María Izquierdo was born in 1902 in San Juan de los Lagos, a commercial center and home to the Basilica de la Virgin de San Juan, the second-most-visited religious sanctuary in Mexico. Both these facts figure intimately in Izquierdo’s art starting in the 1930s. While Frida Kahlo became better known, Izquierdo ranks alongside her as an admired and studied in the pantheon of Mexican women artists—and foreigners such as Tina Modotti, Leonora Carrington, and Remedios Varo—whose careers developed there.
Izquierdo features in the 2024 Venice Biennale’s “Foreigners Everywhere” exhibition curated by Adriano Pedrosa, and she was the subject of the first monographic exhibition by a Mexican woman artist in New York. Near the end of 1930, Frances Flynn Paine, an entrepreneur and enthusiastic promoter of Mexican art, organized a show at The Art Center in Manhattan, where she was director. At the same time, Izquierdo and her then partner Rufino Tamayo were included in “Mexican Arts,” a traveling exhibition (organized by future Museum of Modern Art director René d’Harnoncourt) that began at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and later traveled to 13 other venues in the United States. Izquierdo’s work was also seen in the 1939 MoMA exhibition “Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art.”
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Many of Izquierdo’s subjects paralleled those of Kahlo, and both artists helped strengthen the influence of Mexican popular arts. But while Izquierdo has been treated to a number of academic books, essays, and solo shows over the past two decades, there have been no blockbuster exhibitions, no “immersive experience” spectacles, and certainly no feature films starring Salma Hayek. So why is María not as familiar as Frida?
The answer is both simple and complex. At age 14 Izquierdo entered an arranged marriage to a military officer, and soon had three children. A strong-willed individual, she left the marriage and moved to Mexico City, where she began studies at the National Academy of Fine Arts with some of the stars of the contemporary post-Revolutionary art scene, including Diego Rivera—who called Izquierdo “my favorite pupil.”
As a single mother following her four-year relationship with Tamayo, she did not have the archetype of a “strong man” like Rivera (Kahlo’s husband, and the quintessence of Mexican machismo) behind her to burnish her reputation. More than that, Rivera played a notably destructive role in Izquierdo’s career: in the mid-1940s, he and David Alfaro Siqueiros conspired to block her from executing a commission the municipality of Mexico City had awarded her for a city hall mural. Only a few watercolors and pencil drawings of this unexecuted project remain.
After the Mexican Revolution ended in 1920, a complex new phase of culture, with all its messy contours, began. Gone was the almost slavish admiration for French styles in literature, music, art, and fashion that characterized the long dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz (who effectively ruled Mexico from 1877 to 1911, with a short hiatus between 1880 and 1884). The heritage of pre-Hispanic arts and the incorporation of popular subject matter, derived in part from studies of both Indigenous and self-trained artists, were among the stimuli to which Izquierdo and others of her generation responded. Izquierdo worked for the most part on a modest scale, unlike the best-known muralists of the late 1920s through the 1950s: Rivera, Siqueiros, José Clemente Orozco, and numerous others whose art quickly garnered attention well beyond Mexico.
An interest in scenes of smalltown Mexican life and, especially, views of circus performers, defined Izquierdo’s early phase. In these images, mostly small watercolors painted in the 1930s (of which about 45 remain), she concentrates on female horse trainers and tightrope walkers, in tribute to her earliest childhood memories. San Juan de los Lagos, her birthplace, was a center for trade, with a popular annual fair that provided the occasion for itinerant circuses to visit. The appearance of the Virgin Mary now venerated in the Basilica is even said to have occurred after a circus performance in the 1610s, when a young girl with knife wounds was healed by the miraculous apparition.
Izquierdo’s modest artworks might be the antithesis of male artists’ “heroic” historicizing murals and grand figural compositions for the way they depicted female agency and physical feats. One of Izquierdo’s few works in a US collection—White Horsewoman, also known as Circus Bareback Rider (1932), belonging to the Blanton Museum at the University of Texas at Austin—is a fine example of these themes in its depiction of a woman in a white tutu balancing barefoot on the back of a pony, holding a flexible red baton. It also demonstrates the artist’s characteristic use of subdued color, in this case brown, earthy reds, and grayish whites. These were the years when Izquierdo and Tamayo were close both personally and stylistically; Tamayo employed a similar color scheme in many of his ’30s-era paintings, demonstrating the synergy of back-and-forth inspiration (and also belying the clichéd notion of Mexican painting in this period relying on pinks, fuchsias, greens, reds, and other stereotypical “local” colors).
At the same time, Izquierdo was creating still lifes that combined traditional and contemporary elements: Still Life. The Photographic Camera, 1931, depicts a wooden chair of a kind found in working-class homes in Mexico, a guitar, and a ceramic vessel resting on its seat along with a very modern Kodak Brownie camera. The Telephone, another work from the same year, shows a tabletop with a book, an inkwell, and a telephone.
A number of her self-portraits from the 1940s feature Izquierdo clad in long dresses with a classically Mexican shawl (rebozo) draped around her back—a style of fashion that harked back to both Indigenous and Spanish colonial forms of self-display. Izquierdo’s self-portraits almost always present their creator in a somewhat formal, even stilted manner. They are often enigmatic, as if she were striving to present as few clues as possible to her inner life.
In 1936 Izquierdo met Antonin Artaud, the French artist, writer, and sometime member of André Breton’s Surrealist circle, who had arrived in Mexico in January and stayed less than a year. He was determined to investigate what, according to poet and diplomat Octavio Paz, he called the “real Mexico,” and spent time in the northern state of Chihuahua with the Tarahumara Indigenous peoples, with whom he experimented with hallucinogenic drugs such as peyote. Back in Mexico City, Artaud declared his new friend Izquierdo to be the most “indigenous” artist in the country. This was more or less nonsensical, as Izquierdo had no claims to indigeneity, but Artaud, in his fervor to associate anything Mexican with the “primitive,” was moved to define her that way.
Shortly after he returned to France, Artaud organized an exhibition of Izquierdo’s watercolors (most of which have disappeared) at the Galerie van den Berg, in Paris. These activities parallel interactions between Kahlo and Breton, who visited Mexico in 1938 and declared Kahlo to be a true Surrealist. Was Izquierdo a Surrealist as well?
She (like Kahlo) denied such an association, and aligned herself with the Contemporáneos, a group of writers and painters that sought to establish a “non-Mexicanist” avant-garde in arts and letters. In addition, Izquierdo’s paintings and watercolors do not generally demonstrate anything related to the oneiric experiences that characterize the art of many other painters associated with the amorphous Surrealist style. Then again, several of Izquierdo’s most ambitious pieces, including still life compositions that relate to home altars set up as “offerings” prior to Easter, feature compellingly bizarre juxtapositions of everyday objects, with clay statues of angels and the image of the Sorrowful Virgin.
The Izquierdo painting most convincingly related to Surrealism is her last major work, Dream and Premonition (1947). Here, the artist is seen emerging from a window in an adobe house situated in a dreamlike landscape. She holds her own disembodied head, its hair entangled with the branches of trees that grow from an adjacent second window. Tears drop from the head into a boat-shaped basin with a blue cross standing at its center. Headless figures walking next to the house recede into the distance, passing under heads hanging from the tree branches above them. A troubled nighttime sky and a landscape marked by small mounds that resemble graves complete the scene.
Dream and Premonition may be a cri de coeur or an experiment in the Surrealist visual vocabulary, or both. After she finished it, Izquierdo began to experience serious health problems, with the second of two strokes causing her death in 1955. While her art was by no means forgotten, it was more than three decades before it rose to the level of importance it elicited in the late 20th century, beginning with a monumental 1988–89 tribute exhibitionat the Centro Cultural/Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City. The fact that her work had been declared “national patrimony” and therefore was not exportable for sale from Mexico explains, in part, its absence from the international scene. But why is there such renewed interest in Izquierdo’s art now?
Continuing attention to art by women is one obvious answer, as is the ongoing fascination with all permutations of Surrealism—as evidenced by the 2021–22 show “Surrealism Beyond Borders” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Tate Modern that featured Izquierdo’s 1936 watercolor Allegory of Work. I argue, however, that the cause has more to do with contemporary curiosity about the mixing of genres, a general interest in the “unfinished” (a characteristic present in a number of her paintings), and attraction to the deliberate, self-conscious imitation of so-called primitive forms that Izquierdo favored over the academic modes in which she was trained. All of that resulted in a highly sui generis aesthetic effect.