THE UNEARTHLY ENCHANTMENTS OF NELA ARIAS-MISSON

Arias-Misson became part of the New York Abstract Expressionist movement, the first specifically American movement to put New York City at the midpoint of the western art world, developing her distinct approach to the style. In her career, Arias-Misson turned her attention to other artistic media, including drawings and engravings, in which she achieved the quality of the painting, as the first Latin American female artist to become part of one of the most significant American art movements. As a women artist emerging from Latin America Arias-Misson consciously avoided relating her work to a particular national or ethnic aesthetic, based on her changeling vision of art and her moving through different countries in her artistic journey of almost a century.

As it has occurred with other fabulous women artists through history, recognition has come late in her lives, or after they are gone (Mary Cassatt, Camille Claudel, Berthe Morisot, Remedios Varo, Louise Bourgeois, Ada Balcacer, Gego or Carmen Herrera to name a few), there are no equitable arguments why the name of Nela Arias-Misson and her unique and prolific body of work has remained in oblivion.

DESPITE LIVING IN NORTH AMERICA FOR MUCH OF HER LIFE, IT IS ONLY RECENTLY THAT THE REDISCOVERY

OF NELA ARIAS-MISSON'S PROLIFIC ARTWORK STARTS TO TAKE PLACE

Nela Arias-Misson had a diverse artistic training, including the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes at San Alejandro in Cuba, the Arts Students League and the Parsons School of Design in New York. But her influential formative period was as a student of Hans Hofmann, one of the principal exponents of Abstract Expressionism who became her artistic mentor.

From the ‘1940s to the ‘1950s, Nela became entrenched with the Provincetown, Massachusetts prolific art movement of the time. This city was summer center of Abstract Expressionism represented by such painters as Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Robert Motherwell and Helen Frankenthaler, in addition to Hofmann. She formed relationships and connected with these internationally known American cutting-edge figures.

Her first stage of development as an abstract expressionist shows the influence of her mentors. Where a combination of a natural improvisatory manner often using broad brushes to make full gestural marks is combined with a more mythic approach creating simple compositions with large areas of color intended to produce a much more thoughtful or metaphoric response in the viewer. Colors are subtler, where tonalities emerge from layer upon layer of used color. Ambiguous forms hover and possess actual, subtle three-dimensionality and the dynamism of the strokes and shapes seem to mark her visual narrative.

But Nela had her vision and path within the art movement. With a determined personality and in constant research and challenge of her work, she developed a friendship with Karel Appel, founder of the COBRA group. She became a close friend of Walasse Ting, an abstract-expressionist painter known for authoring art books that included the participation of artists like Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Sam Francis. During these years Nela showed at the Provincetown Art Association and won first prize at the National Association of Women Artists. But she moves on with her life and her artistic process, landing in Europe in 1961. Settling first in Ibiza and Barcelona and later in Madrid and Brussels. She had exhibitions in Britain, Denmark, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, and Spain. Her paintings become exuberant, color-filled canvases as she experiments with the surface like an exercise of texture and shape perhaps approaching with a more intimate and poetic sense to informalism.

(...) THE FIRST LATIN AMERICAN FEMALE ARTIST TO BECOME PART OF ONE OF THE MOST

SIGNIFICANT AMERICAN ART MOVEMENTS

In 1963 Nela held her third marriage with Belgian poet, novelist and artist Alain Misson, a co-founder of the visual poetry movement with artists such as Joan Brossa and Ignacio Gomez de Liaño, with whom Nela became close friends. She experiments with objects and providing a sharper sense of the tridimensional to her paintings. She is invited by Antoni Tapies to join El Paso Group of artists, but Nela rejected the offer, preferring to work independently. Nela must be placed within abstract expressionism, as an artist open to investigate and to explore all possibilities and personal styles permeable in abstraction. She handled the same complex compositions as other very simple ones, with her material and gestural expression, where the vast monochromatic planes and the symbols merge into a single narrative. But the unveiling of the prolific work of this artist, more than a destiny fate, is due to the commitment of Flor Mayoral and Marcelo Llobell with their Concrete Space project in Miami, in accepting cultural diversity as genuine contributions to the social fiber of America. With an aim to rescue the career of a master who devoted her entire life to art and who has been overlooked by time, serendipity or trends, such as the case of Nela Arias-Misson, always at the epicenter of developing artistic movements.

THERE ARE NO EQUITABLE ARGUMENTS WHY THE NAME OF NELA ARIAS-MISSON AND HER

UNIQUE AND PROLIFIC BODY OF WORK HAS REMAINED IN OBLIVION

Of daring character, challenging and committed, Nela feels the impulse, throughout what would become her legacy, to anticipate and plan with no shame or fear the experience of reflectivity and association games present in her paintings. So that going forward, she plays without guilt or fear (as in today’s contemporaneity), the idealism and mystical sensitivity of recounted reflection, appropriation and allusion, making her approach to Abstract Expressionism, and expression beyond the limits of the New York School. Her body of work settled, quietly but steadily, as a cross-cultural dialogue within the global history of contemporary abstraction, almost as an unearthly enchantment.