Thousands fled to Latin America and to parts of northern Europe, unable to return to Spain for fear of imprisonment, torture, death. Franco’s puritanical, fascist press went to work quickly to minimize or even erase anything he considered threatening to his new regime. A repressive attitude toward women was instituted; thus Argentina, the model of independence and entrepreneurship, the woman of grace, sensuality, subtlety, and popularity, was wiped from the history books (just as the short-lived Spanish Democracy movement was quickly replaced by military rule). By 1975, when Franco died, her reputation had all but evaporated. Spain was desperate to enter the European Economic Community, to become a country that could compete with others and do business with the United States. Like the Escorial, Alfonso XIII’s royal palace, Argentina’s magical portraits of Spain have been ignored, made hollow, translucent, imaginary.
Eight years before, in 1931, King Alfonso, who had so loved the dancing of Argentina, was forced to flee Spain. Primo de Rivera’s anti-monarchical government had successfully, although temporarily, rendered the monarchy powerless. At the same time that Spain was in political transition, Argentina was awarded the French Legion of Honor for her cultural service in representation of her country. One year later, in 1932, following a performance in Madrid, she received the Isabel la Católica, presented to her by the president of the Council of the Second Spanish Republic, Mañuel Azaña.
At the end of 1931, a fond admirer of Argentina’s, the renowned prima ballerina Anna Pavlova, died.29 Pavlova’s death had followed the deaths of Sarah Bernhardt and Isadora Duncan in 1927, and of Loïe Fuller in 1928. By 1929, Diaghilev died in Venice and the Ballets Russes dancers dispersed around the world. One might argue that the loss to Paris of the Russian company was filled by Argentina’s Les Ballets Espagnols. Argentina, as an impresaria, inherited from Diaghilev the position of director of the largest ballet company in Paris. And like the Ballets Russes, Les Ballets Espagnols satisfied the French public as a popular foreign company whose stage designs and dancers appeared exotic and oriental—Indo-European Gypsy and southeast Asian, at once—yet grounded in Spanish ballet technique.
Legacy
Franco’s suppression of the memory and work of Spanish artists associated with the Generations of 1898 and 1927 (that is, any artist involved in the flowering of Spanish modernism) helps to contextualize Argentina’s important association with Spain’s literati prior to 1936. To understand why her work and importance to Spanish culture was obfuscated after the Spanish civil war, one must understand that she was excluded from the history books.30 The Generations of 1898 and 1927, however, whose members included such famous literary figures as Miguel de Unamuno, Ortega y Gasset, Jacinto Benavente, Pío Baroja, Federico Garcia Lorca, María Sierra, and Ramón del Valle Inclán, embraced the same Spanish and Gypsy folk culture that so interested Argentina. The Generation of ’27, having lived through World War I and the Russian Revolution, was far more radical than the Generation of’ 98 who had been fighting mostly against the restraints imposed by the Spanish Catholic clergy. The Generation of ’27 aimed their pens mostly at the monarchy in an attempt to build a parliamentary, electoral government out of the medieval, centralized bureacracy of the Cortes system of the Escorial. Argentina’s performance was symbolic of the nationalist energy of the New School generation; her work further integrated their ideology into Parisian modern art circles. These writers, many of whom wrote reviews, essays, and prose on Spanish dance, used Argentina’s performances as material for their musings. Benavente, Ortega y Gasset, and Valle Inclán, in particular, praised the neonationalist aesthetic of the young Argentina. And in the midst of overwhelming political strife, using her as his muse, Ortega y Gasset wrote his 1922 “Meditations on the Spanish Dance.”
As in the case of Garcia Lorca, one might argue that Argentina’s legacy as a Spanish neoprimitivist, utterly devoted to finding a voice for the Spanish Gypsy, was erased by the neonationalist governmental “reforms” of Spain’s dictator, General Francisco Franco (ruled 1939–75). In his biography Franco, Paul Preston argues that Franco’s effort to root out modernists, liberals, and monarchists—anyone associated with either free thinking or the established church and crown—was jailed or killed during the Spanish civil war. In addition, we know from the records of the sección femenina in Madrid, Franco’s all-female folk dance academy, organized to teach the representative dances of Spain to women, that dance was sanitized by him and used as a form of political propaganda—a fascist-sponsored leisure activity for girls.31 Franco’s attempt to reconstruct a society divorced from its interwar period was successful, of course. The Spanish literati, composers, and visual artists who chose to represent Spain individualistically instead of nationalistically had disappeared by Franco’s death in 1975. It is necessary to place Argentina within that political and social context, as it is impossible to isolate her from the times in which she worked.
Unlike a poet, a composer, or a writer, a dancer loses her place in the minds of her public when her physical body is no longer present. Words reside in pure form as do musical notes, but Argentina’s dancing—like that of Vaslav Nijinsky’s or Anna Pavlova’s—barely captured on a three-and-one-half-minute film sequence, could not hold popular attention for long after her death. This is one reason why she has received so little attention, but there are others.
Although she was loyal to the left, many of Argentina’s friends and patrons came from the upper class, some of whom were not leftists at all, and the Spanish monarchy and upper class were soon obliterated by Franco. Without them, without performance on film, and without the two intellegentsias, the Generations of ’98 and ’27, how could a star of the dance world be remembered? Who was left to write about her? World War II was then fought throughout Europe from 1939 to 1945, and rebuilding war-torn Europe continued until the 1950s. Moreover, as Argentina had died prematurely, she had never taught or opened an academy in Madrid where she could pass on her knowledge and creative principles to the next generation.
Argentina in the Excelsior Restaurant, Madrid, with the Spanish literary vanguard. Argentina seated all the way at the end of the table (center) in the back of the photograph. Banquet dinner, 1928. Members of the intellectual vanguard include Jacinto Benavente, Enrique Fernandez Arbós, Rosario Pino, Ramon del Valle-Inclán, Alvarez Quintero, Ignacio Zuloaga, Mariano Benlliure, and Manuel Machado.
Still, for Spain to have forgotten such a star remains puzzling. Argentina, so bright in her day, is like a candle that burned out as Franco’s forces, armed with German artillery—tanks, guns, and ammunition, with the German Luftwaffe flying overhead—defeated southern Spain, the source of Argentina’s folkloristic stage paintings. As democratic and Republican forces were allied to fight the fascist front, Spain had no time to memorialize its heroes, let alone remember a great and heroic dancer. Spaniards were fighting death and hunger; there was no time to preserve Argentina’s memory and her legacy.
Argentina’s contemporaries—dancers, mostly—remembered her legacy until their deaths in the 1950s and 1960s. But they were not writers. They held no political power, wrote no memoirs, published no articles for the Spanish daily press, the mass-media tools that could serve her memory. To this day, several choreographers at the National Ballet of Spain remember her art and her dancing. But they, too, have no ability to revive her memory or to restage her works, to reconstruct and teach her technique, to begin to train a new generation, to be the theater-makers that Argentina once was.
In costume for Tango Andalou, Madrid, Teatro Español, 3 December 1931.
And, of course, the Gypsies who had danced for her held no power to implement a revival or a retrospective. Although Gypsy men had fought alongside Franco in the civil war, Franco turned against the Gypsies during his conquest of Spain in 1940, regularly imprisoning and torturing them as unwanted travelers in his land. Dancers like Joselito and Ibanez tried to build their own nightclub careers, uninterested in Argentina’s memory. They, too, were Gypsies, and in hiring them, Argentina had associated herself with their subculture. But under Franco, no Spanish patron would back a Gypsy