INTRODUCTION

After seeing some of Mallo’s Heads—probably the six that she exhibited at Gallery Silvagni in Paris in 1950—Jean-Paul Crespelle, a journalist and art historian, wrote that her “impressive heads of black women” called to mind Baudelaire’s verse “I am beautiful, O mortals, as a dream of stone.”[1] Crucially, Crespelle mentioned beauty as one of the qualities that the Heads conveyed to the viewer, which was, indeed, a fundamental consideration in Mallo’s conception of this series. Furthermore, by quoting this Baudelaire verse, Crespelle also ascribed to the forms in the paintings a certain sculptural quality and to the figures, a timeless quality. One of the main collectors of Mallo’s work, Samuel Mallah, likely saw the series in a similar way. According to the artist, this French-Israeli man, who had jewelry shops in Paris, New York, Chile, and Argentina, bought many of her Heads and then apparently displayed them interspersed with jewels because he saw the paintings as such, too.[2]

In this section, I propose that Mallo unintentionally pursued a Baudelairean concept of beauty— understood as the combination of an eternal and invariable component with a more circumstantial one—by fusing a timeless geometrical structure with the more ephemeral look of contemporary glamour techniques. I also argue that this combination of elements enabled Mallo to speak to the beauty of all races and to create a collective archetype of the “ideal woman.” Although the visual richness of these paintings rests in their attention to difference, the geometric and sculptural quality of the women creates a collective sense of ideal beauty that Mallo used to emphasize the equality of all Latin American races and ethnicities.