Abstract

Olga Costa (1913-1993), a Mexican painter of Russian descent, has never achieved the success and fame of Frida Kahlo, the best known and most celebrated female Mexican artist of the 20th Century. Costa, unlike the legendary Frida, has never painted a self portrait but she made known her preference for ‘reproducing life, truth, simplicity without ‘theatricality’ (Exposición, 19). This extraordinary painter who emigrated with her parents to Mexico at the age of twelve, is virtually unknown to the world; yet she created and left 241 paintings; many of which one currently housed in the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City. Her images of women and children, with an intriguing sense of colour, and her paintings of the native fruit and flowers of Mexico are the central thematic core of her art. The focus of my paper is to examine the role and position of Olga Costa in the context of modern Mexican art and to explore Costa’s vision of the social reality in contemporary Mexico while tending to the traditions of the pre-Colombian art through the analysis of the selected paintings such as The Dead Child (1944), The Bride (1942) amongst others.