Notre Dame de la Alegría

At the age of twenty, Ana María Gómez González—born on Three Kings' Eve in 1902 in Viveiro and the fourth of fourteen siblings—finally arrived in Madrid from Avilés, where her father, a customs official, had settled after leaving his native Galicia. The artistic impulse that had driven her since childhood found an outlet at the School of Arts and Crafts in that Asturian city, but it was the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando and, above all, the Residencia de Estudiantes that would facilitate her transformation into Maruja Mallo: the painter, the iconoclast, and the free woman who took part in the great intellectual ferment surrounding figures such as García Lorca, Buñuel, Alberti, Dalí, Concha Méndez, Margarita Manso, and María Zambrano—an unprecedented flourishing of poetry, painting, and cinema that emerged in the 1920s and was brought to an end by the Civil War.