Personification and iconography of the "modern woman": its protagonists of the early XXth century in Spain

Abstract

In the first decades of the 20th century the «modern woman» appeared, it was an international phenomenon which was called in a different way by each European country: flapper, maschietta, garçonne, etc. Evident inheritors of the French model, the Spanish artists of these years personified and reflected in her works the aesthetics, the habits, the conquests and the independence and emancipatory aspirations of the new women. With them, the old gender barriers were fractured, and new plastic possibilities appeared to help these women to live and shape the vanguards. By means of a thematic study of the artistic production and the creative personalities of these artists (Maruja Mallo, Ángeles Santos, Delhy Tejero or Concha Méndez, among others), we can understand what was the significance and the popularity of this new model, which put in crisis the ideas that were shaping the definitions, solid and officially established, of gender, modernity and vanguards