Olga Albizu is one of the most significant Puerto Rican painters of the twentieth century, widely credited as one of the island’s first artists to embrace abstraction. Born into a prominent family in Ponce, she took drawing lessons with the renowned artist Miguel Pou (1880-1968), and later studied with the Spanish-born abstract painter Esteban Vicente (1902-2001), who briefly taught at the Universidad de Puerto Rico in the 1940s. After winning a fellowship to study art in New York in 1948, Albizu trained with Hans Hoffman and took classes at the Art Students League, developing her own gestural style of abstraction. This painting, 470-9 Red, represents her mature work, with bold, geometric strokes against a vibrant background, creating what she called “a conversation between color and form.” Although Albizu remained on the margins of the New York art world—fitting in with neither the Nuyorican movement emerging in East Harlem nor the male-dominated Abstract Expressionist group around Tenth Street—her work garnered visibility by appearing on the covers of RCA and Verve jazz albums starting in the late 1950s. Likely completed after 1960, 470-9 Red is richly suggestive of Albizu’s engagements with musicians and the music industry.

This will be one of the first paintings by a Puerto Rican artist to enter the MFA’s collection. Although over 30,000 people of Puerto Rican descent live in Boston, Puerto Rican art remains underrepresented in our galleries. Collecting Albizu’s work demonstrates our commitment to recognizing important Puerto Rican artists and building our holdings in this area. 470-9 Red was included in a 1998 exhibition at the Universidad del Sagrado Corazón that has been described as a “revelatory retrospective,” and interest in Albizu’s work has since continued to grow. Her paintings are now included in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, and institutions across Puerto Rico.

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