Estudio a Trista

(Forner, Raquel) “Estudio a Trista …”. Gelatin silver print. 1955. 24 x 28 cm. Toned with signs of handling. Signed in ink recto with dedication to the poet Ilka Krupkin(?), manuscript title on verso (artist’s handwriting) with date.

$75

Berta Singerman

Wiltschur & Zanella Foto-Studio. Berta Singerman. Gelatin silver print. São Paulo, 1925. 16 x 12 cm. Surface lightly soiled, a few nicks at edges. Signed and dated recto by Berta Singerman to “Mundo Uruguays” [Mundo Uruguay]. Studio stamp verso and pencil annotation “recitadora argentina”.

Rare early signed publicity photograph of the Argentinian actress and singer Berta Singerman (1901-1998), whose Jewish family emigrated to South America from Russia in her early childhood. Her father founded the first Yiddish theater company in Buenos Aires and she joined the troop by age 10. In the 1920s she developed close friendships within the Argentinian avantgarde and moved in the circles of Storni, Mistral, and Quiroga. In addition to theater and movie roles, she was known for her poetry recitals.

Signed dedication to editors at the Uruguayan cultural magazine, Mundo Uruguay.

$125

Untitled Photograph of Alicia Penalba

Untitled. Vintage gelatin silver print, np, nd. (ca. 1965-1970). Sheet: 29 x 20.5 cm, image: 23 x 21 cm. VG.

Press photo? of Argentinian sculptor Alicia Penalba (1913-1982) at work with assistants. Penalba ran away from her childhood home to escape her domineering father and studied art in Buenos Aires and eventually in Paris, choosing to use her mother’s name professionally rather than her patronym (Pérez).

She found great success in Europe and the US, with monumental public commissions alongside smaller works, jewelry, and decorative objects. She won the Grand Prize at the São Paulo Biennial in 1961, and participated in Documenta II and III. Her 1968 retrospective exposition Totems et tabous. Lam, Matta, Penalba, at Musée d´Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris solidified her status alongside two other recognized masters of Latin American modernism.

$125

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

Diez Maestros

Diez Maestros. Buenos Aires: Plan Cultural de la Manufactura de Tabacos “Particular”, 1935. 18.5 cm, 185 pp.; fore-edges foxed, interior clean; wrapper foxed and stained, edges bumped, spine chipping.

Proceedings of a radio conference held simultaneously in Madrid and Buenos Aires. Commercially sponsored by a tobacco company, the list of participants included José Ortega y Gasset, Victoria Ocampo, Leopoldo Lugones, and Manuel Azaña among others. The volume contains the first published iteration of Ocampo’s dogmatic feminist literary manifesto: La mujer y su expresión. An important item for Ocampo bibliographies and a curious artifact of an industrial manufacturer’s “cultural plan” that brought together “illustrious” hispanic authors, political philosophers, scientists, and poets (many with socialist beliefs).

OCLC lists 2 copies in North America: BYU and Univ. of Victoria.

$125

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.

$950

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.

Collection of 140 Argentinian Women Artists’ Exhibition Announcements and Catalogs

Collection of 140 Argentinian Women Artists’ Exhibition Announcements and Catalogs, 1946-2008.

Substantial collection of illustrated ephemera documenting women artist exhibitions in Argentina (artists primarily identifying as Argentinian, with a few expatriates or Central and South American artists showing in Argentina). Spanning a period of more than 50 years and various stylistic movements, the bulk of the exhibitions date from 1965-1985, an era of increasing participation by women artists in the Buenos Aires art world.

The collection includes numerous examples from vanguard Argentinian gallery programs, including Arthea, Peuser, Rubbers, and Witcomb. With a few notable exceptions (e.g. Julia Codesido, Diana Dowek, Ana Eckell, Magda Frank, Raquel Forner, María Martorell, etc.) the majority of the 100+ artists are relatively unknown to North American collections and institutions; most of the catalogues are seemingly unrecorded in relevant databases. Almost all of the items provide biographical detail with a list of works, many have essays by well-known critics and historians. Taken together they offer a wealth of new information about women artists in Argentina: their art education (often listed as autodidacta); their careers; their artistic processes.

Short-title list provided on request.

$3200

Espejo en Sombra

Bertolé, Emilia. Espejo en Sombra. Buenos Aires: Mercatali, 1927. 16.5 cm, 78 pp.; textblock toned, foxed more noticeably in the first third, a few chips at fore edges; in color pictorial wrappers, with pochoir? illustration by Alfredo Guido, toned, spine chipped with a few small losses, reinforced at head and foot. With extensive manuscript dedication from the author. Limited edition, this copy numbered 606.

The only book published by the Argentinian poet and painter Emilia Bertolé (1896–1949), a member of the acclaimed Anaconda literary group and a close friend to its most famous members, Horacio Quiroga and Alfonsina Storni.

Though she is known more now for her painting, in the 1920s Bertolé’s name was mentioned by contemporary critics along with Storni and Juana de Ibarbourou as Rio de Plata’s greatest young poets. A lack of documentation of her role in this group provides an excellent opportunity for research into her poetry, which shares some of Storni’s emphasis on the modern women (e.g. Bertolé’s recurring image of a woman driving alone in this volume) and eroticism.

The pochoir illustration on the front wrapper is by Argentinian painter Alfredo Guido, who studied with Bertolé at the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes. It is possibly a stylized portrait of Bertolé: Guido’s painted portrait of the poet won the Gold Medal at the XI Salon de Otoño (1927). In the painting, Bertolé is depicted with a light blue veil similar to the one that surrounds the female nude on the cover.

The extensive dedication and some of the poems reference spiritualism and Yogi Ramacharaka: reflecting the prominence of these trends in the Argentinian avantgarde, and, for both Guido and Bertolé, in Ricardo Rojas’s cultural naturalism, which privileged indianismo as a kind of local exoticism/orientalism (Rojas, Eurindia, 1924).

OCLC identifies three holdings in North America: Stonybrook, LOC, and IU.

See: Josefina Delgado. Alfonsina Storni: Una Biografía Esencial. Buenos Aires: Debolsillo, 2011.

$650

La Mujer y su Expresión

Ocampo, Victoria. La Mujer y su Expresión. Buenos Aires: Sur, 1936. First edition. 21.5 cm, 67 pp.; small dampstain at upper fore edge, pages largely unopened; signed and dated by the author in ink to author Alberto Gerchunoff on ffep, with shelf stamp (bookseller’s?) on same page; in orig. green paper wrappers, worn, corners bumped, rear wrapper with small repair and a closed tear at rear hinge.

Signed first edition of a volume containing three of Victoria Ocampo’s first openly feminist essays. Ocampo was one of 20th-century Latin America’s most famous authors and intellectuals. In addition to her own writing, she was the founder and editor of Sur, the avantgarde literary magazine closely associated with Borges and his circle.

The present book Includes the ground-breaking title essay, originally given during a radio broadcast conference in Argentina and Spain, which seeks an autonomous feminine expression or language. Anticipating so many later philosophers, including Cixous, Ocampo described the constraints of “masculine” forms and styles and the futility of trying to write within them. She wrote: “El monólogo del hombre no me alivia ni de mis sufrimientos, ni de mis pensamientos. ¿Por qué he de resignarme a repetirlo? Tengo otra cosa que expresar. Otros sentimientos, otros dolores han destrozado mi vida, otras alegrías la han iluminado desde hace siglos.”

The final essay, “La mujer, sus derechos y sus responsabilidades,” directly addresses the evolving fight for women’s civil rights in Argentina and abroad.

$550

Five Programs from the Inaugural Season of Teatro Colón, Buenos Aires: Amlet, Aurora; et al.

(Opera) (Art Nouveau) Five Programs from the Inaugural Season of Teatro Colón, Buenos Aires: Amlet; Aurora; Don Giovanni; Otello; and Pagliacci / Tristano e Isotta. [Buenos Aires, Argentina]: [Imprenta Tragant], [1908]. Trimmed sizes vary slightly, each approx. 26.5 x 14.3 cm, 23 pp.; illus. throughout from b/w photos of conductors, singers, and composers, and advertisements, some toning throughout, a few small closed tears or chipping, Otello with more substantial wear and losses; stapled color pictorial wrappers illus. by “Benesch,” four with small ink inscriptions on cover identifying the opera. Aurora staples removed.

The original Teatro Colón was closed in 1888 to make way for a modern national opera. The new building took twenty years to complete, and it opened in May, 1908, with a performance of Aida. The highlight of the inaugural season was the world premiere of Hector Panizza’s Aurora, the first “Argentinian” opera, commissioned by the theater. Beloved by Buenos Aires’s audiences, the tenor aria “Alta en el cielo” became the hymn for the Argentine national flag. The present group includes the program for this premiere, conducted by Panizza. It also includes a program for Pagliacci; the featured soprano, Emilia Reussi, was the first Argentine woman to sing at the Colón.

The programs are each printed in 2-4 colors. They include plot synopsis and Art Nouveau advertisements for liquors, interior furnishings, fashions, soaps, perfumes, opera glasses, pianos, Pathé records and phonographs, and modern appliances, including an early domestic vacuum.

Not recorded in OCLC.

$1500

Crónicas, documentos, y otros papeles.

(Art—Medicine) ​Slullitel, Isidoro. Crónicas, documentos, y otros papeles. [Rosario, Argentina]: Self-published, 1971. 8vo, 473 pp.; frontispiece b/w reproduction of a woodcut by Juan Grela; paper toned; pink card wraps, worn and splitting, top edge foxed. Gift inscription on half-title from author to the artist Gyula Kosice.

Slullitel was an orthopedist and art collector whose patronage in Rosario extended to both the visual arts and a literary salon. An uncommon volume of his thoughts about the relationship between medicine, art, and culture, with an important association.

Unrecorded in OCLC.

$175

Tercer Salon Italo: La energia en las artes visuals

Compañía Italo Argentina de Electricidad and Museo de Arte Moderno, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Tercer Salon Italo: La energia en las artes visuals. Exh. Cat. [Buenos Aires]: [La Compañía], 1971. Oblong 8vo, [36] pp.; b/w pls., wrappers lightly worn at extremities.

Catalogue an exhibition of painting and sculpture by Argentinian artists, on the theme of energy.

OCLC locates five copies in North America: Getty, Lib. of Congress, MoMA, Univ. of Texas, and Trenton.

$50

Pedrito Contreras y Juan del Campo

Segui, Pedro. Illustrator. Pedrito Contreras y Juan del Campo. [Argentina]: N.p., [1950]. Oblong 8vo, [16] pp.; color illus. propaganda narrative with one page marked with English; stapled illus. wrapper, colors bright, lightly worn, very good.

Unusual Peronist propaganda illustrated by humorist Pedro Segui. Text defends Peronist nationalization policies from criticisms following rapid inflation and economic isolation.

OCLC lists two holdings: Brown and UMass-Amherst.

$60