Rhythm, Time and Space: A Celebration of Myra Landau, Her Life and Her Art
“We are social beings therefore we must always keep integration in mind: the balance, the rhythm, the harmony of the world, of men. This is your goal. This I believe is art.” Myra Landau (1926-2018)[1]
Myra Landau’s body of painting, drawing, writing and poetry has not been visible for some time and is about as far-reaching as the many countries in which she has lived and worked. Given her long and peripatetic career, it is time to present an exhibition of her exceptional contributions to the field of Latin American art. Her works, albeit deriving from sophisticated and complex ideas, evolve from very fundamental and basic forms, in particular, those in which the artist employs her characteristic and singular linear aesthetic, what she came to call Ritmos (Rhythms).
Landau was born in Bucharest, Romania where, at the rise of fascism, she and her family fled and finally arrived to Brazil in November of 1940. Growing up in Rio de Janeiro, the artist began working as a painter and later turned to engraving under the tutelage of her mentor, the renowned Oswaldo Goeldi. She went on to befriend other Brazilian avant-garde artists, writers, musicians and critics of the 1950s, such as Mário Pedrosa, Aracy Amaral and Federico de Morais, who became her peers and followers. In 1958, Franco Terranova, founder of the internationally renowned Petite Galerie in Rio de Janeiro, invited Landau to present a solo exhibition.[2]
During World War II and the Cold War many artists, intellectuals, filmmakers, writers and poets left Europe for Latin America. Mexico became a safe haven for artists such as Mathias Goeritz, Gunther Gerszo, Kati Horna, Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Cordelia Urueta who injected an avant-garde spirit into the country’s art scene. At the end of 1959, Landau moved to Mexico where she immediately became part of the creative milieu, one that was fueled by a group of likeminded artists–known as Ruptura–who broke away from the Social Realism of the Mexican School.[3] This vibrant 1960s’ art world accelerated Landau’s development and allowed her to reach a mature artistic voice, resulting in some startling and dazzling abstract paintings, beginning with her first Ritmo (1965). In the 1960s, curator Miguel Salas Anzures championed the Ruptura artists such as Myra Landau, Lilia Carrillo, Helen Escobedo, Manuel Felguérez, Fernando García-Ponce, Vicente Rojo, Luis López Loza and the photographer Nacho López. During his tenure as Director of Visual Arts at the National Institute of Fine Arts (INBA), Salas Anzures showcased the Ruptura’s non-figurative art in adapted spaces hoping to create a “Museum of Modern Art” inside of the INBA, which, unfortunately, never happened. [4]
In Landau’s “drawing as writing”, forms, ideas and sensations intertwine as though they were a single, proliferating entity. The rhythm and movements also resemble some sort of musical notation, with interweaving linear strands that are halfway between ideograph and magical sign, characters and forms more palpable than legible, a step beyond the sign and the image, something transcending words and lines.
In one of her many artist books, Textos legibles y ritmos ilegibles (Legible Texts and Illegible Rhythms) (undated), the visual and physical allure of the drawings are no less important than the ideas that they convey. On its pages, we are witness to the artist’s idiosyncratic calligraphic handwriting, with its up, down and sideways endings of each word. The drawings have a decidedly personal, tactile dimension, one that counters the seriality of much of the 1970s’ minimalist or concrete drawing. Often, Landau would turn the paper around to either add an overlaying line or fade the lines to the edge of the paper. Additionally, the deliberately inserted spaces, the in-between pauses, counterweigh the writing from the drawing. Also, it seems the undulating waves of lines, or ‘rayas’ as Landau called them, appear to dance, marking movement through space and time. The result is a symphony of sound and silence, rhythms that take your eye to a central spot inside her mazes.[5]
Another aspect of her work points to the optical qualities, as observed by the Mexican art historian Daniel Garza Usabiaga in his text “International Connections through the Kinetic” in the catalogue for the exhibition, The Other Trans-Atlantic: Kinetic and Op Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America 1950s – 1970s, at the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, “Myra Landau produced works that relate to the kinetic. Her work is endowed with certain concerns that seem to conform to Guy Brett’s concept of the kinetic: ‘static works that are radical and dynamic in their formal structures.’” These works display, “the relationship between a structural model and an aesthetic object”.[6] The Mexican critic Raquel Tibol added, “The structures of Landau’s vocabulary can be fragmented yet they always end up being compressed by interlacing a thread with values such as scale and space (1981).”[7] Indeed, many of her works in this exhibition, such as the sketch and acrylic on raw canvas titled, Ritmo Partido (Split Rhythm) (1965), use crosshatching and checkering that seem to reference pre-Columbian textile art or even pre-Columbian Codex mapping, thereby underscoring Landau’s ability to obtain pictorial balance and harmony.
In his text “Gego and the Analytical Context of Cinetismo” Luis Pérez Oramas observes patterns in Gego’s work that show an uncanny affinity to Landau’s, including “weaving and that mother tongue of drawing” and continues, “In this respect, drawing as a graphic trace, is nothing more than writing”.[8] And, as in Gego, Landau’s basic linear aesthetic is inherently graphic, although in her paintings with overlaid shapes, there is a nuanced manipulation of a consistent system of variables.
Landau shares her predilection for line drawing while avoiding systemic, serial, minimal methods with, for example, Eva Hesse, whose drawings exude a similar concentrated intensity to Landau’s heightening of the psychological dimensions of geometry and repetition. Another case in point is Mira Schendel, also a European immigrant to Brazil, whose meanderings and repeated insistence on the line make her and Landau kindred spirits. The work of Gego, Hesse, Schendel and Landau can also be compared with that of Agnes Martin. Though at first considered a minimalist, her drawings of rows of squares and rectangles in pencil resemble internal cartographies–emotional maps that elude rational explanation–like those seen in Landau’s artist books and works.
In sum, the rich and textured works in this exhibition are an open invitation for anyone to celebrate the many worlds of Myra Landau, one of which are her written texts, about rhythm, time and space. As she wrote, “…and life took me where I am and I am where I find myself, time is with me, finding myself alive….” [9]
Carla Stellweg
[1] From Si Sabes Ver, a series of daily recommendations for either an anonymous student or reader. Published by Universidad Veracruzana, 1975 (several editions), no pagination. N.B.: All translations are made by the author.
[2] Terranova was known in the 1960s not only for showing young and upcoming artists, but also, according to Landau, for being a risk-taker with a great eye. He was hugely influential in Brazil, Latin America and Europe.
[3] As of the late 1980s, these mostly abstract artists were bundled together as: La Generación de la Ruptura, later abbreviated to simply Ruptura (Breakthrough Generation).
[4] The then Director of the INBA and the Minister of Education both opposed Salas Anzures’ plans to showcase non-figurative artists instead of those in the Mexican Social Realist canon, and forced him to resign. He then, with the help of the Ruptura artists, created El Museo Dinámico, a conceptual nomadic space that in 1962 featured the artists in an unfinished house designed by the architect Manuel Larrosa. Three more shows followed, one as far north as Ciudad Juárez, concluding in 1967.
[5] As Rita Eder refers to the optical qualities in Landau’s work, “We find a rare combination of op-art that not only is supported by the theory of chromatic and luminous rhythms, but above all, by the capacity to create visual games – which are completed by the viewer – becoming a poem of color; with its suggestions and secrets, its fugacity including its concrete values.” Myra Landau, 1965-1985, Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City, 1987, no pagination.
[6] Guy Brett in Force Fields. Phases of the Kinetic. (Barcelona: Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona and Hayward Gallery, London, 1999, p. 10.
[7]Juan Acha in México Abstracto La Colección del Museo de Arte Moderno en el Espíritu de Una Época (1950 -1979). Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City, 2009, p. 130. This edition also cites Raquel Tibol, p. 130.
[8] Luis Pérez Oramas, “Vibrational and Stationary” in Inverted Utopias: Avant-garde Art in Latin America. Eds. Mari Carmen Ramírez and Héctor Olea, Yale University Press, 2004, p. 257.
[9] From Myra Landau, published by the Universidad Veracruzana, 1990, p. 55.
Myra Landau (Bucharest, Romania, 1926 - Alkmaar, The Netherlands, 2018) was a self-taught artist and art researcher. The Landau family fled Romania in April of 1940, fearing persecution from fascist forces. In November of 1940, the family finally arrived in Rio de Janeiro, when Myra was 13 years of age. In Brazil, Landau met artists Emiliano Di Cavalcanti, Wesley Duke Lee, João Câmara, Sérgio Camargo, Antônio Dias and others who motivated her to paint. At first working in a figurative style, she eventually turned to abstraction, developing a style of her own. In the 1960s, Landau discovered a new metal engraving technique called metal relief. She also honed her own painting style by applying pastel directly on raw linen, and was the first Latin American abstract woman artist to use movements of free geometrical lines, which as of 1965 she called Rhythms. While living in Mexico City, Landau was part of the Salón Independiente, an activist group of art professionals who protested the 1968 Tlatelolco student massacre orchestrated by the Mexican government. Political activism remained important to Landau throughout her life. In 1974, she moved to Jalapa, Veracruz to become a professor at the Faculty of Visual Arts at the Universidad Veracruzana and, in 1975 she was promoted as a full-time researcher for the Institute of Aesthetics and Artistic Creation. In 1994 she followed her family to Italy, moving to Israel in 2010 and finally to The Netherlands in 2016. All those years she never stopped painting and drawing. She also wrote assiduously, producing numerous artist books. Landau had more than sixty individual exhibitions during her lifetime. The most important were presented at the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City, in 1974 and 1987, respectively. She also participated in at least 150 group exhibitions in Mexico, France, Italy, Brazil, Chile, Spain, the United States and Cuba. She passed away on July 14, 2018.