The art magazine Estampa published a special on Spanish female artists in 1934. The text saved, among others, the painter Maruja Mallo. The Galician was enjoying a moment of popularity; André Breton bought her work in 1932. Scarecrowwhich he called “one of the great works of surrealism”, at the most international time of the movement. Only one other Spanish artist received the same praise from the poet and founder of the movement: Remedios Varo, whom he called “the witch of surrealism”. However, when we celebrate the centenary of the manifesto signed in 1924, his work, like that of Ángeles Santos, another with dreamlike features, is rare in commemorative exhibitions, such as the one recently inaugurated at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, reduced to four pieces.
“As is the case with many female artists, the monographic exhibitions that have been held so far have not gone beyond the local level. In the case of Mallo, in Galicia, and in that of Santos, in Valladolid. What concerns Varo is quite striking. Her work is considered national heritage in Mexico, and monographic exhibitions have been held in that country and elsewhere, which demonstrates the international interest that her work arouses, but the last individual exhibition that brought together her works in Spain was in the early 90s, at the Teruel Museum. They deserve a more ambitious recognition than those that have been held so far,” emphasizes the art historian and founder of the educational platform specializing in women in art La casa de Remedios, Montaña Hurtado.
Mallo, Varo and Santos were included in the 2018 sample We are totally free. Women artists and surrealism at the Picasso Museum in Malaga. Its connection with surrealism lies in its mystical, imaginative and magical vocation, more than in its relationship with the postulates and the Breton circle. However, Mallo and Varo were close to their representatives: the first was a friend of Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel, and the second was a partner of the poet Benjamin Péret. They therefore suffered the same evil as the surrealists: being better known for being the muses or friends of the male members. While Santos was brought to the fore by the comments made on her work by her brother Rafael’s friend, Ramón Gómez de la Serna.
Punished by exile and health
“Women were a kind of satellite around the Breton planet. They worked in their own way and did not benefit from this programmatic involvement of men. Some of them were her partners. It was a very authoritarian movement, in which masculinity was predominant. Lee Miller is better known for being Man Ray’s partner than for the excellent photographer that she is,” explains Rosario Peiró, head of collections at the Reina Sofía Museum, which houses several pieces by these artists. Exile contributed to the loss of her mark on Spanish territory. Mallo lived for 25 years in Buenos Aires, where she developed much of her work before returning to the peninsula, where she would receive the Gold Medal of Fine Arts, 13 years before her death in 1995.
The case of Varo, whose father was Andalusian and her mother Basque, was more extreme. She first took refuge in Paris in 1937, but after the outbreak of the Second World War, she left for Mexico in 1941, where she remained until her death in 1963. She is considered a symbol in the Aztec country, but she never returned to Mexico. Spain again, although she kept her passport from the Second Republic. “Ángeles Santos was the only one who remained in Spain after the Civil War and, obviously, these new circumstances were decisive. Not only could they have influenced the change in their way of working, but, during the dictatorship, women became invisible,” says Juncal Caballero, professor of aesthetics and art theory at the Jaume I University.
Exile did not directly affect Santos, but it forced her husband, Emilio Grau, to seek asylum in Paris. The artist was admitted by her father to a psychiatric hospital, an experience that affected her, and she spent several years without painting. He changed his style of disturbing characters and universes, most visible in a world (1929), a painting in which he represents a square Earth watched over by divine entities – for a more academic painting, with themes of still lifes and landscapes. “We cannot say that it has been forgotten, because very important people have written about Ángeles, but it is true that, together with Varo and Mallo, they were considered exceptions, as points on the fundamental lines, and as such, no attention has been paid. that is dedicated to them now,” says Peiró.
A feminine surrealism
Working on the fringes of the movement characterizes the Spanish and international surrealists, from America to Europe. The two versions of the manifesto and other texts in which their forms of action and thought were advocated do not include women among the signatories. “It is said that surrealism sought individual freedom, but always that of men. It is true that over time, given that it was a long movement, there was greater openness. However, for the surrealists, women were more muses and objects than creators,” explains Hurtado. This bias in the legacy of the movement was evident in the first major retrospective exhibition, Dada, Surrealism and their Legacyorganized in 1968 at MoMA, which did not include any women painters.
Another ambitious sample on the current was The Surrealist Revolutiondeveloped at the Pompidou in 2002. Only three women participated. In this new exhibition in the Parisian center, surrealism, open until January 13, 2025, an attempt at balance has been made and about 40% of the exhibitors are women. Four works by Varo are present, three canvases and a gouache, all with her usual concerns: tarot, cooking, mathematics, architecture and geometry. Although Mallo’s only work in the exhibition is algae cover (1945), an intervened photographic self-portrait of the artist, covered with a blanket of seaweed on a beach in Chile, true to his daring and burlesque spirit.
“For a long time, Mallo was considered more of an eccentric character than a great artist,” explains Hurtado. In addition to the Spanish works, there are works by great names of surrealism that have been recovered over the years: Dorothea Tanning, Dora Maar, Eileen Agar, Claude Cahun, Leonora Carrington, Leonor Fini, Jacqueline Lamba or Meret Oppenheim, to name a few. All of them marked by the same tendency that characterized the women of the movement: to show a complex and enigmatic inner world.
Unlike their peers, who used games and techniques such as automatic writing or induced trances to open the subconscious, they immersed themselves in the unconscious as a means of self-knowledge and with a more introspective than playful sense. “In a way, it is because they represent the subject they know best, that is, themselves. If you look at Varo’s painting, it ends up being a portrait in an androgynous or feminine way, with her own face, the red color of her hair. It is not totally introspective, but they end up putting the woman in the foreground. Santos’ work is also full of women in dark environments,” Caballero reflects. Mallo also explores her being, but from traditional angles, with superimposed and colorful worlds reminiscent of festivals, carnival and fairs.
They reject Breton’s rigid assumptions and norms, but surrealism is the avant-garde that attracts the most women. They were drawn to the window that opened to explore and express their subjectivity, to confront gender roles with hybrid or non-normative identities and to be able to exorcise their demons.
