An artist's license to a child's dream: Argentine painter Norma Bessouet evokes the still world of young girls disconnected from life's adult realities.

NORMA BESSOUET'S world is one of childhood fantasies and dreams, that looking-glass wonderland of a young girl, not quite woman. Her work shares traits associated with such other Latin American narrative fabulists as Leonora Carrington, Dorothea Tanning, Leonor Fini, and Remedios Varo, but involves a visual language and viewpoint all Bessouet's own. Meticulous and patient by nature, Bessouet usually produces only a half dozen or so oil paintings annually. Each speaks eloquently to that special state of grace, confidence, and self-knowledge many young women begin to conceal or abandon in the interest of that long-standing male-dominated institution we call civilization. Almost always Bessouet works from a live model, sometimes with the same one for several years. Her highly imaginative statements about the private world of young females derive from close relationships she establishes with her models, both in Buenos Aires and New York City, between which she divides her time. It was in her upper Manhattan studio that she took a break from work to discuss her career and methods.

"I don't much like professional models. If I do not have a personal connection with the young person I am painting, it doesn't work. That is very important to me. That makes it all the more difficult then in finding the right person because she must fulfill a physical requirement and yet also be willing to enter into a personal relationship. That's why working through friends works best because they know and respect me. Here in the States it's very difficult and expensive to have a model come to your studio regularly for three or four hours daily. I find it easier to arrange these things in Buenos Aires, where currently I am working with a model who is a professional musician, a clarinetist named Elisabeth Cueli, who used to be a fine arts student and dancer. She's a bit older than my previous models but diminutive, beautiful, and a delicate spirit. Two years ago she was recommended by a painter friend. I've been working with her ever since. For many years I had a wonderful model who is also a painter. We worked together in Uruguay, but when she left for Germany it was no longer possible. In the early eighties I used her for twenty paintings and drawings devoted to the theme of Selvaggio and Uccello."

Bessouet drew inspiration for that series from French symbolist Marcel Schwob's seminal story collection, Imaginary Lives (1896). One of the fictitious tales describes a love affair between a young beauty named Selvaggio (meaning wild in Italian) and the great Florentine painter Paolo Uccello. In the story she gradually withers away as he neglects and forsakes her in favor of his art. Because uccello in Italian means bird, Bessouet opted to represent the Renaissance master as an enormous raven that consorts with the young woman, whose hair is closely cropped (a convention that would persist for several years). Bessouet's visual treatment is not a literal reading of a story in the manner of an illustrator but rather a highly personal meditation that draws its inspiration from Schwob's story of longing and abandonment. In September 1987, Selvaggio and Uccello opened at the Museum of Art of Sao Paulo and then traveled to Caracas and Buenos Aires. As a prelude to the Columbus Quincentenary, in 1989, Argentina's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Committee on Latin American and Iberian Studies at Harvard University cosponsored another showing at the Arden Gallery in Boston.

Born in Buenos Aires in 1947, Bessouet admits she has always admired the slightly stiff classicism associated with the early stages of the Italian Renaissance. "My mother, an amateur artist, studied drawing and painting with Italian academicians. She got me started. My father, a businessman, liked to work with wood: the restoration of furniture, building things, carving. He encouraged me as well. When I was very young I wanted to be a dancer. As a teenager, a friend asked me to accompany her while she registered for classes at the Academy of Fine Arts "Prilidiano Pueyrredon" in Buenos Aires. Upon entering the building, I realized that was where I wanted to be. I registered and she didn't! I studied with Ideal Sanchez, a founding member of Orion, Argentina's first surrealist group. I also worked with Jorge Krasnapolsky, an excellent technician. Pop Art and figurative work, in the tradition of de Kooning and Bacon, was all the rage then. I was out of step with those trends. Fortunately, one instructor, Aida Carballo, also at odds with the mainstream, took me under her wing. I remember when she saw my work. She said, 'Go to the library, find something on the scola italiana, and stay with that all summer. We will talk next year.' She also gave me a book on Uccello. All of that opened something new and wonderful for me. She became my principal teacher for drawing, printmaking, painting, and even ceramics."

For the cover of the Selvaggio and Uccello catalog, Bessouet selected an oil painting, Traveler, Heart of a Bird, which depicts an unclad maiden holding a handbag full of leaves in the company of four exotic birds. One senses that this evocation of escape from earthly tethers to float and soar, wander and explore, very much reflects the artist's own, early determination to know the world beyond the confines of the Rio de la Plata. During much of her adult life she has moved around a great deal and she still loves to travel. "When I began winning prizes and selling some of my drawings, I decided to travel to Europe to see great art. While in London, someone advised me to study at the Slade School of Fine Arts because it had a reputation for accepting foreigners, in contrast to the Royal Art Academy, which tended to be more exclusive, even xenophobic. Registration at Slade had already closed, but within ten days of my arrival I managed to obtain a fellowship from the British Council. That was 1974. Almost all of my classes involved oil painting, the main emphasis at Slade. The following year I spent time in Florence, but I found the Florentines a bit chauvinistic, perhaps a defense mechanism against the constant presence of tourists and outsiders. I found it difficult to make friends there, so I moved on to Barcelona."

In Spain, Bessouet took an unexpected break from painting. "At that time my father died. I went home briefly, but upon my return to Barcelona my mother sent me his carving tools. I began carving and building dolls in wood and other materials as a form of relief from my drawing and painting. Since childhood, dolls had always been important to me. My mother, very romantic, also loved dolls as did my aunt. I still have their collections. I started making bigger dolls using molds, which I sculpted. I found a teacher, a Portuguese sculptor living in Barcelona who made those enormous gigantes [giants] and cabezudos [fat heads] of papier-mache that are part of seasonal parades and festivals throughout Catalonia. He was deaf and dumb but via sign language he taught me how to work with the traditional brown craft paper and glue. I recall making one doll that I named Graciela. When Carmen Balcells [the literary agent who represents many important Latin American writers] saw it she just had to buy it. As an outgrowth of my work with dolls, in 1981 I won a fellowship from Spain's Ministry of Culture to study sculpture in New York."

The grant was for only one month, but Bessouet decided to stay on when she found several instructors who could help her grow. "I wanted to begin making dolls from porcelain. I hadn't been able to find anyone to teach me, but in New York City I passed a shop with taxidermy supplies that had glass eyeballs in the window. It turned out that in the twenties or thirties, the store owner's father had emigrated from Germany, intent on building a doll factory, a goal he never realized. As luck would have it, the store owner's daughter was doing porcelain dolls in New Haven, Connecticut, so I went there for a time to learn what I could. For a year I also studied at Columbia University, which has a great ceramics program. I've always enjoyed learning new techniques. Unfortunately, making dolls as an art form did not interest many galleries, so, after investing several years in that discipline, I returned to painting."

In the late eighties, Bessouet won a fellowship that permitted her to work unabatedly on a series of paintings, which in 1992 debuted as a show called The World of Anna at Boston's Arden Gallery and then at the Fundacion Previsora Galeria in Caracas. "For that project, I worked with Anna Berlin, the daughter of friends of mine here in New York. They had left Argentina during the military dictatorship. I started with Anna when she was eleven and by the end of the series, she was fifteen." In the first image for the cycle, a drawing called Anna Then (1989), Bessouet posed her model wearing an ornate, crenelated, and perforated collar that she replicated with remarkable fidelity. With her big eyes, the subject stares intently at the artist, but her thoughts seem to be elsewhere as the upper reaches of her head dissolve into nothingness. As critic Whitney Chadwick notes, "The drawing Anna Then and the paintings that developed from it, reveal a child strangely disconnected from contemporary life with its frenetic rhythms and cluttered environments.... The paintings are remarkable for their evocation of the stillness and silence of the child who observes everything that takes place around her, and whose relationship with the external world is internalized rather than expressed through relations with others."

Among other works in the series is a watercolor, The Order of the Universe (1992), which portrays Anna contemplating a unicorn. She is rendered in rigid profile, with her hair tightly bound with ribbons, in tribute to Pisanello's famous portrait of Ginevra d'Este at the Louvre, a masterpiece Bessouet has always admired. In another painting, Seashell Murmurs (1988), in an empty room Anna ponders a sound emanating from the husk of a sea anemone, a little treasure she has removed from an elegant glass box still containing a wild rose. In yet another enchanting scene, Safeguarding the Moon (1991), Anna, unencumbered by clothing, transits a haunted wood of barren trees while bearing a luminous lunar disk as if she herself is responsible for the security of this mystical orb closely associated with the fairer sex. Several works from this period hint at sexual awakening, even initiation. In Passage (1990), for example, a young maiden peers from the security of a tile-paved hallway reminiscent of countless riophatense houses into a surrey, verdant garden and then beyond, towards a long, dark, narrow breach in foliage that could be interpreted as a more arduous path of adulthood. Starting Point (1993) works in a similar fashion but utilizes a severely architectonic hallway, again paved with tiles, from which the vague image of a horse emerges toward Anna, who holds a hoop and stick.

Horses also figure in an immensely appealing diptych from the World of Anna cycle, a painting that still hangs in the artist's studio apartment. Called The Infanta's Dream (1993), the idea for the painting came to Bessouet after she had attended an exhibition at the Diana Lowenstein Gallery in Buenos Aires. "I was on the Avenida Infanta Isabel, near the massive brick arches of the railroad bridge that passes above the Paseo de la Infanta, where children can ride on an ornate carousel containing mostly horses. Inexplicably, the combination of the place names and horses triggered the image." In addition to the equine elements, the large canvas features Anna in two guises. In her role as the Infanta, a ghostly visage directly appropriated from Velgzquez's Las Meninas, she sits timidly behind a wall. The artist also renders a much more assertive version of Anna, with sword and cape, practicing the moves of a female bull fighter. But for her crimson cape, stockings, and slippers, she is naked as she thrusts and parries against a wheeled bull effigy of the sort novices use to perfect their skills. While an obvious sexual message seems to be at work here, Bessouet claims she had a more feminist statement in mind. "At that time, toreras were having a hard time, so much so that toreros would not appear with them on the same day. In their macho sport, they felt threatened and diminished by women who could do the same thing. In honor of those female bull fighters, I decided to record in small letters their names upon the wheeled carito del toro."

Rarely does Bessouet populate her paintings with more than one female figure, but she often includes wild creatures. "I love animals and enjoy mixing them with people in my paintings. I used to have two cats. I love cats and also birds. Birds are so beautiful, so fragile yet strong. As a child I dreamed of flying like birds."

An oil painting called White (1999) depicts just such a young girl who seems to consort and tumble through the air with birds of several species. In an associated work called Blue (1999) she portrays the same girl lying on the floor with her head upon crossed hands in imitation of a feline companion in the same position. The third in the series, Red (1999), presents her sitter as a youthful priestess holding a source of glowing red light, a tone that repeats itself throughout a mysterious, tiled hallway that leads to an erupting volcano in the distance. "I opted for this trilogy of colors," Bessouet explains, "as a tribute to that famous film cycle, Blue, White, Red, by the late Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski. I've always loved his work. Also you will notice that the girl in each painting has realistic hair. It was at about that time that I began painting my subjects with flowing locks in contrast to earlier likenesses, where they appear nearly bald. I have no rational explanation for the change except that for a long time I didn't feel like painting hair. At some point I just started. I go by my feelings."

In 1999, Bessouet exhibited thirty works from the previous ten years in a major retrospective of her work at the National Museum of Fine Arts (MNBA) in Buenos Aires. The museum's director, Jorge Glusberg, wrote an introduction for the beautiful, full-color exhibition catalog. Whitney Chadwick contributed an illuminating essay. The show included new works in addition to examples from the Anna series and another cycle, called Memories and Dreams, featured in a 1997 Arden Gallery exhibition. Several works were notable for their lyrical titles; for example, Where All Horizons End as I Sit (1996), which portrays a girl in a white dress of tiered ruffles sitting in a circle of toads while some whimsical birds of folded paper lift strands of her long hair towards an open doorway. For the piece, Bessouet fashioned an origami bird and then painted it from different angles and stages of flight. As to the toads, "I once read a book in Spain about witches and how people believe that in one's absence, children can be protected from witches by placing them in a circle of toads."

Winds of an Imaginary Night is another enchanting title that Bessouet assigned both a pencil drawing (1997) and oil painting (1995) included in the MNBA retrospective. "Sometimes I use bits of poetry that I like, but in this case the name came from some music by a contemporary, female composer I heard on National Public Radio." In both versions of the composition a little girl, seen from behind, with her doll in a miniature stroller, ponders a locomotive that seems to emerge from an unpaved path to advance upon a more conventional set of steel rails. In his metaphysical works, Giorgio de Chirico often used a train as a metaphor for death's inevitability, but Bessouet refuses to confirm any suggestion of mortal awareness on the child's part. "You can't imagine the wide range of interpretations that image produced. Some people saw it in the most threatening terms, that she might even throw herself on the tracks. Others saw it in a much gentler context. I love all that because a painting never can be the same for different people. It can generate ten, twenty stories. I was practically raised in a movie theater. I think the narrative quality in my work comes from that. I love ambiguity. I should add that the most extraordinary, little girl posed for that painting, as well as the paintings Magical Glow (1995) and Ariadne (1995). Her name is Emilia Pariente. She is the granddaughter of a friend of mine, for whom I did the pencil drawing two years after the painting. Emilia was only four years old at the time but seemed like an old soul. She hardly spoke but sat very still with these enormous, mysterious, dark eyes that, I was told, caused people in the street to stop in amazement. After I finished the paintings we were never sure whether she recognized herself, but some years later she did. She didn't like the fact I'd painted her next to lizards and insects, while other girls appeared with birds and butterflies. Now she laughs it off because she's gotten over it."

The little femme-infant Bessouet depicts in Ariadne holds a string that emerges from a window sill above and extends to the bottom of the picture plane. In yet another canvas, The String (1999), another girl again grasps a cord that seems to keep her airborne. Whether the length of twisted fiber relates to some cosmic connection, one's imagination, or an alternative reality the artist will not say, but she offers a clue in a later work from 2003 in which a girl sits cross-legged holding a ball of string from which a strand has just parted. Bessouet calls the painting The Breaking of the Spell.

In 1998, in response to a trip to India, some new, exotic elements began to invade Bessouet's drawings and paintings. "At the time I was using a different model, Miranda Castro, with whom I'd worked off and on since she was a little girl. Her mother, a congresswoman in Argentina, is a dear friend of mine. I had just arrived in Buenos Aires. In eight days she was leaving for an international congress in India. She invited me to come along. My sister, who is very mystical, urged me to go. She said, 'These things don't come twice, so just go.' So I did. We had the most incredible journey, one of those trips in which nothing goes wrong."

Then, following an artist's residency at the Sanskriti Foundation, near New Delhi, Bessouet's work began to take on the intense coloration of India, sometimes including costumes, motifs, and architectural details she had seen during her trip. For example, In the Realm of the Elusive (2002), a girl wearing deep-blue tights beneath a diaphanous skirt holds the reins to a horse bearing a saddle pad of an intense orange-red tone. The scene is set within an exotic palace or temple defined by several columns. From the background shadows emerges the vague image of Ganesha, the much-beloved elephant-headed deity Hindus believe can remove obstacles while insuring domestic harmony and success. Ganesha, borne upon the back of a blue cat, appears in another, homonymous work in the company of a little girl who quietly studies the mysterious, elephantine deity. Miranda Castro, who accompanied her mother and the artist on the trip, appears in that painting and other works, Sanskriti's Fantastic Birds, The Red Turban, Krishna's Court, and Imaginary Kingdom, in which she stands with two monkeys before a cluster of mist-cloaked temples. With the passage of time, the overt references to the artist's Indian journey have subsided, but not the brilliant hues. In Lyrical Haven and A Separate Reality (both 2003), the artist sets up a powerful visual counterpoint between dark-green verdure and background elements that glow an intense burnt orange. Her current work continues to employ strong color.

Much of the work produced after her trip to India appeared in an exhibition called The Journey, held at the Arden Gallery during February 2004. In a catalog for that show, critics Donald Kuspit and Raul Zamulio Taylor wrote revelatory essays regarding the genesis of this fascinating body of work. On the back cover, the artist and her model, both in traditional Indian dress, cavort with a local musician who at the time was teaching them a few dance steps. Last April, the Arden Gallery hosted another exhibition, Rhythm and Order, which also met with both commercial and critical success. Soon after that show Bessouet, ever the wanderer, said in a telephone conversation that she'd just returned from Guatemala, where she was helping a friend. Intent upon getting back to work, she was putting her studio in order. With her indefatigable drive and characteristic enthusiasm she was about to embark upon yet another series based upon some preparatory drawings executed months earlier in Argentina. She said, "I have in mind some images involving two girls, Elizabeth in Buenos Aires and a little Ethiopian girl who lives here in New York, the adopted daughter of an Italian friend of mine. She is only two and a half years old but seems much older. She has striking features. I can hardly wait to start!"

Caleb Bach is a former teacher of Spanish and art history and a regular contributor to Americas. All images courtesy of Arden Gallery, Boston, MA, and Norma Bessouet