Ángeles Santos (1911–2013) and the Mothers of Her Own Invention

Abstract

Students of Spain’s historical Avant-Garde remember Ángeles Santos (Port Bou, 1911–Madrid, 2013) as one of its leading female artists and one who earned an early notoriety in 1929 for a large-format oil painting titled Un mundo (housed in the Reina Sofia Museum). None the less, for a combination of reasons—personal crisis, the outbreak and aftermath of the Civil War, the loss of her audience and peers—Santos’ major accomplishments in the pre-war period were largely forgotten. This essay revisits an earlier article on the mythic and feminist dimensions of her work to consider Santos’ productions in the key years of 1929–1930 more fully, in the context of Josep Casamartina i Parassols’ research into the biography of the artist and intellectual influences. Bringing forth new data about her reception in 1929 and 1930, I argue that her aerial perspective of the planet is at once the product of myth and marginalization, marking the female artist’s liminal position vis-à-vis her contemporaries.