The other Borges: often in the shadow of her older brother, Norah Borges embodies the artistic movement of the early twentieth century.

• Author: Bach, Caleb
• Position: Biography

Being related to a famous person can be both a blessing and a curse. While the glow of celebrity may offer added exposure, it can also cast a shadow that obscures one's identity and accomplishments. Such was the case of Norah Borges, whose career as a painter and printmaker both benefited and suffered because her brother happened to be the great writer, Jorge Luis Borges. While his revolutionary role within the world of Hispanic letters and far beyond has long enjoyed wide recognition, it was only recently that the pioneering contributions of his sister received the attention they deserve.

Born in 1901 (two years after her famous and only sibling), Leonor Fanny Borges bore the names of her mother and paternal grandmother respectively, but because brother Georgie often called her Norah, the name stuck. The Borges children grew up in a highly regimented, insulated household that protected them from the street life of Palermo, then a rough and tumble neighborhood on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. When not being home-schooled by a British governess named Miss Tink, both took pleasure from countless hours of reading in their father's library or playing games of fantasy in an enclosed garden. Due to their nanny's presence and that of a grandmother from Staffordshire, and to conform to the dictates of an Anglophile father, the two children learned to function in English long before they mastered Spanish.

In 1914, when Norah and Georgie were in their mid-teens, father Jorge Guillermo began to lose his sight, a congenital condition his son would inherit. Abandoning his law practice, Dr. Borges decided to take his family on a grand tour of Europe while seeking treatment with a famous eye specialist in Geneva. The family patriarch misread the brewing storm of World War I, however, so when it struck, the Borges family found itself trapped in neutral Switzerland, a situation that would persist for the duration of the conflict. The parents enrolled their son at the College Calvin and daughter at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. To gain entrance they had to quickly learn enough French to pass an admission test. Georgie struggled with the new language but Norah proved remarkably adept, so much so that she began dreaming in French. Her art school training conformed to the highly structured dictates of the art academy tradition with emphasis on geometric perspective, drawing and painting from plaster cast models, and printmaking using wood and linoleum blocks. Despite this rigid approach, she managed to maintain her own artistic identity. Indeed, at the end of three years of instruction, a professor named Maurice Sarkisoff advised her to "abandon the pernicious influence of the academy ... and instead follow her own internal rules, in order to preserve the originality of her style."

For much of their fourth year in Switzerland, the Borges family lived at the Hotel du Lac in Lugano. While brother Georgie fell under the influence of Walt Whitman and the French symbolists--he would often recite Rimbaud and Baudelaire to Norah while rowing on Lake Lugano--she continued to study graphic techniques with a local artist named Arnoldo Bossi. During her stay she produced two linoleum block prints, La Veronica and Cristo apaciguando las aguas, both expressions of a devotion to Catholicism that would characterize her entire life. Exposure to such German Expressionist artists as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Erich Heckel strongly flavored these early works. The gaunt images also reflected familial hardship because by the end of the war food shortages were commonplace even in Switzerland.

When the war ended, father Jorge decided to move the family to temperate Mallorca where he intended to spend a year writing a novel (El caudillo, his only book). The clan took up residence in an aptly named inn, the Hotel des Artistes in the picturesque village of Valldemossa, high above Palma. While her brother studied Latin, Norah did pencil and ink drawings full of attenuated expressionist elements fractured into planes in the manner of the Cubists. She also took painting lessons from a Swedish artist, Sven Westman, who happened to be living at the hotel. During that year, she painted a small mural for the owners of the inn as well as a no longer extant depiction of Mallorcan peasants for the Hotel Continental in Palma.

In October of 1919, the family headed further south to Sevilla where Norah studied with yet another local painter, Julio Romero de Torres. At the same time, she and her brother fell beneath the sway of two Spanish poets, Rafael Cansinos-Assens and Ramon Gomez de la Serna, adherents to an anti-bourgeois philosophy related to Italian Futurism called Ultraism that espoused...