Marta Traba brought art to Colombian television in programs such as A Visit to the Museums and El ABC del Arte. / Archives of the Zalamea family
She was a multi-faceted woman with an unmistakable passion for art, whose legacy and actions marked a before and after in the Colombian artistic environment. Marta Traba became one of the most iconic women in the country’s cultural history and one of the most recognizable names in Latin American art history. Critic, teacher, founder, curator, director, activist and facilitator are some of the words that reflect the work she has done throughout her life. “She was cheerful, funny and always looked like a teenager, not because of her hood, but because of the enthusiasm with which she approached life,” is how the poet Juan Gustavo Cobo Borda describes her.
Originally from Argentina but a citizen of the world and nationalized in Colombia, with an obsession with Latin America, Marta Traba turned her eyes to the Americas and what it had to offer artistically while her feet roamed the streets of Europe and the United States.
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He was born on January 25, 1923 in Buenos Aires. He grew up in the Argentine capital and began his long career as a writer there. He studied philosophy and literature at the University of Buenos Aires while working at the magazine Ver y Estimar under the direction of art critic Jorge Romero Brest. “One can reconstruct his beginnings, in which he apparently contradicted the severity of criticism with exuberant lyricism. She was passionate and she never stopped being. Her passion guided her with precise instinct, and she would stay true to it and take it halfway across the world.
As the Colombian poet wrote, the philosopher got carried away by her passion and tireless curiosity, leaving her native country to enter the world of art and become the critic and traveler the world remembers. After completing her education in Argentina, she first moved to Genoa, with a stint in Italy, where she “read and toured, driven by an interest in knowing, seeing and reading. He deepened through visits to rooms and art galleries. When he left Rome for Paris he was 26 years old. He passed through Florence and Venice, again staying in monasteries to save money. After arriving in the city, he moved into a modest room in a hotel and devoted himself to writing for Ver y Estimar,” says Betina Barrios Ayala. His last stop was in Paris, where he studied art history at the Sorbonne.
“She could have gone to Paris, as Cortázar said of herself at the time, because the calls of the ‘little blacks’ over the loudspeakers prevented her from hearing Bela Bartok. It was an aesthetic education, well-read, with somewhat outdated museums and somewhat ceremonial rigidity, in which the Sartrean commitment or the awareness of being Latin American were still unthinkable concepts,” wrote Cobo Borda. In Europe she met and married the Colombian journalist Alberto Zalamea and had their first child, Gustavo, in 1951 while the couple lived in Buenos Aires.
Although he preferred to sit in a café without having to move, because “the thing that catches my attention the least is the movement. Traveling from one place to another seems horrible to me. I start being human when I step on solid ground,” Traba said. Moving to Colombia with his family in 1954, he found Bogotá to be the right place to develop his professional career and forge a large part of his legacy.
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“She was prepared, she was smart, skillful, determined and brave. His influence on the dynamism of art in this country marked a before and after. Marta Traba opened the Colombian modern art. She was a pioneer of museography, she set the market in motion, nurturing some and crowding out others,” Barrios wrote. She started with a radio show and made the jump to television in 1955. She was the one who was interested in bringing art to Colombian screens and sharing her passion with an audience who didn’t know the terms she was using at the time.
This was the beginning of a career that stretched beyond the television studios and into the classroom. He has taught at National University, the University of the Andes, and the University of America. In the latter, one of her students was the artist Beatriz González, whom she met “in 1957 when I enrolled in a course in Renaissance art history in Italy that she taught at the Universidad de América in Bogotá. I traveled from Bucaramanga. The university functioned in a colonial house in front of the church of San Ignacio. The room was packed with people, proving that just three years after his arrival – in the early days of September 1954 – he had already conquered Bogotá,” he told Arcadia magazine.
But before becoming a university professor, Marta Traba devoted herself to private study groups, the success of which led to the birth of Prisma magazine. In his first editorial, Traba wrote in 1957: “Art is not only an exhaustive form of knowledge, but the only universal language that exists among human beings.”
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His second son, Fernando, was born in Colombia, for whom growing up with Marta Traba as his mother “was an extraordinary experience. I remember my upbringing as a constant party, mixing love in abundance with an always surprising sensitivity and intelligence. His example was vital to me and I grew up under his constant care. Marta has always been aware of my well-being and the construction of a happy and well-balanced young man.” His mother, he says, taught him not only to see art as “revolutionary expression, sensitive challenge and inventive opening” but also to teach him granted, “which is essentially associated with work and effort: willingness to make sacrifices, permanent dedication, perseverance and discipline, elaboration of an original thought and passion for ideas”.
But apart from being an author, critic, curator, teacher and presenter, one facet that characterizes her legacy is that of the founder of the Museum of Modern Art in Bogotá. It was founded by decree in 1955, but it was not until 1962 that the initiative became a reality through the work and dedication of Marta Traba. It started operating in 1963 with its first exhibition: Tombs of Juan Antonio Roda. She managed to blend all aspects of her professional career with those of her personal life and for her son this was “without a doubt one of his secrets: he understood wonderfully, the intelligence of the teacher, the sensitivity of criticism and the brilliance of a Socialite with the ductility of a housewife and the affection of a mother It is a difficult art to forge, and perhaps thanks to his great life intelligence he managed it: putting everything in its time and place, with a very high level of judgement and enormous ethical freedom.
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When he died in a plane crash while returning to Colombia on November 27, 1983, he left his name in Colombian cultural history with evidence of an extensive legacy and a passion that impacted the lives of many. For Fernando Zalamea, “besides the accompaniment and critical construction of modern art in Colombia, the most valuable of his legacy is probably its Latin American dimension and his effort to connect the arts very deeply with the writings of the continent.” Marta Traba remains today, 100 years after hers Birth, alive in the memories of her family, friends, students and through her cultural heritage that crossed borders and shook Latin America. Her son hopes she will be remembered as “a very courageous, courageous woman who is almost always right in her blunt judgments, as a practitioner of a very original mix (which I would call a ‘critical essay'”) between criticism and narrative , a mingling of a keen rational discipline with a very plastic sensitive emotion”.