An artistic discovery – and made in Galicia!

It’s interesting when bits of your life connect up and you find out about someone new to you, interesting in their own right, whose life is linked with that of others you have studied or admired. And that is what happened when I went along to an exhibition at the Casa das Artes in Policarpo Sanz, here in Vigo.

On Monday evening at the end of the French book club my friend Carmen said she’d been wanting to go to this exhibition for a while but didn’t want to go alone. So on Wednesday evening I met Carmen and another friend, Conchi, at the Casa das Artes where we joined a guided visit of the exhibition of Maruja Mallo’s work. A very enthusiastic young lady filled our heads with information about this Galicia born artist who is apparently better known outside than inside Galicia.

Born in Vivero, Lugo in 1902 (approximately, as she was rather cagey about admitting her true age), Ana María Gómez González, aka Maruja Mallo, was fortunate enough to have enlightened parents who not only allowed but actively encouraged her to go and study art in Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid in 1922.

There she worked on developing her own style and got to know many of those who became the Generation of ’27 such as Salvador Dalí, Federico García Lorca, Luis Buñuel and Rafael Alberti. With the last of these our guide told us Maruja had a relación amorosa which was never officially acknowledged in the poet’s biography because her successor in his emotions was too jealous and possessive to allow it!!

Another little gem our guide imparted to us was that the women artists in Madrid, even though they associated freely with the male artists of the Generation of ’27, were not allowed into their café tertulias (women sitting around talking in cafés was frowned on) and so they would gather outside and press their faces to the windows in disconcerting protest.

Federico García Lorca said of her: "Maruja Mallo, .... sus cuadros son los que he visto pintados con más imaginación, emoción y sensualidad." (Her pictures are the ones I have seen painted with the greatest imagination, emotion and sensuality.)

Maruja Mallo and Rafael Alberti applied together for grants to go and study in Paris and were both awarded them but in the event went there separately in 1931 as their relationship had fizzled out by then. In Paris she made the acquaintance of artists such as Magritte and Miró and did get to attend tertulias with the likes of André Breton (who bought at least one of her paintings) and Paul Eluard.

She had had her grant extended to stay in Paris for a longer period but in 1933 returned to Spain for family reasons. According to our enthusiastic guide, had she stayed in Paris Maruja Mallo might have become one of the big names of the European artistic world. However, she returned to Spain and passed oposiciones to work as an art teacher but soon found that the rather sedate life did not suit her. Rather than simply hand in her notice this seeker after notoriety apparently provoked her dismissal by riding her bicycle round and round inside the church during mass and headed back to Madrid.

As Spain headed towards the Civil War, Maruja Mallo was working with the republicans in educational projects and her art of the period is full of images of workers. She had an affair with the poet Miguel Hernández, republican poet imprisoned and executed by Franco’s troops.

As the Civil War progressed Maruja Mallo hid for a while in Vigo, then went into exile in Portugal and eventually South America where she gave talks on what she had seen of the events in Spain, fully expecting to return to Spain when the republicans won. In the event, of course, Franco won and Maruja Mallo remained in Chile where she had an affair with Pablo Neruda, another of the poets I have read and admired.

It begins to seem as though our guide spoke about nothing but the painter’s romantic links with Hispanic poets but in fact she gave us a fairly comprehensive overview of Maruja Mallo’s progression from a very ordinary photographic portrait painter to an artist who, although influenced by other painters and their styles, never really belonged to any one school of painting, just as she never belonged to any political party although she supported the republic, had affairs with a number of famous men but never married. Her range of style and subject matter is impressive.

During her time in South America she produced a series of what she called natura viva, refusing to use the Spanish term for still life, natura muerta (literally “dead nature”), as she said her work had nothing to do with death. She returned to Spain in the 1960s and kept a low profile until after Franco’s death when had another period of relative fame and was in a way “adopted” by the movida madrileña as a kind of symbol of nonconformist womanhood. She certainly had her own style in all things. Already acknowledged as a beleza galega, she brought back from Paris in 1931 what our guide called “su look”, lots of bright blue eye shadow and red lipstick, a look which she maintained into her old age.

She died in 1995 and it would seem that since then studies of her work have been carried out and paintings that had been lost were relocated. One result is the exhibition here in Vigo which is well worth a visit.

The English entry on Wikipedia on Maruja Mallo is very short, so here is a link to the Spanish entry.