She was provocative, large, intense, a girl from Galicia, an eager art student. Shortly after her training at the San Fernando School of Fine Arts in Madrid, she was invited by José Ortega y Gasset, the Spanish philosopher, to exhibit her work at the offices of the Revista de Occidente, his respected publication. Never before and never thereafter were the magazine's premises used for an art exhibition. The works on display were from the series Las Verbenas, paintings inspired by the popular local festivals of Madrid. The paintings are dense, polychromatic; every inch of the canvas is occupied by a multitude of carnival figures, objects and buildings, overlapping in a chaotic jumble. She called them “cosmic”.

The work was strangely mature for such a young person, the technique was that of a virtuoso, her imagination remarkable. The unprecedented admiration of a leading intellectual, a key figure in Spanish society at the time, acted like a bombshell in the patriarchal environment of Madrid.

A liberated and “cosmic” woman was emerging. She began to understand the codes that were going to define her life. Painting was one dimension, but there was another act of creativity that also required talent and dedication: her self-image.

And so, propelled by the impact of the exhibition and suddenly integrated into the elitist group of mostly male intellectuals and writers of the Generation of '27, Maruja sailed forth for Paris, where, with a grant to study theatrical scenography, her work elicited equivalent passions. André Breton, the father of Surrealism, also fell under the spell of Maruja's art and acquired some of her work. Her presentation in Parisian circles was radically different from the optimism and color of her Verbenas. Cloacas y Campanarios (Sewers and Bell Towers) is monochromatic, gloomy, displaying human skeletal remains, barren lands, mud and rot. But above all, it was a perfect example of the Surrealist embrace of the subconscious.

The Parisian avant-garde environment took her in: through Breton, she met, debated and participated in gatherings with the likes of Max Ernst, de Chirico and Picasso. The admiration and camaraderie of that clique of mostly male figures may not have been such an appealing magnet for the fiercely independent and expansive Maruja. Madrid beckoned, and the end of the grant pushed her to return.

Back on her own turf, she deepened her political engagement with the Republican cause, got a job as a drawing teacher and continued manufacturing her own image as the reigning queen of the Spanish avant-garde. “The only young witch I have ever known,” claimed Ramón Gómez de la Serna, one of her foremost admirers, who captured her shifting styles and regular reinventions.

Her stay in South America lasted thirty years after she was forced to flee Spain during the Civil War of 1936. Pablo Neruda, Gabriela Mistral and Jorge Luis Borges were now her intellectual travelling companions. And her work took yet another thematic turn, intensely influenced by her interpretation of the natural world. Shells, anemones, seaweeds and orchids became empowered objects, symbolic in their almost amused forms. The work was impregnated by her obsession with geometry. It gave it intensity and rigor. It continued to be exceptional.

She appeared to express no nostalgia for the years when she had reigned as the queen of bohemia in Spain. Instead, exile propelled her into another energetic chapter of her artistic pursuits and her restless insistence on fashioning her own image.

At this point, her pictorial talent, her intellect and her labored persona blended almost uncomfortably. She claimed that her paintings were “cybernetic communications launched into space to communicate with minerals and vegetables”.

Upon her return to Spain in the 1960s, she was mostly ignored or forgotten by a society that had erased the memory of the years before the Civil War. Maruja, by this time, had begun to speak more frequently in riddles. She also worked harder on her extravagant image. Gradually, as the Franco regime was beginning to come apart at the seams, a more receptive interest in her work emerged.

It is hard not to question who Maruja really was. The almost reverential admiration inspired by her exceptional talent has tended to obscure the identity of this complex and empowered woman who, until the very end, refused to shed her masks. Maruja left us with her heavily made-up face, clad in extravagant outfits, pointing us toward the Milky Way.