Hernando Valencia Goelkel discusses Lucy Tejada’s work on the occasion of her first exhibition in Colombia after having spent almost five years in Europe. The exhibition, which took place at Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango in Bogotá in November and December 1955, featured a collection of prints never before seen in Colombia. In Valencia Goelkel’s view, the artist’s recent experience with Spanish painting and direct contact with the artistic wealth of Europe had a positive impact on the evolution of Tejada’s work, which he describes as amongst the most “interesting,” “mature,” “lucid,” and “precise” being produced in Colombia. The critic emphasizes the originality of an “overwhelmingly human universe” as opposed to the landscapes in fashion amongst young Colombian painters at the time; he also praises the work’s diaphanous quality and depiction of daily life.

This article by the translator, essayist, and critic Hernando Valencia Goelkel (1928-2003) was published in the magazine Mito (1955-1962) on the occasion of a solo exhibition by Lucy Tejada (b. 1920) featuring works made in Europe and never before seen in Colombia. Tejada was a well known artist who had enjoyed widespread popularity in Colombia when she left the country in 1952. This article, published in 1955 in Mito magazine, constituted a warm homecoming from intellectuals who clustered around the galleries, independent presses, theaters, and poetry readings of downtown Bogotá. The same year that the article was published, the artist had received first prize at the III Bienal Hispanoamericana de Arte, an international competition deemed the most important art event in Spain under Franco in the fifties. 

The article is clearly interested in highlighting the important influence of art from Europe on Tejada’s work and its development. According to Valencia Goelkel, traditional European art has such strong “physical impact” that beholding it in person necessarily enriches artists from the Americas. If left in their native environment, American artists are “scantly stimulated […]” in terms of “artistic beauty.” The writer praises traditional European painting and privileges it over what he calls “contemporary art.” That position, which might be called nostalgic or traditionalist, was common amongst 20th-century intellectuals and critics in Colombia. Indeed, they often deemed assimilation of the European high (and even academic) artistic tradition necessary to the expansion and consolidation of Colombian art. Despite his “mild disenchantment” with the art of his time, Valencia Goelkel finds in Lucy Tejada cause for celebration, even if his writing is at times elusive—he speaks of paintings with “unfathomable depths of calm knowledge and a cross-conceptual sense of assuredness”—and at times excessively vague—he speaks of “wretched, noble, melancholic” works. This ambiguous style was somewhat common in Colombian criticism, which did not have a longstanding tradition. In any case, Valencia Goelkel applauds Tejada’s disdain for theory and its pseudo-problems, as well as her critical assuredness and “deeply feminine form of empiricism.” It is striking that he calls her art “painting without message.”