Olga Albizu’s Lyrical Abstraction and the Borders of the Canvas

Author:

Flecha Vega RaquelORCID

Abstract

The abstractionist paintings of Puerto Rican artist Olga Albizu (1924–2005) gained prominence in the late 1950s when her work debuted in galleries across the Americas and entered the commercial music industry with RCA and Verve records. However, existing scholarship has failed to capture the complex relationship between Albizu’s anti-commercial abstractionist aesthetic and its mass reproduction as cover art for vinyl records during the Cold War era. Returning to the canvas to explore the iconographic, formal, and aesthetic qualities of Albizu’s work within its sociohistorical post-World War II context, this study reveals Albizu’s devotion to formal borders, vivid color juxtapositions, and compositional tensions. I argue that Albizu’s practice constitutes an ongoing concern with a Modernist dialectic and ideals about subjective transformation in a postmodern world of mass culture, a message she conveyed through the material and experiential borders of the canvas. As an avowed formalist and Modernist existing between the postcolonial and postmodern worlds of San Juan and New York City, her work merits formal scrutiny. This paper will add to the diverse histories of Abstract Expressionism and mid-century Modernisms across the Americas while shedding light on an important post-war historical moment and artistic impulse that held on to anti-commercial values in an all-encompassing consumerist world.

Publisher

MDPI AG

Subject

General Materials Science

Reference63 articles.

1. Albizu, Olga (1978–1979). Bridge between Islands: Retrospective Works by Six Puerto Rican Artists in New York, El Museo del Barrio.

2. Alvarez, Mariola, and Franco, Ana M. (2019). New Geographies of Abstract Art in Postwar Latin America, Routledge.

3. Barrios, Mario Alegre (El Nuevo Día, 1998). Pionera de la abstracción borincana, El Nuevo Día.

4. Benítez, Marimar (1989). The Latin American Spirit: Art and Artists in the United States, 1920–1970, Harry N. Abrams Publishers & The Bronx Museum of the Arts.

5. Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War;Cockcroft;Artforum,1974

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