ISLAA Spotlights is a series of focused presentations that highlight pivotal works from the collection across our programmatic spaces. These displays create opportunities for close engagement with artists and ideas that remain underrepresented in dominant art historical narratives, offering a platform to explore individual practices in greater depth.

Spotlight presentations are open during select hours and by appointment. To inquire about a tour or visit, please contact us at info@islaa.org.

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The Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) is pleased to present Los Sobrevivientes (1963) by French Argentine artist Germaine Derbecq (1899–1973) as part of the Spotlight series.

Germaine Derbecq was an artist, critic, and curator whose lifelong commitment to aesthetic developments in modernism helped bring Argentine artists to European attention and vice versa. A formidable painter of geometric abstraction, she remained committed throughout her life to modern art’s conceptual and aesthetic advancement, across borders and milieux.

Born into a prestigious family in Paris, Derbecq gravitated toward painting from an early age. As a teenager, she studied under André Lhote and Juan Gris and befriended some of the artists of the period, including Le Corbusier, Jacques Lipchitz, and Suzanne Roger. By age eighteen, she had fallen in love with Pablo Curatella Manes, an Argentine sculptor who worked at his country’s embassy in Paris. They married in 1922, and that year Derbecq began a long streak of exhibiting her paintings annually at Paris’s Salon des Indépendants and later at the Salon des Surindépendants, until the onset of the Second World War. During the war, with artistic supplies scarce, Derbecq abandoned her previous work of post-impressionist figuration in favor of austere geometric drawings in charcoal, the genesis of the paintings she would make for the rest of her life.

In 1951, Derbecq and her family relocated to Buenos Aires, where she quickly gained prominence as a curator and art critic, surveying the local scene. Between 1960 and 1963, she served as the first artistic director of Galería Lirolay, which became a valuable disseminator of new artistic trends under her stewardship. Located on the same block as the influential Instituto Di Tella, Derbecq’s curatorial vision for the gallery led to groundbreaking early shows for a new generation of artists, including Alberto Greco, Marta Minujín, Nicolás García Uriburu, Luis Felipe Noé, Alfredo Hlito, and Rómulo Macció. From 1953 to 1972, she wrote a weekly chronicle in Le Quotidien, a French-language newspaper published in Buenos Aires, covering Latin American and Argentine art.

The works on display are among Derbecq’s most recognizable, including several paintings from her Pintura múltiple (Multiple Painting) series, begun in 1968. Derbecq conceived of these multiples as a radical reimagining of fine art and consumer culture. Galvanized by the mission of making art accessible to the general public, her aim was to produce work “worth a pair of shoes,” without compromising stylistic vigor or artistic integrity. The result resembles a grand bargain of avant-garde aesthetics and industrial design reminiscent of the Buen diseño para la industria project from the previous decade, and serves today as a reminder of accessibility in presentation. From their place in the Director’s Office, Derbecq’s works serve as a reminder that championing and stewarding great art is itself a creative act.

—Nolan Kelly