![Sample our Area Studies journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5922/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Area-Studies.jpg"})
Abstract
Students of Spain’s historical Avant-Garde remember Ángeles Santos (Port Bou, 1911–Madrid, 2013) as one of its leading female artists and one who earned an early notoriety in 1929 for a large-format oil painting titled Un mundo (housed in the Reina Sofia Museum). None the less, for a combination of reasons—personal crisis, the outbreak and aftermath of the Civil War, the loss of her audience and peers—Santos’ major accomplishments in the pre-war period were largely forgotten. This essay revisits an earlier article on the mythic and feminist dimensions of her work to consider Santos’ productions in the key years of 1929–1930 more fully, in the context of Josep Casamartina i Parassols’ research into the biography of the artist and intellectual influences. Bringing forth new data about her reception in 1929 and 1930, I argue that her aerial perspective of the planet is at once the product of myth and marginalization, marking the female artist’s liminal position vis-à-vis her contemporaries.
Notes
1 Isaac del Vando-Villar & Luis Mosquera, Rompecabezas (Madrid: n.p., 1921), 15.
2 Il Dizionario del Futurismo, ed. Ezio Godoli (Firenze: Vallecchio, 2001). In Spain Ernesto Giménez Caballero claimed that the viewpoint of eagles and airplanes would offset the gloomy view of the tablelands promulgated by the Generation of 1898. See his ‘Paisaje en materia gris’ (from his Julepe de menta [1929]), in Los vanguardistas españoles 1925–1935, selección & comentarios de Ramón Buckley & John Crispin (Madrid: Alianza, 1973), 24–27 (p. 26). Antonio Espina’s narrator in ‘Pájaro pinto’ (1927) observes that after the World War the cheerful bird of popular love song has grown grave as it looks down on a ‘huerto’ with ‘cruces de madera’ (Antonio Espina, Prosa escogida, presentación & selección de Gloria Rey Faraldos [Madrid: Fundación BCSH, 2000], 90–144 [p. 93]). My thanks to John McCulloch for calling my attention to these pertinent references.
3 The daughter of a customs inspector, she lived in various places in Spain, but Valladolid is where she produced her avant-garde work in the late 1920s. For a complete account of her reception, see the essay by Josep Casamartina i Parassols, ‘Un mundo insólito en Valladolid’, in Ángeles Santos, un mundo insólito en Valladolid (Exposición: Museo Patio Herreriano de Arte Contemporáneo Español, Valladolid, del 25 de septiembre de 2003 al 11 de enero de 2004; Residencia de Estudiantes, Madrid, abril y mayo de 2004), ed., con intro., de Josep Casamartina i Parassols (Valladolid: Patio Herreriano, 2003), 13–79. See also his later study Ángeles Santos (Madrid: Fundación Mapfre, 2010), which expands on the earlier text.
4 Enrique Lafuente, ‘Exposiciones: arte otoñal’, La Gaceta Literaria, 68, 15 October 1929, p. 3; Juan de la Encina, ‘Pintura de damas’, La Voz, 16 December 1929, p. 1. Encina mentions among others Marisa Roesset and Maruja Mallo, noting that an all-female salon could be organized. In fact, the first exclusively female salon had been held in Madrid, from 3–13 June, under the auspices of the Heraldo de Madrid, with some eight artists showing work of different tendencies. See ‘Apertura de la exposición de artistas femeninos en el Salón del Heraldo’, Heraldo de Madrid, 4 June 1929, p. 1.
5 Rosa Agenjo Bosch, ‘La pintora Ángeles Santos y su obra anterior a la Guerra Civil española. Catalogación y estudio’, tesis doctoral, 2 vols (Universitat de Barcelona, 1986), I, 22. Lorca and Huidobro visited Ángeles Santos in 1931 while she was living in San Sebastián. For Lorca this would have been his second visit since he seems to have seen Santos when she was working on Un mundo earlier in Valladolid. Ángeles met Jorge Guillén, who was working there as a young professor, and received a visit from Ramón Gómez de la Serna. See also Casamartina i Parassols, Ángeles Santos, 137–38, which follows this chronology.
6 María Alejandra Zanetta, La otra cara de la vanguardia: estudio comparativo de la obra artística de Maruja Mallo, Ángeles Santos y Remedios Varo (Lewiston/Queenston/Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 2006), 116–17.
7 See the monograph by Vinyet Panyella, Ángeles Santos (Barcelona: Indústries Gràfiques Viladot, 1992).
8 Reproductions of this and other works discussed here can be found in the catalogue Ángeles Santos, un mundo insólito en Valladolid, ed. Casamartina i Parassols, and at <http://artevalladolid.blogspot.com.es/2013/11/angeles-santos-torroella-1912-2013.html> (accessed 28 September 2017). Santos also exhibited her Autorretrato (1928) and a large-format painting titled Niñas, which has not been found. In October–November 1929, she held an informal exhibition of her work at the Lyceum Club in Madrid, for which no catalogue was produced. A brief note in El Sol, 27 October 1929, p. 4, states that on the following day (28 October) she would inaugurate a show. The shows generally ran for two weeks.
9 Ramón Gómez de la Serna, ‘Horario’, El Sol, 1 November 1929, p. 1.
10 See Agenjo Bosch, ‘La pintora Ángeles Santos’, I, 122, and Núria Rius Vernet, ‘La pintora Ángeles Santos Torroella’, Duoda, 16 (1999), 177–93.
11 In addition to the interview published in Duoda (see n. 10), see ‘Ángeles Santos’, the interview she gave to Gema Pajares in La Razón (1999), reprinted in the catalogue, Ángeles Santos, Albert Gallery (Madrid: Albert Gallery, 1999), 58.
12 Roberta Ann Quance contextualizes the painting through a discussion of the period’s fascination with matriarchy and the theories of Johann Jakob Bachofen. See ‘Imágenes femeninas, 1929: las “Madres” y Un mundo de Ángeles Santos’, in her Mujer o árbol: mitología y modernidad en el arte y la literatura de nuestro tiempo (Madrid: Ediciones Antonio Machado, 2000), 23–54. The article appeared earlier in La Balsa de la Medusa, 28 (1993), 3–21. See Zanetta, La otra cara de la vanguardia, 125, for discussion of a matriarchal psychology which she argues is relevant.
13 Pajares, ‘Ángeles Santos’, 58.
14 The conference was titled ‘Españolas protagonistas del siglo XX. 8˚ Encuentro Andaluz de Formación Feminista, Baeza, 4–6 de octubre de 2001’ and was organized by the Junta de Andalucía. See Lola Quero, ‘Unas jornadas sobre feminismo homenajean en Baeza a las mujeres españolas “protagonistas del siglo XX” ', El País (edición Andalucía), 4 October 2001, available at <http://elpais.com/diario/2001/10/04/andalucia/1002147747_850215.html> (accessed 7 March 2016).
15 According to the artist, the hospital was a ‘casa de reposo’ whose other inmates were a foreign woman and a few other Spanish women. See Casamartina i Parassols, Ángeles Santos, 94, who does not report the name of the place.
16 I am quoting here and in what follows from the same article in La Gaceta Literaria, 79, 1 April 1930, pp. 1–2.
17 This sentiment may lie behind one of her most enigmatic paintings, Alma que huye de un sueño (1930), reproduced in Casamartina i Parassols, Ángeles Santos, 60, where we see the soul separating from the body, which is split in two and ‘hatching’ a filmy self. The ‘sueño’ being left behind is earthly life with the physical restrictions placed upon bodily existence. A male figure (and a female figure, barely glimpsed), in the upper right-hand corner of the picture, which represents the heavens, reach out to greet the soul. All in all, a traditional Baroque theme.
18 This idea is echoed in excerpts from a letter she wrote to the young journalist Luisa Carnés, included in ‘El magnífico caso de Ángeles Santos’, Crónica, 54, 23 November 1930, p. 15: ‘Ahora que he nacido podré construirme mi vida’; ‘Mi alma será un rascacielos, con un enorme ascensor en el centro. Y sabré llenar ese edificio, y hacerlo vivir y yo seré mi mundo’.
19 On the debates, see Shirley Mangini, Las modernas de Madrid: las grandes intelectuales españolas de la vanguardia (Barcelona: Ediciones Península, 2001). Santos’ remarks can be considered in light of an influential article by George Simmel, ‘Cultura femenina’, which appeared originally in two instalments in Revista de Occidente, 21 (March 1925), 273–301 and 23 (May 1925), 170–99. In an argument that briefly posits the creation of a specifically female as well as male culture, Simmel comes down on the side of pessimism, concluding that the idea of an objective female culture may be a contradiction in terms (197). In the Duoda interview, Ángeles mentions specifically hearing discussion in the Valladolid tertulias she frequented with her father of the Revista de Occidente and the Cahiers d’Art, as well as the poets of the Generation of 1927 (Rius Vernet, ‘La pintora Ángeles Santos Torroella’, 182). For a complete account of the Valladolid ambiance, see Casamartina i Parassols, ‘Un mundo insólito en Valladolid’.
20 Casamartina does not go into the gossip that spread in Gómez de la Serna’s circles, where it was suggested that the older man was pursued by the younger woman. See, for example, Nigel Dennis, ‘Prólogo: el ir y venir de Ramón Gómez de la Serna’, in Ramón Gómez de la Serna, París, ed. & prólogo de Nigel Dennis (Valencia: Pre-Textos, 1986), 13–68 (p. 47). In his Gaceta Literaria article, Gómez de la Serna makes it clear that when he visited Ángeles, her father accompanied her, as convention decreed. Yet Ramón hinted in his autobiography that an unhappy young woman—who ‘anhelaba de amor’— had possibly tried to take her own life when he failed to answer one of her letters. See Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Automoribundia, 1888–1948 (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1948), 521.
21 Carnés, ‘El magnífico caso de Ángeles Santos’, 15.
22 This was typical on the part of a new generation who wrote this desire into their work or depicted the fascination with the mapa mundi. See, for example, Concha Méndez Cuesta, Canciones de mar y tierra [with illustrations by Norah Borges] (Buenos Aires: n.p., 1930).
23 See, for example, Prospettive di volo (1926) by Fedele Azari, a student of futurist Fortunato Depero.
24 Carl Gustav Jung & Charles Kerényi, Introduction à l’essence de la mythologie, trans. Henri E. Del Medico, 4ère ed. (Paris: Petite Bibliothèque de Payot, 1951), 242, 223 (discussed in Quance, ‘Imágenes femeninas, 1929’, 36, 43). The first edition in German, Einführung in das Wesen der Mythologie, appeared in 1941.
25 Olvido García Valdés has devoted a poem to this painting in her book Y todos estábamos vivos (2001–2005) (Barcelona: Tusquets, 2006), 97. Agenjo Bosch had described the painting in these terms as well: ‘Son seres que carecen de los sentidos de la vista y del oído, es decir, no poseen orejas y tienen los párpados cerrados’ (‘La pintora Ángeles Santos’, I, 121).
26 Quance, ‘Imágenes femeninas, 1929’, 34. According to a well-known etymology, the term mystic derives ultimately from the Greek muo, to have the eyes or lips closed, in allusion to the fact that anyone who had partaken of the early mystery religions was enjoined to remain silent. See F. C. Happold, Mysticism: A Study and Anthology (London: Penguin Books, 1963), 18. The doctrine of the music of the spheres was formulated by Pythagoras, who thought that the music made by the sun and moon and other heavenly bodies in motion, could not be heard by earthly ears. Thus Fray Luis de León claims that the (blind) organist Salinas’ music is so exquisite that it transports the soul to ‘la más alta esfera’. See ‘Oda a Francisco de Salinas’, in Fray Luis de León, Poesías, estudio, texto crítico, bibliografía & comentario de Oreste Macri (Barcelona: Editorial Crítica, 1982), 207–08 (l. 17, p. 208).
27 Gómez de la Serna, ‘La genial pintora’, 1.
28 See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, trans., with a commentary, by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), 124, for the triple aspect of the Mothers. Nietzsche claims that ‘by the mystical triumphant cry of Dionysus the spell of individuation is broken and the way lies open to the Mothers of Being, to the innermost heart of things’ (99). He opposes this wisdom to the way of Apollo.
29 See José Roviralta Borrell, Fausto (Barcelona: Imp. Editorial Catalana, 1920). Rafael Martínez Nadal’s testimony regarding Lorca is in his Cuatro lecciones sobre Federico García Lorca (Madrid: Cátedra/Fundación Juan March, 1980), 82.
30 See Agenjo Bosch, ‘La pintora Ángeles Santos’, I, 134. The scholar completed her dissertation on Santos in 1986 under the direction of the artist’s brother, the well-known scholar Rafael Santos Torroella. According to Agenjo Bosch, the detail about ‘Juan’ was according to the artist’s own testimony. It would seem that either Ángeles Santos did not remember this in later interviews or that she was never asked about it. Santos Torroella confirmed the first three names in a 1975 article, ‘El surrealismo en Cataluña’, reprinted in Francisco Rivas et al., Ángeles Santos, Cuadernos Guadalimar 28 (Madrid: Guadalimar, 1987), 14–15 (p. 14).
31 Harold Jantz, The Mothers in Faust: The Myth of Time and Creativity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U. P., 1969), 37.
32 See Amparo Hurtado, ‘Biografía de una generación: las escritoras del noventa y ocho’, in Breve historia feminista de la literatura española (en lengua castellana, catalana, gallega y vasca), coord. Myriam Díaz-Diocaretz & Iris M. Zavala, intro. de Rosa Rossi, 6 vols (Barcelona: Anthropos, 1993–2000), V (1998), La literatura escrita por la mujer: desde el siglo XIX hasta la actualidad, 139–54. Hurtado notes that Spain lagged behind other European countries and the United States in developing asociacionismo among women (143–44).
33 Matriarchy raised psychological ghosts amongst men. See Quance, ‘Imágenes femeninas, 1929’ for discussion of the reception of early twentieth-century theories of matriarchy and the origin of the family.
34 The Church’s opposition to the Lyceum Club has been studied in some detail. See Concha Fagoaga, La voz y el voto de las mujeres en España (1877–1931) (Barcelona: Icaria, 1985). The broader picture is drawn in Shirley Mangini, ‘El Lyceum Club de Madrid: un refugio feminista en una capital hostil’, Asparkía. Investigació Feminista, 17 (2006), 125–40.
35 Manuel García Morente, ‘El espíritu filosófico y la feminidad’, Revista de Occidente, 69 (March 1929), 289–306. This is the text of a lecture delivered at the Lyceum Club on 2 March 1929. Morente writes: ‘No es fantástica, a mi entender, la profecía de un próximo matriarcado o gobierno de las mujeres … ’ (304).
36 This conflation was noted by M. J. Rodríguez Carnero, ‘El dibujo infantil’, Maina, 1 (1980), 28–29.
37 See José Pijoan, Summa Artis. Historia general del arte, 69 vols (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1931–2001), I (1931) and VI (1934).
38 The findings are discussed in Juan Cabré, El arte rupestre en España (regiones septentrional y oriental) (Madrid: Museo de Ciencias Naturales, 1915). The famous paintings at El Cogul in Catalonia seemed to represent women dancing around a male beast and were satirized in a series of anti-feminist and anti-Republican articles written by Ernesto Giménez Caballero shortly after the declaration of the Republic. See Ernesto Giménez Caballero, ‘La feminidad en mi República’, La Gaceta Literaria, 73, 1 January 1930, p. 13, and his ‘Las mujeres de Cogul’, La Gaceta Literaria, 119, 1 December 1931, p. 5.
39 Zanetta has noted the androgynous dress of the dome-dwellers (and of the Mothers in Un mundo) as well as the feminine symbolism of their round houses, which she links to the symbol of the egg (conspicuous in the dreamlike image of Niña durmiendo, 1929). She reads La tierra as a re-writing of the myth of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden. See La otra cara de la vanguardia, 133.
40 ‘Arrojóme las naranjillas / con los ramos del blanco açar, / arrojómelas y arrojéselas / y bolviómelas a arrojar’, No. 1622 A, in Margit Frenk, Corpus de la antigua lírica popular hispánica (siglos XV a XVII) (Madrid: Castalia, 1987).
41 Ana Capella Molas, ‘L’acollida de l’obra dels Santos Torroella a les terres gironines’, in ‘Dossier: els Germans Santos Torroella’, Revista de Girona, 270 (2012), 106–09 (p. 108), available at <http://www.revistadegirona.cat> (accessed 10 June 2018).
42 Rafael Santos Torroella, ‘Angelita (Recuerdo)’, in Ángeles Santos, un mundo insólito en Valladolid, ed. Casamartina i Parassols, 262–63 (p. 262), an article originally published in 1967.
43 Luis Carandell, Madrid (Madrid: Alianza, 1995), 72–73.
44 John Dos Passos, Journeys between Wars (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1938), 311.
45 That is, the Antiguo Café y Botillería de Pombo, which was located in Madrid on the Calle de Carretas, 4, near the Plaza del Sol. It became famous for the tertulias over which Ramón Gómez de la Serna presided on Saturday evenings.
46 Detailed in an extract on Solana in Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Antología: cincuenta años de literatura, selección & prólogo de Guillermo de Torre (Buenos Aires: Losada, 1955), 236–38.
47 Guillermo Díaz Plaja, ‘Feminidad 1930’, in his Vanguardismo y protesta en la España de hace medio siglo, prólogo de José-Carlos Mainer (Barcelona: José Batlló, 1975), 66–68 (p. 66).
48 One of her earliest critics, Fernando de Cossío, noted that her paintings were all ‘como soñados’ and that they availed of a particularly cinematographic lighting (Fernando de Cossío, ‘En el Ateneo. La exposición de Angelita Santos’, El Norte de Castilla, 13 April 1929; cited in Casamartina i Parassols, ‘Un mundo insólito en Valladolid’, 30).
49 As noted in Hurtado, ´Biografía de una generación’. Zanetta emphasizes the female artist’s need to heal a traditional rift between mother and daughter, seeking affirmation in a group of female peers (La otra cara de la vanguardia, 139).
50 Casamartina i Parassols, Ángeles Santos, 95. If Santos had indeed been in a hospital and not a ‘casa de reposo’, it is helpful to know that electroshock was not administered to mental patients until much later in the 1930s, according to Alicia Duro Sánchez et al., ‘Tratamientos en la psiquiatría del siglo XX’, en Colegio Oficial de Enfermería de Madrid, 13 May 2014, available at <http://www.codem.es/Adjuntos/CODEM/Documentos/Informaciones/Publico/9e8140e2-cec7-4df7-8af9-8843320f05ea/3fea1ea3-5c50-4957-abaf-a1a4cd038e91/88ae5efb-1d7d-4c9e-8354-ca2d48cb4f51/88ae5efb-1d7d-4c9e-8354-ca2d48cb4f51.pdf> (accessed 10 January 2016). I have also benefitted from Isabel Julián Quiroga’s knowledge of the mental health sector (conversation 20 April 2016).
51 See Casamartina i Parassols, Ángeles Santos, 94–96, 107–08. After a ‘consejo familiar’ (107), Ángeles’ family, says Casamartina, managed to ‘romper el hilo que la reunía al vanguardismo’ (108). Gómez de la Serna denounced the family publicly in print in his Gaceta Literaria piece and protested against the girl being sent to a ‘sanatorio’ or ‘manicomio’. He contextualized the act by comparing it to the social hostility and difficult relations other young artists faced, such as Salvador Dalí or Tina Modotti (Gómez de la Serna, ‘La genial pintora’, 1–2).
52 Zanetta, La otra cara de la vanguardia, 117.
53 She won glowing praise for her ‘virtuosismo’. See Juan de la Encina, ‘De arte. Décimo Salón de Otoño’, La Voz, 25 October 1930, p. 1.
54 A point made by Casamartina i Parassols, ‘Un mundo insólito en Valladolid’, 61–63. Santos sent paintings to Copenhagen and Pittsburgh in 1931, to the Venice Biennale in 1932 and the Jeu de Paume in 1936.
55 This despite the fact that young Catalan modernizers such as Guillermo Díaz-Plaja and Joaquim Nubiola (who maintained a brief correspondence with Santos) had nothing but admiration for her more radical Castilian work. For a summary of her reception, see Casamartina i Parassols, Ángeles Santos, 109–14.
56 Perhaps a work titled Persona abierta, reported in Casamartina i Parassols, ‘Un mundo insólito en Valladolid’, 59, and Ángeles Santos, 84. In it a young girl sitting at the dinner table is embraced by a skeleton (a dark Baroque theme). Casamartina i Parassols (Ángeles Santos, 111) argues that the destruction of her dark paintings was part and parcel of an effort to convince herself that she could be the happy person her husband portrayed over and over again in his portraits of her.
57 Conversation with author (Baeza, 2001).
58 Rius Vernet, ‘La pintora Ángeles Santos Torroella’, 187.
59 Conversation with author (Baeza, 2001).
60 The implication was that women’s different view of reality would justify their entrance into ‘culture’ as opposed to their accomplishments in the home and affective spheres. A suspicious question if it implied, as Simmel tends to assume, that women had not contributed previously to culture. See George Simmel, ‘Female Culture’, in On Women, Sexuality, and Love, trans., ed. & intro. by Guy Oakes (New Haven: Yale U. P., 1984), 65–101. For the essay in Spanish, see note 19.
61 ‘Es muy diferente la cabeza de la mujer que la del hombre. Mi obra es sólo la que pueden hacer las mujeres’ (‘Textos de Ángeles Santos’, Mirador, 122, 4 June 1931, n.p.). These comments were excerpted from her correspondence with Joaquim Nubiola, a member of the editorial board of Butlletí de l’Agrupament de l’Art, a journal based in Lleida favourable to Surrealism.
62 Discussed in 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, available at <https://www.raco.cat/index.php/Aurora/article/viewFile/268573/356162> (accessed 24 May 2018).
63 This has been broached in Roberta Ann Quance, ‘Maruja Mallo and the Interest in Children’s Art during the Second Spanish Republic’, BHS, XC:7 (2013), 803–18.
64 Victor Shklovsky developed the concept in 1917, arguably responding to the Avant-Garde’s challenges to nineteenth-century art. See his essay ‘Art As Technique’, in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, trans., with an intro., by Lee T. Lemon & Marion J. Reis (Lincoln, NE: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1965), 5–24.
65 It was in the light of what Ángeles Santos had accomplished that he hailed the art of another young woman. See Ramón Gómez de la Serna, ‘Gaceta Catalana: a propósito de la pintora Montserrat Casanova’, La Gaceta Literaria, 95, 1 December 1930, p. 4.
* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.