The female students and the Printmaking Workshop. Strategies and negotiations to enter the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes (Higher School of Fine Arts) “Ernesto de la Cárcova”

LAUMANN LUCIA

Hamburg

Congreso; Conference "Images by Women Artists: Contexts ? Narratives ? Practices. Gendering the Art Histories of Ibero-America and the Iberian Peninsula"; 2022

Carl Justi-Association for the Promotion of Art Historical Cooperation

When in 1921 the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes Ernesto de la Carcova first opened its doors, it was conceived both as a coeducational school and workshop where students could learn painting and sculpture. Only in 1932, with a change of its programs, printmaking became available as an area of studies. Around 1944, after the academic program was once again reformed, the Printmaking and Book Arts workshop emerged. During these two decades, the School was the hegemonic training space for engravers in Buenos Aires. Professional artists were the instructors, and artists who sought to become professional gathered within the walls of the Escuela. The Escuela was a selective academic institution where student’s artistic training would culminate. Thus, acceptance into the Escuela was determined by a series of rigorous tests. One of the characteristics of the Escuela was that, unlike other artistic education spaces in Buenos Aires, it was coeducational. Especially in the printing workshops, there was a large presence of women among the students. Indeed, between 1933 and 1950, of the seventy-eight students who signed up to take printmaking, only twenty-three were male.In order to reflect on the ways in which women negotiated their admissions to school, I first intend to analyze some significant cases that allow us to observe how, in practice, acceptance into the School was gendered: women did not have the same opportunities than men. Through a detailed analysis of the two times that women artist Aída Carballo applied to the school, I propose that women applicants chose Printmaking as a strategy in order to gain acceptance into the Escuela.