Georgina G. Gluzman: Women Artists in the City of Buenos Aires in the 1920 and 1930s

Women Artists in the City of Buenos Aires in the 1920 and 1930s

Lía Correa Morales, Retrato de mujer

Georgina Gluzman’s current project focuses on women artists in the city of Buenos Aires in the 1920 and 1930s. She is interested in sexual difference, understood as a cultural phenomenon, in relation to art production and reception. The impact of feminist critique on the historiography of Argentine and Latin American art is relatively recent and particularly scarce in works related to the proposed period. In Argentina, only a very limited number of artists of these years have been the subject of monographs: Raquel Forner, Norah Borges, Emilia Bertolé, Léonie Matthis, Gertrudis Chale, and Andrée Moch. Despite the great interest of these monographs, they are usually deeply attached to biographical accounts and do not seek to link the artistic trajectories of women to each other, reaffirming in each case the “exceptional” character of these artists and discarding the reflection around gender issues in connection to artistic practice. Georgina Gluzman intends to explore three different topics hitherto ignored. They all concern different kinds of exchanges between women, art scenes, and oeuvres. Firstly, she is interested in analyzing the travels of some women artists, such as Lola Nucífora and Hilda Ainscough. Their trajectories provide new insights into the cultural connections of the Buenos Aires art scene with other scenes, particularly with Europe. Moreover, the writings of Andrée Moch, a French-born Argentine women artist, may enhance our knowledge on the ways gender and displacement intersect. Secondly, Gluzman is concerned with the “virtual” encounters between Argentine women and their international counterparts. She defines “virtual encounters” as indirect encounters in an imagined space with an artist or an oeuvre, most likely on the pages of a newspaper or on the walls of an exhibition. This topic includes both the diffusion of international news concerning women artists and the exhibitions women artists from abroad organized in Buenos Aires. Thirdly, she intends to analyze some aspects of Mariette Lydis’ career. The Austrian-born Argentine artist worked in Buenos Aires for a long period of time and published her autobiography in Argentina, where she died in 1970, after donating a large quantity of her works to the Museo de Artes Plásticas Eduardo Sívori.

Georgina Gluzman is an Assistant Researcher at the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas, having received doctoral and postdoctoral fellowships from the same institution in 2010 and 2015. She is also an Assistant Professor of Art History and Gender Studies at the Universidad de San Andrés in Buenos Aires. She received her PhD in Art History and Theory from the Universidad de Buenos Aires in 2015, having previously received an undergraduate degree in art history and a teaching certification at the same university. Her work focuses on the art of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Argentine women artists. Her research has been supported by the Getty Foundation and the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art. She has published Trazos invisibles: Mujeres artistas en Buenos Aires (1890–1923) (Buenos Aires: Biblos, 2016).