In this brief chapter, the artist and researcher Nicolás Gómez Echeverri explains how the art critic Marta Traba became a cultural icon on television in Colombia. Gómez draws on his research to describe the physical and intellectual characteristics that helped to transform Traba into a peerless media personality at the time. According to Gómez: “Marta Traba had been educated in art history and theory at European academies, and when she arrived in Colombia she joined a social circle in Bogotá that included the most influential people in communication, opinion, education, literature, and art.” Gómez goes on to discuss Traba’s “charisma” and the role it played in the power of television as a mass medium in order to explain the impact this media-critic personality had on her fans. This document includes a number of quotes that refer to events or press reports that help to explain the effects of the cultural phenomenon created by the television programs produced by this noted art critic.   

Marta Traba (1923–1983) was a controversial art historian and critic who played an influential role in the field of visual arts in Colombia. She made valuable contributions to the establishment and development of art criticism in the media and in the academic field. She worked as a teacher, critic, historian, and promoter of cultural projects; her accomplishments included the founding of Prisma [Prism] magazine (1957), her role as curator, and of course, the production of cultural programs and interviews for Colombian television.  

En blanco y negro: Marta Traba en la televisión colombiana, 1954–1958 [In Black and White: Marta Traba on Colombian Television] is a historical and analytical document that tracks and discusses relationships between art criticism and the media as a result of Traba’s work on television. It is therefore a pioneering document of this genre, particularly because of how it links the cultural phenomena of a society to modes of visual expression. The essay by the media critic Omar Rincón (b. 1961), published as the prologue to the book, mentions this point, and questions the low priority given to the preservation of audiovisual material that documents the cultural dialogue developed through audiovisual products. During his research, Gómez discovered that Traba’s programs were never archived, so he was obliged to look for other material such as press reports, photographs, and interviews. This both reaffirms Rincón’s concerns and adds undeniable value to the publication.      

It is interesting to note how Gómez structures the story of Marta Traba. Six chapters are devoted to discussing the Argentine critic’s place in Colombian cultural television and the sociopolitical context of each of her programs. The book also includes some of the texts or scripts that describe the content of each program, and a detailed chronological report that Gómez produced with the assistance of the researcher María Natalia Paillié. 

This document is complemented by Chapter Four of the same book that has been reviewed for this digital archive [see doc. no. 1131920].