Otoño Imperdonable

Walsh, María Elena. Otoño Imperdonable. Buenos Aires: [Imp. Ferrari], 1947. First edition. 20.5 cm, 78 pp.; interior evenly toned, wrapper bumped and a bit faded, separating at internal hinge. Signed dedication from the author to the poet and tango critic/historian León Benarós, dated 31-7-1947.

María Elena Walsh (1930-2011) was a nationally beloved Argentinian poet, singer, and composer. Walsh published her first book of poetry at the age of 17. These adolescent verses, reissued numerous times over the next 30 years, were praised by a remarkable list of literary greats including Pablo Neruda, Juana de Ibarbourou, and Juan Ramón Jimenez. Following a trip in 1948 to Paris, she began her musical career, forming the group “Leda & María” with her romantic partner Leda Valladares. The two women toured extensively in Europe before Walsh returned to live in Argentina in 1956.

Much of her later poetry and music was written for children, including a number of anti-dictatorship and anti-censorship songs. She lived openly with her partner, the photographer Sara Facio, from 1978 until her death in 2011.

OCLC records 3 holdings in North America.

$750

Cocktail

Guerrico, Silvia. Cocktail (Para el atardecer de un sábado inglés): Cuentos Breves. Buenos Aires: Editorial Tor, 1932. First edition. 18.5 cm, 157 pp.; textblock toned with foxing, stories followed by five pages of publicity and press blurbs about Guerrico and an index. Color wrapper with illustration by Luis Macaya (1888-1953), older glue repairs to spine. With signed manuscript dedication from the author to Mané Bernardo on half-title, and a newspaper clipping with a photograph of the author, accompanied by a second handwritten note from Guerrico to Bernardo, both laid in. Note reads “A Mane Bernardo, amiga muy querida, en el atardecer de este sábado inglés en que la alegría de todas hizo editar un segundo cocktail. Cariñosamente. Silvia.” Together with a signed copy of: Guerrico, Silvia. Los príncipes azules. Montevideo: Rossi, 1927. First edition. 20 cm, 139, [5] pp.; in color illus. glued wrapper, illustration by Mario Castellanos. Losses to wrappers, spine, and interior chipped and toned. Reading copy only. Signed dedication by the author on half-title to the poet Fermín Estrella Gutiérrez.

Important association copies of early short stories by radio star Silvia Guerrico (Uruguay, 1905-1983), whose daily program in Buenos Aires became one of the most popular primetime shows in Rio Plata during the medium’s golden-age. Guerrico began her career as a theater critic in Montevideo, where she published Los príncipes azules (Prince charmings) when she was just 22. The collection was well-received by her contemporaries, including Juana de Ibarborou and Blanca Luz Brum. Brum wrote that “since she lives her life touching the painful and burning things, she could very well be a ‘little Russian’ in our literature [otherwise] prostituted by pornography and gauchismo.” (From publicity blurb in Cocktail, p. 157.)

Guerrico moved to Buenos Aires in 1928, where she shifted back and forth between print (incl. a regular newspaper column) and the radio, starting her own “magazine” program in late 1930. This quickly evolved into a daily broadcast called Cartel sonoro featuring many of her own poems and radio plays. Cartel sonoro was part of a wider effort to attract female audiences and consumers to variety shows and narrative programming. By the age of twenty-seven, Guerrico’s program had become a primetime success and an important platform for other women journalists and writers.

Despite her popularity, she was regularly criticized for the “vulgarity” and “femininity” of her on-air persona. Her rise corresponded to a new era of celebrity in Argentinian radio, and the government was just catching up to conservative concerns about the immorality of radio programming and modern music (particularly tango). It was during this period that she wrote the stories in Cocktail, which, like Los Principes Azules, depict modern women drinking and dancing and men who exploit and violate them. In Guerrico’s telling, the only exceptions to this dynamic are men and women of strong moral character brave enough to stand up for themselves. Guerrico’s playful dedication of Cocktail to her “dear friend” the lesbian puppeteer Mané Bernando conjures an intimate world of artist party-going on the “English Saturday”, i.e. the newly created legal right to a half-day off on Saturdays.

The cover illustration of Cocktail reflects the place tango had come to occupy in the Argentinian popular imagination. Associated in the 1930s with violence, the lower classes, and urban areas where prostitution was legal, the racist components of the image were part of the public association of tango with Afro-Argentinian traditions (“tango” and “tambo” were probably initially used to refer to musical gatherings of enslaved people in the Rio Plata).

Rare despite Guerrico’s fame: two copies listed by WorldCat for Cocktail; approx. 6 for Los príncipes. None in modern sales records.

SOLD

Further historical notes on Guerrico and censorship against women:

In 1933, shortly after Cocktail’s publication, Argentina passed laws to limit political speech on the radio and censor tango lyrics. In the spring of 1934, Guerrico interviewed Mexican film star Ramon Navarro for the evening news. Apologizing for recent poor reviews of his local performances, she offered him an impassioned defense that was the start of what became known as the “Guerrico affair”:

“I am going to say to you [...] what women would [say] if nobody was listening, if the mocking gaze of men did not weigh upon them, injuring and humiliating them. . . . Women love you, and there isn’t one who would not [like to say] thank you [...]. For an hour, from whatever movie screen in the world, you have …. erased all realities . . . there were no women who worked like dogs and had to marry some pimple-faced guy; there were no women who waited for the rough kiss of a dirty husband; there were no women overloaded with sadness and children. . . . Men have made life very difficult for women. And day-by-day, they make it uglier.”

Despite the seemingly low-stakes context of a radio interview, the speech’s implications about women’s desire, fantasy, and social silence surrounding their ordinary suffering was incendiary. The radio press called for government investigations. They questioned Guerrico’s qualifications, and women’s more generally, to speak. When she was not immediately fired they criticized her for having dared to “speak for Argentinian women” and described her as a “true threat to the tranquility of the radio listener.” One aggrieved reviewer wrote that Guerrico had proved “women and a microphone are incompatible.” Later that year, there was an executive degree with strict radio regulations to curb offensive content, a move that mirrored the new Hollywood industry guidelines known as the Hays Code. Eventually Guerrico was fired.

She found her way again with a more conservative radio program in the mid-1940s but went into exile after Perón’s election in 1946. After a number of years in Mexico, she eventually settled back in Uruguay.

Cited:

Ehrick, Christine. Radio and the Gendered Soundscape: Women and Broadcasting in Argentina and Uruguay, 1930-1950. United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp. 33-69.

Cuentos para Mari-Sol

Brunet, Marta. Maria Valencia, Illus. Cuentos para Mari-Sol. Santiago de Chile: Zig Zag, nd. (1938?). First edition. 25.2 cm, 49, [1], pp.; letterpress? with four-color halftone title page and five four-color halftone plates, additional in-text color halftone illus. throughout; each of the seven stories beginning with a historiated initial “R” (“Resulta que…”); the page numbers with changing ornamental surrounds corresponding to the different stories. Text block clean and uniformly toned, colors bright with some ghosting/bleedthrough from the inking of the color illustrations. Orig. stapled card stock boards, rebacked, with orig. color illustrated wrapper, stained and reinforced at edges and spine where there were small losses, Brunet/Valencia “ex-libris” design on the rear wrapper.

First edition of the beloved mid-century Chilean children’s book, Cuentos para Mari-Sol. Authored by the award-winning novelist Marta Brunet (1897-1967) and the only edition with exuberant color illustrations by Maria Valencia, one of four participants in the groundbreaking neocubist Exposición de Diciembre (often described as the first abstract art exhibition in Chile). Known from a single other copy, at the Biblioteca Nacional de Chile (BNC), the first edition seems to have been rarely consulted by most Brunet bibliographers, who do not fully differentiate it from all subsequent editions. One of the seven stories appearing in the first edition is missing from all others, and the second edition, published approximately 25-30 years later, was much enlarged, including an additional thirteen stories (Los Cuentos de Mama Tolita) written many years after the original Cuentos para Mari-Sol.

Brunet was a feminist novelist, one of the earliest Latin American women writers who were not “simply displaying the ways in which women have been subordinated and excluded from the conventional social contract” but actually imagining “alternative social arrangements not based on fixed gender identities or conventional gender roles.” She was deeply involved in the Chilean suffrage movement, and her writing “violated in particular the limits of a rigidly class-based society, attacking ‘good customs’ (...) The demand for boldness in the behavior of women linked to the rise of the suffrage movement included above all the use of language.”

Both Brunet and Valencia had traveled to Europe in the 1910s and 1920s and were known for their participation in avant-garde intellectual circles there and in Chile, Argentina, and Venezuela. In addition to their involvement in the suffrage movement, they were also involved in Chilenidad and Americanismo, which prioritized local and indigenous references and expressions. Gabriela Mistral wrote of Brunet: “se ha amamantado de chilenidad. Chilenidad de paisaje, de acento, de costumbre, de carácter.” Cuentos de Mari-Sol is an example of Brunet’s early, rural chilenidad: familiar tropes of children’s folktales placed in a Chilean context (e.g. a protagonist condor; and the landscapes of Chile, rather than Europe). After Mistral, Brunet was the second woman to receive the National Prize for Literature, in 1961.

We offer the approximate date of 1938 for this edition because Valencia’s distinctive cover image is visible in a famous photograph taken of Brunet in that year (photograph in the collection of the BNC). Various bibliographies offer different dates, ranging from 1934 in Marting’s Spanish American Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographic Source Book, to 1941 by the BNC.

$3500

Works cited:

Mistral, Gabriela. “Sobre Marta Brunet.” El Mercurio. July 8, 1929.

Oyarzún, Kemy. “Género y canon: la escritura de Marta Brunet.” Revista de la facultad de filosofía y humanidades, Universidad de Chile. No. 14. 2000.

Pignatello Regenstreif, Ellen G. Power, sexuality and the new social contract: Five twentieth century Latin American novels. Diss., Stanford University, 1994.

Traços biographicos da heroína brasileira Jovita Alves Feitosa ...

[Feitosa, Jovita Alves]. Traços biographicos da heroína brasileira Jovita Alves Feitosa, ex-sargento do 20 corpo de voluntários do Piauhy, natural do Ceará, por um Fluminense. Rio de Janeiro: Typ. Imparcial de Brito & Irmão, 1865. 14.6 cm, 44 pp.; litho frontispiece portrait of Feitosa, with foxing to same and title page, rest lightly toned; later cloth over decorated boards, spine worn at foot, orig. front wrapper bound in.

At 17, Jovita Alves Feitosa disguised herself as a man and enlisted in the Brazilian army to fight in the Paraguayan War. She cut her hair and bound her breasts, but was discovered before being deployed. The patriotism of her efforts was acknowledged by provincial authorities who allowed her to continue in the army as a uniformed second sergeant. When her volunteer corps reached Rio de Janeiro, her story became a sensation and was seized upon by propagandists to increase recruitment for the war. Despite this acclaim, the Minister of War refused her petition to proceed to the battlefront. Denied her goal, Jovita remained in Rio where she continued to be used as a symbol of Brazilian bravery until her sudden death in 1867, aged 19. Contemporary newspapers described it as a suicide.

This volume was published shortly after her arrival to Rio in September 1865 and includes a long poem celebrating her honor and bravery. It is the first biography of the national war heroine known today as simply “Jovita.”

Two North American holdings recorded in OCLC: Stony Brook and UCLA.

HOLD

1a Exposició de Cartells [...] Internacionals en Previsió dels Accidents de Treball

(Graphic Design) (Worker Safety) (Expositions) Generalitat de Catalunya, Conselleria de Treball; and Marti Bas, Illus. Calendar commemorating the 1a Exposició de Cartells Nacionals i Internacionals en Previsió dels Accidents de Treball. Barcelona: 1937. 23.5 x 16.6 cm; 52 weekly calendar sheets printed recto, each sheet illustrating a different international worker safety poster with explanations of the dangers represented in each, in Catalan. Sheets loose, neatly removed from their original perforated(?) binding, the final week mounted to a heavier card stock, weeks 43 and 46 with small losses to blind top edge where removed from binding. Orig. color cover present, illus. by Marti Bas, lightly foxed on blank verso, not affecting recto. Together with a second calendar: Generalitat de Catalunya, Conselleria de Treball. [Croada de La Previsio 1937]: [Commemoració de la 1a Exposició de Cartells Nacionals i Internacionals en Previsió dels Accidents de Treball…]. Barcelona: 1937. [Fotolitografia Barguño]. 11.4 x 7.7 cm. [8] pp., single sheet, tri-fold monthly calendar with 14 illus. Both VG+.

Appealing, otherwise unrecorded, artifacts of a graphic design exhibition organized during the Spanish Civil War by the Catalonian Ministry of Labor, probably in conjunction with the UGT (General Workers Union). The weekly calendar surveys 52 dramatic, often frightening, international accident prevention posters (incl. the workplace dangers of alcohol, electrical shocks; eye safety; braking; cranes, ladders, fire, slips and falls, heavy lifting, cables, scaffoldings, scalding, sharp tools, sewing machines, etc.). Examples drawn from safety campaigns in Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Japan, The Netherlands, Norway, Poland, and the U.K. (Strange bedfellows given the political realities of many of these countries in January 1937!)

The safety posters themselves were probably the product of union efforts in individual countries, not necessarily by governmental organizations or propaganda offices. They underscore the dangerous and inhumane conditions that many laborers faced twenty years after the creation of the ILO in the Treaty of Versailles (1919). Occupational health and safety policy would not be nationally regulated in most of these countries for another thirty to forty years.

Cover illustration by artist Marti Bas, known for his work on other civil war-era posters and propaganda programs.

We are unable to find records of another copy of the weekly calendar in OCLC or market records, such as they are. The smaller, monthly calendar is known from other examples, but is also not listed in OCLC holdings.

$1750

Skema. Mensile fotografico d’attualità. (All published).

Skema. Mensile fotografico d’attualità. Anno I, No. 1 (November 1969) through Anno VI, No. 12 (December 1974) (all published). Bologna: [ALFA Farmaceutici], 1969-1974.

Comprising a complete run of a rare Italian photographic serial with poster-sized color inserts designed and distributed in association with ALFA Farmaceutici. Monographic issues cover social, cultural, or political themes relevant to this tumultuous period in world history; each introduced by famous Italian public intellectuals, journalists, politicians, scientists, artists, and writers. Including Umberto Eco, Federico Fellini, Gianni Agnelli, and Gillo Dorfles.

Skema was a forum for unmediated photographic storytelling loosely modeled on the anti-realist movement Gruppo 63. In the first issue the editors state “ideas will be directly and freely provided by images: a medium that suffers from fewer alterations.” Echoing some of the experimentalist manifestos of Il Verri, Skema’s editors criticized the perceived transparency of language, freeing meaning to be made instead in the mind of the “viewer.” “Words will remain at the bottom,” with captions and textual interpretation only where world events “most deeply dug a furrow, or a wound, on the crust of common beliefs.”

The eye-catching covers, unusual photographic spreads, and striking color inserts were the responsibility of designer Marco Caroli. Together with editor Franco Vanni, they created a unique visual language juxtaposing international photojournalism, modern infographics, and quotable short form essays in a section called “di parere.”

Topical issues included protest movements, drugs, feminism, avantgarde theater, and Vietnam. But many were also dedicated to scientific and economic aspects of the difficult period that followed Italy’s “economic miracle”: hunger, prisons, agriculture, space, housing, the elderly, divorce, computers, mafia, circus, ecology, China, Latin America, propaganda, anthropology, and a few on single artists or philosophers: Irinia Ionesco, Ghitta Carell, Pablo Picasso, Diderot, and Galileo; among the photojournalism are press photos of installation art, Pop, and assemblage by artists including Wolf Vostell, Andy Warhol, and Ed Kienholz.

The scarcity of complete runs and bibliographic study has led to confusion about Skema’s origins. It is not, as it is often described, a progressive publication with independent social criticism. Instead, it is a deft work of appropriation: produced by Alfa as a promotional tool for its medical and biotech clientele. Skema’s inventive design and forward-looking reporting were a creative and subtle advertisement that was discontinued when production became too expensive. We speculate that Skema was the brainchild of Alfa’s founder, Marino Golinelli, listed in early issues as a member of the editorial board. Later Golinelli became an important collector of contemporary art and a celebrated philanthropist supporting projects in education, arts, and the sciences.

These experimental artistic attitudes were brought to bear on the cataclysmic socio-economic changes affecting lived realities in Italy and abroad. In the case of Skema, they reflect an increased demand for cultural consumption from a new Italian middle class, and the growing sophistication of bourgeois taste.

Scarce. OCLC finds one complete run at the University of Rome. A few scattered issues recorded in British, European, and North American holdings (UCSD and UCLA).

$4500

62 numbers in 58 fascicules, plus two supplements (to Anno III, no. 2 and Anno V, no. 10), Issues range from 60-74 pp., early issues almost exclusively illustrated, reproducing b/w photographs from Italian and international press agencies, including ANSA, Farabola, Publifoto, Keystone, Liverani, Lehtikuva, UPI, and AP among many. Later issues with up to 20 pp. of text on orange newsprint. About 30 issues with color inserts or advertisements offered as a “manifesto” or “regalo una stampa a colori,” some in poster format (unfolded: 22 ½ x 15 ¾ in.), others small bound-in half-page pamphlets, or full-page vintage Fiat ads. Some toning as expected, illustrated wrappers somewhat rubbed, scattered creasing and rounding at corners. Many stamped internally “Omaggi ALFA Farmaceutici [...]” Small loss to front wrap of Anno. I, No. 1. Lacking five inserts or advertisements as follows: Anno II, Nos. 4 and 13; Anno III, No. 7; Anno IV, No. 3; and Anno V, no. 12.

Nineteen Press Photographs of Havana Riots, President Céspedes, and La Pentarquía

(Cuba) Nineteen Press Photographs of Havana Riots, President Céspedes, and La Pentarquía, 1933. Vintage silver prints, trimmed to various sizes, most close to 16.5 x 11.5 cm. Sixteen with typed English captions pasted verso, all with Vidal (Madrid) stamps, some with editing pencil marks, also verso. Lightly worn, three groups of prints (4, 2, and 2) taped together by a contemporary newspaper editor for layout. Overall VG.

Dramatic photographs taken during the first “Cuban crisis” of August-September 1933, including the Havana strikes and riots that led to the resignation and exile of President Gerardo Machado, the formation of a provisional government under President Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, and the subsequent coup d’etat that led to the latter’s removal and the establishment of the Pentarchy coalition.

The majority are focused on looting and violence in front of the Presidential Palace and the offices of El Heraldo newspaper in August 1933. Two captions identify members of the ABC resistance and other student organizations that fought against Machado and “El Porra,” the regime’s secret police.

Several other images show the Céspedes cabinet and moments from during the Sergeant’s Revolt in which it was overthrown. The constitutional crisis began decades of political instability and US interference, leading directly to the Batista dictatorship and eventually, to the Cuban Revolution.

No photographer identified but the captions were supplied by a US news organization. Stamps identify a Spanish agency founded by José Vidal.

$950

Sous la jupe: illustré

Maindouce, G. Sous la jupe: illustré. Paris: Les Éditions du Couvre-Feu, n.d. [ca. 1933-1935]. 8vo, 115 pp.; erotic fiction illustrated with 28 b/w pls., most printed recto, some also verso; in orig. wrapper with color d.j., d.j. beginning to split at spine, edges worn, else very good. D.j. with misprint “Nombreuses illustrations sujestives” [sic] described by Pia.

Éditions Couvre-Feu was one of a number of imprints founded by Léon [a.k.a. Victor?] Vidal under the larger umbrella of his erotic publishing and fashion group, Société des Éditions Gauloises. Couvre-Feu specialized in pseudonymous fetish, sadomasochist, and bondage literature; illustrated with fetish photography by Studio Biederer and from the archives of Vidal’s other business, the lingerie company Diana-Slip, whose catalogue included anonymous fetish images by Brassaï, Kertesz, and Roger Schall.

Several editions bearing the title “Sous la jupe” were issued by Couvre-Feu between 1933-1935. They differ considerably from this rather avant-garde example and priority has not been convincingly established: one was unillustrated, another included extracts of several erotic stories with only scattered illustrations, a third was a promotional list of erotic publications, and an English variation was issued by Éditions Richepanse in 1935. Nevertheless, it is possible to match some of the “detourned” images in this artistic edition to others by the Studio Biederer and from the Diana-Slip catalogues.

Though recorded in Pia, P., Livres de l’Enfer, this version and d.j. seemingly uncommon, OCLC locates no holdings of this edition in North America.

$450

Aire. No. 1 (Junio 1937) through No. 4 (Primavera 1938) (all published)

Aire. No. 1 (Junio 1937) through No. 4 (Primavera 1938) (all published). Barcelona: N.p., 1937-1938. 4to, 12-1/2 x 9-3/8 in., four issues: [48], [72], [74], [76] pp.; full-page illustrations throughout, incl. b/w reproductions, experimental typography and design, numerous multicolored printing techniques, with overlays and varied papers, corners bumped with a few creases and scattered toning to interior, No. 1 with a small loss to blank edge on two leaves not affecting text or images. No. 4 with small dampstain to blank fore corner on a few central leaves. Spiral-bound color pictorial wraps, No. 1 with short closed tear to front wrap, Nos. 2 and 4 a bit foxed and worn at the edges and wire.

A complete run of “one of the most luxurious and visually dynamic publications of the [Spanish Civil] war.” This short-lived avant-garde aviation serial was published during the war under the direction of the Republican Air Force. The contents are antifascist and literary, promoting solidarity with the Popular Front, the USSR, and Mexico. Wartime aviation news is interspersed with articles on artistic and cultural topics, poetry, photo essays, and advertisements. The first issue’s somber and poetic epigraph belies the exuberant graphics: “Al hombre le nacieron alas … Cuando conquisto el cielo, quiso destruir la tierra.”

Artist Salvador Ortiga, known for his political graphics, was responsible for the dramatic covers and probably much of the design. Ortiga was arrested at the end of the war and died in a notorious Nationalist prison camp in 1939.

An oft-cited highlight of Guerra Civil print culture, rare complete. OCLC lists three North American holdings: UI-UC, UPenn, and Princeton.

See Jordan Mendelson, Revistas y Guerra, 1936-1939, Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid, 2007.

$2500

Collection of 31 photographs of Chilean modern dance pioneer Andrée Haas

[Modern Dance] [Chile]. Collection of 31 photographs of Chilean modern dance pioneer Andrée Haas. Comprised of 21 medium format prints: each trimmed to approx. 9 x 6-1/2 in.; and nine other prints: seven approx. 5 x 7 in. and two smaller; together with an undated playbill for a Andrée Haas performance at the Teatro Municipal, Santiago de Chile: 12-3/4 x 9-1/8 in. Fourteen of the photographs by Ignacio Hochhäusler, identified by recto ink signatures and/or studio stamps verso; six by Georges [Jorge] Sauré, signed in ink recto. Most good with light rubbing or toning, some with adhesive or adhered paper verso, a few edge worn, two with small losses at edge. Santiago de Chile: ca. 1930-1940.

Early modern dance in Chile was influenced greatly by the Swiss dancer Andrée Haas (1908-1981), a student of Émile-Jaques Dalcroze and founder of the first modern dance program at the University of Chile in 1928. Along with her colleague Elsa Martin, who studied with Mary Wigman, Haas taught new approaches to dance influenced by modern music, psychoanalysis, and personal expression.

Haas included coursework in gymnastics, eurhythmics, free dancing, choreography, pantomime, and other techniques drawn from Dalcroze, Wigman, and Rudolf Laban. As the only modern dance teacher in Chile until the late 1930s, her classes were the principal origin for most of the first generation of Chilean modern ballet dancers, including Malucha Solarí. Her program and many well-reviewed performances in Santiago during the 1930s have been described as a critical element of the explosion in public appetite for avantgarde arts in Chile during this period. These performances came well before Kurt Joos’s South American tour in 1940, often described, perhaps unjustly, as the seminal moment in Chilean modern dance history.

This group of photographs documents the expressive and gestural movement that Haas popularized in Chile. Many of the prints are by Georges [Jorge] Sauré and Ignacio Hochhäusler, both well-known portraitists of Chilean artists and intelligentsia.

Most of the images are identifiable as Haas, ca. 1930, from a similar image in the catalogue of the Salon des Independientes, 1931. A few photos somewhat later, two group photographs, and two headshots of other performers, probably Elsa Martin.

See María José Cifuentes, Historia Social de la Danza en Chile (Santiago: LOM Ediciones, 2007); Andrée Haas, “La Escuela de Danza del Instituto de Extension Musical,” Revista Musical Chilena, Año I, No. 7-8 (1945): 19-26; Eduardo Lira Espejo, “La Danza Sintesis Expresiva,” Revista de Arte Vol. 3, No. 13 (1937): 22-26; and Yolanda Montecino de Aguirre, “El ballet nacional chileno: perspectiva histórica y humana,” Revista Musical Chilena, Año 16, No. 80 (1962): 9-30.

$2250

COLLECTION OF PROPAGANDA PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE SECCIÓN FEMENINA

40 silver gelatin prints: 36 approx. 5 x 7”, near fine, all stamped verso identifying two SS-PK photographers, [Bruno] Wisniewski and Ege, some with a “Sachregister” stamp and numbered pencil annotations verso; 3 smaller, approx. 3 x 4”, good; one 4 x 6” mounted to toned card, rubbed with a few scratches.

The Sección Femenina [SF] was officially recognized by General Franco following the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939. Its mandate was to organize and educate women to be full participants in the reconstruction of the nation according to Falangist/fascist principles. To this end the SF had to reconcile politically conservative and religious (Catholic) doctrine with the modern social realities of the 1940s. It found itself in the awkward position of arguing strongly for the higher education of women and girls while rejecting “feminist intellectualism”. Similarly, it had to promote the ideal woman at home while providing a model for women whose membership in the workforce was an economic necessity.

The model of ideal femininity central to this mission had to be flexible enough to contain these contradictions. The photos in this collection exemplify this elastic image of womanhood, depicting SF leaders and members engaged in the wide variety of activities promoted by the organization. These include history and music classes, field hockey, cooking, sewing, childcare, and patriotic events. As a group they reflect the inherent ambivalence of the SF: an independent and powerful network of educated women that offered its members “an unusual level of public activism, both professionally and politically”, while preaching traditional ideology.

The Nazi Waffen-SS Propagandakopanien (SS-PK) was formed in 1938 to provide wartime propaganda to domestic German audiences. SS-PK photographers were embedded in armed divisions and diplomatic corps; these photos of the Sección Femenina were probably taken between October 1940 (when Hitler and Franco met in southern Spain) and late 1941, when relations between the two countries deteriorated as it became clear Spain would not officially enter the war. The names of the two photographers appear in other SS-PK records.

$2250

NEW LIST

GRAPH BOOKS: PRINTED MATTER FROM RADICAL ART AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS.
FEMINIST HISTORIANS OF MATERIAL CULTURE.

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GRAPH BOOKS: PRINTED MATTER FROM RADICAL ART AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS. FEMINIST HISTORIANS OF MATERIAL CULTURE.

Otoño Imperdonable

Cocktail

Cantar Juvenil. Año I, Núm. 2-3

Cuentos para Mari-Sol

Traços biographicos da heroína brasileira Jovita Alves Feitosa ...

Eight Spanish Republican Women’s Groups’ Handbills and Flyers

1a Exposició de Cartells [...] Internacionals en Previsió dels Accidents de Treball

Skema. Mensile fotografico d’attualità. (All published).

Twenty-One Egyptian and Syrian Tourist Guides, Pamphlets, and Ephemera

Nineteen Press Photographs of Havana Riots, President Céspedes, and La Pentarquía

El Ĉina fotografia arto: kompilita de la redakcio de “Ĉina Fotografio.”

Grand Torneo Internazionale di Lotte Feminili al Salone Margherita