Abstract
In October 1961, the Romanian-Argentine artist Cecilia Marcovich (1894-1976) flung open the doors of her house to the public, with the idea of exhibiting all the work she had produced over the last thirty years. Drawings, oil paintings, pastels, monocopies and sculptures were displayed in different rooms, and occupied most of the building. The leitmotif was provided by the main themes of each period. As from that moment, the artist's home, on 4100 Guardia Vieja street, was transformed into a house-museum. This proposal represented a culminating point of arrival for her, the last and most extensive stage in a career featuring at least four highly significant stages. The first centered on Marcovich's personal story as a migrant, while the next refers to the period when she was studying in Paris. The third stage was when she dedicated herself exclusively to teaching art, marked by the pivotal moment when she founded a school-workshop; and finally, her decision to transform her home into a permanent exhibition space. Each step involved a major shift in more ways than one, a series of disruptions in terms of social expectations linked not only to gender, but also to artistic circuits and institutions. The objective of this work is to examine how Cecilia Marcovich’s house-museum fitted into a much grander project aimed at constructing a space for personal, artistic and social action where the main impact was produced outside official channels, more especially within an educational framework.