Friday Art Find: La Verbena (The Street Fair)

I've had this painting tucked away for a while. We've been guided to use it for this week's art find, but I'll be honest: I feel repulsion when I look at it.

The funny thing is that it's not really coming from me.

Despite years of deprogramming, protection, energetic healing, and more, this one cuts to the bone. And the intrusive elements that are actively and deeply embedded in our psyches to varying degrees, that have sought to manipulate and control us through much of history, they feel threatened by this painting. Even now, as I write this, I can sense the pressure mounting.

Spanish avant-garde artist Maruja Mallo influenced the art world during her time, was compatriots with Lorca, Bunuel, and Dali, and transgressed the limits of the social and intellectural spheres. Her work was admired by Surrealists like Breton and others. However, even as she lived, others sought to minimize and erase her artistic contributions. Mallo traversed liminal spaces: between cultures in exile during the Spanish Civil War, working in a field dominated by men, and in her embodiment of the "modern woman" during the changes of the early 20th century.

Women During the Second Republic | Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía

The years presided over by the government of the Second Republic (1931–1936) were key to advances in the process of women’s emancipation that was already under way but ultimately cut short by the National faction’s victory.

Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía

Mallo has been called a Surrealist, but her paintings capture something more living than symbolic. Reading this painting by symbols and composition—as I first attempted to do in my reluctant engagement with it—does not provide the full picture, misses the mystery depicted within. Take a moment to see what this painting elicits in you.

My roots are what connect me to feeling alive.
They run deep.
I am exuberant and free.

1. Mallo, Maruja. 1927. La Verbena. [Painting].
2. Cámara, Esther Rodríguez. 2021. A Brief Biography of Maruja Mallo. Maruja Mallo's Heads of Women: A Pictorial Response to Racial Inequalities in Latin America [Master's Capstone Project]. American University. Retrieved from: https://edspace.american.edu/marujamalloheadsofwomen/maruja-mallo-biography/.
3. Bender, Rebecca M. 2016, Aug 9. Women and the Avant-garde: Maruja Mallo's "Verbenas" (Carnivals). [Blog post]. Retrieved from: https://rebeccambender.com/2016/08/09/maruja-mallo-verbenas/.