Olga Costa

Olga Costa (August 28, 1913 – June 28, 1993) was a Mexican painter and cultural promoter.

She began to study art at the Academy of San Carlos but left after only three months to help support her family.

However, she met her husband, artist José Chávez Morado during this time.

Her marriage to him involved her in Mexico's cultural and intellectual scene and she began to develop her ability to paint on her own, with encouragement from her husband.

She had numerous exhibitions of her work in Mexico, with her work also sent to be sold in the United States.

She was also involved in the founding and development of various galleries, cultural societies and three museums in the state of Guanajuato.

She received the Premio Nacional de Ciencias y Artes among others for her work.

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 when Olga was twelve.

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’s nickname came from her not compromising her painting to western culture.

In Merida’s word she was the white angle of Mexican Painting due to Mexican artists being seduced by the western style of painting and ridiculing those who continued painting traditionally.

Costa herself voiced that she would continue to paint in a traditional way, like Diego Rivera and Jose Chavez Morado, and keep on making Nationalist content even if it angered the people dominating the art scene at the time.

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.

Although she studied very briefly at the Academy of San Carlos, she began to paint in 1936 “as a game” she said with no intentions of doing it professionally.

This began in while she followed her husband, José Chávez Morado to Xalapa, Veracruz to open a painting school and paint the halls of the teachers’ college there.

Chávez Morado encouraged her to experiment although she was hesitant about it.

Through her husband, Costa was active in Mexico's cultural and intellectual scenes, where she became friends with Galería de Arte Mexicano owner Inés Amor.

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 1941 she lived a short time in San Miguel Allende while Chávez Morado worked as a teacher at a local art school for foreigners.

Amor invited Costa to exhibit her work for the first time in 1945, with major individual exhibits at the same gallery in 1948, 1950, 1962 and 1971.

Amor was also the first to start sending Costa's work to the United States where it received higher prices.

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.

Costa died on June 28, 1993, in Guanajuato.

Costa was one of a number of prominent female artists in 20th-century Mexico, along with María Izquierdo, Lola Cueto and Helen Escobedo although the field was dominated by men.