Teresa Sánchez-Gavito

Madrid, 1918-2000

Teresa Sánchez-Gavito was a painter with Asturian origins. She managed to finish school just before the Spanish Civil War started. After the war she studied Art in San Fernando. She loved painting and music. However, hers was a very uncertain authorship, as can be seen when reading her diaries. She worked hard but kept to herself a lot. Her diaries show a woman stifled by the conservative atmosphere of the central decades of the last century. They also show an artist committed to knowledge. She has left a series of self-portraits that constitute a highly revealing autobiography.

Hello...

I want to succeed by myself, I aspire to nothing more... and to nothing less.

Teresa Sánchez-Gavito knew she was an artist from a very early age. The Spanish Civil War breaks out the year in which she should have started her higher education. And although she completed her art studies after the war, the Spain in which she should have fulfilled her destiny as a painter was not the Spain that had seen the brief consolidation of the New Woman, artist, writer or professional, prior to 1936. Domestic duties took over her life. She struggled to think outside conventional gender expectations and suffered knowing that she was not free because she was a woman. She tries to find time to paint and to read and suffers when she does not have it.

Of course, what I long for most is the one thing that cannot be changed: not to have been a man.

Writing a diary becomes a therapeutic activity for Teresa. In her notebook she expresses her anger for the time spent looking after the house. Writing gives her peace; the white page soothes her spirit and compensates the longing for not being able to paint as much as she wants. In her diaries she shapes her ideas on painting techniques and on the pleasure and pain of artistic creation. The page, like the silence of the night, become her room of her own. And there she can proclaim loud and clear that she has artistic ambitions.

I have to forget about myself.

Painting is personal fulfilment and constant longing. For an accomplished painter like Teresa, not being able to pick up the brush feels like punishment. That does not prevent the need to find time and space to satisfy her artistic needs from prevailing. Sánchez-Gavito is not the only female artist or writer that has fears of being caught creating rather than doing house chores. Fortunately, although she apparently accepted the submissive role imposed by the regime she continued painting and, most importantly, painting her self-portraits.