mother was a première danseuse at Madrid’s Teatro Real, and her father was its principal ballet master. She was trained by him from age four, joined the company at age nine, and was appointed première danseuse at age eleven. In 1910, after a long trip through southern Spain with her mother, where Argentina began to study flamenco dance and Gypsy life with Sevillian Gypsy women, Argentina went to live in France where she would make her home, her career, and her life. Argentina’s modernism was shaped by three colossal forces: Paris and its avant-garde art world, Spain’s Gypsy past, and European Romantic neoprimitivism.
Paris in 1910 was the center of the modern art world with a European and American émigré population of artists. Georges Clemenceau, president of France, commented that the future rests always with the avant-garde. The cubist legacy of Paul Cézanne and the coloristic ideas of Henri Matisse had radicalized young artists of all genres into believing that the old-fashioned academy no longer held the answer—the formula—to making “good” art; high art. One could actually be self-taught, and young artists, like Salvador Dalí, were discovering that their own personal ideas—highly influenced by Sigmund Freud’s theories of the unconscious mind in the dream state—could provide the modus operandi and inspiration for an entire painting, or an entire ballet.
A young Argentina posing in Spanish dress, 1920s, Paris.
From Paris and from her world tours, Argentina’s lifelong correspondence with the Spanish vanguard—Manuel de Falla, Federico Garcia Lorca, Enrique Granados, Néstor de la Torre, Joaquín Nín, and Gregorio Martínez Sierra and María Sierra—establishes her importance to modernist Spanish art, both in Paris and worldwide, from the second decade of the twentieth century until her death on 18 July 1936. Alongside and in collaboration with such outstanding artists, Argentina also transformed the Spanish arts of the period. Her collaborations with numerous Spanish composers, painters, writers, and poets secure her importance as an artistic force in Spanish cultural history.1
Argentina’s career coincided with a particularly volatile moment in Spain’s history. With radical syndicalism and incipient revolution on the horizon, women were politically restrained by Spanish law and social mores, limited in movement, and in their right to express themselves as they desired. Paris, by comparison, was a serene city in which to work, more liberating for a woman living and working alone, and Argentina found a home there in 1921. It was in Paris that Gertrude Stein and her brothers Leo and Michael would provide a salon and showcase for Matisse, Picasso, and many other modernists, mainly Spanish and French, who were also interested in theatrical design. Although industrially polluted and heavily populated, Paris was a beautiful city that provided a certain anonymity. And, by virtue of its artists, its exiled and émigré populations from World War I, its café culture, its theatrical traditions, and its audiences, it was appealing to a young artist seeking a place in which to realize herself.
Flamenco as Modern Art
For Spaniards, flocking from the conservative and Catholic atmosphere of turn-of-the-century Madrid, Paris became a haven for the exploration of their radical ideas. In Paris, their dismissal of historical portraiture and their adoption of an austerely Spanish cubism would speak not only of and to Spaniards, but become, in the hands of a Picasso or an Argentina, a universal language of modern art. Who best to describe the Spanish aesthetic credo but its greatest supporter, the American aesthetician Gertrude Stein, who lived in Paris and encouraged the latest trends in the arts?
Stein believed that the “new” art of composition that was created in Paris arose solely from the exodus of Spanish artists—Julio Gonzalez, Picasso’s teacher, Pablo Picasso, Juan Grís, and Joan Miró—to France in the early twentieth century. For Stein, the “instinctive tragedy” and the stark compositions of synthetic cubists like Picasso and Grís was a Spanish phenomenon. “Americans can understand Spaniards,” wrote Stein in her autobiography of 1925. And “cubism” as created and executed by Spaniards “is a purely Spanish conception; only Spaniards can be cubists.”2 That commentary may be a bit limited, but as the main supporter and collector of early cubist work, Stein was relating not only to the “insistent iconography”—the object as subject—of a painting, but also to the primary feeling of the composition. Stein once referred to Picasso’s “passion and sexuality, directed wholly toward his painting.” By this, she meant his Spanish persona and his Spanish-informed genius.3 Further, the words “insistent” and “passionate” also reveal a violent and angry temperament—the Spanish persona about which Stein wrote. A parallel will be drawn between the intensity of Picasso’s brushstrokes and the fury associated with flamenco footwork as choreographed and performed by La Argentina in her most mature works of cubist design.
When Argentina came to dance on the French stage; she could not help being influenced by Picasso and his fellow cubist, Georges Braque. At the 1925 Spanish Pavilion for the Exposition des Arts Décoratifs, where she danced, she was bound to have encountered Juan Grís, a fellow Madrileño whose painting The Green Cloth hung in the Nouveau pavilion. Indeed, this very pavilion was designed by Le Corbusier, an architect whose work might have reminded her of the Catalonian structures built by Antonio Gaudi (1852–1926). Argentina would become what Stein felt Grís was: “A Spaniard who combines perfection with transubstantiation,” a painter whose “very great attraction and love for French culture” made him a compelling artist.4
Although Argentina missed the 1905, 1907, and 1909 Salon des Indépendants and Salon d’Automne, she was most likely captivated by Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), his still lifes with guitars (1907–14), and Grís’s Flowers (1914). She was a discriminating woman, a woman of taste, who saw everything, inhaled everything, and then used what she liked as material for her own work. Inspired by both French and Spanish design, as she was by Diaghilev’s, Nijinsky’s, and Massine’s theater, Argentina broke with traditional Spanish ballet. Although she was the soloist, she was no longer always at the center of the composition: at times, her set designer’s looming scenery would be tipping toward the stage, absorbing the dancer’s violent footwork just as Picasso’s decomposed compositions flattened his figures through violent brush strokes, removing hieratic and hierarchic significance from the composition and imposing a more evenly distributed (or disruptive) sense of disproportion, disunity, and disorganization. Second, these Spanish cubists’ break with what Stein called “the evil nineteenth century” breathed a neoprimitivist aesthetic. For example, Picasso’s use of a pre-Roman Iberian mask for his portrait of Gertrude Stein and his use of Yoruba masks for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, although a cultural theft on his part, might well have provided Argentina with the idea of looking into Gypsy culture, an oriental culture that lived in hiding within Spain itself.
Just as Picasso would use the Iberian mask for Stein’s face to re-invent his subject, objectifying her so that he could capture her colossal will and extraordinary single-mindedness, Argentina would use Gypsy rhythm as the sole signifier and accompaniment, the principal choreographic and musical agent throughout an entire ballet (for example, La vida breve). The idea of rhythm for Argentina—and for the Gypsies—like the unspecific look of the mask for Picasso, allowed the aesthetic of the ballet to become more important than the dancing bodies themselves. As Argentina’s choreography and taste for scenic design improved and matured, the semiotics of her late ballets like Sonatina and El contrabandista not only subsumed the composition; they became its genesis. Just as Picasso used—and stole—the African mask from its original context, translating its masklike exterior into a new formal vocabulary which he then reconfigured, out of Argentina’s use of the flamenco rhythm, accompanied by Manuel de Falla’s use of ancient Jewish liturgical chant, the saeta antigua, would emerge a modern, cubist composition in which bodies were no longer bodies but the objects of sound.
Argentina and Les Ballets Espagnols in Scene 1 from Triana, Opéra-Comique, 27 May 1929.
Like Picasso, Argentina began to draw on the decorative