It’s not every day an exhibition in Chicago introduces a significant historic figure who is little known in the United States, but that’s what “Maria Izquierdo 1902-1955” does at the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum.
The last time something comparable happened was 18 years ago, when the Museum of Contemporary Art organized the first museum survey in the United States for Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, whose work has since achieved worldwide popularity.
So not only was a show with the same spirit of rediscovery overdue, but it was also a remarkable coincidence that the exhibition should again be for a woman who enlarges our view of the kind of work being done in Mexico during the 1930s and 1940s.
Kahlo and Izquierdo were of the same generation and had equally high reputations in their own country, which suggests it’s inexcusable for us to know one and not the other. However, Kahlo’s turbulent life and art were bound to overshadow Izquierdo’s more pacific achievements, even though the latter was the first woman painter from Mexico to exhibit in the United States.
Izquierdo’s paintings are more international and more immediately comprehensible than Kahlo’s, but Izquierdo spoke out strongly against the feminism of her day, and that apparently counted against her with contemporary feminist critics in America who initially revived interest in Kahlo.
For whatever reason, Izquierdo has been confined in the English language to a few brief entries in art reference books, whereas Kahlo has benefited from a spate of monographs and pictorial analyses, which recently was augmented by publication of a facsimile of her diaries.
The essays by Teresa del Conde and Luis-Martin Lozano in the catalog for the present exhibition are the best sources for Izquierdo in English, and even they are less than definitive. More than 65 years after her first solo exhibition in the United States–and four decades after her death–much about Izquierdo’s deceptively ingenuous art is still a mystery.
How much training did she have? Beyond 17 months at the Academy of Fine Arts in Mexico City during 1928 and 1929 we don’t really know. Izquierdo said she was self-taught, and her paintings often show the awkwardness of a naive artist. But Lozano suggests she had more formal instruction than she admitted, and because going against training usually was part of an avant-garde stance, his surmise may well be accurate.
How much was Izquierdo’s art affected by ties to Rufino Tamayo, one of the most advanced Mexican artists of the period? That, too, we do not know. Tamayo received credit for her movement from a dark to light palette in the early 1930s. Yet Lozano proposes the pupil influenced the teacher, Tamayo adopting Izquierdo’s handling of thick paint. So it’s also possible she came to heightened chroma mainly on her own.
Even the long-held view of Izquierdo as a “pure” painter of figures, landscapes and still lifes is not entirely correct. The exhibition holds works from several stages in her career that convey something about the social conditions of the time, and this peacefully co-exists with more formal currents from modern European art, which she learned about from magazines and journals.
The look of a mature Izquierdo painting may, then, be odd to American eyes. Its subjects, no matter the genre, are clearly Mexican, celebrating indigenous landscapes, objects and rituals. Its treatment, however, may often have the arbitrariness of Fauve color or the fractures of Cubist design.
Izquierdo brings together Mexican and modern European influences in watercolors and paintings that recall the rapture of Marc Chagall or the hallucinatory stillness of Henri Rousseau. In other words, there’s a sophistication but also an endearing earthiness that keeps them from rarefied heights.
Izquierdo’s watercolors, in particular, constitute a playful art that is of the Mexican people. The subjects are circus performers that both Toulouse-Lautrec and Picasso squeezed expressive juice from just before and after the turn of the century. But Izquierdo’s performers, unlike theirs, are without anxiety and metaphor-free. She gives them back their innocence.
No major European artist of the 1930s painted circuses like these. The motif had been exhausted. Only in America was it possible to avoid existential overtones, as in, say, the circus paintings of Everett Shinn. But he was an illustrator compared to Izquierdo. Her circuses have more poetic innocence than her Garden of Eden.
After her shift to a lightened palette, Izquierdo’s oil paintings occasionally took on a strangeness that went beyond the dreamlike Rousseau to the more troubled sleep of Giorgio de Chirico. But Izquierdo required a full decade for the nightmare to blossom. And in the middle ’30s her landscapes and still lifes barely shiver with dark hints and allusions.
“Landscape With Zebra and Ship,” from 1935, is a rough-hewn nocturne that captures some of the fright of a child, for Izquierdo approaches Kahlo’s grown-up guignol only at the end of her life. Here, as in the dense “The Jewelry Box,” from 1942, her sense of drama is still relatively light, a matter of masquerades and spooks in the playroom.
All during the ’40s, Izquierdo showed a marvelous command of color allied to an apparently unforced sense of wonder. It deserted her only when she reclaimed some of the allegorical subject matter of murals she was engaged to paint but never completed. Lozano tells the ugly story of famous male artists freezing Izquierdo out of the mural project. Paintings near the time of her struggle with the muralists indicate she did not do her best work under pressure.
Nor did she translate convincingly the edgy Surrealism picked up (as if by osmosis) from meetings in Mexico with poet Antonin Artaud. Some of Izquierdo’s later paintings have been seen by historians as premonitions of the suffering she would endure from a stroke in 1948. But their pictorial language of blasted landscapes and decapitated heads is a come-down, frayed and imitative. A 1947 piece, actually titled “Dream and Premonition,” is almost unbearable in its Kahlo-ish melodrama.
Photographic portraits throughout the show hint at the flintiness that allowed Izquierdo to retrain herself to draw and paint with her left hand after the stroke. However, if the truth be told, these final works are among the weakest of all her paintings, despite heightened color and texture. Here she seems an artist of apocalypse, though in relation to what came before, it looks desperate, foreign to her nature.
Izquierdo was at her best in portraits and still lifes from the late ’30s and early ’40s. She achieves a plenitude in both the forms and colors that is wholly her own, despite debts to Rousseau, Andre Derain and others.
In those pieces Izquierdo is a difficult artist, too, as she often embeds her modernist borrowings so deeply that viewers can fall into thinking of her only as a “primitive,” as Artaud did. The exhibition overall proves Izquierdo to have been more, but sometimes you have to work to get at it.
In her art, she never made a show of being a sophisticate; only in flashes does she allow us to see she clearly, unmistakably was.
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THE FACTS
`Maria Izquierdo (1902-1955)’
When: Through Sept 8.
Where: Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum, 1852 W. 19th St.
Admission: Free
Call: 312-738-1503
