boarding house, studied drawing from the moving figure and mural painting at the Academy of San Fernando and went to the Prado to look at Goya; hence the exhibition closed the next day. In 1957 in Medellín she had to take down in a hurry 37 paintings shown at the Marian Congregation: the streets were celebrating the fall of General Rojas Pinilla, and she feared for the works.

In 1959 she went to England for two years with a niece, worked in ceramics and portraiture and travelled through Scotland, France and Austria. In 1960 she showed ceramics in a group exhibition at the Museo de Zea and then disappeared from public life for fifteen years, not touching a brush. She shut herself up in the house and studio “Casablanca”, built by her grandfather in the mid-nineteenth century, and there made tiles, skirting boards and ceramic panels for the walls.

In 1975 the Biblioteca Pública Piloto of Medellín showed a hundred of her works. The press barely noticed the exhibition, but the artist herself returned to painting for two years: satirical oils and watercolours of bathers, couples, clowns, passers-by. She sold little, both for want of a market and because she preferred to keep the works for herself. In 1986 she gave 233 works to the Museum of Modern Art of Medellín. In the 1990s came regional and national honours, in 2003 the Order of Boyacá, Colombia’s highest award; the University of Antioquia conferred on her the honorary title of maestra. Débora Arango died on 4 December 2005, at ninety-eight; she had laid down her brush only a few years before. Since 29 November 2016 her portrait has been printed on the 2,000-peso banknote, and in Envigado an art school bears her name.