THE ART JOURNAL FOR CONTEMPORARY CULTURE, ART HISTORY, AND THOUGHT

The Order Behind the Mask

Maruja Mallo and the Limits of a Museum Rediscovery

DOSSIERS

Hans Struberger

11/7/20255 min read

Maruja Mallo, Española contemporánea (Cabeza de mujer), 1941, in two versions: a frontal view and a profile. Both works on view in Maruja Mallo: Mask and Compass, Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid. Photographs: DOKUNST. © Maruja Mallo, VEGAP, Madrid, 2025.

To see the five Verbenas together again is an event. They had not been shown as a group since Maruja Mallo’s exhibition at the offices of Revista de Occidente in 1928. At the Museo Reina Sofía, one can follow how she turns the bustle of Madrid’s popular festivities into pictorial order: figures, signs, attractions and glances compete for attention without the composition falling apart. The painter of exuberance works with remarkable control. This is a persuasive starting point for Mask and Compass, the retrospective curated by Patricia Molins. It becomes less persuasive when a recurring principle of order is asked to explain the whole of Mallo’s work.

Organised jointly by the Reina Sofía and the Fundación Botín, the exhibition brings together around a hundred paintings, some seventy drawings, and a substantial collection of photographs and documents. Following its presentation in Santander, the Madrid version has expanded the archival material in particular. The exhibition proceeds chronologically through Mallo’s series, from the popular culture of Madrid through images of the earth, labour and exile to the figures and cosmic visions of her later decades. Molins gives the American years a weight they are often denied in accounts of the artist. Mallo emerges as more than an eccentric member of the Generation of ’27, and her most consequential work does not simply end with the Spanish Civil War. The exhibition makes it possible to tell a longer and less settled story.

A chronology, however, never merely records events. By placing changes in sequence, it suggests that each phase grows out of the one before it. Mallo’s interest in geometric construction makes this reading especially tempting: the compass of the exhibition’s title appears capable of drawing a line from the early festival scenes to the spaces of her later work. But order does not mean the same thing in every painting. In the Verbenas, it holds together the conflicting simultaneity of the street. After war and flight, Mallo faced a different task. Her paintings had to find forms for experiences and ideas that could no longer be derived from the Madrid of the 1920s. To find continuity everywhere is to risk treating a historical rupture as a mere change of subject.

Two paintings from 1941 make the problem visible. Both are titled Española contemporánea (Cabeza de mujer). In one, a woman looks directly out of the picture. Her face is composed with deliberate restraint; the red dress makes a firm boundary at the lower edge against the subdued background. The other painting shows a woman in profile, her shoulder bare and her gaze directed beyond the frame. Their hairstyles, flushed cheeks and painted lips connect the two heads. Those similarities do not establish that they depict the same person. What matters is how Mallo takes a related pictorial conception and creates two different relationships with the viewer. The frontal figure meets our gaze; the woman in profile allows herself to be seen without returning it.

Their shared title gives this difference its historical force. What did “Spanish” mean to an artist working in exile in 1941? And what could “contemporary” mean when she no longer lived in the Spain from which she came? Mallo does not answer with a portrait of someone whose identity can be securely established. The paintings show how an image of womanhood takes shape through posture, hairstyle, colour, gaze and the framing of the body. What changes between them is more than the angle of a head. It is what the figure offers to view and what the viewer is able to make of her. Here, the “contemporary Spanish woman” is not a fixed identity that painting simply records.

This is where the mask of the exhibition’s title becomes precise. A mask need not be a false face concealing a true one. It can be the form through which a face becomes legible to others. Mallo’s portraits investigate that legibility, while photographs and public appearances reveal how consciously she fashioned her own image. The retrospective’s archive is therefore more than biographical accompaniment. It asks us to distinguish between Mallo’s self-presentation, the ways her contemporaries saw her and the meanings the museum assigns to her today. A search for the “real” Maruja Mallo behind her performance would overlook the extent to which the making of images was itself part of her work.

This also bears on the description of Mallo as a “modern woman”. The phrase has a historical basis: she claimed a public and professional position as an artist when such a position was far from assured for women. It does not, however, provide a complete reading of her images of women. The two Españolas contemporáneas offer neither a single ideal nor a straightforward progression towards an emancipated self-image. Their resemblance invites comparison; the difference between their gazes prevents that comparison from settling into one definition. A retrospective seeking to establish Mallo’s importance should preserve this uncertainty rather than resolve it with terms to which contemporary audiences can readily assent.

The language of “rediscovery” calls for similar care. It responds to a genuine imbalance in art history. Mallo’s work has not occupied the place in the canon of European modernism that its range and distinctiveness warrant. Yet she was exhibited and discussed during her lifetime, and research and exhibitions preceded Mask and Compass, including a major survey in Madrid in 1979. The achievement of the present retrospective is therefore not that it brings an entirely unknown artist to light. It gathers widely dispersed works and documents on a scale that makes new judgements possible. That is substantial. It does not mean that a historical debt has been settled by admission to a major museum.

For Mallo’s renewed visibility also raises a question about those around her. The reunion of the Verbenas makes a powerful case against placing her at the margins of the Spanish avant-garde. But what was her position within its relationships: with other artists, writers, stage designers and the cultural circles in which she worked and argued? A retrospective is entitled to place her work at its centre. If it also seeks to revise art history, it must take care not to present Mallo as an exceptional woman within an otherwise unchanged account. Recognising one artist does not, by itself, alter the terms in which her milieu is understood.

In the works made in the Americas, this task extends beyond Spain. Bodies, the sea, plants and geometric signs enter into new relationships; Mallo’s paintings imagine connections between people and the world that no national boundary can contain. Their aspiration towards a broader idea of humanity deserves attention. For that very reason, “universality” cannot be the end of the analysis. Which differences remain visible within such a vision? Which are absorbed into a harmonious form? And how did exile in the Americas change Mallo’s way of seeing, rather than simply supply new subjects for an established visual language? These questions do not diminish the ambition of her art. They take it seriously enough to leave its tensions in view.

Mask and Compass is an exhibition of considerable art-historical importance. Molins shows how much is lost when Mallo is reduced to her early fame in Madrid, and assembles material against which that reduction can now be tested. Precisely because the retrospective brings so much together, it need not be made to tell a seamless life story. Between the five Verbenas and the two women’s heads of 1941 lies more than the development of a style. There are war, exile and the question of how an artist might create images of belonging without remaining bound to a single place or role. Mallo’s entry into the canon does not settle that question. It makes it possible, at last, to ask it with the necessary precision.

Exhibition: Maruja Mallo: Mask and Compass, Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid, 8 October 2025–16 March 2026.

Curated by Patricia Molins; organised by the Museo Reina Sofía and the Fundación Botín.