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.
Lorca's understanding of the nature of traditional ballads-how they were composed, performed, transmitted-shaped his own reinvention of the ballad. This article argues that Lorca wrote with Menéndez ...Pidal's early theories of the Romancero in mind. Therefore Lorca's ballads do not issue from a narrator, strictly speaking, but from a voice that is standing in for a juglar and which I term a textual balladeer. This figure transmits textual fragments (as analysis of the 'Burla de don Pedro a caballo' suggests) which are revived by a balladeer's imposing voice. It is all illusion but, as we see in the 'Romance sonámbulo', Lorca conceives of the ballad as the performance of a powerful voice which can cast such illusions. Therefore, the article examines sound patterning in concert with metre as a way for the textual balladeer to develop voice's agency. Lorca's divided soul, nostalgic for orality but grounded in textuality, is considered.
This article analyzes how Lorca develops the concept of 'duende', finding a crucial missing link in the Elogio de Antonia Mercé, 'la Argentina' (1930). 'Duende' crystallizes around 1929/1930 when the ...poet explicitly takes into account the art of the dancer in performance. Three aspects of performance are singled out and systematically traced through Lorca's evolving reflections on popular art and the struggle of the modern artist to create the new - from his first lecture on the cante jondo in 1922 to the Arquitectura del cante jondo (1930) and finally Juego y teoría del duende (1933). The conclusion is drawn that it is in the performance and reception of a text - whether it is heard or read - that the artist's agonistic stand between tradition and modernity, repetition and singularity, is played out, in an invitation to the listener or reader to celebrate his or her mortality.
The "escuela nueva" was suspicious of old-fashioned diction and clichés about what was poetic; theirs was a style or, rather, an aesthetic, in the process of crystallization; they favored irony about ...love and even a certain skepticism about the innocence of sexual desire (which would have been fostered by an early reading of Freud, whose Interpretation of Dreams was available as early as 1922).
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