The first book in English on the artist, Maruja Mallo and the Spanish Avant-Garde examines the life and art of a woman sidelined by history and her male counterparts. Out of the misogyny and political conflict of interwar Madrid, Mallo emerges, not as Surrealist muse, but as a vital figure in the flowering of Spain's cultural vanguard. Unprecedented interviews with Mallo's family provide fresh insights into this extraordinary artist.
The first book in English on the artist, Maruja Mallo and the Spanish Avant-Garde examines the life and art of a woman sidelined by history and her male counterparts. Out of the misogyny and political conflict of interwar Madrid, Mallo emerges, not as Surrealist muse, but as a vital figure in the flowering of Spain's cultural vanguard. Unprecedente
The first book in English on Maruja Mallo, this volume is an insightful examination of the life and work of this seminal artist of the Spanish avant-garde. Previously sidelined by a culture that treated women as "insider-outsiders" and by her own mythmaking, Mallo no longer can be viewed as simply a muse to famous counterparts such as Salvador Dal?nd Federico Garc?Lorca; her role has been re-contextualized to demonstrate that she was a driving force in the flowering of Spanish culture through the 1920s and 1930s. The analysis of Mallo's unique life and extraordinary art is set against the complicated social and political backdrop of interwar Madrid. This book highlights the struggle of Mallo and other women artists against the rampant misogyny of both Spanish culture and the avant-garde community of the time. The effects of the Spanish Civil War are also analyzed-in Mallo's case, Franco's victory forced her into exile in South America for almost 30 years, with profound effects on her art and her life. Added to this rich context, the author's numerous interviews with members of the Mallo family provide essential new background material. Maruja Mallo and the Spanish Avant-Garde recasts this artist as a vital figure in the heretofore all-male establishment of the Spanish artistic vanguard.
"The first book in English on Maruja Mallo, this volume is an insightful examination of the life and work of this seminal artist of the Spanish avant-garde. Previously sidelined by a culture that treated women as "insider-outsiders" and by her own mythmaking, Mallo no longer can be viewed as simply a muse to famous counterparts such as Salvador Dali And Federico García Lorca; her role has been re-contextualized to demonstrate that she was a driving force in the flowering of Spanish culture through the 1920s and 1930s. The analysis of Mallo's unique life and extraordinary art is set against the complicated social and political backdrop of interwar Madrid. This book highlights the struggle of Mallo and other women artists against the rampant misogyny of both Spanish culture and the avant-garde community of the time. The effects of the Spanish Civil War are also analyzed-in Mallo's case, Franco's victory forced her into exile in South America for almost 30 years, with profound effects on her art and her life. Added to this rich context, the author's numerous interviews with members of the Mallo family provide essential new background material. Maruja Mallo and the Spanish Avant-Garde recasts this artist as a vital figure in the heretofore all-male establishment of the Spanish artistic vanguard."--Provided by publisher.
This interdisciplinary volume interrogates bodily thinking in avant-garde texts from Spain and Italy during the early twentieth century and their relevance to larger modernist preoccupations with corporeality. It examines the innovative ways Spanish and Italian avant-gardists explored the body as a locus for various aesthetic and sociopolitical considerations and practices. In reimagining the nexus points where the embodied self and world intersect, the texts surveyed in this book not only shed light on issues such as authority, desire, fetishism, gender, patriarchy, politics, religion, sexuality, subjectivity, violence, and war during a period of unprecedented change, but also explore the complexities of aesthetic and epistemic rupture (and continuity) within Spanish and Italian modernisms. Building on contemporary scholarship in Modernist Studies and avant-garde criticism, this volume brings to light numerous cross-cultural touch points between Spain and Italy, and challenges the center/periphery frameworks of European cultural modernism. In linking disciplines, genres, —isms, and geographical spheres, the book provides new lenses through which to explore the narratives of modernist corporeality. Each contribution centers around the question of the body as it was actively being debated through the medium of poetic, literary, and artistic exchange, exploring the body in its materiality and form, in its sociopolitical representation, relation to Self, cultural formation, spatiality, desires, objectification, commercialization, and aesthetic functions. This comparative approach to Spanish and Italian avant-gardism offers readers an expanded view of the intersections of body and text, broadening the conversation in the larger fields of cultural modernism, European Avant-garde Studies, and Comparative Literature.
This book offers a critical reinterpretation of the Spanish avant-garde, focusing on narrative, transculturality, and intermediality. Narrative, because it prioritizes the analysis of prose over poetry, against the traditional use of critical literature on the subject up to this point. Transculturality, because the Spanish avant-garde simply cannot be understood without the acknowledgement of its multi-linguistic reality and the transnational scope of the experience of Modernism in Europe – of which Spain was an integral yet underexposed component. And intermediality, because the interrelations of painting, photography, film, and literature articulate a correlation and mutual affect among different media, creating a rich cultural tapestry that needs to be addressed. Contributors: Rosa Berland, Jennifer Duprey, Marcos Eymar, Regina Galasso, Eduardo Gregori, Juan Herrero-Senés, John McCulloch, Andrés Pérez-Simón, Lynn Purkey, Domingo Ródenas de Moya, Evelyn Scaramella and Antonio Sáez Delgado.
This is the first book in English to examine the development of the avant-garde in Spain during the early twentieth century, across a wide range of cultural media.
Why is the Spanish input to Surrealism so distinctive and strong? What do such renowned figures as Dal , Bu uel, Lorca, Aleixandre and Alberti have in common? This book untangles the issue of Surrealism in Spain by focusing on a consistent feature in Spanish avant-garde poetry, art and film of the late twenties and thirties: its supersaturation in religion. A repressive religious upbringing, typically under the Jesuits, intensifies both the paranoiac and the mystical - Surrealism's twin pillars - which were already deeply ingrained in the Spanish psyche. Striking examples are Lorca's prophetic voice in New York, Dal and Bu uel's Eucharistic transformations, Alberti's Loyolan materio-mysticism. Alberti is the fulcrum of this study since his poetry goes the full distance of Surrealism's evolution from Freudian catharsis to metaphysical transcendence until it expires in a Marxist reaction to church-bound tradition when his nation convulses in civil war, the surrealist ethos in Spain is not reducible to measuring how closely it imitates French theory. It is 'more serious' than the French, says Alberti, and its bearings are found on a cross of mental suffering and in a journey out of hell that made real art in practice. ROBERT HAVARD is Professor of Spanish, University of Wales, Aberystwyth.
The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) pitted conservative forces including the army, the Church, the Falange (fascist party), landowners, and industrial capitalists against the Republic, installed in 1931 and supported by intellectuals, the petite bourgeoisie, many campesinos (farm laborers), and the urban proletariat. Provoking heated passions on both sides, the Civil War soon became an international phenomenon that inspired a number of literary works reflecting the impact of the war on foreign and national writers. While the literature of the period has been the subject of scholarship, women's literary production has not been studied as a body of work in the same way that literature by men has been, and its unique features have not been examined. Addressing this lacuna in literary studies, this volume provides fresh perspectives on well-known women writers, as well as less studied ones, whose works take the Spanish Civil War as a theme. The authors represented in this collection reflect a wide range of political positions. Writers such as Maria Zambrano, Mercè Rodoreda, and Josefina Aldecoa were clearly aligned with the Republic, whereas others, including Mercedes Salisachs and Liberata Masoliver, sympathized with the Nationalists. Most, however, are situated in a more ambiguous political space, although the ethics and character portraits that emerge in their works might suggest Republican sympathies. Taken together, the essays are an important contribution to scholarship on literature inspired by this pivotal point in Spanish history.
