Researching the Human Form

From Portrait to Archetype

Figure 16. Maruja Mallo. Portrait of Woman, profile, c. 1947. Archivo Maruja Mallo. 

Ramón Gómez de la Serna (1888-1963), who was one of Mallo’s closest friends, was the first to fall under the spell of her Heads when he saw them at her house in Buenos Aires. In the 1942 monograph on the artist (Fig. 17), he wrote that “Maruja Mallo [was] dealing with the immensity of portrait,” and that “as el Greco, as the great Italian portraitists, she meditate[d] in the solitude of the human figure.” Moreover, he also poetically foresaw that “the world of the aristocratic or anonymous creatures that observe in museums as only portraits do, would be the painter’s next gallery [of paintings].”[1] His words are significant because they place Heads of Women in the tradition of portraiture in art history and exalt Mallo’s approach to the human figure.

Indeed, Mallo’s Heads of Woman paintings exhibit classical qualities that evidence her interest in the human form, which is the focus of this section. Their static poses, their carefully thought proportions, their marked contours, the faces’ contrast with the backgrounds, the attention to detail, their aristocratic gazes, and the strict profile of the figures in six of the paintings are some of the aspects that connect Mallo’s Heads with the tradition of Renaissance painting, specifically with the works of Piero della Francesca, discussed below, and with a previous lineage of artists devoted to portraiture, including El Greco, mentioned above. As such, the works clearly reflect Mallo’s formal and informal training in art history—shaped by her time at the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid, her readings and her visits to museums, and her direct attention to the theories of influential intellectuals of the time, such as Eugenio d’Ors (1881-1954), Joaquín Torres García (1874-1949), and Matila Ghyka (1881-1965).

Mallo believed that artistic authority resided in art-historical training and that such training was foundational to professional legitimacy. In fact, she was very critical of those contemporary artists who lacked what she considered to be required knowledge of ancient art, in particular the Greco-Roman tradition. Although she said that she felt she had been painting since birth, Mallo’s official training began when she left the Spanish region of Galicia in 1922 and moved to Madrid at the age of twenty.[2] Once there, she registered at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando, founded in 1744. In order to be accepted, she had to pass an exam consisting of copying a cast of Bacchus by Jacopo Sansovino.[3] (Fig. 18) We can assume that she was already equipped with good drawing skills because the acceptance exam was very strict, and Mallo was proud to be the “única señorita aprobada” (the only woman who passed it) that year.[4] In the academy, she encountered a nineteenth-century curriculum that followed classical themes and methodologies and that could not be considered as particularly avant-garde or ground-breaking.[5] This does not mean that Mallo developed a special attachment to academicism; on the contrary, she disregarded it and followed instead those artists who demonstrated a more ‘innovative’ spirit, like Dalí, who was also studying there and was soon to become her friend.[6] However, during her education, Mallo likely adhered to the guidelines of her professors, as she successfully passed her courses and, unlike Dalí, was not suspended from the Academy. [7] Furthermore, in San Fernando, Mallo would have had ample opportunity to become acquainted with classical art because the Academy had been for years amassing an impressive collection of casts from which she trained.[8] (Fig.18) Thus, what we should take away from Mallo’s academic training is not a presumed conservatism, but a commitment to serious artistic training and her admiration for ancient classicism, whose principles of harmony and order were essential in the conception of her Heads of Women as emblems of beauty.

In addition to attending classes at San Fernando, Mallo—together with male painters such as Dalí, Francisco Bores, José Moreno Villa, and Wilfredo Lam—trained at the independent academy of Julio Moisés Fernández de Villasante (1888-1968) from 1924 to 1926.[9] Julio Moisés especially stood out among his contemporaries as a portraitist of elegant and sensuous women, and his lessons could have informed Mallo’s appreciation of female beauty. In fact, during her formative years, she painted many portraits of women. According to Ana Rodríguez Fisher, in 1926, Mallo exhibited five of these works—Lolita, Virginia, María Luisa (Fig. 19), Olimpia, and Raquel— at the Exhibition of Galician Art in Santiago. The classicizing qualities of these works led Shirley Mangini to understand them as predecessors for Mallo’s Heads of Women due to their classicizing qualities.[10]

Mallo’s deep knowledge of art history, evidenced in many of her writings, makes it likely that her Heads of Women had connections with the art of those painters that she began to admire during her formative years in Madrid.[11] In relation to this series of portraits, Mallo’s frequent visits to the Museo del Prado are of particular relevance.[12] There, she encountered an impressive encyclopedic collection, including works by those painters that she considered the best in the history of art, such as El Greco, Velázquez, and Goya, but also Fra Angelico, Botticelli, Tintoretto, Veronese, Titian, and Piero della Francesca. In the interviews that she gave during her life and the texts that she wrote, Mallo conveyed what she found special or unique about these painters’ images. For instance, she reiterated that works by El Greco, Velázquez, and Goya represented periods of exceptional achievement in Spanish portraiture and that each artist was able to interpret the soul of their time.[13]

Among the artists from the past that Mallo admired, there is one whose influence was remarkable in the conception of the Heads of Women series: Piero della Francesca (c.1415-1492). For Mallo, El Greco and Piero were the two “pintores capitales” [major painters]: to her mind, they were the ones who created the most admirable compositions.[14] Indeed, her Heads of Women, especially those presented in strict profile, echo some of Piero della Francesca’s most renowned paintings (see figures 20 and 21), such as his double portrait of The Duke and Duchess of Urbino (1465-1472), the Portrait of Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta (c.1451), and the Portrait of a Boy (c.1483).

Renaissance portraits, even if idealized by the artists, presupposed a “true likeness.”[15] In fact, scholars have traditionally associated the emergence of modern portraiture with the rise of celebrity and individualism.[16] According to Patricia Simons, the prevalence of the profile format in fifteenth-century portraiture derived “from the busts of the Caesars on Roman Imperial coins [and] further served to glorify Italian signori by linking them visually to the kind of power to which they aspired.[17] In figure 22, we can see Head of Woman (front, 1941) featured in a magazine precisely called Renacimiento.

Despite Mallo’s evident interest in studying the idea of accurate physiognomy in Renaissance portraiture, she departed from it in her Heads. The featured women were not meant to represent specific individuals. That said, although there is no definitive evidence to this point, based on different pieces of evidence included in this project, I am inclined to think that, indeed, she did in fact work from real models. Mallo based the paintings on models, but they represented Mallo’s own perceptions and ideas regarding those people.

A philosophy expressed by the contemporaneous artist Joaquín Torres García is essential to understanding why Mallo worked from models but used geometry to distance the women’s appearance from reality. He argued that the “idea” for an artwork must emerge from artists’ minds while the “form” must “emerge from geometry.”[18] Although Mallo based her portraits on real faces, her final images constitute a synthesis, executed with exacting geometrical technique. In other words, she converted them into “archetypes,” which enabled her to use them for more theoretical purposes. Even if she may have not been fully aware of the connotations of this choice, we will see that approach ended up being more essentializing than individualizing.

Figure 17. Cover of the first monograph devoted to Maruja Mallo, with prologue by Ramón de Gómez de la Serna. Buenos Aires: Losada, 1942. Archivo Maruja Mallo.

Figure 18. Left: Jacopo Sansovino (1486-1570), Bacchus, 1511. Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence, Italy. Right: Plasters at the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Madrid, Spain.

Figure 19. Left: Julio Moisés Fernández de Villasante. Portrait of Miss Iturrióz, 1921. Oil on canvas, 65.5 x 53 cm. Right: Maruja Mallo, María Luisa, c.1922. Oil on tablex, 55 x 48 cm. © Maruja Mallo.

Figure 20. Piero della Francesca. The Duke and Duchess of Urbino, c. 1465-1472. Tempera on panel, 47 cm × 33 cm. Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy.

Figure 21. Right: Maruja Mallo, Head of Woman (profile), 1941. Oil on panel, 56x44 cm. Left: Maruja Mallo. Blonde Woman/ The [Male] Champion, 1951. Oil on panel, 49 x 40 cm. © Maruja Mallo

Figure 22. Living Nature and Head of Woman (profile, 1941) featured in magazine Renacimiento, Revista Italo-Sudamericana de Cultura nos. 10-11, Lima, Perú. Archivo Maruja Mallo.