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The Encounter with Brazilian Diversity
Although Mallo resided in Buenos Aires, she was an enthusiastic traveler. Among the countries that she visited while in exile, Brazil was the one that had the greatest impact on her Heads of Women and its influence is stressed here. In fact, Juan Pérez de Ayala affirmed that the artist’s visits to Brazil were a source of inspiration as important to her as was her experience of the Chilean beaches during the 1940s, which she captured in her Naturalezas Vivas series.[1] The artist first traveled to Brazil in February of 1946, with the simple goal of “going around” and discovering its local people.[2] She stayed at the luxurious hotel Copacabana Palace in Rio de Janeiro, where she presented some of the paintings she had brought with her to the press in her own hotel’s apartment.[3] (Fig. 54) She also experienced the carnivals, went to the top of Corcovado, and visited the bay and the areas of Petrópolis and Teresópolis, which are close to Rio de Janeiro.[4]
Her encounter with Brazilian natural and human diversity also enchanted her, and she was charmed by everything “exotic” or connected to what she considered magic rituals. Juan Pérez de Ayala suggests that the pair of Mallo’s Heads called The Human Deer (front and profile, 1948) represented a black-Asian performer who modeled for her in Rio de Janeiro and who, according to his memory of a conversation with Mallo, “danced macumba.”[5] This fact reveals that, to a certain degree, Mallo conventionally related Blackness with dance, music, and ritual.[6] Nevertheless, neither in the Human Deer nor in the rest of Heads, did the artist chose to focus on this association as had others before her. One example is Pedro Figari (1861-1938), an Uruguayan artist who Mallo considered to be the best painter in South America,[7] and who became especially renowned for his paintings of Black people dancing candombes in Montevideo. By contrast, in the Human Deer, Mallo concentrated on the woman’s face and did not include her in any folkloric environment that could perpetuate this association. Nevertheless, she perpetuated others, like this woman’s connection to nature, as evidenced by the chosen title and the inclusion of two rounded adornments that give her face a triangular shape reminiscent of that of a female deer’s head.
Ayala’s memory also supports the idea that Mallo worked from real models. Some of her contemporaneous studio sketches feature a Black model and further attest to this theory. In the case of Sketch for a Female Nude (1946) the woman is clearly posing, with an arm resting in a kind of stand, while in two other drawings she adopts a more dynamic pose, which could correspond to a kind of dance. However, although Mallo based her portraits on real faces, as we addressed elsewhere in this project, she converted them into “archetypes.” Her interest in the beauty of the archetype can be inferred from her own words:
I believed in the supremacy of the races because I saw more aesthetic in the archetypes I met in Brazil, that were called “cafuzos,” who were the mix of three races: the White, the Black and the Chinese, and when they generate an archetype, as it has the most beautiful features of each archetype, what results is an astral being.[8]
The way Mallo is conceptualizing the expression of “supremacy of races” is quite contradictory here, as she is again equating the word supremacy with equality. Although she did it in a confusing way and by means of classifying people by their ethnicity, what she was trying to convey is that the beauty that she found in the mixed-race people that she encountered in Brazil was for her a way to prove that all races were equally relevant and that no one should be seen as inferior to any other.
Figure 54. Maruja Mallo interviewed by a journalist of O Jornal in her apartment of the Copacabana Palace, Rio de Janeiro, 1946.
Figure 55. Maruja Mallo. The Human Deer (front and profile) © Maruja Mallo
Figure 56. Maruja Mallo, right: Young Nude Black Woman, 1948. Oil and pencil on cardboard, 49 x 34.5 cm; center: Study for Female Nude, 1946. Oil on canvas. 50 x 38.5 cm; left: Black Young Woman with Her Back Turned, 1948?Oil and pencil on cardboard, 53 x 37 cm. Archivo Maruja Mallo.
Mallo’s interest in the exotic, the “type,” and Brazilian diversity fits within a tradition of foreign naturalists and artists travelers who, especially at the end of the 19th century, explored Brazil’s territories in search both of unique specimens of fauna and flora and new types of men and women who were the product of the perceived extreme miscegenation in the country.[9] However, at the end of the 19th century, this idea of the Brazilian mestiçagem began to be interpreted negatively understood by certain local politico-intellectual circles influenced by contemporaneous racial theories claiming that “mixture” implied the decadence of a “superior race.”[10] Therefore, those same intellectuals concluded that society needed to be whitened in order to civilize it.[11] Fortunately, as noted by Eduardo Elena, with World War II, ideas connected to the notion of racial improvement or to the supposed existence of biological hierarchies started to lose support, including among politicians.[12] Transnational social scientists in the 1940s began to feel an especial interest in Brazil because they saw this country as exemplary of racial harmony and thought that it “could give clues to update a durable worldwide peace.” [13]
All these debates crystallized in different and nuanced ways in various of Mallo’s Heads, especially in those depicting Black or mixed-race women. Just like Mallo’s Naturalezas Vivas series has been read as a personal and imaginative subversion of old botanic illustrations and still lives, I believe that her Heads of Woman can be read as a reinterpretation of the anthropological type through painting. Thus, in the following two sections, I will discuss how Mallo both continued and departed from Brazilian pictorial precedents, and the tradition of ethnographic photography and expeditionary illustrations.
[1] Juan Pérez de Ayala. “Cotas de Ascensión/Puntos de Contemplación,” in Maruja Mallo, edited by Fernando Huici March and Juan Pérez de Ayala vol. 1 (Madrid: Sociedad Estatal de Conmemoraciones Culturales, Ministerio de Cultura, Fundación Caixa Galicia, 2009), 105.
[2] “Ouvindo Maruja Mallo, no Rio,” O Jornal (Section “Revista”) no. 7923, Rio de Janeiro (February 24, 1946): 1.
[3] “Ouvindo Maruja Mallo, no Rio,” 1.
[4] Juan Manuel Bonet, “Maruja Mallo: la forma expresa el contenido de una época,” El País (January 30, 1977): n.p, online version.
[5] In some unpublished notes, Pérez de Ayala also read that Mallo went to the Brazilian jungle to see a macumba ritual together with the director of O Jornal. Macumba was the name that a series of syncretic Afro Brazilian religions often related to witchcraft by those who do not participate in the rituals. Pérez de Ayala, “Cotas de Ascensión/Puntos de Contemplación,” 105.
[6] Jaime Arocha and Nina Friedemann, De sol a sol: génesis, transformación y presencia de los negros en Colombia (Bogotá: Planeta, 1986), 5.
[7] Maruja closely followed Figari’s career and was even aware of the price at which his paintings were sold. Maruja Mallo. Maruja Mallo to Jorge Oteiza, December 18, 1952. In Maruja Mallo. Orden y Creación. Óleos, dibujos bocetos y su Archivo (Madrid: Galería Guillermo de Osma, 2017): 63.
[8] My translation. Original in Spanish: “Yo creía en la supremacía de las razas porque veía más estética en unos arquetipos que conocí en Brasil que le llamaban cafuzos, que eran las mezclas de las tres razas, la blanca, la negra y el chino y que cuando da un arquetipo, como tiene las facciones más bellas de cada arquetipo, pues resulta… pues… un ser astral.” Maruja Mallo. “Imágenes. Artes visuales: Maruja Mallo,” min. 39:55 of 54:28.
[9] Carine da Costa Cadilho, “O negro e o mestiço na pintura de Candido Portinari da década de 1930” (Master’s thesis, Centro Federal de Educação Tecnológico Celso Suckow da Fonseca, 2015): 19.
[10] Mónica Velasco Molina, “Políticas raciales en Brasil: 1862-1933,” Latinoamérica. Revista de Estudios Latinoamericanos 61 (October 2015): 33.
[11] Cadilho, “O negro e o mestiço,” 15.
[12] Elena, “Argentina in Black and White,” 187.
[13] David Cook-Martín and David FitzGerald, “Vender el mito de la democracia racial: Selección étnica en las políticas migratorias de Brasil desde la República hasta el presente,” in Migraciones Transatlánticas: Desplazamientos, Etnicidad y Políticas (UC San Diego, 2015): 46.
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