In Mexico there have been many women artists, but those who have always been referred to are Frida Kahlo, Remedios Varo, and Leonora Carrington, the latter two of European origin; Varo, Spanish, lived in Mexico from 1940 until her death in 1963; and Carrington, British, arrived in Mexico in 1943, the country where she died in 2011. Although they weren’t born in Mexico, they are considered Mexican artists, since they developed their work in that country, the place from which they became known internationally.
But let’s go with the case that corresponds to us this time, María Izquierdo, a talented contemporary painter to the aforementioned triad of artists, who was born in Jalisco, Mexico, in 1902, and died in Mexico City, in 1955. She came from a family of more indigenous descent than mestizo.
Regarding her academic education, Izquierdo studied at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes, at the end of the 1920s. An institution directed by Diego Rivera a few months after she entered. There she took painting, composition, color, and art history classes and had important artists of the time as teachers, such as Rufino Tamayo, for example, with whom she related professionally and sentimentally. For this reason, she received a lot of artistic influence from Tamayo, which can be seen in her production made between 1929 and 1933, a period in which both shared a workshop, whose theme revolved around portraits of people close to her, such as family and friends.
Among the themes that Izquierdo worked on are portraits, self-portraits, still lifes, children, nude women, kneeling, tied to columns, maternity, dancers, characters and circus scenes, animals, as well as Mexican and indigenous traditions, particularly; but her women, recurrent images in her paintings, she represented with a markedly melancholic aspect, as if they were experiencing great loneliness (3).
