Work in Paris

Every year hundreds of wide-eyed young painters go flocking to Paris. Each has been a standout in his home town or in art school; each hopes to conquer the art capital of the world. One in a thousand makes a dent.

Esther Gorbato, 24, is one of the lucky few, but her luck has not changed her life in the least. A student at Buenos Aires' National Academy of Fine Arts, she had "read all the art books that came from Paris," and she was resolved to get to the source. At 19 she made it, moved into a Left Bank room, enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, and looked around for inspiration. To her disappointment, she could find it neither in the academy nor in the cafes. "Art here," she says, "had stopped at the same point I already knew; I realized that what I wanted remained to be done." What she wanted, to judge by her work, was an art as human and uncompromising as she could make it.

In her dim closet of a room opposite Notre Dame, Gorbato pinned up reproductions of the pictures that pleased her best--Masachio, Bruegel and Giotto. Shy as a chipmunk, she spent her days alone, doing figure compositions, painting and sculpturing harsh self-portraits. "People ask me why I portray myself with such a suspicious look in my eyes," she says. "Others call my portraits frankly ugly. I don't think so; I merely try to paint what I see."

Last December a friend persuaded Gorbato to enter one of her self-portraits in a competition for the Adolphe Neuman Prize: 1,000 Swiss francs offered each year for the encouragement of young Jewish artists. The jurors picked her canvas, reported that they had "discovered not only a real painter but also a child who lives in Paris with a moral dignity and courage we could not help admiring."

Gorbato is using the prize money for daily expenses. She plans no trips, no exhibitions, no change of address. As the days grow longer, her room brightens, giving her more chance to work.

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