Maruja Mallo and Her Fight Against the World Order

I tend to walk down streets as we all do, those marked by incisions of tram tracks, on either side of me weed dispensaries and bookstores, sex shops and museums, cafés and dogshit. Trees. Looking up, incandescent bulbs turn on. A baby waves at me from a bench, I wave back. Back to tracing tram lines on their sides. The tired bulbs buzz, planted in rows on either side of a bridge as I walk ten steps straight, curve left, cross over. The laughter from waiters smoking outside a restaurant door fades, and I shiver. A sprinkle drops on me and suddenly, a light rainfall. “The street, with its cares and its glances, was my true element,” André Breton once declared: “there I could test like nowhere else the winds of possibility.” 

Hats in fragmented lines, uncanny holes in faces where mouths should be, and lips placed above a forehead larger than a floating door waiting for a pair of hands: surrealism. It’s strange, it’s sleek, it’s erotic, it’s uneven. “It never made sense to me,” a friend said to me about two weeks ago over a glass of wine, “I just don’t understand, on an aesthetic level, the value of cutting up a body.” 

A place between human and nonhuman, alive and unalive, where edges blur reality into more of a smokescreen, something certain but full of doubt. It’s been well-documented how warping binaries through paint was an instinctive reaction of artists responding to the traumatic aftereffects of World War I. The mind-blowing and sometimes mind-numbing images of wolves, queens, composite animals, chairs, hands bigger than faces, and faces being eaten by sphinxes, all make sense in that context. Seems so obvious, more than true when the notion of a “world order” is turned on its axis. Who’s to say lions can’t cast spells? 

On a walk, such contortions also occur. Even without a definitive war, the world’s so-called “normal” nevertheless can feel disruptive and violent, warping what’s visible into a different sensory dimension. The wave of a baby’s hand becomes an omen. The shadow of a street light flickers into a familiar silhouette. A neighbor returns from a visit to their parents with a broken nose. Not just on walks can the surface of things resound with a gleam of something beyond. In 2024, across the world we feel ourselves in such a moment, as a global era of authoritarianism looms over us all with the tease of fascism not far behind. Confusion about the increasingly transparent border between artifice and authenticity flickers across our eyelids everytime we blink.  

The start of the Franco Dictatorship in Spain was another such moment of profound change. Countless workers, shop owners, artists, parents, artisans, were all forced to flee based on their political activity. Even just the suggestion of opposition resulted in frequent exile. One among those who fled, first to Buenos Aires for twenty five years and eventually to New York City for a brief stint of time before returning to Madrid, was the painter Maruja Mallo, born Ana María Gómez González. When she fled Madrid, she’d already exhibited her paintings in notorious galleries across Europe, and had been close friends with Federico García Lorca, Margarita Manso, Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel, Concha Méndez, and Rafael Alberti. She was a founding member of Las Sinsombrero, the influential women poets and writers of the Generation of ‘27 in Spain who removed their hats in social spaces as a form of protest. In an anecdote that would eventually become legendary, she defeated Luis Buñuel in a blasphemy contest among the artists of Generation of ‘27 by riding her bike through a church during the celebration of a Mass, subsequently losing her teaching job at the time. 

On Walking

Walking creates a topography of curiosity, connecting the pedestrian to a city’s circuitry of possibilities while enabling them to observe it all from the position of a witness. Breton, widely considered the inventor of surrealism, believed that the footstep represented the symbol of the everyday—free from the grid-line, linear constraints of society, of the road often inhabited by cars, buses, and trains. Walking leaves behind it abstraction, capitalism, the rhythms of industry; by its nature is a constant state of irregular movements and an escape, a chance for a detour, a deviation from a prescribed route. 

An artist may twist down a side street, behind a road under construction and a shopping mall. Their  shadow may appear against a window and as their eyes adjust themselves to the minimal light, in a liminal space between codes, silent, they’ll pause—allowing their mind’s hold on hooks and rules, on schedules and rigging from the last years or so, to let go and slide through their bones. Before breaking down the door between what was and what’s next with an idea that feels bigger than their body, they take that second before it to breathe—before getting ready to walk through the frame of what was before, keeping with them only its outline.  

It’s impossible to identify the exact moment when it starts, the whisper of a desire that becomes invasive. A conviction with a metastasized origin that spreads throughout a body from a place unknown but whose presence one day flashes across a sightline so brightly that it becomes unimaginable to deny it. What happens after a pulse, a feeling, an instinct isn’t suppressed anymore and it expands like a glowing, neon line of light. For a long time it might have hid, in the space between an artist and the people they saw, the places they went, drinks they bought to fill time, between work and sleep—this madness inside of artists that screams out for expression. 

That also, may be another way of describing what it feels like, to be confronted with the necessity of leaving home.

Mallo’s Career Path

Mallo was a radical defender of the Republic, collaborating with the Society of Iberian Artists, participating as a teacher in the Pedagogical Missions, teaching drawing at the Instituto Escuela de Madrid, the Instituto de Arévalo and the Escuela de Cerámica, making exhibitions at museums in London and Barcelona. She previously had won a scholarship to study in Paris. During her time there, she immersed herself in the surrealist movement; meeting Joan Miró, René Magritte, Pablo Picasso, Giorgio De Chirico and Breton himself. While she was there, she organized an exhibition of her own work at the Pierre Loeb Gallery in Paris which included what would become her famous painting, Scarecrows. Breton bought the painting at that show. Despite his aversion for women painters, he forever declared it as one of the great works of surrealism. 

She was in Galicia when the Spanish Civil War began and fled to Lisbon. In Portugal, she stayed with Chilean Nobel Prize winner Gabriela Mistral, who was able to secure her friend an invitation to give lectures in Buenos Aires. Mallo lived in Argentina for over two decades, painting, making sculptures, giving classes and lectures, collaborating with artists across Latin America and with the renowned magazine Sur, run by Victoria Ocampo and supported by the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, himself the founder of the Spanish magazine Revista de Occidente. 

In 1962, Mallo returned to Madrid after the end of the Spanish dictatorship, even though she admitted soon after that she didn’t know why she did. All of her friends at that point were underground, in exile, or dead. She arrived back in Spain with fear that Franco would remember her, only to learn that her work as an activist and artist had been completely erased. Not just hers, but many works by women artists in the 20’s and 30’s—they had all been destroyed by the dictatorship. 

How To Make It End

It seems so familiar to anyone this story, the place it ends. Where every artist on the margins makes it end—they become the advocate for their work because no one else volunteers for the job. Mallo dressed herself in blue. In red. In light pink. Walking down the streets of Spain in the 60’s, the 70’s, and the 80’s, she passed by water trickling down gullets after a storm following an exhibit of hers, or a talk. She recreated her old sculptures, painted canvases in new designs. She rejoined her artistic circles, supported emerging artists, and resumed collaborating with Revista de Occidente. Unmarried her whole life, she chose herself as her partner, again and again. In makeup and blouses, she answered every call for an interview, for a documentary, for a lecture where she could talk about what was. Not for the clout but from the conviction of someone who knows proof of life needs to be left behind, the evidence of some resistance to the patriarchal world order. She knew that it might not be enough to stop another tide towards fascism, but that reference points can always be left as breadcrumbs for those who may want to follow a windy trail. In 1982, she was awarded the Gold Medal of Fine Arts and the Prize for Plastic Arts of Madrid, achieving a level of recognition she spent her whole life fighting for. She died seven years later.

Mallo’s Artistic Imprint

Hats drawn with curved lines, goats the size of girls, gnomes the size of staircases, Christmas trees next to a mural of horses returning from war. Or horses in a performance, maybe a performance about war. A head with dark hair curled around a skull with an empty face, its hole shaped like a heart. A ferris wheel hanging over the ceiling of a theater. A wizard in a tophat: Maruja Mallo. She’s wild, she’s effervescent, she’s determined. “It never made sense to me,” a friend said to me about two weeks ago over a glass of wine, “I just don’t understand, on an aesthetic level, the value of cutting up a body.” It isn’t just the shock value, as symbolism for its own sake isn’t a thing. It is what it is—bodies are empty all the time. When I see one of her works, I look in or lean back—they always make me move.

I tend to walk down streets as we all do, those marked by incisions of tram tracks, on either side of me weed dispensaries and bookstores, sex shops and museums, cafés and dogshit. Trees. Looking up when a dog reminds me of the angel in the top right corner of Estampa, or a poster like her painting in pastel, Concorde. Faces wide, swollen from the cold or square in sadness at twilight, so similar to those she rendered on canvas. So often with an open gaze, as hers was, in all of the photographs of her that remain. A baby waves at me from a bench, I wave back. Back to tracing tram lines on their sides as tired bulbs buzz, planted in rows on either side of a bridge as I walk ten steps straight, curve left, cross over. The laughter from waiters smoking outside a restaurant door fades, and I shiver. A sprinkle drops on me and suddenly, a light rainfall. 

The street: a place between human and nonhuman, alive and unalive, where edges blur reality into more of a smokescreen, something certain but full of doubt—a site where links between paint and image connect in my mind, turning an encounter with another into a memory tinged with the quality of a melody out of tune. As a global era of authoritarianism looms over us all with the tease of fascism not far behind, confusion about the increasingly transparent border between artifice and authenticity seems to flicker across our eyelids, everytime we blink. But walking can temporarily leave behind all of that—abstraction, capitalism, the rhythms of terror; by its nature is a constant state of irregular movements and an escape, a chance for a detour, a deviation from a prescribed route. 

Art too.

A pedestrian may twist down another side street, behind a road under construction and a shopping mall. Their shadow may appear against a window and as their eyes adjust themselves to the minimal light, in a liminal space between codes, silent, they may pause—allowing their mind’s hold on hooks and rules, on schedules and rigging from the last years or so, to let go. 

Read more about women artists in surrealism who challenged societal norms and redefined artistic boundaries through their groundbreaking works.