Untitled

“A man does not enter priesthood to become Pope, but because he feels the religious vocation,” Albizu once reasoned. “A painter becomes a painter because he feels the urge to paint, not to become a famous artist” (in Bridge Between Islands: Retrospective Works by Six Puerto Rican Artists in New York, exh. cat., Henry Street Settlement, New York, 1978, p. 6). If fame once eluded her, Albizu is lately recognized among the great women of American Abstract Expressionism and may be considered the movement’s most outstanding representative from Puerto Rico. She trained under the Spanish-born abstractionist Esteban Vicente, in San Juan from 1945 to 1947, and followed him to New York in 1948; she continued her studies there under Hans Hofmann, the preeminent teacher of the New York School, and at the Art Students League. Albizu’s arrival came on the eve of what has been described as a triumphal moment for postwar American painting, just months after the first exhibitions of Jackson Pollock’s “drip” paintings and of Willem de Kooning’s breakthrough black-and-white abstractions. Although long occluded from period accounts of Abstract Expressionism, she evolved an exuberant, painterly practice of abstraction from the 1950s through the 1970s whose lyricism and chromatic brilliance mark an entirely original contribution to American and Puerto Rican art history.
Albizu remains perhaps best-known today as the artist behind the celebrated album covers produced by Verve and RCA Victor for Stan Getz, João Gilberto, and many others identified with Brazilian Bossa Nova. “The association is not accidental,” wrote José Gómez Sicre, Chief of the Visual Arts Division at the Pan American Union, at the time of her solo show at the PAU in June 1966. “The flat splashes of pure color, rhythmically distributed across the surfaces, while in no sense a literal translation of musical ideas, are nonetheless suggestive of syncopation” (Olga Albizu of Puerto Rico, June 13 to 28, exh. cat., Pan American Union, Washington, 1966, n.p.). Albizu’s associations with RCA were also of a practical kind: she supported herself from time to time through secretarial jobs there, and through a remarkable connection—a friend who worked as assistant to the head of the record division, who displayed her work in the office—at least ten of her paintings were chosen for contemporary album covers. Albizu’s financial and professional struggles as a woman artist were, unsurprisingly, of a piece with her time; like peers from Carmen Herrera to Joan Mitchell and Elaine de Kooning, she lacked institutional support and regular exhibition opportunities. Her aptitude, however, was clear from the beginning. “Although still a very young painter,” Dore Ashton noted in a review of her first solo exhibition, at Panoras Gallery in midtown Manhattan, “Miss Albizu shows considerable range in her handling of singing colors, putting them together in dense masses composed of heavy but sure strokes…her work has the mark of promise” (“Simpson-Middleman Paintings on View,” New York Times, 19 December 1956).
Albizu’s mature paintings possess a radiant equanimity and power. Freer in their paint handling and color arrangements than her earlier works, they resound with a chromatic intensity whose harmonies rise and fall, calibrated through hue and texture. Made through gestural and densely compacted slabs of pigment, they rhapsodize color through an inside-out layering of surfaces in shallow pictorial space. As Gómez Sicre recognized, the synaesthetic quality of her painting, in which strokes of color take on an expressive musicality, yields an internal incandescence and rich emotional timbre, delivered beautifully in the present Untitled. Here, pure colors interact dynamically across the surface, the staccato passages of paint—green, orange, yellow, blue, pink, purple, black, white—dramatized against a thick red ground. Albizu used a palette knife to give dimensional depth to these jagged rectangles of color, laid both in broad applications and in smaller taches of pigment, lively and vigorously overlapping within the image. The all-over flux of colors and shapes is additive and suggestively syncretic, a mosaic of polyphonic and tactile values.
“I don’t believe the artist should give clues to his work,” Albizu maintained, explaining her reluctance to title her paintings. “It is up to the viewer to react without any guidelines.” She allowed only that her abstractions described “a dialogue between myself and my work,” advising, “The art viewer must introduce his own conversation into that dialogue to complete the circle” (in C. Lewis, “Puerto Rican Sculptor: Making Machines into Humans,” Washington Post, Times Herald, 15 June 1966).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park