Olga Costa - Life

Life

Costa was born in 1913 in Leipzig, Germany. Her parents, violinist and composer Jacobo Kostakowsky and Ana Falvisant Bovglarevokeylandel, were from Czarist Russia but left the Ukraine region to escape the persecution of Jews just before the First World War . They fled first to Leipzig, where Olga was born and after the war began to Berlin where her sister Lya was born.

When the war ended, the family had severe economic problems, prompting her father to become radicalized politically, influenced by figures such as Rosa Luxemburg. He was detained several times by the German government but when sentenced to death, the family escaped to Mexico in 1925. The family arrived to the country at the port of Veracruz then in the same year settled in Mexico City .

Olga’s full legal name was Olga Kostakowsky Falvisant but shortly after arriving to Mexico, she began signing her name Olga Costa, which sounded more Spanish. It would become the name used in her art career. She and her sister Lya first attended the Colegio Alemán (German School) in the city, with Lya becoming a writer (later married to historian and art critic Luis Cardoza y Aragón) and Olga participating in music, especially playing the piano and singing in the school choir. This musical bent was due to the influence and encouragement of her father. Her first exposure to painting was attending concerts at the Anfiteatro Simón Bolivar where Diego Rivera had painted a mural, the colors of which fascinated Olga.

In 1933, Costa entered the Academy of San Carlos but left only three months later, needing to work in order to help her family. However, before she left, she studied painting with Carlos Mérida and engraving with Emilio Amero, meeting her husband José Chávez Morado. Mérida later called Costa the “white angel of Mexican painting.”

Costa and Chávez Morado married on May 18, 1935 in Mexico City. Her marriage introduced her to new artistic and intellectual circles in Mexico as Chávez Morado’s career was on the rise and encouraged her to participate in the cultural scene of the country. In 1941 she lived a short time in San Miguel Allende while Chávez Morado worked as a teacher at a local art school for foreigners. In Mexico City in the 1940 and 1950s, their social life revolved around the Monument to the Revolution area or Tabacalera, then filled with refugees from the Spanish Civil War including Andrés Henestrosa, Lola Álvarez Bravo, Julio Prieto Posadas, María Izquierdo, Juan Soriano and Inés Amor. This connection landed Costa her first exhibition of her work. In 1955 she lived for a while in Guanajuato while Chávez Morado painted the murals of the Alhóndiga de Granaditas. Eleven years later the couple moved back to stay, where Costa continued to paint and do cultural promotion. She hosted Queen Elizabeth II at her home at the end of the 1970s.

She came from a leftist family and with other artists was politically active with the Mexican Communist Party for decades.

Olga Costa died on June 28, 1993 in Guanajuato.