GRAPH BOOKS: PRINTED MATTER FROM RADICAL ART AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS.
FEMINIST HISTORIANS OF MATERIAL CULTURE.
Espejo en Sombra
Emilia Bertolé, 1927
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.
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