Figura [Figure]

Technique

Colored pencil and ink on paper

Dimensions

Paper size: 19 x 34 cm
Frame size: 47.5 x 62.5 x 4 cm

Inventory

FM002453

Description

In the summer of 1927, the first solo exhibition of Marjua Mallo’s work was held at the Gijon Trade Fair, where she showed a series of oil paintings – Verbenas, El Mago, Elementos de Deporte, La Isleña – along with a series of prints on different subjects. This exhibition might be regarded as a prelude, or a dress rehearsal, for her future presentation in Madrid. From August 1927, when her friend José Díaz-Fernández wrote about her painting for the first time, until May 1928, when her exhibition was held in the rooms of the Revista de Occidente in Madrid, Maruja Mallo would continue painting works to flesh out her next exhibition and show her paintings to other painters, critics and sculptor friends. Thus throughout 1928 there were a series of articles on her painting in the Spanish press which anticipated and announced the next exhibition of her work. By the time this date came around, a tremendous amount of expectation had been generated and its success was guaranteed. 

Maruja Mallo’s exhibition in Madrid, entitled Paintings and Prints, was diverse in terms of themes and eclectic in terms of forms, and can be divided into paintings and prints on popular subjects, beach scenes and sports, and cinematic prints of mannequins. It was a mixture of “dynamism and plastic and mathematical solidity” according to Luis G. de Valdeavellano in his article on the exhibition, also pointing out that Maruja Mallo only accepted three rules and sources: “the popular, the precise, and the cinematic” (La Época, Madrid, June 2, 1928). 

Manuel Abril, who was more descriptive in his critique of the exhibition, established and identified the different ranges and concepts used by the artist. In reference to the popular prints, “the color of the painting takes on the joyful colors of toys again”; and on the beach scenes, he remarked that the qualities of the paintings “of sand, tinted by the blue of the sea, or of land baked by fire”. With regard to the cinematic prints, Abril highlighted the tonality sought by Maruja Mallo: “everything is colorless and aseptic, burnished and mathematical, everything has been disinfected, the light is surgical, the chill of nickel, the opacity of compressed rubber, the accuracy of a calculating machine” (Revista de Occidente, Madrid, July 1928).

 This Print, created in February 1928, belongs to the third and last rule or source: cinematic. In her treatment of color we find the cool range of blues and pale tones – that ‘surgical light’ . and the final sense of being ‘disinfected’. In her plastic treatment, the decomposition and play of planes respond to the coldness and geometry that Maruja Mallo sought to portray the decadence and putrefaction of the time: laboratory elements – test tubes, glass eyes – were mixed with mannequins, masks, and blindfolds, and with angels flying overhead; an imagery that we might classify as both scientific and popular. 

Many years later, when this Print was exhibited again (Surrealism in Spain, Galería Multitud, Madrid, 1975), Maruja Mallo would rename it with the rather long and descriptive title of The Eyes of Luis Buñuel on the Table, Guarded by Rafael Alberti, José Bergamín, Federico García Lorca, the Virgin of Pilar and Pablo Neruda; a title that in the first instance does not correspond to the image of this ‘cinematic print’ and which we can only assume to be an evocation of a time already past that the artist wanted to remember and honor. 

[Juan Pérez de Ayala]