Nela Arias-Misson

Biography

In 1959 Nela Arias won first prize at an exhibition of the National Association of Women Artists at the Argent Gallery in New York. She resigned from the association afterwards: she wanted her work judged on a par with men’s, not in a separate category for women.

She was born on 8 September 1915 in Havana. Her parents, Amadeo Arias Rodriguez and Sira Garcia Menendez, came from Asturias and owned tobacco plantations in Cuba. Until the First World War they travelled between Cuba and Spain; then the crossings became impossible, and the family stayed in Havana. Her father died when she was a child. In the 1930s she studied art with a relative, Armando Maribona, an artist, journalist and teacher at the San Alejandro National Academy of Fine Arts in Havana.

In 1941 she went to New York with her mother, stayed several months and, on the voyage back, met Willis Hesser Bird, an executive of Sears, Roebuck & Company, on board the ship. Two weeks later they married in Havana and settled in New Jersey. Their daughter Carole was born in Washington in 1942. Her husband was called up into the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime US intelligence agency, and served in the China-Burma-India Theater, while the army moved the family to Sarasota, Florida. After the war they all moved to New York. Bird decided to stay in Thailand and asked his wife to join him; she refused, and in 1949 the marriage ended. In New York she returned to art. In the late 1940s she studied fashion design and art at the Traphagen School of Fashion, at the Hans Hofmann School and at Parsons School of Design, and worked with the sculptor Leo Lentelli and at the Art Students League of New York. In 1949 she married a New York lawyer, Sidney Kraft; the marriage ended in divorce in 1955 (by other accounts, it began in 1950 and lasted seven years).

From 1957 to 1959 she studied with Hofmann and lived in Provincetown, Massachusetts. There she met Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning, and became friends with Karel Appel, one of the founders of the COBRA group, and with Walasse Ting, with whom she made several works together. She exhibited at the Provincetown Art Association and at the New Gallery.

From 1961 to 1976 she lived in Europe: first in Ibiza and Barcelona, then in Madrid and Brussels. She showed her work in Britain, Denmark, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, Italy and Spain. In Spain she met Joan Miró, who was then living in Palma de Mallorca, and his collaborator Josep Llorens i Artigas. Antoni Tapies introduced her to the painters of the El Paso group; they invited her to join, and she declined, preferring to work independently. In 1963 she married the Belgian poet, novelist and artist Alain Misson. The couple combined their surnames, and both became Arias-Misson. Alain was a co-founder of the visual poetry movement and worked with Joan Brossa, Herminio Molero and Ignacio Gomez de Liaño, with whom Nela also became friends. In 1970 she had solo exhibitions at the Galería Céspedes in Cordoba and the Cult-Art Gallery in Madrid. In 1974 the couple showed work together at the Galeria Senatore in Stuttgart, and they worked with Paul De Vree, Emile Kesteman, Carlfriedrich Clauss and Seiichi Niikuni. In 1975 she took part in “Phantomas”, an exhibition of art and poetry at the Musée d’Ixelles, where Enrico Baj, Bram Bogart, Marcel Broodthaers, Jean Dubuffet, Lucio Fontana and Piero Manzoni also showed.

In 1976 the Arias-Missons returned to the United States and settled in rural New Jersey. She went on painting but lived quietly and withdrew from the art world, occasionally showing individual pieces in New York, Dallas, Paris and Germany. After a car accident in 1993, which required several operations on her left arm, she could no longer paint as before. In 1995 she moved to New York, and in 2002 she settled permanently in Miami.

She died on 17 July 2015 in Miami, a few weeks short of her hundredth birthday. Her remains rest in a niche at the cemetery of the Church of San Esteban de Covera, near Avilés, in Spain.