Women Modernists and Fascism

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 explores confrontations between private and public identity, and between 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 This study makes use of extensive archival material, such as letters, photographs, journals, unpublished manuscripts, and ephemera, and includes ten illustrations.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, authority and representation.