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.)Comisarenco Mirkin, Dina; Ana Torres; y Karen Cordero, compiladoras, Para participar en lo justo: recuperando la obra de Fanny Rabel, México, DF, Impresores en Offset y Serigrafía S. de R.L. de C.V. () She entered the Escuela Nocturna para Trabajadores, where she took classes in drawing and engraving.

Her anti-Nazi and anti-Fascism politics resulted in her participation in a mural called '' Retrato de la Burguesía'' in 1940 for the Sindicato Mexicano de Electricistas building on Alfonso Caso Street in Mexico City. Rabel met a group of exiled Spaniards in Mexico along with Antonio Pujol, who invited her to take part in a mural project headed by him, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Joseph Renau, Luis Arenal, Antonio Rodríguez Luna and Miguel Prieto. This work depicted, among other things, children killed by Nazi bombing in Spain.

She entered the Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado "La Esmeralda" shortly after it was established in 1942, taking classes with José Chávez Morado, Feliciano Peña and Frida Kahlo, with whom she became close friends. (universal) . She also became one of Frida Kahlo’s students at the Casa Azul, a group of four called “Los Fridos” (a play on Frida’s name). She was the only female in this group, learning alongside Guillermo Monroy, Arturo García Bustos and Arturo Estrada. Other teachers included Francisco Zúñiga, Alfredo Zalce, Raúl Anguiano, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Carlos Orozco Romero and Diego Rivera.

She changed her last name from Rabinovich to Rabel during her career.

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. Rabel was buried at the Panteón Israelita. She was survived by her daughter Paloma and her grandchildren.

Career

Rabel had her first exhibition of her work in 1945 with twenty four oils, thirteen drawings and eight engravings at the Liga Popular Israelita with Frida Kahlo writing the presentation. In 1955, she had an individual exhibition at the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana . She had a large exhibition at the museum of the Palacio de Bellas Artes to commemorate a half century of her work. Her last exhibition was in 2007 at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana . Her work can be found in collections in over fifteen countries including those of the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., the Royal Academy of Denmark, the National Library in Paris, the Casa de las Américas in Havana

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