Maruja Mallo: Lost at Sea

Abstract

Like many female artists, Maruja Mallo has been "written out of history." Standard texts treating Surrealism generally exclude female Surrealist artists, and Mallo is no exception. However, she is also seldom included even in books dealing with female Surrealists. Even though Mallo' s work extends over seventy years of steady artistic production, her paintings are displayed in important museums such as the Reina Sofia, and she was highly praised in her day, public information regarding her artistic development is limited. Most of it provides a very narrow point of view of her work, and is in Spanish or the even more inaccessible Gallego language of her native region, making her unfamiliar to English speaking W estemers. Only within the past twenty years has Mallo been recognized for her relationship with the Spanish vanguard of the 1920s and 30s. I found few accounts of Mallo' s work and what I did find treated her oeuvre in formalist terms. Nonetheless, what I found implied that she was celebrated and admired in her day. Mallo' s case calls more for investigation than argument. Given the scant availability of information, I decided to treat not just one question, but several. Who is she? Does she qualify as a Surrealist painter and why? What methodologies best suit the study of her work? How is it that an artist who was respected, admired, and embraced in her own time was so lost to history? Mallo's love of the ocean and her exclusion from history led me to my thesis title, "Maruja Mallo: Lost at Sea." [From Introduction]