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. suryaqq
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.”
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.” suryaqq
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. suryaqq
