This is one of the few articles that include a statement by Colombian sculptor Feliza Bursztyn (1933–1982) about her Polish origins, her parents’ arrival in Colombia, and her studies. We learn that she studied painting at the Art Students League in New York and sculpture at La Grande Chaumière academy in Paris. It also tells the story about how her use of scrap metal in her works was related to the unstable situation of foundries in the late 1950s. The encounter with scrap metal was also in keeping with the need to work and to make sculpture above all else, including her family. Although the 1979 article mentions Latas de Nescafé [Coffee Cans] (1964), shown at the Museo de Arte Moderno [Museum of Modern Art] in Bogotá, as her first exhibition of scrap-metal sculptures, she had actually shown other works using the material in 1961. Walter Engel (1908–2005), an Austrian art critic based in Colombia, reviewed this earlier work in the article “Felisa [sic] Bursztyn y Gloria Daza” [Felisa {sic} Bursztyn and Gloria Daza], published on September 3, 1961, in the Sunday magazine El Espectador [The Spectator]. The title of the interview stands out: “En un país de machistas, ¡hágase la loca!” [In a Sexist Country, Be the Crazy Lady!]. It humorously expresses the way Bursztyn had to operate at the outset of her art career, as a woman in a conservative country. In this way, [even] in Colombia, she was able to open paths for sculpture that eschewed the naturalistic perspective prevalent at the time. The last question of the interview elicits the sculptor’s heartfelt response about the subjectivity of the art critic. She argues that the critic must give an impassioned, emotional reading that shows the position and education of the person who writes the review. To Bursztyn, the work remains in history as the subject of multiple interpretations; this being the case, the critic’s point of view must be regarded as only one of its possible readings.
