Maruja Mallo

Maruja Mallo (born Ana María Gómez González; 5 January 1902 – 6 February 1995) was a Spanish surrealist painter.

Mallo was the fourth daughter of fourteen children born to Justo Gómez Mallo (Customs Corps Official and native of Madrid) and María del Pilar González Lorenzo, born in Viveiro, Spain, on 5 January 1902.

She is the older sister of sculptor Cristino Mallo (born in Tui in 1905).

When she was a young girl, Mallo would alternate between living with parents and her aunt (Juliana Lastres Carrer) and uncle (Ramiro Gonzalez Lorenzo).

While living with her aunt and uncle at a young age, she felt inspired to create and express herself through artwork.

After the birth of one of her brothers, the family moved to Avilés, where they remained from 1913 to 1922.

During the 1920s, Mallo also worked on numerous literary publications and produced several books.

Her paintings of the 1920s represent urban entertainments and sports, composed in complex overlapping arrangements that express the dynamism of modern life.

In 1922 at age 20, Mallo's family moved to Madrid.

During this time, Mallo's paintings followed the theme of new objectivity or magic realism, theorized by Franz Roh in his book Magic Realism in 1925.

According to biographer Shirley Mangini, "Although historians of Spanish avant-garde art locate the origins of the movement in the activities of Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel, Federico García Lorca, and another student at the Residencia, José Bello, Mallo's artistic vision was an important catalyst in the Spanish avant-garde movement."

There, she began to study at the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts, where she stayed until 1926.

^2. In Madrid she met artists, writers, and scientists from the Spanish Generation ’27 like Salvador Dalí, Concha Méndez, Ernesto Giménez Caballero, Gregorio Prieto, Federico García Lorca, Margarita Manso, Luis Buñuel, María Zambrano, and Rafael Alberti, with whom she maintained a relationship until he met María Teresa León.

She went on to form a group of women from the Generation of ’27 known as “Las Sinsombrero” (English: those without hats).

In particular, she was friends with Concha Méndez and Josefina Canarias.

She is considered an artist of the Generation of 1927 within the Spanish avant-garde movement.

These works, such as La Verbena (The Festival) of 1927, combine sharply defined, smoothly modeled forms with bright colors.

Author Ortega y Gasset recognized her paintings in 1928 and organized her first exhibit in Revista de Occidente, which was very successful, praised for its originality and freshness.

It displayed ten oil paintings representing towns full of sun, bullfighters and women from Madrid, as well as colored prints of machinery, sports, and cinema from the beginning of the century.

The exhibit was a starting point from which Mallo was judged for her work and not her gender.

Mallo's work became more surrealistic in the early 1930s, including geometric visual language and themes that ranged from fruits to agricultural structures as well as creating ceramic disks with themes of fish and bulls.

Mallo collaborated intensely with Rafael Alberti starting in 1931.

In those years she painted the series Cloacas (Sewers) y Campanarios (Belfries).

Her first exhibit in Paris took place in the Pierre Loeb Gallery in 1932.

There she began her surrealist stage.

She returned to Madrid in 1933 and actively participated in the Society of Iberian Artists.

This was the beginning of a period in which Mallo's interests emphasized geometric order and nature's intricacies.

In that same year, Mallo, committed to the Second Spanish Republic, started teaching as a drawing professor at the Institute of Arévalo, in the School Institute of Madrid, and at the Ceramics School of Madrid, for which she designed a series of dishes that no longer exist, and where she learned mathematic and geometric concepts to use in ceramics.

She frequently spent time with Miguel Hernández, with whom she maintained a romantic relationship.

They also planned the drama Los hijos de la piedra (The sons and the stone) together, which was inspired by the events of Casas Viejas.

From 1936, she began her constructive age, while still exhibiting with surrealist painters in London and Barcelona.

She participated as a teacher in the Pedagogical Missions, which brought her closer to her homeland, Galicia, which after a few months was surprised by the Spanish Civil War.

In May 1936 her third individual exhibit took place, organized by ADLAN in the Center of Studies and Information of the Construction in the Career of Saint Jerónimo of Madrid with a series of sixteen paintings from Cloacas y Campanarios, the series of twelve works from Arquitecturas minerales y vegetales (Mineral and vegetable architectures), and sixteen drawings from Instrucciones rurales (Rural instructions), which was published in 1949 in the Clan Library with a prologue from Jean Cassou.

She then had an exhibit with Ángel Planells of international surrealism in London's New Burlington Galleries.

With the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Mallo fled to Portugal.

All of her ceramic work from this time was destroyed in the war.

Later, Gabriela Mistral, who at the time was ambassador of Chile in Portugal, helped Mallo move to Buenos Aires, where she received an invitation by the Friends of Art Association to give a series of conferences about a popular theme in Spanish art, “Historical process in the way of the plastic arts,” in Montevideo and later in Buenos Aires.

When the Spanish Civil War erupted, Mallo went into exile in Argentina.

When Mallo went into exile, her male partners in the creation of Spanish Avant-Garde Art, Vanguardist parties and Surrealist happenings began to boycott her, Occasioning her exclusion from the History of the Spanish Avant-Garde.

Until recent years Mallo was rarely mentioned in Spanish Texts on Art and Cultural History.