BOGOTÁ, Colombia, Dec. 11 - Débora Arango, a prolific artist who at first repelled socially conservative Colombia with stark paintings of nudes and social conflict but who was later celebrated as one of the country's most inventive, daring artists, died on Dec. 4 [Sunday, Dec. 4, 2005] at her rambling colonial home outside Medellín. She was 98.
Her death was confirmed by a great-nephew, Pedro Miguel Estrada.
In a career that began nearly 80 years ago and lasted until late in life, Ms. Arango produced countless works that often depicted the hurdles and indignities she found in being a woman in a strict Roman Catholic country. She made dramatic paintings of prostitutes, which shocked midcentury sensibilities, and one of a woman giving birth in prison.
Though a product of a traditional, affluent family from the Antioquia province of Colombia, Ms. Arango produced work that pushed the bounds of decorum, vividly touching on delicate and troubling subjects like Colombia's political violence, poverty and brutality. In her work, she depicted a 1950's-era Colombian dictator, Gen. Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, as a toad, and portrayed a military junta as five monkeys wrapped in Colombia's flag.
Ms. Arango always pushed boundaries, even as a young girl. In a favorite story, she talked about how she wore pants to ride horses, unheard of in her time, and about how her father permitted her to drive the family car.
"In those times in Medellín, there were three women who drove: a foreigner, the daughter of a trucker and me," she said.
One of 12 children, Ms. Arango first studied art at 13 at the rigid Catholic school she attended in Medellín and later at the city's Instituto de Bellas Artes. In 1935, she began working with Pedro Nel Gómez, a well-known artist who painted murals that portrayed the powerful and influential of Colombian society.
Despite living amid anti-reform movements, Ms. Arango began to capture social issues in her work, as well as the female body, which she often depicted as corpulent and wrinkled.
Ms. Arango first caused a public stir in 1939 when she exhibited in Antioquia with established male artists. In 1940, after an exhibition in Bogotá, the newspaper El Siglo said of her works, "They constitute a true attack against the culture and artistic tradition of our capital city." Ms. Arango's work also came under assault in Spain in 1955, when the dictator Francisco Franco closed an exhibition of her paintings.
Ms. Arango, like the better-known Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, was inspired by the muralist movement of Mexico, which captured Latin America's roiling history in epic proportions. She never became a muralist, but she did paint large, trying to hammer her message with broad, thick brushstrokes. Her subjects inhabited the seamy side of small-town life: drunken men leaving a bar, a woman roughed up by policemen, an emaciated child in a mother's arms.
"She did it with brazen language," Fernando Botero, Colombia's most renowned artist, said of Ms. Arango's message in a telephone interview from his studio in Paris. "She was not preoccupied with aesthetics. What was central was expressing herself."
Her paintings also tackled subjects that in an isolated, provincial country in the 1940's and 50's were best left alone. What she saw as hypocrisy in the church became an important subject for her. In one famous painting, Ms. Arango portrayed a group of nuns circling a caged bird, a cardinal. In another, a boxcar is filled with bodies, a reminder of the relentless political violence that has marked Colombia for decades. Ms. Arango often focused on race and poverty, as well as on corrupt leaders.
"She was capable of condemning," said Alberto Sierra, curator of the Museum of Antioquia in Medellín and an expert on Ms. Arango's work. "Politically, Débora was a voice of protest as things were unfolding. A lot of artists wait and portray events after they happened."
As Colombia opened itself up to the world and produced celebrated artists like Mr. Botero and writers like Gabriel García Márquez, Ms. Arango's work eventually found acceptance and critical acclaim.
Though her art has been exhibited in Madrid and the United States, Ms. Arango never sought fame and was reluctant to have her paintings shown. Still, in Colombia art books feature her work, and the Museum of Modern Art in Medellín boasts of the 233 pieces she donated in 1986.
In old age, she continued to work, her paintings climbing the walls of her beloved house in the town of Envigado. She delighted in having visitors, surprising them with her sharp wit.
When one asked her about her relationships with men, whom Ms. Arango's art often portrayed in a less-than-positive light, she said, "Men never thought much of me, and I never thought much of them, either."
Her diminishing skills forced her to give up painting in the last year or two of her life. In 2003, shortly before receiving the Cruz de Boyacá, Colombia's most important honor, she recognized the inevitable.
"There is so much to paint, but the tears come to my eyes and I
cannot do it like I would like," she said. "I was very bold, but you
start to wear down with the years."