Spanish artist Maruja Mallo engages in a double rebellion against the gender norms of society and the equally gendered ideas about modernity and modern art embraced by the Madrid avant-garde of the 1920s–1930s. Mallo refuses the prevailing conceptualization of modernist and avant-garde aesthetics in terms of an intellectualized abstraction that erases the body; while these elisions render the “new art” and “new style” apparently gender-neutral, they actually affirm male dominance. Through her portrayal of the female figure and female body, Mallo dissociates her brand of the new style from the masculine-as-objective perspective with which modern art is linked in José Ortega y Gasset’s The Dehumanization of Art. This uncoupling occurs on three levels: one, Mallo’s taking of a socially engaged stand in her depiction of women and popular culture; two, her foregrounding of the female figure and the material experience of the female body; and three, her troubling of the masculine objectivizing and objectifying perspective as related to the desiring male gaze and classificatory ontology. As Mallo crosses borders from home to exile, her emphasis on the female figure and body destabilizes androcentric concepts of aesthetics and ontology as the basis of the new style and new art.
