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Abstract
While male artists dominated the Avant-Garde movement in Paris, Barcelona and Madrid in the first third of the twentieth century, women began to make their mark simultaneously. In Spain artists such as Remedios Varo, Maruja Mallo, the Argentinian Norah Borges, Ángeles Santos and María Blanchard, as well as several female artists working outside Spain such as Raquel Forner and Leonora Carrington, because of their experiences as outsiders, searched for the absolute, for transcendence through their art. In general, the originality and the ultimate success of these artists were derived from a heavy dose of what Freud labelled das Unheimliche, the uncanny, the ineffable, the dreamlike qualities which result from the subversion of reality and the unwitting inspiration to transgress the boundaries of the male establishment.
Notes
1 Shirley Mangini, Maruja Mallo and the Spanish Avant-Garde (Farnham/Burlington: Ashgate, 2010), 51, n. 26.
2 By the 1930s, women joined their male contemporaries with more ease; they began to participate in, or at least attend, the tertulias that had been exclusively populated by males. Regarding general background on the Spanish Avant-Garde, see Vicente Aranda, El surrealismo español (Barcelona: Editorial Lumen 1981); Juan Manuel Bonet, Diccionario de las vanguardias en España, 1907–1936 (Madrid: Alianza, 1995); Luis Buñuel, Mi último suspiro, trad. Ana María de la Fuente (Barcelona: Plaza y Janés, 1987 [1ª ed. 1982]); Companion to Spanish Surrealism, ed. Robert Havard (Woodbridge/Rochester, NY: Tamesis, 2004); Guillermo de Torre, Historia de las literaturas de vanguardia (Madrid: Ediciones Guadarrama, 1965); Manifiestos, proclamas, panfletos y textos doctrinales: las vanguardias artísticas en España (1910–1935), ed. Jaime Brihuega (Madrid: Cátedra, 1979); Surrealism and Spain, 1920–1936, ed. C. B. Morris (London: Cambridge U. P., 1972); Renato Poggioli, Teoría del arte de vanguardia, trad. Rosa Chacel (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1964); and Harald Wentzlaff-Eggebert, Las vanguardias literarias en España: bibliografía y antología crítica (Madrid: Iberoamericana/Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert, 1999).
3 For further information on women and the Spanish Avant-Garde, see Shirley Mangini, Las modernas de Madrid: las grandes intelectuales españolas de la vanguardia (Barcelona: Ediciones Península, 2001).
4 See Mangini, Maruja Mallo, 23–24.
5 They also had a sojourn in Seville in 1919–1920, when Norah contributed to the avant-garde journal Grecia. See the article by Francisca Lladó (‘Una isla a su medida: Norah Borges y la práctica de la vanguardia desde Mallorca’) in this issue on the subject of her illustrations published in these journals.
6 On the plight of the young women who managed to pass through the iron doors of San Fernando, see Mangini, Maruja Mallo, 28–29.
7 We recall that, as Mallo explained, Dalí had labelled her ‘half angel, half shellfish’, symbolic of the hybridity with which Mallo negotiated her role on the phallocentric avant-garde circuit (quoted in Mangini, Maruja Mallo, 33).
8 There were various other female artists who studied at San Fernando during the avant-garde period, such as Delhy Tejero, Francis (‘Pitti’) Bartolozzi, Victorina Durán, Margarita Manso and Marisa Roësset Velasco. But they did not achieve the fame that Mallo and, later, Varo did.
9 Quoted in Beatriz Varo, Remedios Varo: en el centro del microcosmos (México D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1990), 59.
10 We should note that Varo is the one of the few female avant-garde artists whose visual language included the fragmentation of the female body, which was typical of the surrealists working in France. And, it should be noted, that her incursion into this theme was mostly done in collaboration with male artists. Nevertheless, in some of Mallo’s early lithographs from the Estampas series, the subject of female fragmentation is evident. It should also be noted that Mallo’s staged photographs of herself, taken by her brother, also suggest female mutilation and transgenderism. See Shirley Mangini, ‘The Gendered Body Politic of Maruja Mallo’, in Modernism and the Avant-Garde Body in Spain and Italy, ed. Nicolás Fernández-Medina & Maria Truglio (New York: Routledge, 2016), 156–62.
11 Quoted in Josep Casamartina i Parassols, Ángeles Santos, un mundo insólito en Valladolid (Valladolid: Patio Herreriano, 2004), 37.
12 See Casamartina i Parassols, Ángeles Santos, 58–60.
13 Quoted in Casamartina i Parassols, Ángeles Santos, 46.
14 Quoted in Mangini, Maruja Mallo, 107.
15 Fernando Huici & Estrella de Diego, Fuera de orden: mujeres de la vanguardia española—María Blanchard, Norah Borges, Maruja Mallo, Olga Sacharoff, Ángeles Santos, Remedios Varo [exhibition catalogue] (Madrid: Fundación Cultural MAPFRE VIDA, 1999). Included are Blanchard, Borges, Mallo, Sacharoff, Santos and Varo. It should be noted that Sacharoff is not dealt with in this issue. See the exhibition catalogue, Olga Sacharoff: pintura, poesia, emancipació: del 25 de novembre de 2017 al 2 d’abril de 2018, coord. Elina Norandi (Girona: Museu d’Art de Girona/Generalitat de Cataluña et al., 2017).
16 Elena Laurenzi explains the influence of Max Scheler and Georg Simmel on Spanish male intellectuals (especially on Ortega and his Revista de Occidente group). She describes their philosophies: that men were the ‘hacedor[es] de la cultura’ and that women were pure ‘soul’, ‘emotion’ and ‘nature’ (Elena Laurenzi, ‘Desenmascarar la complementariedad de los sexos: María Zambrano y Rosa Chacel frente al debate en la Revista de Occidente’, Aurora, 13 [2012], 18–29 [p. 19]). Therefore, we can assume, according to these thinkers, that women had been instructed that they were not capable of abstract thought.
17 Ángeles Santos quoted in Mangini, Maruja Mallo, 13.
18 While Santos had opted out by becoming that ‘domestic’ being that she eschewed as a youth, another artist, the sculptor Marga Gil Röesset, after destroying her works with a hammer, chose suicide at the age of twenty-four. Coincidentally, both artists had been inspired by the poetry of Juan Ramón Jiménez. See Nuria Capdevila-Argüelles, Artistas y precursoras: un siglo de autoras Roësset (1882–1995) (Madrid: Horas y Horas, 2006), 71–113.
19 For example, McCarthy wisely emphasizes that the taboo subject of sexuality in her painting El marinero y la sirena—symbolized by the hybrid woman-fish—was done after she was married, which made the work more acceptable. On this subject, see Roberta Quance, ‘Las sirenas de Norah Borges: el sexo inocente’, Boletín de la Fundación Federico García Lorca, 35–36 (2005), 96–114.
20 As Zanetta points out, those who knew Mallo found her hermetic gibberish entertaining and welcomed her back as one of the most important vanguardistas of the 1920s and ’30s, while recognizing that she was no longer interested in concrete reality.
21 This brings to mind Mallo’s series, Naturalezas vivas in which flowers are shaped to suggest vulnerable female sexual organs ripe for penetration.
22 It should be mentioned that Mallo’s quest for the ineffable to replace Catholic teachings, began while she was in France in the early thirties while studying esoterica. When she fled Spain, she travelled around South America in search of life’s meaning through indigenous religions. By the 1950s, she became mentally unstable and had an obsessive need for affirmation. Subsequently, her friends began to avoid her and she lost most of the support system she had acquired in Buenos Aires. Varo’s situation was quite different; she had of course gone through the horrors of two wars, escaping Barcelona for Paris during the Spanish Civil War, then fleeing Paris and going into exile in Mexico City during World War II. But in Mexico she found the solidarity she needed in her close friendship and collaboration with Carrington, her lover, French poet Benjamin Péret, and with all the others who congregated at her home, and at the homes of both Gurdjieff and Paalen, to discuss art and the spiritual life. Finally, her relationship with Walter Grüen, who supported her financially and artistically, was definitive for her art.
23 See the catalogues of these exhibitions: Josep Casamartina i Parassols, Ángeles Santos, un mundo insólito en Valladolid; Maruja Mallo, ed. Juan Pérez de Ayala & Fernando Huici (Madrid: Sociedad Estatal de Conmemoraciones Culturales, 2009). A documentary film on Mallo, directed by Antón Reixa, Mitad ángel. Mitad marisco, was produced by Filmanova for the Sociedad Estatal de Conmemoraciones Culturales and the Ministerio de Cultura, 2009, as part of the exhibition.
24 The collection of essays Remedios Varo: caminos del conocimiento, la creación y el exilio, ed. María José González Madrid & Rosa Rius Gatell (Madrid: Entelequia, 2013) was a product of these conferences.
25 See the exhibition catalogue Blanchard (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2012).
26 See the catalogue of the exhibition produced by Ana Vázquez de Parga: Istmos. Vanguardias españolas 1915–1936 (Madrid: Turner Libros, 1998).
* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.