On the soft sand of the beaches of Tecolutla, in the Mexican state of Veracruz, Myra Landau (Bucharest, 1926) discovered that the sea could not only console her, heal the wounds that tore her apart inside, but also gave her the power to innovate. Landau —who at the age of 15 had fled her native Romania with her family due to Nazi persecution— arrived as an immigrant to Brazil aboard a ship called Angolawho moved to Mexico following a love, lost her son when he was very young and suffered the destruction of part of her work—, understood that the grayish color of the sand, the lines she drew, the poetic forms traced by the exuberant nature of the Gulf of Mexico could mark a new beginning in her career as an artist.
“Since then I follow the color of the sand, the raw linen, and I play with lines on the branches,” wrote the creator, who then immersed herself, in the mid-1960s, in abstract art until she became a leading artist in a Mexico that was bustling with new artistic expressions. “She discovered in the lines of the sea that her art should go there, she began to work with concentric lines that are replicated, what is called split rhythm, and thus began to develop her abstract language,” explains Pilar García, who has been in charge of the curatorship of a retrospective that the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) has mounted to celebrate the work of this innovative author who over the years fell into oblivion. “One of the premises of the exhibition is to rescue one of the women artists who were removed from canonical historiography by the hegemonic patriarchal discourse,” explained the MUAC.
Landau’s trip to Tecolutla was due to a crisis. In the early 1960s, the artist began working with etching plates, using different acids that allowed her to insert and polish her works on paper, which was an unusual move in Mexico at that time, and was therefore considered to be breaking with the parameters imposed until then. “She was very successful,” says García, who is also in charge of the MUAC Art Collection, one of the largest museums of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and not one of the most important contemporary art museums in Latin America. “She worked in this line for about four or five years, but there came a time when she stopped because all the acids that have to do with these plates were also very toxic. Unfortunately, we managed to get very few pieces from that period,” the expert excuses herself. There was also an unfortunate event. The reason is not clear, but what is known, because she has recounted it in her memoirs and experts describe it in broad strokes in this exhibition, is that “for some reason her pieces were destroyed.” This is when Landau broke down. “One of the sons of Miguel Salas Anzures (a prominent Mexican painter) destroyed her pieces and she went into crisis and that is the moment she decided that she had to change,” says García briefly.
Landau had met Salas Anzures in Brazil, where she and her family settled after fleeing Nazi barbarity. At that time, Landau was painting portraits and landscapes of the Amazon rainforest and the favelas or poor neighborhoods of Rio de Janeiro, where she lived, but when she met the Mexican in Brasilia during an art critics convention, they fell in love and decided to move to Mexico. In the North American country, artists were fascinated by abstraction, by exploring new artistic forms, breaking with the parameters of the traditional Mexican school of painting, of muralism, of attachment to official forms. Landau was fascinated by this avant-garde scene and entered it with the help of Salas Anzures. The couple had a son, who died at a very young age, which left a deep mark on her. “She began to explore other artistic languages,” says García. “From 1963 she began to exhibit her work, which was uncommon at that time, her engravings,” she adds. There began a success that was cut short in part by the later destruction of her work and her self-exile in Veracruz. It is in this state in the southeast of Mexico where Landau lived and worked for a long time, creating her artistic language by venturing into what her experts call sensitive geometric abstraction. The sand of the Tecolutla sea inspired her to use raw linen in her work, as well as pastel colors and a texture that allows her to trace lines of concentric rectangles that she drew freehand. “The result is a plot that is reminiscent of traditional textiles, pentagrams or labyrinths,” explains the MUAC.
Although Landau’s work was important and recognized by the great critics of her time, she gradually fell into oblivion, which is not common with male artists who achieve fame in the art world. The painter traveled in the mid-seventies of the last century to work at the Faculty of Plastic Arts and at the Institute of Aesthetic and Creative Research at the University of Veracruz and when she left Mexico City, the nerve center of art, her name began to fade away. “Although she achieved recognition at the time, she was never recognized as a geometric artist. When Jorge Alberto Manrique (writer, historian, researcher and academic) wrote a book about Mexican geometricism and wrote several texts, he never included Landau as a geometric artist and it is something that I have always wondered why that happened,” García questions. “But what he conceives as geometricism has a lot to do with the rational, with very defined lines, almost as if made with a ruler, and he did not include this type of sensitive geometry, which is what I call it, because it is a freehand geometry, where you put your body and it does not create completely straight lines or lines made with a compass or a ruler, but rather they have much more to do with an emotional issue,” explains the curator.
The MUAC is now trying to make up for this injustice with one of the great contemporary artists with an impressive exhibition, which brings together more than 200 pieces by Landau, entitled Sensitive geometry and will be open to the public until next February. The exhibition opens with a spectacular work, Rhythm No.7from 1970, a mixed technique on canvas and wood, with pastel colours, an interweaving of lines, a cadence so full of harmony that some critics have compared it to the perfection of the pre-Hispanic pyramids, because Landau also admired the architecture and art of the indigenous peoples of Mexico. The work also makes a statement of intent: in it the artist placed newspaper clippings, some in support of President Salvador Allende, overthrown by a military coup in 1973, or with headlines about freedom.
It is well worth the experience of moving through this rhythm of colours, lines and labyrinths that tell the story of a woman who, despite her misfortunes, always sought to innovate through art. “I think that this exhibition allows us to recover and give visibility to an artist who was important in her time,” says curator García. She adds: “It is also an opportunity for many of us to see her works for the first time, to see what she did and to what extent she was experimenting and to include her in a very specific context. And also to break with this patriarchal historiography, as one more example of many women who have had visibility. It is to contribute a grain of sand to be able to tell a different story, in which women really have much more presence.”
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