After the proclamation of the Second Republic, Moreno Villa was appointed director of the National Palace’s archives, a position that he held until November of 1936. He began to conduct historical research again and created a catalogue of people with mental illnesses, dwarves, buffoons, blacks, children, and courtesans present in the court of the Habsburgs. He would eventually publish the resulting book already while in exile in Mexico in 1939.
At the same time, this was a year of feverish creative activity for Moreno Villa. He published three series of his Carambas poems, in which he used word play and imagery similar to those of the Surrealist movement of the era. At that time, he maintained a close friendship with Vicente Aleixandre, and above all, with Luis Cernuda. With the dawning of the Second Republic came a proliferation of associations and groups of all artistic styles, and Moreno Villa did not distance himself from them. He signed the Manifesto of the Visual Artists Guild (AGAP) and participated in the group's first show, simply entitled Exhibition of Paintings and Sculptures, held in the Museum of Modern Art of Madrid in May of that year. This exhibition was shown again, but with fewer participants, in the Ateneo of Madrid in November. Other painters belonging to the AGAP were, for example: Climent, Souto, Santacruz, Fernando Mateos, and Santiago Pelegrin.
At this time, the old Iberian Artists Society was also reborn. The association had organized a significant exhibition in 1925, and in September of 1931, returned with the Second Exhibition of Iberian Artists, which was presented in the Ateneo of San Sebastian. Moreno Villa also took part in this exhibition. The periodical of the GATEPAC (Grupo de Arquitectos y Técnicos Españoles para la Arquitectura Contemporánea), AC, published an article entitled, "The Poet Moreno Villa, painter", in which Moreno Villa talked about modern painting in relation to the interior of the “rationalist house,” using examples from his own body of work:
“Sometimes a painting is an element as essential as a pillar or a staircase, literally and metaphorically. [...] A painting in the study may pertain to one style, while those in the sitting and living rooms may come from other artistic movements. [...] There are Surrealist paintings that are incompatible with bourgeois decor because of the rawness of their subjects or allusions, but there is no doubt that a painting with a poetic and truly mysterious subject matter can be a conversation piece capable of provoking exciting discussions. A Cubist painting, on the other hand, demands a space devoted to silence and concentration, such as an office or a study.
For the dining room, there are other types of paintings that are neither abstract nor poetic, which are, above all, paintings with references to recognizable forms, such as those by Cossío and Bores. In accordance with these three paintings styles, which, in my opinion, are imposed by the various spaces that comprise a home, I would tell my friends, the editors of this publication, that my pictures belong in the sitting and dining rooms. Few of my paintings are purely abstract. According to perceptive connoisseurs, they haveelements that can lead the spirit to wander for long hours through distant regions.”