Olga Costa

Biography

The surname Costa came to her in Mexico, a few months after the family arrived. Her real name was Kostakowsky, and the new one sounded, as the girl saw it, more Spanish.

Olga was born on 28 August 1913 in Leipzig. Her parents, the violinist and composer Jacobo Kostakowsky and his wife Ana, were Jews from Odesa who had left for Germany to escape pogroms. Soon after Olga’s birth the family moved to Berlin, where her sister Lya, later a writer, was born. Her father held socialist views and had been in prison. After his release under an amnesty the family decided to leave: on 7 September 1925 they came ashore at Veracruz and then settled in Mexico City. The sources differ somewhat on the reasons for the departure. In Mexico City the girl attended the German School, sang in the choir and played the piano. She first saw painting in the Bolívar Amphitheatre, where she went to concerts: it held a mural by Diego Rivera, and its colour fascinated her. At home, musicians, painters and writers gathered every week.

In 1933 Olga entered the National School of Plastic Arts at the Academy of San Carlos. She studied with Carlos Mérida, and in Emilio Amero’s lithography workshop she met José Chávez Morado. The family needed money, and after three or four months (the sources give different lengths) she left to work in a shop. Mérida later called her the “white angel of Mexican painting”.

She and Chávez Morado married on 18 May 1935. A year later her husband was invited to organise a painting school and decorate the teachers’ college in Xalapa, in the state of Veracruz; she went with him and began to paint there, as she put it herself, “as a game”, with no thought of a profession. Her husband encouraged her, and she hesitated. She had in effect no formal training, so she is regarded as self-taught. Her early works, in the judgment of critics, are timid: bright folkloric subjects, the influence of Rivera and Mérida, lessons taken from Tamayo.

In 1941, together with Angelina Beloff, Francisco Zúñiga, Feliciano Peña and others, she opened the Galería La Espiral and directed it. It was more a meeting place for artists than a shop. That same year she designed sets and costumes for the Ballet Waldeen. In 1943 the gallery became the Sociedad de Arte Moderno, which put on a major exhibition of Picasso. In 1949 Costa became one of the founders of the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana. Inés Amor, owner of the Galería de Arte Mexicano, offered her a first solo exhibition in 1945. Major shows followed at the same gallery in 1948, 1950, 1962 and 1971, and Amor began sending her work to the United States as well. In 1951, on commission from the National Institute of Fine Arts, she painted the large canvas “The Fruit Vendor” (195 × 245 cm): a woman surrounded by Mexican fruits, among them sugar cane, pears, mamey and guava. It is now in the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City. In 1952 she made her only mural, the mosaic “Motivos sobre el agua” (“Motifs on Water”) for the Agua Hedionda spa in Cuautla: an enormous wave from which a pre-Hispanic conch rises, with mermaids who have flowers instead of scales.

From 1955 Costa lived for long periods in Guanajuato while her husband painted murals in the Alhóndiga de Granaditas, and from 1966 she settled there for good. Landscape took up more and more space in her work; from 1959, according to some accounts, she almost abandoned the human figure. Her late landscapes of the Bajío are red and green, with ochre and violet; houses and roads remain in them, while people almost vanish. Her last works date from 1978–1979 (“Ladera” and “Niebla”).

In 1975 the couple gave their collection of pre-Hispanic, colonial and folk art to the museum of the Alhóndiga de Granaditas. In 1979 they founded the Museo del Pueblo de Guanajuato, and they bequeathed their home, a former hacienda, to become a museum that now bears their names. In 1989 the Festival Internacional Cervantino held a retrospective of her work, and in 1990 she received the Premio Nacional de Ciencias y Artes. Olga Costa died in Guanajuato on 28 June 1993.