Norah Borges: (Self-)Criticism, (Self-)Censorship, (Self-)Effacement

Abstract

At present, even in scholarly circles, few are aware of the pioneering role Norah Borges played in the introduction of modern art into Argentina when she returned to Buenos Aires in 1921 after her formation in European vanguardism. More than a critical oversight, this lack of knowledge regarding her role in the Argentinian avant-garde is the result of a process of conscious and unconscious repression or erasure of an individual and collective nature affecting not only the artist's choice of media, subject matter, style, and palette, but also the ways in which contemporary critics and subsequent cultural historians perceived her work. Because of this process of erasure constantly at work in the artist's psyche, oeuvre, and cultural milieu, reconstructing her place in Argentinian vanguard art often requires a peripheral reading of the margins and interlinear spaces of the official discourse of Argentinian cultural history in order to identify distortions, omissions, or even explicit, yet untruthful, denials in regard to the artist and her works. Similarly, an interstitial study of numerous texts by and about her older, more famous brother (Jorge Luis Borges) is often necessary in order to reveal her role in the movement in question.