Antonia Mercé, "LaArgentina". Ninotchka Bennahum

from her material work to the service of goodness and nobility, as though returning home to her beloved child. She is an experienced but pure woman, in rapid movement like the spirit of the age, with fluttering garments and streaming hair, striding forward. That is our new divine image: the Modern”—the Modernista.¹⁹

      Carmencita was the Spanish dancer who truly established a way for Argentina to move out of the music hall and onto the concert stage. Unlike Otero and especially Carmencita, Argentina would do nothing but work. From her letters and touring contracts, no mention of sitting in cafés, or even walking around New York or Paris is to be found. Everything that Argentina did was somehow tied to dance, music, and theatrical productions—unlike her predecessors, who were often in attendance at social events. And with her musical lyricism, her austere beauty, and her utter seriousness, Argentina inspired a certain high-mindedness that existed both in her own thinking and, later, in the critiques of those who wrote about her. If Carmencita’s and Otero’s personal lives ended up “undermining their art,” Argentina’s life revolved continuously around her dancemaking.²⁰

      In an important way, both Carmencita and Otero had prepared Parisian mixed audiences for a strong, potent, very visible female body on the turn-of-the-century public stage. They had both displayed the Spanish dancer as one of skill and rhythm, whose first objective was not to shock the spectator. Rather, both performed with strength and agility, with pride and humor, allowing Europeans and Americans to “discover,” not fear and avoid an overt display of the female form in motion. Whether at first these imported flamencas were considered as moving sculpture—the subtle means toward acceptance of their femininity—was not so important as the idea that they were revealing knees, arms, and backs in front of an audience who was used to some greater costume coverage. Only in the infamous, disreputable nightclubs were women showing their parts to mostly male patrons (while dancing the cancan, for example).

      

      On tour in London, 1933.

      From Otero and the many other Spanish dance artists touring at the time, Argentina may, indeed, have learned what she did not want to be: a woman dressed in seductive layers of lace and pearls. Did Argentina’s fascination with scenery and fabric—important elements in the Paris of the day, in the staging of both the popular Loïe Fuller and the scandalous Ballets Russes, and in haute couture design—reveal a connoisseurship of Carmencita and Otero? Argentina would abandon the multiple skirts of the Art Nouveau period—the Gypsy flamenca’s polka-dotted dress that left a slender waist but puffed up a woman’s hips, modestly hiding her thighs and knees—shortly after her return from her South American tour of 1915. Instead, she would modify her costume and thereby make herself even more slender, asking her designers to lengthen the line of the skirt by first dropping the back into a V