He met Walt Disney and devoted himself to children's illustration: the 'fairy tale' life of Lilian Obligado

Veronica Abdala

09/20/2021 3:35 PM

• Clarín.com

• Culture

Updated 09/20/2021 3:35 PM

She had the life of a movie, or a story - today, when many great life stories are adapted to streaming platforms, one would have to say a life worthy of a series - although, above all, she is distinguished by her ability to transmute what she saw and he always imagined an illustrated universe that fascinates anyone who looks into his books: in total, there

 are more than 130 children's titles in which Lilian Obligado leaves a surprising and timeless legacy

.

That, the originality of her style, is the quality that enshrines this

90-year-old

woman

 as the great artist that she is: owner and mistress of a parallel dimension made with colored strokes, and in which her characters - animals, children and their mothers, ice cream and balloon vendors - seem to be moving, coming to life.

Impossible to remain indifferent to the beauty of these compositions that will, over time, surely turn her into

a cult artist.   

Born in Buenos Aires in 1931,

Obligado

is a direct descendant of the writer

Rafael Obligado

–her grandfather–, although she is also a member of a line of women artists –María Obligado, Rafael's sister was a painter, and her cousin is the writer Clara Obligado–.

More than 130 illustrated works that move and entertain successive generations of readers.

Photo Andrés D'Elía

Perhaps the explanation for that early vocation that proliferated in an unlimited imagination and a talent that even drawing professionals recognized as rare and precocious is in the blood: Lilian had been drawing since she was 3 years old, although it was at 10 that she met Walt Disney and

that meeting marked his destiny.

"My life has been a fairy and witches tale", she recognized, who

between 1959 and 1999, illustrated more than a hundred children's books and forged a meteoric career, which also took her around the world, to work for

the main editorials in the United States and Europe, who even disputed it.

He also wrote short stories and adaptations of classic stories.

His identity, however, was unknown until recently to the Argentine public, who appeared in his cartoons, comics and paintings from the great retrospective that the National Historical Museum dedicated to him in 2017. It was then that the public noticed and recognized his stamp, characteristic of the covers of children's books widely circulated in the 70s and 80s.   

Lilian Obligado, Argentine illustrator.

/ Photo: Andres D'Elia lilian bound illustrator illustrator illustrator illustrator illustrator

The three little pigs, The Ugly Duckling, or the fable of The Tortoise and the Hare

were some of the classics that he produced for some of the most important publishing houses in New York or Paris, the capitals from where his drawings were exported to the world: Europe, Latin America, even Japan.

That exhibition, entitled

Trazos de vida

 , lasted four months in Buenos Aires and brought together for the first time in 2017 

more than 300 drawings including sketches, originals and covers

.

Finally, Lilian Obligado was a

 prophet in his land.

In 2018. Sample of the illustrator Lilian Obligado at the National Historical Museum.

Photo Andrés D'Elía

Before, in what can only be

described as a glamorous past, had traveled the world, working for some of

the most renowned publishers in the United States and Europe:

the artist published his first drawings in 1956. And it

was in those years that he settled in New York, where he began his most fruitful artistic stage.

You have to imagine her, then, going through the internal corridors that linked offices and even buildings on Fifth Avenue, in New York, even with a drink in hand.

"I did them all,

" she said, smiling, in an interview she gave to this newspaper three years ago.

In the mid-1960s, he moved to Paris and at the end of 1983 he would arrive in Switzerland, where his mother, a woman with whom he had a distant relationship, had been born.

Since then and throughout her vast career that lasts more than half a century, she was a star illustrator for editorials such as

Viking, Simon & Schuster, Random House, Golden Press, Western Publishing, Holiday House, Guild Press, Doubleday, Abelard, Flammarion and Gallimard - they literally 

fought for her.

An impulse that led her to redouble her commitment to work.

She was a star illustrator for publishers such as Viking, Simon & Schuster, Random House, Golden Press, Western Publishing, Holiday House, Guild Press, Doubleday, Abelard, Flammarion, and Gallimard.

Publishers fought over her.

"The key is in the details: the images count," she explains, when asked about the secret of her unmistakable style.

The meeting that changed his life

In the story of

Lilian Obligado,

her father, Jorge Obligado, writer and editor, deserves a prominent mention, and the first who taught her the world of children's fiction, reading to her

 the stories of the Brothers Grimm.

At the age of five or six, and after spending months as a pupil in the different countries where she accompanied her father, on work trips, the paternal family left for the United States: California, Santa Monica.

This is

where his vocation

is

born.

Children's classics.

Its covers circulated massively through Argentine homes, during the 70s and 80s.

A visit to Warner Studios, where his father worked, allowed him to suddenly peer into the gigantic screens that reproduced the pencil strokes of the illustrators of animated films, such as

Bambi

and

Sleeping Beauty

, at a time when

a movement or gesture could require hundreds of drawings, 

and the industry relied heavily on illustrators.

They were at a cocktail party:

"Now Walterio will come

," announced a man, while I was looking at those moving figures - she herself told

Clarín

, in 2018 -.

We were six or seven children including

Shirley Temple.

And then

Walt Disney himself appeared,

to show us how the illustrations of that gigantic factory that was Warner were made.

I already drew a lot, but I think

that day I knew I would be an illustrator ”.

"Now Walterio will come," announced a man, while I was looking at those little figures.

And then Walt Disney appeared, to show us how illustrations were made.

That day I knew I would be an illustrator ”.

Lilian Obligado Illustrator, artist

The trip back to the country, by train, in 1941, lasted three months: that American journey filled his eyes with images and color, as well as the countryside, in childhood - in the middle of the wild nature of the Paraná River, in the castle of Vuelta de Obligado, province of Buenos Aires–, he had filled his memory with animals.

Already in Buenos Aires, she went to a drawing academy, that of Professor Puig, where, in addition to animals, she would learn to paint portraits, and would work for the April publishing house, at a time when

the presence of women in newsrooms was rare.

From that stage dates her series of comics starring

Tita

and other

female characters, who traveled the world or went on adventures on their own: it

was often the real stories of her friends and her own that inspired the illustrations that later celebrated their own colleagues and teachers.

Pioneer

Obligado worked very actively at a time when the presence of women in newsrooms was rare.

Until in the 60s, he decided to return to the United States, and settle in New York: then, he undertook the challenge of

going out to knock on doors with his portfolio under his arm.

Luck worked in her favor

:

 “I was sitting in a waiting room, waiting for an editor to receive me,” she said, when I saw her come out and argue loudly because a cartoonist had left a book half-done.

At one point they turned and knowing that I was carrying my drawings, they asked me if I dared to finish that book in two weeks, something that for them seemed to be of vital importance.

I was in the Simon & Schuster publishing empire, but I still said yes. "

Artwork by Lilian Obligado.

Until not too long ago the artist was unknown to the mass public.

The book is titled

Animals and their babys,

and it came out in 1961: since then his career would shoot towards success:

50 years of professional life, which lasted until the turn of this century.

Among his most beloved works: one written by his father,

The gaucho boy

(1961) and his

Jock's Island

(1963).

That - the 1960s - was also the most prolific and happy decade in his history, as he admits: “Those were the Madison Avenue years, of big publishing projects, we spent it in

meetings with editors who drank like in the movies. .

Everything seemed possible at that time ”, recalled who would become, sooner rather than later,

one of the best-valued children's book illustrators in the northern country.  

Obliged.

Children's books with their own stamp.

Among his most beloved works: one written by his father,

The gaucho boy

(1961) and his

Jock's Island

(1963).

Another of her last and most precious books was

The Animal Gifts (1994)

, with a text by her husband and father of her children, the Hungarian diplomat Szabolcs de Vajay, with whom she had two children, Cristina and Sigismond.      

A life dedicated to illustration, art, aesthetics, childhood, and an author who is already beginning to be a legend.

Who would ever want to leave the fascinating universe of

Lilian Obligado

?

His cartoons brighten up like happy childhood memories.  

Look.

A life dedicated to illustration, art, aesthetics.

/ Photo Andrés D'Elía

VA / PC  

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