Raquel Forner, an iconic figure in Argentine art, overcame the challenges implicit in being a woman artist in her time. She travelled to Europe in 1929 to study art, visiting Italy, Spain, Morocco, and France. Back in Buenos Aires, she began working on series that express her genuine concern for human suffering. Deeply affected by the Spanish Civil War, she supported the international struggle against fascism. The two series España and El Drama, produced between 1937 and 1950, signal her despair. Through the complex iconography surrounding her own figure in Autorretrato, from the El Drama series, Forner expresses the effects of war in the first person. In the foreground, Forner holds three paintbrushes; on the globe in the right-hand side of the canvas, Africa and Europe are partly hidden by the blood-stained pages of a crumpled newspaper. In the middle ground is a hand with a dead dove resting in its palm and two grieving women embracing before a corpse. In a spatial and symbolic counterpoint, the left- hand side of the canvas shows a map of Argentina with a sheaf of wheat. It is in that land of plenty that the artist made her home and formed a family. In the distance, tiny parachutists descend onto a wasteland. In this painting and others, the artist works through the trauma of her times.
—Sonia Becce
