31.05.1924–30.07.2005
Olga Albizu
Olga Albizu Rosaly of Ponce was the first Puerto Rican woman artist to devote herself wholly to abstraction. A pupil of Esteban Vicente and Hans Hofmann, from 1953 she worked in New York in the manner of abstract expressionism. Her paintings are known even to people who have never heard her name: they are on the covers of Stan Getz records of the early 1960s, among them “Getz/Gilberto”.
Biography
In 1964 an abstract painting by Olga Albizu, a Puerto Rican artist living in New York, appeared on the cover of Stan Getz’s album “Getz/Gilberto”. Her works had already graced three of his records before that: “Jazz Samba” and “Big Band Bossa Nova” in 1962 and “Jazz Samba Encore!” in 1963. In the same year, 1964, a painting of hers went onto the cover of Bill Evans’s “Trio 64”, and in 1966 onto the second volume of “Getz/Gilberto”.
She was born on 31 May 1924 in Ponce, Puerto Rico, into a fairly well-off family. From 1943 to 1947 she studied painting with the Spanish painter Esteban Vicente, and in 1946 she took a bachelor’s degree at the University of Puerto Rico. In 1948 she went to New York on a fellowship for postgraduate study at the Art Students League, where her teachers were Morris Kantor, Carl Holty and Vaclav Vytlacil. She also studied with Hans Hofmann and then became his assistant. Then came Europe: the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris and the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence. She spent a year painting in Provence, as Van Gogh and Cézanne had done before her. In 1953 she returned to New York and stayed there.
She is called the first woman in Puerto Rico to devote herself entirely to abstract art. In 1957 she took part in the first comprehensive exhibition of contemporary Puerto Rican artists, in 1964 she won second prize at the Esso Salon of Young Artists in San Juan, and in 1967 second prize at the Ateneo Puertorriqueño. On 16 June 1966 her paintings were formally inaugurated at the Pan American Union. She exhibited widely, in Puerto Rico, in Israel and in the United States.
To my mind, there is something odd about her story: her best-known paintings were seen by many people who never learned the artist’s name. The painting “Radiante” (1967) is in the Smithsonian American Art Museum; in 2013 her works were included in its exhibition “Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art”, and in 2017 “Radiante”, together with works by other artists, was printed on the new banners at the museum’s entrance. In Ponce her name is in the Park of Illustrious Ponce Citizens.
Olga Albizu died on 30 July 2005 in New York.
Profile notes