Women Modernists and Fascism

Abstract

Modernism both influenced and was fascinated by the rhetorical and aesthetic manifestations of fascism. In examining how four artists and writers represented fascist leaders, Annalisa Zox-Weaver aims to achieve a more complex understanding of the modernist political imagination. She examines how photographer Lee Miller, filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, writer Gertrude Stein and journalist Janet Flanner interpret, dramatize and exploit Hitler, Göring and Pétain. Within their own artistic medium, each of these modernists explore confrontations between private and public identity, and historical narrative and the construction of myth. This study makes use of extensive archival material, such as letters, photographs, journals, unpublished manuscripts and ephemera and includes ten illustrations. This interdisciplinary perspective opens up wider discussions of the relationship between artists and dictators, modernism and fascism, and authority and representation.

Böske Simon, Miss Hungaria and Miss Europa (1929): Beauty Pageants and Packaging Gender, Race, and National Identity in Interwar Hungary

“…A complex and charismatic political figure, Tormay claimed that her movement was entirely "home-grown" in Hungary. In fact, her politics are better understood in the comparative perspective of the fascist aesthetic of reactionary modernism, specifically within the context of the complex psychosexual dynamics and artistic self-promotion of rightist interwar lesbian modernism (see further, Carlson 1998, Zox-Weaver 2011. Tormay was skilled in navigating the tensions between her modernist private life and her manufactured public image.…”