Introduction Out of the Ordinary: Women of the Spanish Avant-Garde

Abstract

While male artists dominated the Avant-Garde movement in Paris, Barcelona and Madrid in the first third of the twentieth century, women began to make their mark simultaneously. In Spain artists such as Remedios Varo, Maruja Mallo, the Argentinian Norah Borges, Ángeles Santos and María Blanchard, as well as several female artists working outside Spain such as Raquel Forner and Leonora Carrington, because of their experiences as outsiders, searched for the absolute, for transcendence through their art. In general, the originality and the ultimate success of these artists were derived from a heavy dose of what Freud labelled das Unheimliche, the uncanny, the ineffable, the dreamlike qualities which result from the subversion of reality and the unwitting inspiration to transgress the boundaries of the male establishment.