Myrna Báez

Biography

Her first rejection came in Madrid. In 1952 Myrna Báez applied to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando and was turned down.

She put together a new portfolio and was admitted a year later.

Báez was born on 18 August 1931 in Santurce, a district of San Juan, into a well-off family of five children. Her father, Enrique Báez, was a civil engineer and her mother, América González, a teacher, and it was her mother who insisted that all the children study the arts, took them to the theatre and encouraged them to read. Myrna began painting lessons at the age of nine. In 1947 she graduated from the Colegio Puertorriqueño de Niñas, and in 1951 she took a bachelor’s degree in science at the University of Puerto Rico. In those years many Spanish intellectuals and artists who had emigrated to the island were active around the university. There she formed her convictions about Puerto Rican independence, went to political rallies and cultural evenings, and supported the women’s rights movement. She went to Spain to study medicine, spending some time in New York and Paris on the way. In 1952 she gave up her medical studies for painting. At the San Fernando Academy she received a master’s degree in art in 1957. Back in Puerto Rico, she studied with the graphic artist Lorenzo Homar at the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture in San Juan. Later, in 1969–1970, she studied at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Lithography and intaglio she had been taught in Spain by Dimitri Papagiourgi.

From 1957 she worked as an artist, and from 1962 to 1987 she taught painting and drawing in schools in Puerto Rico; from 1981 to 1987 she also taught at the Art Students League in San Juan. She painted in oil and acrylic. Critics describe her paintings as softly handled and luminous, and her prints, especially the collotypes, as rich in colour and texture.

Her early work of the 1960s is described as “traditional images of Puerto Rico”: the everyday life of working people. Later she turned more and more to printmaking, including engraving and woodcut, and absorbed the influence of Impressionism, Surrealism and abstract art. In the 1970s she became interested in collotype. The political climate on the island had changed by then, and Báez turned to the new middle class. The art critic Margarita Fernández Zavala sees class tensions in these works: urban subjects, an emerging Puerto Rican bourgeoisie, sitters who seem unsure of their new position and not quite at home in their surroundings. Bright colour, however, lifts them out of the ordinary. I think what matters most in these pictures is precisely that awkwardness between a person and the room in which he or she stands.

Space, and a person’s place in it, remained her subject later on. In her prints and paintings she builds layers of “unreal” space from frames, reflections, pictures on walls and open windows. She turns to the European masters directly: she reimagines famous female nudes and places figures of classical descent in Caribbean interiors and landscapes, hiding and revealing them in a single gesture. She paints women from a woman’s point of view, questioning the “male gaze”. Of landscape she said that she did not want to make it for tourists and was not looking for the sentimental or the folkloric; what interested her was form, colour, place and light.

In 1981 Báez was one of the founders of the group Hermandad de Artistas Gráficos, set up to protest against government interference in cultural affairs. She founded the fine arts programme at the Sagrado Corazón University, worked there as artist in residence from 1988, and later as a professor. In 1983 her work was shown in the exhibition “Images and Identities: Art and Artists of Puerto Rican Heritage” at the Paul Robeson Galleries of Rutgers University–Newark.

In 1997 Báez received the National Medal of Culture for her contribution to art, and in 2001 the Sagrado Corazón University awarded her an honorary doctorate. In December 2014 the annual Campechada festival in Old San Juan was dedicated to her work; until then it had honoured neither a living artist nor a woman. Her work has been exhibited by, and entered the collections of, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She died on 24 September 2018 in San Juan.