A Country of Women?

Women played a central role in the history of Paraguay after the War of the Triple Alliance (1865–70).^# Because the male population had been decimated on the battlefield, women had to perform the tasks of workers while also doing their part to repopulate the country.^# Nevertheless, it was not until 1961 that Paraguay granted women the right to vote—the last country in Latin America to do so. Paraguayan art history is organized according to a similar scheme: while women artists are recognized as central, most of their works are not exhibited or published, and it is extraordinarily difficult to reconstruct their history.^#

Nonetheless, it is possible to trace their presence in the work of, for instance, Ofelia Echagüe Vera (1904–1987), an artist trained in Montevideo and Buenos Aires whose aesthetic research was bound to the "return to order" of the period between the World Wars; in the work of Edith Jiménez (1918–2004), whose painting in modern language was exhibited at the Instituto Paraguayo-Norteamericano in 1952. Jiménez participated in the second São Paulo Bienal, in 1953, and in 1954 she joined the Arte Nuevo group, which exhibited work that evidenced an innovative spirit in the display windows along Calle Palma in Asunción. That group's aesthetic was not unified but encompassed works akin to social realism, constructivist abstraction, and stylizations of figuration. The exhibition on Calle Palma featured work by Olga Blinder (1921–2008), Ruth Fisher, Lilí del Mónico (1910–2002), and Josefina Plá (1909–1999).^# Some of those artists would take part in the explorations of language, subjectivity, and corporality characteristic of art of the 1960s. Significantly, 1954 also witnessed the onset of the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner, who would remain in power until 1989—thirty-five years during which Paraguayan society endured death, torture, and exile.^#

Edith Jiménez's woodcuts allude to the body without showing it. Printed in black and white using parts of trees as printing elements, the abstract forms suggest body parts and substances. The woodcuts Los dedos en la madera (Fingers in the wood), Los ojos en la madera (Eyes in wood), and La sangre en la madera (Blood in the wood), all from 1967, have the impact of an enormous stain rich with life—the life of trees and of the bodies to which the titles refer (figs. 1a and 1b).

The body is at center stage in the prints that Olga Blinder produced in the 1960s. In works such as Inútil espera (Useless wait; fig. 2), the female body makes reference to a semantic field that associates more universal aspects of female experience^# with the specific situation of Paraguayan women—waiting for companions in exile or for political change in the country.^# Other prints by Blinder make reference to the afflicted body as well. Her series of woodcuts titled Los torturados (The tortured) employs two formats: works in which the human body depicted is placed at the outer edge of the sheet and works in which the bodies are lined up—sometimes even placed on top of one another—like a geometric motif that cuts across a composition framed by two planes printed in intense blue. The composition gives a sense of the confinement, suffering, and suffocation experienced by an imprisoned body. Blinder even decomposed the body, depicting, alongside the aligned bodies, fragments, knots of bone, and bundles of flesh on a flat black plane rendered by a wooden matrix. The life that makes itself felt in the texture—the texture of nature, the texture of wood—contrasts with the confinement of the figures. Blinder explained that when the Stroessner dictatorship began to grasp the oppositional nature of her works, her passport was taken away and she could not travel to the United States for an exhibition of her work.^# 

Women artists were at the center of the experimental work in installation and performance that emerged in the 1960s. Laura Márquez (b. 1929), for instance, was eighteen years old when she went to Buenos Aires to study art. While there, she took part in the student movement to reform art academies and came into contact with kinetic art, the experimentation at the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, and the art critic Jorge Romero Brest. In 1967 her Puertas inútiles (Useless doors, 1967; fig. 3) was exhibited at the 9th São Paulo Bienal, as well as in Montevideo and in Buenos Aires. Ticio Escobar describes that work as a forest of intertwining doors, a theatrical and labyrinthine space that speaks of confusion, of divergence and misunderstanding.^# With so many ways in and so many ways out—none of them definitive—this labyrinth can be interpreted in terms of identity, subjectivity, and an investigation of one's own consciousness in the form of a question that has no answer.

Excerpted from Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985. Copyright © 2017 by the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center, Inc. Published by DelMonico Books, an imprint of Prestel. The full essay can be found in the exhibition catalogue, available here.