Fanny Rabel

Fanny Rabel (August 27, 1922 in Poland – November 25, 2008 in Mexico City), born Fanny Rabinovich, was a Polish-born Mexican artist who is considered to be the first modern female muralist and one of the youngest associated with the Mexican muralism of the early to mid 20th century. She and her family arrived to Mexico in 1938 from Europe and she studied art at the Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado "La Esmeralda", where she met and became friends with Frida Kahlo. She became the only female member of “Los Fridos” a group of students under Kahlo’s tutelage. She also worked as an assistant and apprentice to Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, painting a number of murals of her own during her career. The most significant of these is "Ronda en el tiempo" at the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City. She also created canvases and other works, with children often featured in her work, and was one of the first of her generation to work with ecological themes in a series of works begun in 1979.

Life

Fanny Rabel was born Fanny Rabinovich on August 27, 1922 in Poland to a Polish-Jewish couple from a family of traveling actors. When she was a child, she could not have dolls, according to her daughter Paloma, so she drew the ones she saw in store windows. Her family was cultured with her sister Malka becoming a theatre critic.

The family moved to Paris in 1929, where she first attended school. They then moved to Mexico in 1938. (New information: While the majority of sources maintain Rabel's date of entry in Mexico as 1938, Dina Comisarenco Mirkin has noted that this date may be 1936, based on information related by Rabel's daughter, Paloma Woolrich, citing the dates on passports in her personal archive. However, no evidence of this earlier date has been made public.) She entered the Escuela Nocturna para Trabajadores, where she took classes in drawing and engraving. Other teachers included Francisco Zúñiga, Alfredo Zalce, Raúl Anguiano, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Carlos Orozco Romero and Diego Rivera.

Rabel married urologist Jaime Woolrich and had two children Abel and Paloma Woolrich, both of whom became actors.

She lived for decades in an apartment on Martinez de Castro Street in the San Miguel Chapultepec neighborhood in Mexico City. Near the end of her life she lost most of her memory, with Alzheimers suspected. She was almost evicted from her apartment at this time as it was deemed unsafe, but she continued living there until she died on November 25, 2008. The Salón de la Plástica Mexicana had a retrospective of her work after he death called Retrospectiva in Memoriam, Fanny Rabel (1922-2008) held at the Museum of the Universidad Popular Autónoma del Estado de Puebla .

Artistry Rabel is considered to be the first modern female muralist in Mexico although she also did significant work in painting, engraving, drawing and ceramic sculpture. Her work has been classified as poetic Surrealism, Neo-expressionism and is also considered part of the Escuela Mexicana de Pintura (the dominant art movement of the early to mid 20th century in Mexico) as one of the youngest muralists to be associated with it along with Arnold Belkin and José Hernández Delga.

Rabel was more drawn to depicting mankind’s pain rather than happiness, sharing other Mexican muralists' concerns about social injustice. However, she stated to Leopoldo Méndez that she could not create combative works, with clenched fists and fierce faces, and she wanted to leave the Taller de Gráfica Popular. Méndez convinced her to stay, saying that more tender images are important to political struggle as well. Children with Mexican faces are common in her work, often with expressions between laughter and tears. They are generally poor children, meant to depict the socioeconomically marginalized populations in the country. However, she did not paint outright tragedy or tears. In many of her works, the different social classes of Mexico are contrasted, often with indigenous peoples. The gentleness of her works, she insisted was “for the revolution.” She also did one portrait of Frida Kahlo, a pencil drawing which was first exhibited near the end of her life.

She was economically prosperous, something which bothered her as she worried about exploiting the poor for art. Unlike artists who avoided the news and popular culture as to not poorly influence their art, Rabel attended concerts, listened to the radio and was a fan of film from both Mexico and Hollywood.

She was one of the first of her generation to develop themes related to ecology, the changes in Mexico City, against technocracy and emphasis on commerce. She began a series of paintings in 1979 called “Réquiem por una ciudad” depicting what she considered to be the destruction of Mexico City by smog, traffic and garbage. The works include: "Diálogo capitalino," "Muerte citadina," "Los peatones van al cielo," "El profundo drenaje," "La rebelión de los peatones" and "México, D.F." "Réquiem para una ciudad" in 1979 considers three themes: the lack of human communication, the traffic, and pollution of the air and ground. "La rebelión de los peatones" in 1987 expresses a worry about the excess of cars in the city.