Celia Calderón

Mexico has contributed to the great volume of universal art history with the creative talent of a good number of artists, among whom, notably women painters, only a scant handful are known. Besides María Izquierdo and Frida Kahlo, the most famous, many other artists worked in parallel fashion, they are lesser known beyond our borders but equally valuable in the process of modern art in Mexico. Such is the case of Celia Calderón who, like Izquierdo, chose to study professionally at the National School of Fine Arts, and obtained recognition and scholarships which allowed her to perfect her talents in engraving in England and the, that time, Soviet Union. Hers was a definite feminine concern, if by this one understands that she focused her work on exploring the intimacy of her condition as a woman, and which appears as the central theme of her work. She was member of the Popular Graphics Workshop and mentor at the Academy of San Carlos where Andrés Blaisten was her student in his early years of artistic initiation. This is why, in his collection, the Bañista - reminiscent of Renoir - holds a special and pleasing memory. As far as her career as an artist, the critic Justino Fernández said, "recently a painter has emerged... whose excellent works show evidence of the good discipline in which she has been educated, the influences she has received and the personal feel for color and forms; because of all of this she has come to occupy a distinguished place".