Maruja Mallo: The Rebel Muse of the Spanish Avant-Garde

pintores gallegos contemporáneos Maruja Mallo

The life of Maruja Mallo was, in itself, an anachronism. The Spain into which she was born was not prepared for a woman as free and independent as she was. Transgressive in her way of living, speaking, and painting, her persona was a source of astonishment, indignation, and crossing oneself by a prudish society incapable of not being scandalized by her provocations. Although she cared little. Her original sin was being free, and her great talent was breaking with all schemes and conventions.

Heretic, blasphemous, and voluntarily emancipated from a world in which she did not fit, with her transgressive aesthetics and overwhelming personality, she was able to unravel the ropes of hegemony that tied her, as a woman, to her home and her labors, carving out a deserved niche in the seminal art world of the 20th century until she became one of the most representative figures of the Generation of '27 and one of the great international exponents of figurative surrealism, whose work has nothing to envy that of Tanguy or Magritte. However, her name is still the least celebrated of them all: perhaps because today's world is still too primitive for the libertarian and transgressive Maruja Mallo.

Maruja Mallo's Painting

She is remembered as the ungodly lady of surrealism, although Maruja Mallo never liked labels. She didn't feel the need to give her style a name: she did what she wanted, painted what amazed her… and she did it however she pleased. Her artistic career was a continuous process of technical and formal experimentation in which, with voracity, she apprehended the diverse artistic movements that permeated the convulsive and prolific 20th century, achieving personal stylistic maturity in each of them. Hers was an awake and thirsty gaze, a profound sensitivity before which the world bared its most grotesque and absurd side.

A precocious avant-gardist, she began to be known in Madrid in the late 1920s thanks to the exhibition that Ortega y Gasset organized for her at the headquarters of the Revista de Occidente. The apparent spontaneity of her works is merely the mirage that envelops a dense symbolism, materialized with a T-square and set square in millimeter-perfect geometric superimpositions. From the paintings of this first period emerges a symphony of colors where kinetic and crowded figures congregate, forming saturated compositions where the magical and the bizarre exude from everything that appears normal to the eye.

Festivals, street parties, crowded streets, and hedonistic sports scenes in which the female figure acquires an active protagonism for the first time make Maruja Mallo's critical and cosmopolitan gaze evident, as demonstrated by her emblematic painting La Verbena (The Street Fair) (1927). It is also the time of machines, decadent shop windows, and empty mannequins that make up her "estampas" (prints), with which she invokes the memory of an already outdated romanticism.

Colors would fade from her painting, along with her joy, during the subsequent years; a dark stage in Maruja Mallo's life that is reflected in her works through deadly gray and brown pigments. Her pictorial universe now appears chaotic and syncopated, devoid of the geometric balance that characterized her early works, inhabited by gloomy troupes of skeletons and scarecrows with a taste of agony and putrefaction, as in “Antro de Fósiles” (Cave of Fossils) (1930), where it is impossible not to appreciate the mutual influence that Salvador Dalí and Maruja Mallo had on each other during their Madrid period. It is also a time of rediscovery and technical evolution for the painter, leading her to experiment with various procedures and languages. She exchanges the brush for the spatula and incorporates organic materials such as ash, lime, or slate into her compositions, displaying a wide variety of reliefs and textures that make her paintings as rough as the emotions from which they are born.

When the storm ceases and calm ensues, Maruja Mallo's works recover the balance and geometric harmony of earlier periods, incorporating elements of great figurative power that will mark a before and after in her artistic production. An example of this turning point is found in La sorpresa del Trigo (The Surprise of the Wheat) (1936), considered by the painter herself as her most representative painting.

With the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War came exile and her most complex and effective expressive stage. She traveled through much of South America, allowing herself to be amazed by the exuberant nature of the mountains and the ocean, collecting objects washed ashore by the sea to elevate them as central motifs in her works, full of presence, autonomous, and significant. Some of her most purely surrealist creations were born from her travels, a kind of abyssal still life in which shells, conches, stones, flowers, and curious beings from the marine depths combine to give rise to figurations of elevated purity and sophistication, as we can appreciate in Naturaleza Viva (Still Life) (1943). Among the production of this era, it is also worth highlighting her heads and masks, authentic technical works based on ethnographic studies, and large-format works such as Mensaje del Mar (Message from the Sea) (1938), the painting that heads this post.

The "opening" of the regime allowed her to return to Spain in the early 1960s, when she turned her gaze to the universe and the world of the occult. From this cosmological stage emerge works like Selvatro (1979) or Viajeros del Éter (Travelers of the Ether) (1982), fragments of her personal esoteric ode to the dimension of the impossible, in which we observe constellations, symbols, and spaceships born from Maruja Mallo's own subconscious, now freed from any external referent. However, the dictatorship and twenty-five years of exile had buried the memory of that impetuous young woman who, before the Civil War, found her place in Madrid's intellectual environment.

The Life of Maruja Mallo

Maruja Mallo liked to subtract years from her age, so some of her biographies list 1909 as her birth year, but the truth is that this painter first saw the world in 1902, in the Lugo town of Viveiro. She resided in Corcubión, where she made her first drawings, although her artistic career began outside the land of her birth, in Avilés (Asturias) where, supported by her father, she began taking painting classes and managed to hold her first exhibition at just 20 years old. Her time at the San Fernando School of Arts consolidated the personality and style of this hatless lady who broke with all the stereotypes of the era, becoming the first and only female member of the Cofradía de la Perdiz (Brotherhood of the Partridge), the historic group of intellectuals formed by Dalí, Buñuel, and Lorca, erroneously considered an exclusively male triangle.

From her Madrid period emerges the endearing and fascinating character we remember today: a woman who refused to wear the attributes proper to her social status, who flouted the ban on entering the Silos monastery in a skirt by improvising rudimentary trousers with her friend Dalí's jacket, who lost her teaching job for taking a bicycle ride through a church during mass, or the woman who won a blasphemy contest cum laude at the Madrid café de San Millán.

Dazzled, like others, by her impetuosity and talent, Ortega y Gasset contributed to Maruja Mallo's success by organizing her first exhibition in Madrid at the Revista de Occidente, a fact that further highlights the profound impression this unrepeatable woman made on her contemporaries, as it was the first and only exhibition held by said magazine throughout its history.

Her professional and personal life always went hand in hand. A regular at cafés and social gatherings, shows, conferences, and exhibitions, Maruja Mallo met the brightest stars of the 20th-century artistic scene: her closest circle included poets like Rafael Alberti and Pablo Neruda, and painters like Salvador Dalí or André Breton, father of the Futurist Manifesto, who acquired her work “Espantapájaros” (Scarecrows) and defined the artist as one of the greats of surrealism. She also maintained friendships with philosophers like the aforementioned Ortega y Gasset and with other international artists of the stature of Andy Warhol. The intense social and intellectual relationships she maintained with these circles were a source of inspiration for her that ended up materializing in her eclectic paintings, imbued with multiple visions and experiences. However, it would be unfair not to recognize the influence that this biblical sybil, as some of her acquaintances called her, would also exert on them.

Committed to the Second Spanish Republic, the Civil War surprised her in Galicia, and she decided to cross the sea, exiling herself in Argentina. Her exile would last more than twenty-five years, during which travels, people, and experiences would continue to shape both her way of seeing the world and her way of expressing it.

Upon her return to Spain, Madrid received her with the indifference of oblivion. Five lustrums of exile had ended up erasing her name from Madrid's circles and, alone, in a world turned upside down after the War, she decided to seclude herself for years. She returned to the public scene when her works regained some recognition in Spain, attending bars, social gatherings, and meetings until she became the muse of the Movida Madrileña. The end of her existence took place in a nursing home in Madrid, until she passed away in 1996 at the age of 93.

Maruja Mallo left the world having already made clear the value of her painting and, in her absence, her works continue to travel the world as she did in life. Her paintings and engravings have been exhibited in important museums and art galleries in Europe and America, and in Spain, they can be admired at the Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sofía, where they continue to arouse passions and evoke the memory of this rara avis who flew towards the universe leaving on earth the singularity of her wake.

Eva Vilar C.