“Cosmic” Archetypes

According to the previously mentioned 1979 interview, Maruja Mallo believed that the “archetypes” that she saw in Brazil resulted from the intermixing of diverse races and that this intermixing made a person look like an “astral being.”[1] With this phrase, she wanted to highlight what she perceived as the extraordinary and quasi-celestial qualities of mixed-race people. This was not the first nor only time in which she, like Renaissance artists and cosmologists, tried to connect, through art, the human sphere, and the immeasurable universe. Indeed, she looked to earlier precedents for inspiration in this regard. For instance, Mallo described painter Joan Miró as “astral,” perceiving him as an intuitive, sensitive, and mysterious artist with a particularly rich inner world.[2] She also defined Picasso’s Guernica as “the most immense cosmic scream in the boundless space.” For Mallo, Guernica represented a great act of human cruelty and, rather than solely representing a specific, local event, explored potentially universal themes.[3] Furthermore, she praised her early friend the painter Alberto Sánchez for his ability to connect the minute and the infinite, “from thyme to atmospherical catastrophes; from esparto to celestial volumes,” and how he converted “wheat bread in astral bread.”[4] Even contemporaneous critics and current scholars have employed the word “cosmic” or related terms to talk about Mallo’s art and philosophy. For instance, the critic Melva Luna wrote that the color scheme of Mallo’s 1945 murals for the Los Ángeles Movie Theatres in Buenos Aires (Fig. 69) interpreted the “cosmic vitality, which gives energy to the races and unifies the peoples” and that “[t]he five races are here featured in a circular movement paralleled with el cósmico de rotación.”[5] For her part, Alejandra Zanetta wrote that, in her Heads, “Mallo employs the female head as the cosmic symbol of a new inclusive order.”[6]

Indeed, the notion of “The Cosmic Race,” introduced by the Mexican writer, philosopher, and politician José Vasconcelos in his eponymous essay La raza cósmica, first published in Barcelona in 1925 (Fig. 70), may have inspired Mallo’s Heads. In The Cosmic Race, Vasconcelos condemned Darwinist theories and how they were used by the Nazis to establish the supremacy of the ‘pure Aryan.’ Instead, the central thesis of his book was that the different races of the world tended to merge and would end up fusing into a fifth race.[7] He considered the other four races to be the Black, the Indian, the Mongol, and the White.[8] He also thought that each race had a mission and after they accomplish it, they would disappear. Therefore, according to him, the period of “pure white” domination was ending.[9] However, although The Cosmic Race clearly differed from prevailing theories that proclaimed White supremacy, the text still exhibits many racist prejudices coming from colonial times, especially regarding Indigenous and Black people, who according to Vasconcelos, would be “liberated” of all imperfections once part of his proposed cosmic race.[10]

Mallo, who was an insatiable reader, likely was exposed to Vasconcelos’s theories, which were disseminated in Latin American cultural circles. For example, the concept of the “cosmic race” is mentioned in one of the Argentinean magazines to which Mallo contributed, Hombre de América. The August 1943 issue featured a cover illustrated with a reproduction of the artist’s painting Mensaje del Mar (Message of the Sea, 1937) and the interior included her text “Posición.” Interestingly, in the same issue, Justino Cornejo, an Ecuadorian intellectual, wrote that America seemed to be the synthesis of the universe and that its race was “‘the cosmic race’ that was once introduced by José Vasconcelos.”[11]

Sketches dating from 1957 preserved in Mallo’s archive demonstrate that she was experimenting with different ways of organizing schematic portraits frontally and profile, as the Heads of Women are generally presented. Estrella de Diego first pointed to one of these drawings (Fig. 71), which Mallo had annotated with the inscription “5 races” at the top, as a demonstration of how important mathematics and orderliness were in Mallo’s work.[12] Nevertheless, I think we can take her analysis even further if we consider the five letters that appear above each of the five columns. “N, B, R, A, A,” that seem to represent the first initials of the words “Negro,” “Blanco,” “Rojo,” “Amarillo,” and “Azul?” [black, white, red, yellow, and blue?], would correspond to those five races conceptualized by Vasconcelos.[13] Here, the “blue” category would be Mallo’s own way of naming the “fifth race,” in line with Vasconcelos’s concept of the “cosmic race.” Furthermore, as part of her archive, some casual annotations made by Mallo in her notebooks reinforce the idea of her reflecting on the concept of the “5 races,” while others suggest that she also probably thought of the idea of race in connection with different continents. However, the measurements that she included in her annotations do not always coincide with the Heads that this project has considered as part of the series so it is difficult to assess if she meant to ascribe those names to some of the Heads that are currently titled in a different way.

5 Immortal Names
5 Races
5 Psychic [characteristics?] – Knowledge Courage Justice Temperance
5 Physical [characterisctics?]– Health Beauty Wealth [14]

Portraits
Immortal
Races
Psychic
Physical [15]

Heads

Oceanic – 56 x 44
Black – 56 x 46
America – 56 x 55
Europe – 56 x 55 [16]

Figure 69. Maruja Mallo. Armonías Plásticas. Mural paintings for Los Ángeles Movie Theatre, right panel, Buenos Aires, 1945 (destroyed at the beggining of the 1980s).

Figure 70. Cover of José Vasconcelos. La raza cósmica: misión de la raza iberoamericana (Barcelona: Agencia Mundial de Librería, 1925) and portrait of José Vasconcelos, photographed by Harris & Ewing.

Figure 71. Maruja Mallo. 5 RAZAS [5 races], c. 1957. Ink and color pencils on paper, 16 x 22 cm. Archivo Maruja Mallo.

Fig. 72. Maruja Mallo. COLOR 5= 25 COMB= “RAZ,” December 22, 1957. Archivo Maruja Mallo.