Norah Borges

Leonor Fanny "Norah" Borges Acevedo (March 4, 1901 – July 20, 1998), was an Argentine visual artist and art critic, member of the Florida group, and sister of the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges.

Early life and source of nickname She was the daughter of a lawyer, Dr. Jorge Guillermo Borges and Leonor Acevedo Suárez. Leonor was given the name Norah by her older brother, Jorge Luis Borges. Of his sister, Jorge wrote:In all of our games she was always el caudillo, I the slow, timid, submissive one. She climbed to the top of the roof, traipsed through the trees, and I followed along with more fear than enthusiasm. —Jorge Luis Borges, Norah

Growing up, Norah lived in the shadow of her famous brother. It wasn't until later in life that she emerged from her brother's shadow and gained her own personal popularity. As a child, she moved with her family to Switzerland to treat the progressive blindness of her father. She studied with the classical sculptor Maurice Sarkisoff at the École des Beaux-Arts of Geneva. After three years of school, Norah was told by Professor Sarkisoff to leave the ways of the academy to grow in her individual style. After leaving Sevilla, she passed through Granada and then finally came to Madrid, where she studied with the painter Julio Romero de Torres. Here she befriended the poet Juan Ramón Jiménez. She illustrated a number of his books and dedicated a portrait to him in her book Españoles de tres mundos.

In March 1921, Borges returned by boat to Buenos Aires. As a young painter, she aligned herself with the vanguard artists of the Florida group. Her work in Prisma (1921) reflects the ultraist (anti-modernist) ideas of the group, but her illustrations for magazines such as Mural, Proa (1924-1926) and Martín Fierro, and her illustrations in the first edition of the poetry book Fervor de Buenos Aires by Jorge Luis Borges (1923) reveal the influence of the Cubism that she had begun to assimilate with her French contacts in Spain. In 1923, the French surrealist magazine Manomètre, and, in 1924, Martín Fierro published her paintings. In the September-October 1924 issue of Martin Fierro, Borges' first collection of poems called Calle de la tarde were displayed.

In 1942, a version of Platero y yo by Juan Ramón Jiménez was published with illustrations and vignettes by Norah. She also worked as a graphic artist on other books by Spanish emigrants in Argentina, including Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Rafael Alberti and León Felipe and illustrated the works of her brother and other Argentine writers like Victoria Ocampo, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Norah Lange and Julio Cortázar. She designed the scenery of a play by Federico García Lorca using the techniques of oil, watercolor, engraving, woodcut, and drawings in ink and pencil.

Death and burial She died in Buenos Aires in 1998, aged 97, and was buried in the family vault in the La Recoleta Cemetery.