Maria Fuentealba

Montecino, Sergio, Intro. Maria Fuentealba. Exh. cat., Instituto de Extensión De Artes Plásticas de la Universidad de Chile. Santiago de Chile: Imprenta Londres, nd. [1964]. Square 16 cm, [10] pp. followed by [7] b/w plates; stapled wrappers with reproduction of sculpture verso, wrapper a bit rubbed with light wear, interior VG+. Photos by Luis Ladrón de Guevara (1926-2015)?

The only? exhibition catalogue documenting the work of mid-century Chilean sculptor Maria Fuentealaba (1914-1963). Fuentealba was a professor of sculpture with a promising career when she died in 1963 at the age of 49. She exhibited and won prizes at annual national salons, and at the first Bienal do Museu de Arte Moderna, in São Paulo, in 1951. Her work is in the Collection of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago. The booklet is a posthumous celebration of her work with an essay by artist and critic Sergio Montecino.

OCLC records one copy at the Biblioteca Nacional de Chile (listed twice), none in North America.

$125

Magdalena y Aurora Mira

Carvacho Herrera, Victor. Magdalena y Aurora Mira. Santiago de Chile: np, 1953. 26.5 cm, 22, [1], pp.; booklet toned, followed by 14 b/w plates from photographs by Rene Combeau mounted to card with captions identifying the location of the work, in addition to the normal data; plates loose, in orig. paper wrapper with portrait tipped-in, wrapper worn and splitting, old repair on verso not visible recto. Edition limited to 100 copies, this copy no. 95. Extra-illustrated?

The earliest monographic study of the Chilean painters Magdalena (1859-1930) and Aurora (1863-1939) Mira, published to coincide with a privately organized exhibition of their work in their family house in Santiago.

The sisters were from a socially prominent family; their father was an artist who helped them gain admittance to the Chilean Painting Academy. Magdalena and Aurora were two of the first women to study painting in Chile at the national academy, and their skill was recognized during their lifetimes with a number of medals at national salons in the 1880s and 1890s. Despite these early successes, both women ultimately prioritized domestic lives and rarely exhibited after 1895. Their story is emblematic of the changing opportunities and limits faced by upper class Chilean women in the late 19th century.

This midcentury study is an important object of the history of their reception in Chile. Now celebrated in Chile as “pioneering” women artists, the next major monograph of their work, Magdalena y Aurora Mira: Pioneras del Arte Femenino, was not published until 2013.

OCLC finds two copies of the portfolio, at UConn and Biblioteca Nacional de Chile, both local catalogs reference 10 plates. The present copy has 14.

$550

Cantar Juvenil. Año I, Núm. 2-3

Juventudes Comunistas de Chile. Cantar Juvenil. Año I, Núm. 2-3. Santiago de Chile: np, 1975. Approx. 22 cm, 4; 12 pp.; mimeographed poems on folded sheets, somewhat toned, in color silkscreen wrappers (year and number added by hand in ink), colors bright, num. 3 with ghost of recto on verso where they were presumably stacked after printing. Núm. 2 with two versions of the orig. 4 pp. folded sheet, changes have been made to the mimeo stencil. Together with a duplicate of num. 3, incomplete.

The Communist Party of Chile (PCCh) was outlawed in 1973, following the deposition of the Allende government in the coup d’etat by Augusto Pinochet. This clandestine poetry serial was published by the youth wing of the party: poems are signed with pseudonyms unless they are by recognized poets, i.e. Pablo Neruda (a PCCh member before his controversial death in 1973). The third issue with more ideological text (quotes from Hegel, Stendahl, and Deznos [sic], etc.).

Pagination and folding are irregular. The distinctive wrappers with artifacts of their handmade production (i.e. ink smears). Cover image of Victor Jara’s guitar?

Unlikely survivors. No records in OCLC.

$550

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.

La Hora de Queda: Novelas Cortas

[Echeverría Bello, Inés]. Iris. La Hora de Queda: Novelas Cortas. Santiago: Imprenta Universitaria, 1918. First edition. 19 cm, 223 pp.; signed manuscript dedication from the author to “mi amigo Mario …” on ffep, brittle paper chipped and toned, in pictorial wrapper with nouveau cover design by Laureano Guevara Romero, soiled, with small water stain verso, spine repaired with losses.

Inés Echeverría Bello (1868-1949) was a Chilean author who published under the pseudonym “Iris”. This collection of six short stories was her fifth book. Literary critic Elvira Santa Cruz Ossa (1886-1960) reviewed La Hora de Queda psuedoymously in Zig Zag. She praised the stories, deeply influenced by the spiritualist movement, for their description of the “repetitive and confined” life of the upper class woman, in which “neither ‘freedom of thought’ nor the ‘right to reason for themselves’ were present.” Santa Cruz Ossa also wrote that this monotony revealed the urgency of progressive (feminist) ideas: “[existía un] abismo entre aquel ambiente femenino de la ‘Hora de queda’ y el de la hora presente”, “abismo que comienza a llenarse con el sacrificio de algunas, con la valentía de muchas, con la rebelión callada y vibrante de todas… Abismo que va llenándole el heroísmo de las que enarbolan el estandarte de ideas progresistas en medio del escarnio de timoratos y retrógrados.”

Echeverría Bello is generally acknowledged as one of Chile’s early feminists, for her work founding the women’s intellectual salons, The Reading Club and The Ladies Club, and for her passionate advocacy against domestic violence following the murder of her daughter Rebeca by Rebeca’s husband, Roberto Barceló (1934).

Cited: [Santa Cruz Ossa, Elvira]. Roxane. “Al margen de la hora de queda”. Zig-Zag. Número 699, Santiago, 13 de julio de 1918.

$275

Apóstrofes: Revista de la Escuela de Periodismo Universidad Católica. Año I, No. 1–No. 3

[Chile] [Student Movement] Apóstrofes: Revista de la Escuela de Periodismo Universidad Católica. Año I, No. 1 (May 1982)–No. 3 (Sept.-Oct. 1982) (all published?). Santiago, Chile: 1982. 8vo, three issues: 23 pp., [25] pp., [21] pp.; side-stapled mimeograph with illus. wrappers, b/w reproductions of orig. graphics, including cartoons, collage, and photography, light edge-wear and toning at extremities, No. 2 toned, front wrap with small crease.

When the left-wing Popular Unity party (led by Salvador Allende) came to power in 1970, they reached an agreement to undo previous limits on the freedom of the press in Chile. This brief period of pluralism was silenced by the Pinochet coup in 1973, which ushered in not only an era of censorship, persecution, and state-sponsored journalism, but also a period in which opposition journalists were imprisoned, tortured, and “disappeared.”

It is within this context that students at the Journalism School at Santiago’s Catholic University began publishing this short-lived serial, questioning the role and relevance of the professional journalist in Chile. Beginning as a general inquiry into the conditions of journalism and teaching, the tone shifts, rejecting university and national hierarchies and censorship. No. 3’s headline “Renacer del Movimiento Estudiantil,” declares the rebirth of the student movement following the arrest and torture of Marcela Palma, secretary general of El Centro de Estudiantes de la Universidad Católica (and sister of the leftist paramilitary Ricardo Palma). Articles report on colleagues in exile and the duty of the journalist to justice and critical thinking.

No copies found in OCLC or direct searches of Chilean national online catalogues.

$275

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