How to Become a Professional (Woman) Artist in Argentina? The Case of the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes (1930s-1940s)

GLUZMAN, GEORGINA G.

Faire Oeuvre. Training and Professionalisation of Women Artists in the 19th and 20th Centuries

AWARE

Lugar: París; Año: 2023; p. 79 - 93

The Graduate School of Fine Arts (Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes) “Ernesto de la Cárcova” was a center for advanced studies in the visual arts created in 1923 in the city of Buenos Aires by the painter Ernesto de la Cárcova (1866-1927). Its essential purpose was to deepen the training and artistic education of emerging artists in media such as painting, sculpture, printing, scenography, and mural painting. In the 1940s, new areas of expertise such as ceramics were introduced to the curricula. From the 1920s until the late 1940s, the Graduate School of Fine Arts was a privileged horizon for many Argentine artists, including many women. The School’s students were carefully selected among dozens of undergraduates of the fine arts academies nationwide and even among some candidates who had been trained privately, in what has been unanimously described as very hard admission process. This paper aims to contribute to a new reading of the Argentine art scene through the study of the training and careers of Argentine women artists from the 1930s to the end of the 1940s at the Graduate School of Fine Arts, often referred simply as “La Cárcova”. My aim here is to revisit their experiences as women artists in a world in which the male artist dominated, that is, to offer a reading of their gendered experiences as emerging professional artists. Their careers and specific artworks will be discussed to better understand the impact of “La Cárcova” on women artists, drawing from previously unknown archival material.