Maruja Mallo and the Interest in Children’s Art during the Second Spanish Republic ROBERTA ANN QUANCE Queen’s University Belfast l Abstract A little-known article in the Spanish Republican journal Diablo Mundo (1934) reveals valuable information about the artist Maruja Mallo’s brief experience teaching art to children, even as it points up an important current in progressive pedagogy instituted in Spain in the early twentieth century and [AQ1]fomented under the Second Spanish Republic. The artist’s interest in children’s art is contextualized through a discussion of women’s role and documentation of leading artists, and intellectuals’ enthusiasm for the experimentation carried out in the wake of the Mexican Revolution. The suggestion is made that the children’s drawings which were featured in the Diablo Mundo article forecast the kinds of drawings that were made by children in Republican zones during the Spanish Civil War. Resumen Un artículo poco conocido, aparecido en la revista republicana Diablo Mundo (1934), contiene valiosa información sobre la artista Maruja Mallo y su breve etapa como profesora de dibujo en el Instituto de Arévalo (Ávila). Su experiencia se inserta en una corriente pedagógica en auge a principios del siglo XX y fomentada por la Segunda República. La práctica de la joven artista es situada con respecto al feminismo y a las distintas maneras de entender el papel de la mujer, y es valorada igualmente a la luz del entusiasmo que destacados intelectuales demostraron por la pedagogía artística de la Revolución Mexicana. Se plantea por último la posibilidad de que los dibujos que realizaron los alumnos de Maruja Mallo augurasen (o inaugurasen) una práctica que iba a desembocar en la producción de miles de dibujos infantiles de carácter testimonial durante la Guerra Civil española. It is a well-known fact that avant-garde art coincided with a keen interest in the point of view of the child and a renewed faith in Charles Baudelaire’s deinition of genius. In his essay ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ (1863) Baudelaire celebrated the artist’s ability to recapture his childhood: ‘Genius is nothing other than childhood deliberately regained’. By this he meant the ability on the part of the adult to see the world as a child does, for whom perception had not become BHS 90.7 (2013) doi:10.3828/bhs.2013.49 BHS90_7_04_Quance.indd 803 20/08/2013 10:42 804 Roberta Ann Quance bhs, 90 (2013) Fig. 1: Diablo Mundo [Madrid], No. 5, 26 May 1934. Courtesy of Biblioteca Nacional, Spain ‘dull and blunted’ (Baudelaire 1992: 350). He did not have in mind the art a child actually produced (Pernoud 2003: 15), but that of an adult. Yet he presides in spirit over a wave of interest in the eye and the imagination of the child, which, by the early 1920s and the years of the Second Republic spread through Europe and into Spain. Not surprisingly, then, it is Baudelaire who inspires the title of the little-known but key journal article, [AQ2] ‘El niño, genio natural’ (see Fig. 1 and Diablo Mundo 1934a), which links the pedagogy of art to progressive politics. This unsigned text was published in Diablo Mundo, a Republican weekly remembered for its non-partisan commitment to social, political and cultural reform, despite its short lifespan (it ran only to nine numbers, from 28 April 1934 to 23 June 1934). Here we ind rare documentation of the way in which the concern for child art in Spain was interpreted by one of the leading avant-garde artists, Maruja Mallo (1902–1995), who was also, for a brief time in 1933–1934, a schoolteacher in the Republican classroom. Over the past twenty years a number of exhibitions in Spain have drawn our attention to the parallel histories of the avant-garde and the rise of new pedagogies in Europe (see Guigon 1996; Bonet 1998; Bordes and Pérez 2010). But the important connection between this phenomenon and the Second Republic’s interest in educational reform has not been made. Nor has there been any appraisal of the generation of young artists who came of age around the time of the Republic and who responded to the government’s appeal in the summer of BHS90_7_04_Quance.indd 804 20/08/2013 10:42 bhs, 90 (2013) Maruja Mallo and the Interest in Children’s Art 805 1933 to become teachers (Otero Seco 1933). The aim of this article is to study one such case, that of Maruja Mallo, which has not received the attention it deserves. Although I will refer to the impact of a child–art aesthetic on the artist herself (especially as it may be her art too that is on display in the margins of the text), my aim in the irst place is to contextualize the Republic’s interest in children’s art and to situate the subject politically within the late years of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship and the lifespan of the second Republic. Secondarily, I will place Maruja Mallo’s experience as a teacher within the context of her own art and a noticeable trend in the 1930s for women to express their civic and political commitment through concern for children’s welfare. The topic is a complex one that can only fall into place as the pieces of a mosaic would, after one has considered the various facets of the question involved: an exemplary post-revolutionary movement in Mexico; a developing discourse in Spanish media on the parallels between avant-garde art and child art; the role of women in the 1920s and 1930s; and the artist’s investment in these discourses. Background Although modern artists did not set out to imitate a child’s drawings, it is a fact that the rise of the avant-garde brought with it a new appreciation of children’s art and its innocent eye.1 The Expressionists’ Der Blaue Reiter almanac (1912), for example, included 9 children’s drawings among its 144 illustrations. Throughout Europe painters as different as Klee and Miró began to collect children’s art; and such was the esteem for it that examples were sometimes exhibited beside adults’ work. This expression of interest grew apace with the discovery of a new way of teaching art that legitimized the child’s way of seeing the world. By 1909, in France, for example, a new method based on progressive Swiss theories largely replaced an older method that had required children to copy models or to master geometry.2 In Spain the Instituto–Escuela, founded in 1918 along the principles of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza (1876), and Barcelona’s Escola del Mar (also founded in 1922) introduced a different, experimental approach to art for children.3 A new pedagogy developed, which fostered greater self-expression on the part of children and stimulated the child’s imagination rather than seeking to train him (or her) vocationally.4 1 2 3 4 Pernoud (2003) studies the rise of new pedagogies and the interest in children’s art among artists such as Klee, Matisse and Picasso. See also Fineberg 1997. Hernández Belver (2002) [AQ3] provides an overview of developments in Europe, including Spain, yet passes over the question of Republican reform. In France at the end of the nineteenth century the authoritative manual Enseignement primaire du dessin, à l’usage des écoles primaires, 1883, by Léon Charvet and Jules Pillet, prescribed geometry in the classroom as a means of physical and mental discipline. Later, this method gave way to ‘intuitive’ theories. See Pernoud 2003: 28–53. Ferrant (1933), Bonet (1934), and Gasch (1953) discuss the early example of the Escuela del Mar. The most widely used manual, according to Hernández Belver, was by Víctor Masriera, who was associated with the Institución Libre de Enseñanza: Manual de pedagogía del dibujo, BHS90_7_04_Quance.indd 805 20/08/2013 10:42 806 Roberta Ann Quance bhs, 90 (2013) [AQ4] Several Hispanic artists and critics of the interwar period sought inspiration in the work of children and placed their art at the service of the schools or extracurricular material for children. The Uruguayan artist Rafael Barradas (1890–1929), who lived and worked in Barcelona and Madrid in the late 1910s and early 1920s and made a name for himself as an illustrator of children’s books, was impressed with children’s object-oriented vision, the fact that children did not place their I on a higher plane than any of the objects they encountered in play.5 His compatriot Joaquín Torres García (1874–1949) began to design toys for children during his residence in Barcelona and exhibited them in 1918 at the Galeries Dalmau, one of the pioneering outlets for modern art.6 Both he and the young sculptor Angel Ferrant (1891–1961), who designed a curriculum for Catalan schools in the 1930s (Arnaldo and Fernández 1997; Arnaldo 2001), were convinced that children could, if allowed, produce art spontaneously, on the basis of their experience, without the prejudice imposed by the retina and its narrow criterion of visual realism. By the late 1920s this orientation dovetailed with an ongoing critique of igurative, mimetic art. That children’s art had something in common with cubism – its ‘latness’, its ‘intellectual realism’ (the tendency for the child to draw what he or she knew of an object as opposed to what one might merely see of it) – was not lost on critics (Gasch 1930; 1953).7 Child art interested well-informed adults because it was unfettered by convention and offered a fresh perception of the world. In some cases, too, an ontological argument was made for it, claiming that it was closer to primitive expression. It is a notable fact that initially all of the artists who spoke authoritatively on this subject were men. Women artists were too few to count in the earliest debates; yet in the period of the Hispanic avant-garde, the link between women and children was irmly in place, and so women too were eventually brought into the picture. Women No eyebrows would be raised by this. On the contrary, in the early twentieth century, when women were irst entering the professions or making their mark 5 6 7 1917. According to the same scholar, another progressive manual was less well known: Adolfo Maíllo, El dibujo infantil, 1928. See Santos Torroella 1992: 28. Barradas illustrated several children’s books. See Bonet 1998 for details. After a show at the Galeríes Dalmau in 1918 he began to manufacture toys, with uneven success. He pitched some of his designs (Aladdin Toys) to American manufacturers in his brief sojourn in New York and later tried to launch them in Italy. See García Puig 1990: 40–44; Buzio de Torres 1999; and Torres 2010: 265–83. Developmental psychologists have traditionally established stages in the child’s production of art: Gasch, for example, citing the Swiss theorist G. H. Luquet, reports (1953: 12–13) that young children typically depict what they know of an object, whether or not these features are visible to the eye. See Fernández Martínez 2006 for current views and also the website of gallery owner and scholar Antonio Machón, available at: http://www.dibujoinfantil.com/ (accessed: 28 July 2013). BHS90_7_04_Quance.indd 806 20/08/2013 10:42 bhs, 90 (2013) Maruja Mallo and the Interest in Children’s Art 807 artistically in any number, it was generally assumed that their primary role was to raise children and form a home. As a number of feminists have shown (e.g. [AQ5] Scanlon 1986, Mangini 2001) the traditional view of women as mothers was irmly backed by the rise of scientiic and medical discourse in the early twentieth century, and its effect was to condition, if not curb, women’s entry into the professions. In reaction to this discourse, one or two lone voices – the anarchist leader Lucía Sánchez Saornil comes to mind – warned that the role of motherhood should not be allowed to usurp the very concept of woman (Nash 1983: 76). But this period also saw the emergence of a feminism that led progressive women not to reject the role of wife and mother but to expand it and even to exploit certain aspects of the discourse surrounding it to make room in arts and letters for women’s difference. To give a practical example of how this worked: the journalist María Luz Morales, who was active in the Lyceum Club Femenino, wrote a weekly page for the highly respected Madrid daily, El Sol, from late 1926 to 1931, entitled ‘La mujer, el niño y el hogar’, in which she discussed topics traditionally of interest to mothers and wives (such as how to decorate the bedroom or remove stubborn stains in the wash), as well as ways in which women could broaden their horizons. Morales also polled male intellectuals extensively on what women should read, mounting a spirited defence of the feminist Lyceum Club. The strategy among progressive women was clearly to take their sisters from where they traditionally found themselves – in the home – and to encourage them to educate themselves and take part in activities with a public dimension. Following a similar logic, though tending at the same time to reinforce tradition, the argument surfaces that women’s role in the family brought them closer to the child’s point of view and that this insider’s knowledge could even be exploited by the new woman artist. That, at least, is how María Teresa León saw it.8 Her opinion, recorded in an article in the Gaceta Literaria on the female storyteller (‘La narradora’ (León 1930)) is an early example of what Spanish women would consider ‘feminismo de la diferencia’.9 Other women, such as the writer Elena Fortún (who would later be known for her Celia novels), or the artists and illustrators Delhy Tejero (1904–1968) and Rosario de Velasco ([AQ6]1910–1985) also gravitated towards literature for children. Others, while not writing about either motherhood or femininity, made it plain that they did not conform to conventional expectations of womanhood. They neither married nor had children. This was the case of women associated with surrealism, such as Remedios Varo or Maruja Mallo.10 And yet, despite the differences in view among these women, there is a common feeling throughout 8 9 10 The author regrets that women, who were most likely to have ‘stored up’ a treasure trove of stories for children, are now tempted to ‘hombrearse’, that is, to adopt masculine habits or ways of being. Corresponding roughly to ‘cultural feminism’ and ‘enlightenment feminism’. Estrella de Diego (2007: 30) suggests that this was a sacriice made by women who identiied with surrealism. The women rejected a social role and, in a sense, bought their membership in a group that deined marriage and homemaking as bourgeois. BHS90_7_04_Quance.indd 807 20/08/2013 10:42 808 Roberta Ann Quance bhs, 90 (2013) the 1930s, especially among the women with a developed social consciousness, that women’s contribution to culture would entail concern for the welfare of children.11 So pervasive is the sense of mission among the leading women artists and intellectuals of the Second Republic that even the iconoclastic Maruja Mallo – who lived like a liberated woman avant la lettre – seems to have taken an active and prophetic concern for the welfare of children by – for a brief time – becoming a teacher and teaching them to draw. This article will not tackle all of the aspects of the question posed by female avant-garde artists’ and writers’ interest in a child’s perspective on the world. There is a range of opinion and convictions among the women of the avantgarde on the subject of femininity and its essential or incidental connection to intellectual endeavour and artistic creation.12 But, as we move into the period of the Republic, the pressure on ‘advanced’ women grows to show that they as a collective – which was seen as an inert group blocking change, especially after their vote helped to return a right-wing government to power in 1933 – could use their talents to contribute to social reform. Many Republican women displayed leadership in this area, especially pyschologists, teachers, and writers.13 These remarks are intended to help provide a frame in which to place an unusual aspect of the practice of one artist in particular: that of Maruja Mallo, who took part in an experiment of the Second Republic to draft young artists to teach art to children in the schools. In 1933 she won an oposición for a permanent post (a cátedra) to teach drawing in primary schools and was sent to Arévalo in the conservative heart of Avila, where she taught for under one year.14 The article published in Diablo Mundo should convince us that Maruja Mallo took this job quite seriously, even if she did not stay there long.15 Not only does it give us 11 12 13 14 15 See, for example, Morales (1927) on the opening of ‘Casas del Niño’. She thought that the initiative lent greater dignity to the Lyceum Club than its mission to provide a cultural centre for middle-class women. Women had to contend with deep-seated prejudice. In liberal circles one of the most inluential speculations on what women could contribute to culture came from the sociologist Georg [Jorge] Simmel (1930), who argued that men and women had different kinds of spiritual constitution. Simmel held that women would generally ind it dificult to objectify themselves in the creation of culture, but that they would contribute positively to the plastic arts (sculpture, ceramics and the like) over and above the verbal and visual arts. Recent scholarship highlights the contribution of psychologists such as Regina Lago, who eventually took charge of children’s education in the colonies set up for them during the Civil War (García Colmenares 2010). We should also remember Carmen Conde’s work as a teacher and activist, some of which is transmitted through the essays in Por la escuela renovada (1931). Ferris (2004: 192) places her there for the school year; however Mangini (2010: 126) dates her post to January 1934, on the evidence of available documentation. Otero Seco (1933) mentions Mallo, Enrique Climent, Rafael Penagos, Timoteo Pérez Rubio, and Antonio Rodríguez Luna among 150 who were doing a cursillo in Madrid in preparation over the summer. He notes that there were twenty women among them. Ferris (2004: 192) inds it dificult to imagine her in this role. He alludes, no doubt, to her rule-breaking behaviour as a ‘liberated’ woman. Mallo was all but run out of town after one of her characteristic pranks – riding her bicycle through Mass in church one Sunday (Mangini 2010: 127). BHS90_7_04_Quance.indd 808 20/08/2013 10:42 bhs, 90 (2013) Maruja Mallo and the Interest in Children’s Art 809 insight into Mallo’s practice at this time, which coincides with her association with the Uruguayan artist Joaquín Torres García and his Grupo Constructivo, but it also gives us rare insight into the government’s aims in sending young artists out into the schools. The article, as well as the project on which it reports, its into the brief Nigel Dennis has outlined for Diablo Mundo, which he sees as an important example of Republicans’ commitment to draw on leading intellectuals to shape the nation’s political and cultural life – and this in the wake of the November 1933 elections that menaced the reforms of the irst bienio. Anonymous The article in question, ‘El niño, genio natural’, is unsigned. One cannot be entirely certain whose perspective shapes the account we are given. What we can say is that it reads very much like an appraisal offered by someone with classroom experience. Given that it was the young philosopher and teacher María Zambrano who was entrusted with any material in the journal relating to events of interest to women (Dennis 1983: 21) and that Zambrano and Mallo were close friends at this time, both attending Ortega y Gasset’s tertulia at the Revista de Occidente ofices (see Torre et al. 1935: 179), I suspect that this article was, if not drafted, then at least commissioned by her as an example of how progressive women could lend their support to the Republic. Although Maruja Mallo’s name is not in the title, the article features her role, as well as an explanation of the aims and techniques that in this instance the young instructor employed. Mallo is the only teacher interviewed, and the four drawings reproduced in the two-page report are from her classes in the Instituto Nacional de Arévalo.16 Moreover, the article contains several vignettes ornamenting the margins, which are in all likelihood hers. By not making their authorship clear, the implication is that she has produced a work like a child’s, and that she, too, has some of the genius referred to in the title. Before commenting on the techniques Mallo applied in the classroom (according to the article), it will be helpful to review background about the interest in children’s art in Spain, some of which is brought up in the article and which, I have concluded, may well have stimulated the Spanish experiment. By 1934 the Spanish public had grown used to seeing children’s art on display and there is some evidence that progressive women took up the cause. The Mexican Example In the wake of the twentieth century’s two great revolutions – in Mexico and the USSR – interest in children as the future agents of change ran high.17 There 16 17 A note on the new journal Diablo Mundo in El Sol (1934: 7) describes this article as a report on ‘la escuela de pintura de Maruja Mallo’. In 1929, for example, Blaise Cendrars organized an exhibition in Paris of children’s books from the USSR (Bordes and Pérez 2010: 72). An anonymous reviewer has directed my BHS90_7_04_Quance.indd 809 20/08/2013 10:42 810 Roberta Ann Quance bhs, 90 (2013) is abundant evidence above all for the example set by Mexico. In December 1926 an exhibition was mounted in Madrid titled ‘Joven pintura mexicana’, a show consisting of the work of Mexican schoolchildren who had participated in schools of the Escuelas al Aire Libre (also known later as Escuelas de Acción Artística). These schools for art were promoted by the great Mexican theorist José de Vasconcelos, who saw in them a way to develop a distinctive Mexican art based on the dormant gifts of the indigenous peoples. Gabriel García Maroto, a Spanish artist and printer with a particular interest in art reform in Spain, delivered a stirring defence of the project when it arrived in Madrid (García Maroto 1926; Valender 1994: 419–20). The work on show – which had also travelled to Berlin and Paris – was the fruit of a government project headed by the Mexican Minister of Education Alfredo Ramos Martínez. In the wake of the Revolution, the Mexican government put into effect a new way of teaching children art that commanded the respect of other Latin American countries as well.18 [AQ7]฀The new Mexican method (which had some parallels in the reform of children’s education in Europe), advocated moving away from the traditional way of teaching drawing based on the duplication of a model. Drawing was no longer to be seen as a manual art but as a means of self-expression. More importantly, the programme was allied to a political cause. The Escuelas al Aire Libre were valued as an example of what the country’s indigenous peoples could bring to a nation’s cultural growth and in particular to the growth of a distinctive national identity. [AQ8] In Spain, the printer and artist García Maroto, who lived in Mexico, Cuba and New York between 1928 and 1934,19 was the great and controversial spokesman for this movement. He not only delivered his impassioned talk on the politics of Mexican children’s art in 1926 at the exhibition’s inauguration but he also designed a poster for the show, which took place at Madrid’s Museo del Arte Moderno. His lecture or ‘lección’, as he put it, published as a pamphlet in Madrid in 1926, appeared a short time later in the state-sponsored Mexican review Forma (núm. 4, 1927). In 1929 the Mexican government brought the children’s art to the International Exposition in Seville, and in the summer it sponsored yet another exhibition of the art produced by the Escuelas Populares Mexicanas in the Retiro in Madrid. The author of a brief review published in La Gaceta Literaria (‘R. M.’ 1929) expresses approval that an excellent way had been found for the government to promote the creation of a Mexican art while respecting the artists’ freedom. The key, according to this author (probably the Mexican painter Roberto Montenegro), is to tap the uninhibited spirit of the young. The link was forged between children and indigenous peoples as an unspoiled 18 19 attention to an article by Otero Seco, of which an excerpt is cited by Pérez de Ayala (2009; in Huici March and Pérez de Ayala 2009, 2: 19), and which links Mallo’s teaching in Arévalo to the Russians’ interest in children, but a search for the complete text as cited has yielded no results. Including Argentina, Cuba, Chile and Peru. See Gutiérrez Viñuales 2002. Maroto also lived and worked in Cuba during this period. See Serrano de la Cruz Peinado 1999. BHS90_7_04_Quance.indd 810 20/08/2013 10:42 bhs, 90 (2013) Maruja Mallo and the Interest in Children’s Art 811 source of creativity. Bringing home the potential of the union were the vivid illustrations of children’s toys from the different regions of Mexico gracing the pages of the state-sponsored art review, Forma. The Mexican exhibition highlighted the contribution of the indigenous peoples. This appeal to common people and to ‘popular’ culture came at a time when in Spain the interest in popular art forms like folk songs, folk tales, and native crafts was at its peak and was studied by progressive scholars who had emerged from the Institución Libre de Enseñanza (Garrido González and Pinto Martín 1996). It came also at a time when a number of intellectuals on the left placed their faith in the ‘pueblo’ as a source of regeneration. Yet there can be no doubt that the Mexican success story sparked an immediate burst of social and political interest in children and in their visual art. In May 1927, for example, an exhibition of traditional Spanish children’s toys was held at the Lyceum Club Femenino in Madrid (reported in La Nación, 7 May 1927), drawing on the enormous success the 1926 Museum exhibition had had and marking the feminist founders’ own particular concern to underline the club’s social mission. The Lyceum Club had only two months earlier announced the opening of a crèche for the children of women who wanted to participate in their activities, thus silencing those who saw the club merely as a hive of gossip! (Morales 1927). The Lyceum’s exhibition of children’s drawings commanded a front-page review in La Voz by the respected art critic Juan de la Encina, who endorsed the educational experiment (De la Encina 1928). He claimed that the results were better than anything else that the Club had previously exhibited.20 When Maroto returned from Cuba in 1934, where he had spent some six years working with his own escuelas artísticas, he was received in some quarters as a hero. In May he mounted an exhibition of his labours in the Museo de Arte Moderno and received a full two pages of coverage in the June issue (no. 27) of the Gaceta de Arte (Torre, Abril, Ferrant et al. 1934). Guillermo de Torre and Angel Ferrant were especially supportive. For both of these critics the experiment suggested a way in which Spain could develop its own native talent. This was an issue that Maroto himself had placed on the agenda in his reformist programme in La Nueva España (1927). Given the precedent in Spain for women’s interest in children’s welfare and for concern on the part of leading male artists in developing art for children, it is not altogether surprising that the two currents should merge. Even if the young philosopher and militant Republican María Zambrano did not write for Diablo Mundo – none of the articles carry her name – it may yet be at her instigation that the new review at once propagandized in favour of the Second Republic’s initiative and vindicated the work of the politically committed young woman artist.21 20 21 De la Encina shows his awareness of progressive pedagogy when he stresses that adults should not hinder children’s spontaneity or give them inappropriate material to copy. See the chronology in María Zambrano 2000: 189. Ferris (2004) attributes the authorship to V. Salas Viu, following Peréz de Ayala (1992: 81), who reproduces an excerpt of the Diablo Mundo article, attributing it to Salas Viu in his Bibliography (1992: 127). BHS90_7_04_Quance.indd 811 20/08/2013 10:42 812 Roberta Ann Quance bhs, 90 (2013) Technique and Themes According to the article, the (unnamed) teachers who took part in this initiative were all young artists themselves. They were not given programmes or speciic instructions about how to conduct their art classes, but were asked to foster a spirit of self-expression in their pupils. When Maruja Mallo explains what she did in her classes, we are given to understand that this was her practice, but not necessarily what the others did, who, like her, had been given a free hand. And yet, it is clear from the execution of the drawings that her pupils had been encouraged to think about the ways in which their drawings evoked a narrative; they might well have been encouraged also to relect on the distribution of objects and human igures on the page. The published examples reveal a concern for symmetry and order and for the ways in which form could be rendered through the use of geometric shapes like the circle and square. There is little concern, on the other hand, for the adoption of traditional perspective or a single vanishing point.22 Mallo notes that she used three different types of exercises to develop the children’s abilities: apuntes de memoria, dibujos de imaginación, and dibujos de composición. The dibujos de imaginación, according to the article, gave the children free rein to depict whatever they liked, while the dibujos de composición emphasized ways to achieve a harmonious structure through the organization of space, volume and line. The illustrations published in the article are all ‘dibujos de memoria’ in which the children were asked to depict a remembered scene, whether it occurred a short time earlier or several years before. One theory held that this kind of drawing developed the child’s subjectivity, requiring an assimilation of his or her perceptions and consideration of the child’s potential to tell a story. Indeed, the critic Sebastián Gasch had argued (1930) that drawing from memory was creative in that it tapped into the unconscious; and that modern painters should take their cue from children who produced this kind of art spontaneously: instead of copying another work of art or reproducing a model that had been put before them, the children summoned up imagery that bore an individual stamp. Thus the objects were not literally reproduced (lapsing into the slavish illusionism the avant-garde deplored) so much as recreated. As for where pedagogy it in with the artist’s own practice, a question arises: Did Maruja teach what she believed in and practised herself ? Or did her brief experience in the classroom shape her own practice? Ramón Gómez de la Serna has claimed that teaching led Maruja to plot her works with a compass, while at the same time suggesting she was predisposed to this sort of approach: ‘y Maruja se encara con lo geométrico porque la hacen profesora de dibujo, explayando su ingénita condición generadora de líneas que se vuelven hojas concéntricas que 22 Note the convergence with Torres García’s ideas. He had formed a group in Paris in the late 1920s around the journal Cercle et Carré. In ‘El dibujo del niño’ (1934; see Torres García 1996), he rules out forcing perspective on children: ‘que todos poseemos, en medida variable, una facultad de expresarnos gráicamente, y que tal germen no debiera jamás ser desnaturalizado por el dibujo a tres dimensiones’ (Guigon 1996: 52). BHS90_7_04_Quance.indd 812 20/08/2013 10:42 bhs, 90 (2013) Maruja Mallo and the Interest in Children’s Art 813 se cortan en sus remates en los giros danzantes del compás’ (1942: 113). Huici March (2009) has concluded that in the 1930s her principles would have converged with Torres García’s constructivism and with doctrines they might both have imbibed from an inluential work circulating in Paris entitled Esthétique de la proportion dans la nature et dans les arts (1927) by the Rumanian critic Matila Ghyka. According to Huici, Mallo read Ghyka while she was in Paris in 1931–1932. Although it has proved hard for critics to trace which writings by Torres García she would have known, it is fair to say that by the time the Uruguayan relocated from Paris to Madrid in 1933, he had already laid the foundations of what would soon become a school (García Puig 1990). In an oral culture such as Spain’s, it is inconceivable that friends like Maruja who visited him at home (Torres García 2000: 162) and participated in the irst Constructivist show in October 1933, would not have heard him talk about his aesthetics, either in person or through public lectures. Mallo clearly sympathized with his view that art is a graphic language. To say this was to imply that art could be taught in order for everyone to be able to ‘speak’. And this principle is underlined in the Diablo Mundo article: Mallo’s aim is ‘hacer del dibujo un lenguaje expresivo’, to teach the children ‘los signos de un nuevo discurso’. Torres García afirms much the same thing in his 1934 text ‘El dibujo del niño’ (1996), and Mallo insists on this again in the opening lines of the lecture she delivered in Buenos Aires in 1937, ‘Proceso histórico de la forma en las artes plásticas’.23 [AQ9] Whether the older artist inluenced the younger or whether they both drew on similar sources, it is clear that they shared a desire to preserve a childlike spirit in their own work.24 Throughout the prewar period we ind Maruja Mallo cultivating two different styles, as if attending to two different sides of her temperament: one accentuated the childlike and playful, such as the Verbenas (1927–1928) – which were produced at the height of the interest in Mexican child art in Madrid – and the vignettes she did in the early 1930s for the Revista de Occidente, which were named after different children’s games and toys – La gallina ciega, El aro, La comba, La cometa, etc. (reproduced in Huici March and Pérez de Ayala 2009); the other, at the opposite extreme, responded to social crisis and even led her briely to a vision of dark apocalyptic change in her series Cloacas y campanarios (Jarnés 2009, 2: 89).25 23 24 25 Torres García’s text, although published in 1944 in Uruguay as part of a treatise (‘Universalismo constructivo’), was drafted in 1934 in Madrid: ‘En lecciones anteriores se habla de un dibujo geométrico que más o menos todos poseemos: un medio gráico de comunicarnos y expresarnos, lo que en términos pedagógicos se ha llamado el dibujo escritura’ (1996: 52). Maruja Mallo (2009): ‘El origen de la expresión es la plástica. El dibujo de los niños es la imagen primitiva del hombre que empieza a expresarse con formas plásticas y que, más tarde, con otras formas constituye el alfabeto. El dibujo en general es un lenguaje igurado, una escritura de las formas’ (cited in Huici March and Pérez de Ayala 2009, 2: 58). Manuel Abril observes of her Verbenas: ‘No se sabe jamás en estos cuadros dónde acaba la persona y dónde empieza el juguete’ (1928: 90). As Shirley Mangini observes (email to author 7 February 2011), a childlike spirit is also apparent in a series entitled ‘Le Cinéma Comique’ (1932), in drawings done for ABC in BHS90_7_04_Quance.indd 813 20/08/2013 10:42 814 Roberta Ann Quance bhs, 90 (2013) Because of the principles she shared with Torres García, it could be predicted that in the classroom, Maruja would teach children how to plot composition on the page in order to create an expressive syntax, and that she would teach them to perceive phenomena geometrically. This, in effect, according to the article, was the purpose of the dibujo de composición: La disposición de los elementos para realizar una estructura armónica es lo que principalmente se pretende en éste. Lo divide Maruja Mallo en composición de supericies y cuerpos y líneas y supericies. Ésta es la mejor manera de que se familaricen los niños con uno de los factores de la creación estética de mayor importancia, como es la ordenación de una estructura, el combinar valores geométricos. Para con ellos realizar una unidad plástica. [AQ10] (Diablo Mundo 1934a: 6–7) But it was also a good bet that Mallo would respect children’s naiveté – just as she preserved this quality in herself – and not impose her adult world view on their themes. The Drawings The illustrations commented on in the article were done by two different children, a boy and a girl who would have been about eleven or twelve years of age and in the second year of their bachillerato at the Instituto. Two are placid depictions of farm life in an unindustrialized community; one is in a lyrical vein and the other is guided by a more didactic impulse to show the yearly work involved in the harvest. The other two drawings, by contrast, focus on events that disturbed the town’s equilibrium and in one case may have shaken the young artist profoundly. The young Carmen Aboreta’s memories of farm life are idyllic: her shepherd is playing a pipe as he tends the sheep and looks back across the ields to the house, sitting above him and on the diagonal in the midst of a gently rolling countryside. Thus house and chickens, on the one hand, and shepherd and lock on the other are gathered compositionally into a single domestic unit. The road to the house follows the undulating lines of the hills, as if to underscore the harmony of this way of life within the natural setting. In another drawing, exhibiting the childish realism Gasch would have approved of, Aboreta has applied herself to the depiction of all the stages of work involved in the harvest. She shows the typical cart pulled by a team of mules, the threshing loor, a hut in which the hired hands would have taken shelter at noon, a haystack, a broom and so on, all harmoniously arranged on the picture plane as an assemblage of geometrical forms. It is as if the lattened drawing with its disregard of perspective were the occasion to show how the circle, the triangle and the rectangle deined the forms of the farm. the 1930s, and in drawings inspired by Rafael Alberti’s poetry and theatre. Eventually the artist settles on a luminous style emphasizing a ‘new mythology’ as in her ‘Religión del trabajo’ series (1937–1938) or her ‘Naturalezas vivas’ (1942–1944), yet the aesthetic of child art is still evident in the dancing mermaids of her mural for the Cine Los Angeles in Buenos Aires (1945). BHS90_7_04_Quance.indd 814 20/08/2013 10:42 bhs, 90 (2013) Maruja Mallo and the Interest in Children’s Art 815 In one of the overtly social drawings, we see that the child was impressed when she saw an automobile drive through her town. For a country girl it was undoubtedly a new kind of machine, which she contrasts with the carts that most of the farming community used for transportation. The unhitched wagons along the right hand side of the road are arranged symmetrically so that they point from either the left or the right towards the new vehicle at the centre of the composition. The motorist is tooling through town looking every bit the señorito as his car raises dust, while the several wagons stand without their owners or the mules that would have pulled them. Indeed the drawing is crowded with parked carts. Perhaps their owners are conducting business in the marketplace (given that the title refers to the market), unlike the motorist who does not farm the land or sell its produce. Yet the exceptionality of the automobile can also convey a sense that in the child’s eyes the carts had been superseded In another rather chilling drawing we have a distant, almost aerial view of a scene a child (Pedro Juárez Blanco) ostensibly witnessed at one point in his young life. Here several members of the mounted police (guardias de asalto), depicted as fat little men, are seen opening ire on unarmed citizens demonstrating in the street. The initial violence is captured but not its possible effects, for none of the demonstrators appears to be injured. The child has chosen to convey the threat and that alone, and by allowing the police to dominate the foreground, has produced a clear sense of injustice and an imbalance of power. The mounted police have advanced on the demonstrators and taken over the public square, which is otherwise empty. (Some viewers will think of De Chirico’s depiction of empty squares.) Notice that the child, who probably did not understand the reason behind the protest, has left the demonstrators’ placard blank. This suggests that the signiicant act for him is the violence and not what prompted the townspeople’s agitation. The mounted police are drawn with care (unlike the townspeople, who are little stick igures) and clearly distinguished from the two members of the Guardia Civil, who stand on either side of the picture, with their characteristic capes, riles, and tricornio. By giving us a frontal view of the two guardias the child innocently suggests that these men are presiding over the action, while not directly participating in it – a subtle political point! We can conclude that he added such detail as seemed signiicant to him and that like his classmate he ills space – or not – to impressive effect. In the interview reported Mallo does not comment on the content of the children’s drawings or on what the rationale was for selecting these particular examples. Indeed we do not know who made this selection, whether it was Mallo herself or whether the editors had a hand in the process. Nor do we know if the children were encouraged to work on speciic themes. But the teacher may well have guided her students to focus on what they had personally remembered or seen, whether good or bad. BHS90_7_04_Quance.indd 815 20/08/2013 10:42 816 Roberta Ann Quance bhs, 90 (2013) Looking Ahead: Wartime Drawings The glimpse we have had here of a Republican experiment allows us to posit a connection with a singular body of work produced by children during the Civil War. Republican children who had been evacuated to colonies on the east coast or in southern France were openly encouraged to remember and recreate, using art to suggest what they had experienced. In directives issued in 1937–1938 by the Ministry of Public Education, children were asked to produce pictures that recalled their life before the war, during the war, and to imagine how life would be once the war was over (Hernández Merino 2006: 70). Over 2,000 of these drawings were collected by international volunteers such as the Quakers, who exhibited and sold them abroad in New York and London, using the proceeds to help the children (Alted and González 2006). Although perhaps only a very few children had avant-garde teachers like Maruja Mallo, one can only marvel at the way the Republican initiative in 1933, as glimpsed through this unusual article in Diablo Mundo, forecast the kinds of drawings that children would later produce and which – scholars suggest (see, for example, Duroux and Milkovitch-Rioux 2011) – were therapy for the young as much as they were a powerful propaganda tool for the Republic. Three major collections of these drawings are extant: at the University of California at San Diego, at Columbia University, and at the Biblioteca Nacional de España.26 In the growing documentation on this work we do not yet see, however, the connection made between them and the Republican initiative of 1933, or the history of interest in children’s drawing in Spain. It is, so far, an untold story. Works Cited Abril, Manuel, 1928. ‘María Mallo’, Revista de Occidente, 61 (June): 80–95. Alted, Alicia, and Roger González (eds), 2006. A pesar de todo dibujan … La Guerra Civil vista por los niños (Madrid: Biblioteca Nacional). Arnaldo, Javier, 2001. ‘“Aquí está lo magistral”. La alternativa Angel Ferrant’, Boletín de la Institución Libre de Enseñanza, 42–43 (May): 181–88. Arnaldo, Javier, and Olga Fernández, 1997. Angel Ferrant. Todo se parece a algo. Escritos críticos y testimonios (Madrid: Visor). Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, n. d. Virtual Exhibition, ‘Children’s Drawings of the Spanish Civil War’. New York: Columbia University. [Online.] Available at: http://www. columbia.edu/cu/lweb/eresources/exhibitions/children/ (accessed: 17 June 2011). Baudelaire, Charles, 1992 [1863]. ‘Le peintre de la vie moderne’, in Critique d’art. Suivi de critique musicale, ed. Claude Pichois, Intro. Claire Brunet (Paris: Gallimard). Bonet, Antoni, 1934. ‘L’infant prodigi’, Art (Lleida), 1: 5–6. Bonet, Juan Manuel (ed.), 1998. Infancia y arte moderno. Exhibition catalogue, 17 diciembre 1998–8 marzo 1999 (Valencia: IVAM Centre Julio González, Generalitat Valenciana). Bordes, Juan, and Carlos Pérez (eds), 2010. Los juguetes de las vanguardias. Exhibition 4 October 2010–30 January 2011 (Málaga: Museo Picasso). 26 The Mandeville Collection at UCSD, ‘They Still Draw Pictures’ (see Mandeville Special Collection n.d.), comprises 617 drawings (digitally reproduced from the book by Geist and Carroll (2002)); [AQ11] Columbia’s Avery Library, has 153 ‘Children’s Drawings of the Spanish Civil War’ (see Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library n.d.), and the Biblioteca Nacional de Madrid has catalogued 1171, most of which have been digitized. BHS90_7_04_Quance.indd 816 20/08/2013 10:42 bhs, 90 (2013) Maruja Mallo and the Interest in Children’s Art 817 Buzio de Torres, Cecilia, 1998. ‘Joaquín Torres García. Arte y pedagogía’, in Infancia y arte moderno, ed. Juan Manuel Bonet, pp. 41–59. Conde, Carmen, 1931. Por la escuela renovada (Valencia: Cuadernos de la Cultura). De la Encina, Juan, 1928. ‘Los dibujos de niños en el Lyceum’, La Voz (Madrid), 2 July: 1. Dennis, Nigel, 1983. Diablo Mundo. Los intelectuales y la Segunda República. Antología (Madrid: Editorial Fundamentos). Diablo Mundo, 1934a. ‘El niño, genio natural’ (unaccredited article), 5 (26 May): 6–7. Dibujo infantil n.d. ‘Los dibujos de los niños’. Website of Antonio Machón. [Online.] Available at: http:// www.dibujoinfantil.com/ (accessed 7 August 2013). Diego, Estrella de, 2007. Remedios Varo (Madrid: Fundación Mapfre). Duroux, Rose, 2006. ‘Françoise y Alfred Brauner, transmisores de la memoria infantil’, in A pesar de todo, ed. Alted and González, pp. 77–90. [AQ12] Duroux, Rose, and Catherine Milkovitch-Rioux (eds), 2011. J’ai dessiné la guerre. Le regard de Françoise et Alfred Brauner (Clermont-Ferrand, France: Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal). El Sol, 1934b. ‘Libros’ (unaccredited article), 21 de junio: 7. Fernández Martínez, Dolores, 2006. ‘Los niños que sufren una guerra. El dibujo como expresión’, in A pesar de todo, ed. Alicia Alted and Roger González (Madrid: Biblioteca Nacional), pp. 53–63. Ferrant, Angel, 1933. ‘Resplandor y proyección de los dibujos infantiles’, AC (Barcelona), 10: 34–35. Ferris, José Luis, 2004. Maruja Mallo. La gran transgresora del 27 (Madrid: Edición Temas de Hoy). Fineberg, Jonathan, 1997. The Innocent Eye. Children’s Art and the Modern Artist (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). García Colmenares, Carmen, 2010. ‘Regina Lago, una psicóloga comprometida con la infancia durante la guerra civil española’, CEE Participación Educativa, 14 (July): 211–20. García Maroto, Gabriel, 1926. ‘La revolución artística mexicana. Una lección’. Conferencia por Maroto (Madrid: n.p.) —, 1927. ‘La Nueva España’ (Madrid: Biblos). García Puig, María Jesús, 1990. Joaquín Torres García y el Universalismo Constructivo. La enseñanza del arte en Uruguay (Madrid: Ediciones de Cultura Hispánica). Garrido González, José, and Amparo Pinto Martín, 1996. ‘La educación estética en la Institución Libre de Enseñanza’, Revista Interuniversitaria de Formación del Profesorado (Zaragoza), 27 (Sept.–Dec.): 151–66. Gasch, Sebastián, 1930. ‘Creación e imitación’, La Gaceta Literaria, 73 (1 January): 13. —, 1931. ‘Dibujos infantiles’, La Gaceta Literaria, 100 (1 March), n.p. [AQ13] —, 1953. El arte de los niños (Barcelona: Producciones Editoriales del Nordeste). Geist, Anthony Leo, and Peter Carroll (eds), 2002. They Still Draw Pictures. Children’s Art in Wartime from the Spanish Civil War to Kosovo (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press). Gómez de la Serna, Ramón, 1942. Maruja Mallo. 59 grabados en negro y 9 láminas en color. 1928–1942 (Buenos Aires: Losada). González Rojo, Enrique, 1927. ‘Los alumnos–pintores de Ramos Martínez’, La Gaceta Literaria [Madrid], No. 1 (1 January): 5. [AQ14] Guigon, Emmanuel (ed.), 1996. La infancia del arte. Arte de los niños y arte moderno en España. Exhibition catalogue: Museo de Teruel, 5 de noviembre–8 de diciembre; Logroño, Sala Amós Salvador, 13 de diciembre 1996–12 de enero 1997 (Teruel: Museo de Teruel; Logroño: Cultural Rioja). Gutiérrez Viñuales, Rodrigo, 2002. ‘La infancia entre la educación y el arte. Algunas experiencias pioneras en Latinoamérica (1900–1930)’, Artigrama, 17: 127–47. Hernández Belver, Manuel, 2002. ‘Introducción: el arte y la mirada del niño’, Arte, Individuo y Sociedad, Anejo, 1: 9–43. Hernández Merino, Ana, 2006. ‘Hebras que dibujan el dolor’, in A pesar de todo, ed. Alicia Alted and Roger González (Madrid: Biblioteca Nacional), pp. 65–75. Huici March, Fernando, 2009. ‘Maruja Mallo con el cerebro en la mano’, in Maruja Mallo, ed. Fernando Huici March and Juan Pérez de Ayala, 1, pp. 33–69. Huici March, Fernando, and Juan Pérez de Ayala (curators), 2009. Maruja Mallo. Casa das Artes, BHS90_7_04_Quance.indd 817 20/08/2013 10:42 818 Roberta Ann Quance bhs, 90 (2013) Vigo, 10 de septiembre 2009–10 de enero 2010 and Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid 26 de enero–4 abril 2010. 3 vols. (Madrid: Sociedad Estatal de Conmemoraciones Culturales, Fundación Caixa Galicia). Jarnés, Benjamín, 2009 [1934]. ‘En cal viva’, in Maruja Mallo, ed. Huici March and Pérez de Ayala, Maruja Mallo (Madrid: Sociedad Estatal de Conmemoraciones Culturales, Fundación Caixa, Galicia), 2, pp. 87–90. León, María Teresa, 1930. ‘La narradora’, La Gaceta Literaria, 85 (1 July): 8. Mallo, Maruja, 2009 [1937]. ‘Proceso histórico de la forma en las artes plásticas’, in Maruja Mallo, ed. Huici March and Perez de Ayala, 2: 58–66. Mandeville Special Collections n.d. ‘They Still Draw Pictures’, Library, University of California, San Diego. [Online.] Available at: http://libraries.ucsd.edu./speccoll//tsdp/frame.html (accessed 17 June 2011). Mangini, Shirley, 2001. Las modernas de Madrid (Barcelona: Ediciones Península). —, 2010. Maruja Mallo and the Spanish Avant-Garde (Farnham, UK: Ashgate). María Zambrano 1904–1991, 2000. (Madrid: Círculo de Bellas Artes, Alcaldía de Vélez Málaga y Fundación María Zambrano, Diputación Provincial de Málaga, Junta de Andalucía). Morales, María Luz, 1927. ‘“Lyceum” y los niños’, El Sol [Madrid], 19 March: 4. Nash, Mary, 1983. Mujer, familia y trabajo en España, 1875–1936 (Barcelona: Anthropos). Otero Seco, Antonio, 1933. ‘El cursillo de Dibujo, donde trabajan ciento cincuenta futuros profesores’, Nuevo Mundo (11 August), n. p. Pérez de Ayala, Juan, 1992. Maruja Mallo (Madrid: Guillermo de Osma Galería). —, 2009. ‘Album/Cronología’, in Maruja Mallo, ed. Huici March and Pérez de Ayala (Madrid: Sociedad Estatal de Conmemoraciones Culturales, Fundación Caixa Galicia), 2: 7–39. Pernoud, Emmanuel, 2003. L’invention du dessin d’enfant en France, à l’aube des avant-gardes (Paris: Editions Hazan). ‘R. M.’ 1929. ‘Las escuelas populares mexicanas’ La Gaceta Literaria (Madrid), 64 (15 August): 5. Santos Torroella, Rafael, 1992. ‘Barradas y el clownismo’, in Rafael Barradas. Exhibition catalogue (Madrid: Galería Jorge Mara), pp. 25–33. Scanlon, Geraldine, 1986. La polémica feminista en la España contemporánea. 2nd ed. (Madrid: Akal). Serrano de la Cruz Peinado, Angelina, 1999. ‘Hacia el reconocimiento debido: Gabriel García Maroto, promotor e impulsor de las artes’, in Gabriel García Maroto y la renovación del art. Catalogue of exhibition, 25 February–30 June (Toledo; Guadalajara; Ciudad Real; Albacete: Junta de la Comunidades de Castilla–La Mancha), pp. 139–93. Simmel, Jorge, 1930. Cultura femenina y otros ensayos (Madrid: Revista de Occidente). Torre, Guillermo de, Manuel Abril, Angel Ferrant, et al. 1934. ‘Maroto en Madrid’, Gaceta de Arte (Tenerife), 3 (June): 2–3. Torre, Guillermo de, Miguel Pérez Ferrero and E. Salazar y Chapela (eds), 1935. Almanaque literario 1935 (Madrid: Editorial Plutarco). Torres, Cecilia de, 2010. ‘Los juguetes de Torres García. La deconstrucción del objeto’, in Los juguetes de la vanguardia, ed. Juan Bordes and Carlos Pérez (Málaga: Museo Picasso), pp. 264–83. Torres García, Joaquín, 1996 [1934]. ‘El dibujo de los niños’, [AQ15] in La Infancia del arte. Arte de los niños y arte moderno en España, ed. Emmanuel Guigon (Teruel: Museo de Teruel; Logroño: Cultural Rioja), pp. 52–53. —, 2000 [1940]. Historia de mi vida (Montevideo: Arca). Valender, James, 1994. ‘García Maroto y los contemporáneos’, in Los Contemporáneos en el laberinto de la crítica, ed. Rafael Olea Franco and Anthony Stanton (México: El Colegio de México). BHS90_7_04_Quance.indd 818 20/08/2013 10:42