Norah Borges - Early Career

Early Career

In Switzerland, Norah wrote and illustrated her first poetry book, Notas lejanas (1915). After the publication, Norah and her family hoped to return to Argentina, but their stay in Europe was extended 4 years because of the First World War. During this time, Norah saw much of Europe. First, she visited Provence (Norah was deeply impressed by Nîmes, and dedicated some of her later work to her travels there). After traveling through Province, she moved to Spain, where she furthered her studies and participated in the Avant-Garde movement. In Spain, Norah first visited Barcelona, and then, in 1919, moved to Palma, Majorca. In Palma, she studied under Sven Westman and collaborated with her brother on the magazine Baleares. Next she visited Sevilla, where she became a part of the vanguard of Ultraísmo, published her work in magazines like Grecia, Ultra, Tableros y Reflector, and in 1920 she illustrated the cover of El jardin de centauro (The Garden of the Centaur), a book of poems by Adriano del Valle. After leaving Sevilla, she passed through Granada and then finally came to Madrid, where she studied with the painter Julio Romero de Torres. Here she befriended the poet Juan Ramón Jiménez. She illustrated a number of his books and dedicated a portrait to him in her book Españoles de tres mundos.

In March 1921, Norah returned by boat to Buenos Aires. As a young painter, she aligned herself with the vanguard artists of the Florida group. Her work in Prisma reflects the ultraist (anti-modernist) ideas of the group, but her illustrations for magazines such as Mural, Proa and Martín Fierro, and her illustrations in the first edition of the poetry book Fervor de Buenos Aires by Jorge Luis Borges (1923) reveal the influence of the Cubism that she had begun to assimilate with her French contacts in Spain. In 1923, the French surrealist magazine Manomètre, and, in 1924, Martín Fierro published her paintings. In 1926, she displayed 75 works (oils, woodcarvings, drawings, water-colorings, and tapestries) in the Asociacion Amigos del Arte exhibition. In 1928, she married writer and art critic Guillermo de Torre, student of the Ultraist movement and expert on Avant-Garde art and literature, whom she had met in Spain when she was 19 years old. They had two children.

In the Second World War, she became a vocal supporter of la Junta de la Victoria, an association of anti-fascist feminists in Argentina directed by Cora Ratto de Sadosky and Ana Rosa Schlieper de Martínez Guerrero. Also included in the group were the writer María Rosa Oliver, the photographer Annemarie Heinrich, the psychoanalyst Mimí Langer, the artist Raquel Forner, and the poet Silvina Ocampo.