At Last, a Painter at the Crossroads of Mexico Gets Her Due

The complexities of Modern art in Mexico remain poorly understood in the United States, not least because significant exhibitions of it are all too rarely organized here. Names of artists are usually better known than the actual arc of their careers, while some unusually compelling figures languish in outright obscurity. For the late 19th century, Hermenegildo Bustos is one of these; for the 20th, Maria Izquierdo is another.

Now, Izquierdo is finally the subject of a small but engaging survey exhibition, newly opened at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Organized by the Americas Society, New York, where it was seen in a slightly larger version last spring, it’s her first solo show in the U.S. since 1929. Then she was just starting out as a painter; she died 42 years ago.

Izquierdo (1902-1955) is one of those artists who stands at the fascinating crossroads of Mexican artistic life in the 1920s and 1930s. Post-revolutionary Mexico was in the midst of convulsive change--especially in the capital, where Izquierdo moved at the age of 21. The politically charged story of the mural movement has been widely told but, as a woman, Izquierdo didn’t have much chance at that.

Her one mural commission, awarded in 1944, was scuttled with the help of Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros. “It is a crime to be born a woman,” she ruefully declared in her memoirs.

A four-year romantic liaison with Rufino Tamayo at the start of her career was likely both help and hindrance to Izquierdo. He taught her how to paint with watercolors, and among the show’s 28 works on paper--there are also 28 oils--are some of her most remarkable pictures. (The influence didn’t just flow in one direction, though; “I owe a lot to Tamayo,” Izquierdo acknowledged, “but he also owes quite a bit to me.”) Tamayo’s break with the hard-core political wing of the mural movement in favor of a more poetic, less polemical art made many powerful enemies--for both of them.

Izquierdo’s paintings are frequently described as naive in style, but that naivete is anything but artless. Instead, it’s frankly loaded. It speaks of a sophisticated refusal of an entrenched pictorial tradition that has its roots in conservative European painting.

Tabletop still lifes such as “Offering for Our Lady of Sorrows” and “The Wise Cat” (both 1943) are marked by similarities in form and subject to her wonderful series of gouaches on the theme of the circus (1932-1940). In all of them space is shallow, crowded, even claustrophobic. Figures are modeled in the round, but the emphasis is on contours and profile views.

A halved squash or mango might be shown from its side, but the cut end will be viewed head-on. The circus ring appears like a rainbow that arcs across the surface of the paper, while the acrobats and animals seem to be decals or cutouts, dispersed on the page.

In the formal, full-length triple portrait, “My Nieces” (1940), the three girls fill the large canvas, sitting and standing before a verdant jungle background that is so shallow it could almost be wallpaper. The two legs of the little girl in red are almost identical to one another, creating the beginning of a flat pattern that is picked up in the shallow folds of drapery in the dress of her sister seated next to her, which wash across the picture in waves.

Figures are always pushed forward to the surface of Izquierdo’s images, while space is collapsed. For the avant-garde in general, this type of stylization reflects a cosmopolitan interest in contemporary European abstraction; and--specifically for Mexican artists--it shows a disavowal of the conservative training at the old Academy of San Carlos, pride and joy of the dictatorial regime of Porfirio Diaz, which the revolution ended.

Still, the source of Izquierdo’s flattened, crowded pictures is not just in the forward-looking avant-garde. It also echoes with the rediscovery of ancient history.

Izquierdo’s paintings have something of the visual qualities of painted relief carvings, which are likewise shallow, patterned and emphasize contour. Mesoamerican pyramids, decorated with extraordinary reliefs, as well as all manner of decorated implements, were then being unearthed with fervor by archeologists. The rich, earthen reds, blues and greens in Izquierdo’s work of the 1930s and early 1940s might even put you in mind of Mayan art.

In keeping with this, her simple subjects also convey the spirit of mexicanidad, or the ordinary experiences and accouterments of daily living in Mexico. The circus is a common allegory for modern life, familiar from Picasso and Seurat, but the clowns and jugglers in Izquierdo’s consistently gorgeous works on paper are more childlike and fantastical in their melancholia. And her still life paintings often recall domestic altars, such as those assembled for Day of the Dead remembrances, or else the interiors of kitchen cupboards.

In the show, the largest painting is an eccentric portrait of her fashionable French milliner, Henri de Chatillon. He’s shown seated on a wooden bench in a garden, dressed in a white suit and striped tie and carrying a woven peasant hat, like a humble emblem of his trade.

At the right, Izquierdo shows her easel and--in a rather awkward insertion of herself into the picture--her own hand holding a paintbrush enters from the canvas edge. The portrait on the easel is considerably different from the sitter before it: hat on head, bright blue shirt, no white suit, solid tie. The artist plainly means to show us who’s in charge.

Curiously, men don’t show up often in her art. Portraits of women (four or five of them self-portraits) and domestic subjects are far more common. Even her great circus pictures show mostly women and girls, both as performers and as audience, while men occupy a distinctly minor place.

Unlike her famous contemporary, Frida Kahlo, Izquierdo does not partake of an obsessive self-regard in her art. Yet, it’s clear that women and their complex place and potential in the world are always very much on her mind. It’s a principal motif in her art.

What gives her best work its vibrant edge, however, is its improvisatory feel. Izquierdo didn’t make drawings or studies for her paintings; she painted directly on her canvas, feeling her way through the composition.

The technique, which is probably related to her early instruction in watercolor, and her astonishing mastery of that medium, sweeps away any remnant of fussy academic ponderousness. Even though pictures could of course be repainted and reworked to achieve the desired result, there’s an unlabored immediacy to her most compelling work.

“The True Poetry” is the second show here this year of Mexican Modernist painting that you can’t help but wish could be seen in Los Angeles. Last spring, the Santa Barbara Museum hosted “Portrait of a Decade: David Alfaro Siqueiros, 1930-1940,” organized to celebrate the centennial of the radical and inventive muralist’s birth.

With the recent announcement by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art of its acquisition of the Lewin Collection of Mexican Modernism, and that museum’s declared intention to begin actively developing the field, perhaps we’ll begin to see shows like this one in L.A. It would be worth whatever effort it might take.

*

“THE TRUE POETRY: THE ART OF MARIA IZQUIERDO,” Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1130 State St. Dates: Tuesdays to Saturdays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Sundays, noon to 5 p.m.; Tursdays, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Ends Dec. 28. Prices: adults, $4; senior citizens, $3; students, $1.50; children 5 and under, free. Phone: (805) 963-4364.