Woman and Puppet: Angel Zarraga’s Femme Fatale, and Her Counterparts in the Art of Julio Romero de Torres and Federico Beltran-Masses

Woman and Puppet, by Angel Zarraga (Mexico) 1909

It’s a disturbing painting. A beautiful woman with pale skin and dark features stands nude save for a floral shawl and fingers full of rings, showing off shapely legs and teacup breasts. A grotesque doll-man with a macabre clown face, frill collar, and billowing pink gown slumps helplessly, subordinate. She holds his strings in both hands. 

The woman’s expression is both bored and defiant, daring the viewer to intervene and knowing we won’t.

Mexican artist Angel Zaragga’s Woman and Puppet is meticulously painted, glossy, with rich colour contrasts and strong graphic lines. Zarraga’s style was constantly shifting, with quite a few Impressionistic landscapes, florals, and bathers, an assortment of forgettable canvases of soccer players, and then a preference for Cubist style works after encountering Picasso in Paris. His name is seldom mentioned today, but in his time he exhibited widely and was in demand for painting portraits. But his best paintings all carry the same striking dramatic aesthetic as Woman and Puppet. They are moody, strange, and polished, with mysterious, mythic figures in staged poses, with motifs suggestive of rich symbolism. 

Ex Voto (Saint Sebastian), by Angel Zarraga (Mexico) 1912

Zarraga had only a handful of these masterpieces. I was lucky enough to see his most famous painting, Ex Voto (Saint Sebastian), at the Museo Nacional de Arte in Mexico City. It’s a sublime work that seems to grapple with similar tensions of devotion and submission, serving up equal portions of beauty and pain. Sebastian is beautiful and erotic, his body as artfully posed as a dancer’s, a single arrow piercing his nipple. It was the artistic sensation of the Paris Salon in 1912. The Three Wise Men seems far removed from its Biblical story, turning into a sumptuous, sensual, Art Deco monument to all that glitters, with lavish attention paid to the beauty of the body and the ornament of jewels.  

These spectacular paintings seem to come out of nowhere, and disappear back into the ether they came from, as the artist moved forward into fuzzier palettes and then onto choppier, colourful deconstructions. But no doubt they were influenced by Julio Romero de Torres, whom the artist met in Spain in the years he lived there, studying with Joaquin Sorolla. De Torres’ paintings forged his own enigmatic style, seldom paralleled, drawing from Art Nouveau, symbolist art, and modernismo for his aesthetic, focused all the while on uniquely Spanish storytelling, with imagery from regional fashion, folklore, religion, and literature. 

The Sin, by Julio Romero de Torres (Spain) 1915

Perhaps De Torres shows up outside Zarraga only in the work of Cuban painter Federico Beltran-Masses, who ran in the same circles and uses a similar lush palette and drama. His paintings are more thickly outlined than De Torres’ but the kinship of style and subject matter are unmistakeable. Beltran-Masses’ work was considered so erotic that it scandalized the conservative powers of art, and De Torres stood up in support of the merit of his paintings.

With just a half-dozen or so known standout paintings that suggest De Torres’ influence, Zarraga has carved out a small but significant place in the pantheon of Mexican masters. Anyone who has seen these works has not walked away unscathed.

Woman and Puppet is so strange to contemporary eyes that it might be mistaken for surrealism. (Zarraga did actually work with Giorgio de Chirico, whose pre-surrealist work inspired many of the surrealist painters.) It is the stuff of nightmares. We can’t help but thinking that the puppet man is alive in some terrible way, even as the mesmerizing beauty manipulating his strings seems empty, a vortex, despite her beauty. 

The femme fatale is an ancient archetype, surfacing in art, literature, and mythology throughout diverse cultures. She was especially appealing to the Romantic poets and to symbolist artists of the late 1800s. The femme fatale is attractive, sexy, and deadly. She lures men with her charm, then manipulates them for attention, money, or amusement, destroying them in the process. Men are her playthings, and she takes enormous pleasure from their decimation. The subtext of the story is often one of dominance and submission, with the lady in the driver’s seat.
​
Zarraga’s painting comes from a French novel of similar name, The Woman and the Puppet, by Pierre Louys. In the story, a man becomes obsessed with a young Andalusian beauty he meets at a carnival in Seville, Spain. Despite being warned off by another man who admits to being her previous boy toy, he pursues Conchita, gets reeled in, then pushed away, until he is psychologically decimated. His power shifts completely to her hands, and he realizes he is her puppet. All the more alarming is the pleasure he feels alongside humiliation, as if he is only alive in the deprivation.

Gala and Paul Eluard.

A real-life reference to Pierre Louys’ novel comes from Michele Gerber Klein’s biography of Gala Dali, a formidable figure who by all accounts was magnetic, powerful, demanding, and insatiable. 

Most of the circle of artists and writers in Gala’s wake were afraid of her and saw her as a kind of dominatrix. Ten years older and married when she met Salvador Dali, he spent the next fifty plus years in complete devotion and cuckoldry. Dali sometimes signed her name on his paintings and said all that he was, was because of her, and he was probably right. She was a shrewd and greedy manager, driving him to increasingly eccentric performances because the weirder he became, the bigger the cheques grew. She insisted on polyamory: she was in an open marriage with poet Paul Eluard when she met Dali, including a three-year menage-a-trois with surrealist painter Max Ernst. Eluard agreed to the terms, but he said he was tortured by her affairs. Even so, he continued to send passionate letters long after their divorce. 

Dali dutifully participated in performative orgy parties, but claims he only ever consummated his passions with Gala. When they were old, she insisted on living in a castle Dali paid for but was forbidden to visit, entertaining her young lovers and jet-setting around the world with them. Dali begged her to spend their final years together, but his request was refused. Gala continued to push him to work and earn when he was sick and weak, spending extravagantly on herself. 

Nonetheless, Gala’s story is no doubt complicated and surely Dali was no angel. Her peers were most certainly judgemental or misogynist. The surrealist artists were notoriously sexist, despite their claimed enlightenment.

In Klein’s fascinating biography, Gala, she writes of Eluard and Gala dressing up for a ball. They both wore Pierrot costumes. Klein explains that Pierrot was an important figure in Symbolist poetry. Pierrot embodied the themes of idealism, emotion, alienation, and unrequited love. Eluard “styled himself as gala’s puppet: a reference to The Woman and the Puppet, Symbolist Pierry Louys’ novel about carnal obsession.” 
​
Eluard later said of the photo that he was dressed up as Gala.

The Puppet, by Francisco Goya (Spain) 1791

Zarraga’s arresting artwork of his version of the dangerous woman is inspired by Louys’ book, but the book was at least partly inspired by another painting, The Puppet, by Francisco Goya, c. 1791. The painting depicts four women tossing a straw effigy of a man up and down with a blanket. We know this is the case because the victim, Don Mateo, explicitly compares himself to the figure in Goya’s painting.

The stereotype of the femme fatale often shows up in times of cultural change and speaks to men’s anxieties about power exchanging hands. Modern feminist philosophy interprets the trope as misogynist, though some view her as a heroine rather than a villain, and the idea of her is seen as an empowering restoration of control to its rightful hands. Men have indeed long feared women’s power and independence, and have viewed their sexuality as dangerous, blaming women they find attractive for their unruly desires.

However, the idea that no such woman exists, or that if she does, her strategies are justified, is equally problematic. Humans of all genders have their dark sides, and they use the powers available to them to execute their wiles. Perhaps what is most interesting about The Woman and the Puppet is the phenomenon it examines, and the complexity of human behaviour and desire. Today, the femme fatale is more often known as the narcissist, a term that often substitutes for sociopath when the perpetrator in question is a female. Female sociopathy presents differently from the male’s, as her violence is usually predominantly psychological (though not always.) 

I know the sadistic narcissist intimately. I was raised by one. This painting presents a profoundly chilling dramatization of something I witnessed and experienced a version of firsthand. From Potiphar’s wife to Karla Homolka, the ruthless woman is sometimes real, and the complexity of such personalities and situations are worth examination by writers and artists.    
​
The femme fatale is not a recurring theme in Zarraga’s oeuvre; nor does erotic desire make frequent appearances, which make its presence in these few works all the more mysterious. There are a few reasonably chaste looking nudes. Some of his sports paintings have been referred to as erotic, even homoerotic. I don’t see it myself. The latter is hardly likely, as Angel painted soccer because his first wife was a championship-level futbulista.
​
On the other hand, the femme fatale shows her face again and again in the work of Julio Romero de Torres and Federico Beltran-Masses. 

Salome, by Julio Romero de Torres (Spain) 1922

De Torres has least two versions of Salome, and Beltran-Masses has more. Salome was a Biblical beauty who danced for her stepfather, King Herod, who offered her, in exchange, anything she wished. She consulted with her mother, who bore a grudge against John the Baptist because he publicly denounced her marriage to the King. She advised Salome to request John’s head on a silver platter. The symbolic impact of a woman’s role in beheading a male, in cahoots with her mother, was irresistibly grisly. This story shows up frequently in literature and throughout art history, with depictions by Titian, Caravaggio, and Picasso, to name a few.

One of Beltran-Masses Salome paintings showed Salome completely naked, with jewelled bands on her parted thighs and wrists, head thrown back, recoiling from the horror she wrought. The painting was six feet wide, and it was so scandalous and offensive that the artist removed it from public exhibition personally to appease his critics. The public then demanded its restoration, and the Royal Academy officially requested its return to the spotlight, where thousands flocked to view. Salome catapulted Beltran-Masses into superstardom, her powers undiminished by two millennia.
​
Both de Torres and Beltran-Masses courted considerable controversy throughout their careers for shocking the arbiters of art, and both were extraordinarily popular with the public and their peers. Versions of the femme fatale showed up frequently in their bodies of work, but this archetype was only one subject of their kaleidoscopic explorations on the theme of women. 

Salome, by Federico Beltrán-Masses (Cuba) 1918

La Belle Otero, by Julio Romero de Torres (Spain) 1914

De Torres examined feminine roles in Cordoba and Andalusian culture from a variety of perspectives, presenting traditional and modern women with sexuality and agency. He painted maternidad, or motherhood, and he also painted prostitution, without judgement. His exquisite portrait of La Belle Otero, a famous, rather, notorious, courtesan, is one she likely posed for in person. Otero was considered a femme fatale, a woman of insatiable greed who handpicked her client lovers from kings and counts. At least one of multiple duels over her patronage is documented, and legend holds that no less than six men committed suicide in the wake of scandal and spending themselves into the grave. Yet Otero was a skilled dancer, performer and model, a lively companion, and a great beauty, and her companionship was widely sought and valued. It is known that she was the victim of rape at the age of ten, and that she ran away to Lisbon at fourteen to become a dancer. Torres paints her as a figure of extraordinary dignity and intelligence.

Flamenco was born in De Torres' backyard, and the lore of strong women in the mythology and performance of flamenco figures prominently in his work as well. 
​
As a painter, duality was an important theme, and De Torres frequently painted two women of contrast beside each other, suggesting a multiplicity of psychological motivations in women’s roles and how those roles were perceived. And he frequently alluded to the contrasts of traditional mores with the emerging independence of modern women, something signified by the recurring symbol in his work of women’s high heeled footwear.

Granada, by Federico Beltrán-Masses (Cuba) 1929

Beltran-Masses more often portrayed the wealthy and decadent revelers of the Jazz Age, using rich celebrities as his subject, a kind of Cuban-Spanish Great Gatsby treatment. His paintings were so lush and rich in palette, almost always building from a spectrum of blue that his colouring was called Beltran blue. Every celebrity and moneyed person vied for a place in his canvases. Americans praised his work for its psychological depth. Martha Graham created a dance inspired by his paintings. William Randolph Hearts bought at least four paintings. He portrayed countless people of great fame but his painting of Salome, shown devastated and remorseful for her part in the murder of the disciple John, was his favourite, according to the artist’s wife. He refused to sell it during his lifetime.

The Wise Men, by Angel Zarraga (Mexico) 1910

While De Torres and Beltran-Masses were prolific in works of their similar aesthetic and richly symbolic psychologies, Angel Zarraga only dabbled with the vibe. However, those are the very works that withstand the century. Zarraga’s skills were never in doubt: he was capable of anything as a painter, but most of his body of work simply does not stand out. 

His treatment of Saint Sebastian, The Wise Men, and the femme fatale are a different story. Ex Voto is strangely beautiful, and asks interesting questions about the boundaries between religious devotion and eroticism. The Wise Men reframes a familiar story in opulence and wonder.

But in my humble opinion, Woman and Puppet is Zarraga's magnum opus. It is gorgeous and garish, and his brushstrokes unflinchingly demean Conchita’s prey into a helpless, tortured, husk of a man. Even so, it is the smug satisfaction on the face of the female figure that haunt long after the viewer has moved on.

Lorette C. Luzajic