THE REVOLUTION OF MARIA IZQUIERDO:

CONSTRUCTS OF GENDER AND

NATION IN THE ARTIST'S

FEMALE FIGURES

A THESIS

Presented to the Department of Art

California State University, Long Beach

In Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for the Degree

Master of Art in Art History

Committee Members:

Catha Paquette, Ph.D. (Chair)

Alicia Del Campo, Ph.D.
Karen Kleinfelder, Ph.D.

College Designee:

David A. Hadlock, M.F.A.

By Miranda Viscoli

B.F.A., 2003, California State University, Long Beach

August 2009
 UMI Number: 1481598

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 ABSTRACT

THE REVOLUTION OF MARIA IZQUIERDO:

CONSTRUCTS OF GENDER AND

NATION IN THE ARTIST'S

FEMALE FIGURES

By

Miranda Viscoli

August 2009

This thesis explores how the Mexican painter Maria Izquierdo used the

medium of painting to create an original and disruptive visual iconography that

allows for the renegotiation of gender identity during the decades following the 1910

Mexican Revolution and civil war. At the center of her images is the female figure.

These figures range from women contorted, tortured and bound in settings bereft of

sustenance, mothers nurturing their children, women starving in desolate landscapes,

to monumental figures at work. One of my main points of interest is how her visual

vocabulary resisted the muralist's dominant visual paradigm and their treatment of

the female form as an object of male supremacy under the umbrella of nationalist

fervor. The result is a body of work that offers an alternative to the political

ideologies at play, as well as addressing the complexities of gender identity and

nationalism at this time in Mexico.

 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

In the process of writing my thesis I have been extremely fortunate to work with

a committee that offered vast expertise. Professor Alicia Del Campo was immensely

helpful and offered an insightful point of view regarding Izquierdo's Mexico. I

appreciated her emotional support and belief in the importance of this project.

Professor Kleinfelder's intuition, imagination and profound knowledge of modern art

helped me discover an unexpected trajectory in the narrative of this thesis. Her

humor and thoughtfulness kept me going through the tough weeks and months of the

writing process. Particular gratitude goes to my committee chair, Professor Catha

Paquette, for her tireless support, energy and copious editing of my thesis. She never

let me forget the importance of the work and its potential impact on future discussions

of this important Mexican female artist. I would also like to thank Christopher Miles

my graduate advisor. His humor, cheerful manner, and patient guidance were a vital

part of the process. And, I would like to express my gratitude to my dear friend, Dr.

Charles Lyons. His input and support were an integral part of the early formation of

the thesis and his continued encouragement throughout was much appreciated.

I would also like to thank my children Zoe and Henry for giving up there

mommy on Saturday mornings and all those games they wanted to play, as well as

understanding that my thesis was an important part of my life. There is one person

that I can honestly say made this thesis possible and that is my husband Steve

Lipscomb. His encouragement, support, humor, and love throughout the writing of

iii
this thesis never faltered. His endless patience to read my chapters into many early

morning hours was an astounding contribution. This, combined with an infinite optimism

and sage advice, guided me to the very end.

IV
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT iii

CHAPTER

1. INTRODUCTION 1

2. THE POLITICS OF GENDER: WOMEN IN MEXICO BEFORE AND

AFTER THE REVOLUTION 16

3. CHALLENGING THE NUDE: MARIA IZQUIERDO'S DESNUDO 35

4. IZQUIERDO'S WOMEN: RE-IMAGINING THE FEMALE FIGURE IN

POST-REVOLUTIONARY MEXICAN ART 52
5. THE SHIFTING CONSTRUCTIONS OF MOTHERHOOD IN THE
IMAGES OF MARIA IZQUIERDO 83

6. IZQUIERDO'S MURAL 92

7. CONCLUSION 119

BIBLIOGRAPHY 122

v
 CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

In 1920, after ten years of revolution and civil war, Mexico began the complex

task of transforming from an oligarchic state to the beginnings of a functioning

democracy. In the two decades of reconstruction that followed, the painter Maria

Izquierdo produced an unusual body of work that featured highly diverse images of

women. Her female figures range from women contorted, tortured and bound in settings

bereft of sustenance, mothers nurturing their children, women starving in desolate

landscapes, to monumental figures at work. She painted these diverse and at times

contradictory images at a time when gender biases and restrictions that had existed for

centuries were being challenged. Questions surfaced as to what the new construct of

female identity would look like in Mexico. Women's rights took great strides forward

during this time, despite the vehement defense of traditional female roles in many

quarters. There has been and continues to be significant scholarship dedicated to the

divergent paths of gender identity in this time of dramatic cultural transformation. What

the following chapters will reveal is how the multifarious, conflicting and fascinating

images of Izquierdo provide a unique means by which to consider the complex and at

times opposing notions of female identity during the first half of the twentieth century in

Mexico.

Only in the past two decades has the art world begun to recognize that the life, art

and writing of Maria Izquierdo might be worth a more in-depth investigation. During her

1
lifetime the artist received critical recognition, but the valuation of her work then was

ultimately mixed resulting in problematic interpretations. The lack of in-depth art

historical research on the artist prior to the 1990s is due in part to the fact that she was a

female artist working in Mexico during the height of the muralist movement, a tradition

that for the most part celebrated a masculine experience and vision. Another possible

explanation may lie in the enigmatic images that comprise her work. As we shall see,

Izquierdo's often peculiar and baffling paintings have unfortunately been labeled as

"primitive," "naive," "feminine," or "decorative" and often simply as an emotional

response to her break up with her lover, the famous Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo.

This paper begins with the supposition that Izquierdo's paintings were located

specifically within the sphere of the intellect and are a public and not a private expression

that actively and radically uses the artistic medium as an instrument of reform. I will

demonstrate how her images stand in stark contrast to the muralist's definition of female

identity, thereby disrupting the muralists' male-centric trajectory. The result is a body of

work that pushes the marginalized to the center, giving a voice to the often unspoken

reality of female subordination within Izquierdo's culture while challenging much of the

central visual iconography that defined much of Mexican art at the time.

A majority of the paintings this paper will examine were produced during the

period of 1930-1938. In these emotionally driven images the women are under extreme

physical and mental duress. Much of the critical analysis of these paintings has tended to

interpret her work as autobiographical. As mentioned, throughout Izquierdo's career, and

even today, historians writing about these paintings infer that her images have been

affected aesthetically and emotionally by her broken-off affair with Tamayo. Raquel

2
Tibol described theses images as a way for Izquierdo to exorcize "the profound wounds

of love."1 Elizabeth Ferrer similarly writes that, "Such compositions reveal Izquierdo's

personal difficulties and soul searching during this period. The personal difficulties she

faced may have influenced her portrayal of women as weak, alone and dependent."2

Olivier Debroise in his essay, "The Shared Studio," follows a similar course when he

writes that her paintings during this time are "pessimistic metaphors of a gloomy vision

of the world." He then singles out Sadness (1934). "In that year," he writes, " Izquierdo

broke up with Tamayo, who then married a young piano student. ..' In Wake and

Woman and Cross (1933), Debroise sees, "Desperate illuminations, torn images of an

emotional rupture filled with a latent sadomasochism, qualities which set them apart from

the eroticism and sensuality of her immediately preceding works."4 This common

interpretation reduces Izquierdo's work to that of a lovesick woman using her art to

exorcize the pain of a broken heart. Debroise goes so far as to analyze her imagery as

simply the sexual expression of a female artist when he compares them to her earlier

works that he sees as conveying feminine "eroticism" and "sensuality."

Art historians have also consistently argued that Tamayo profoundly influenced

Izquierdo's aesthetic during this time. Luis-Martin Lozano was the first art historian to

1
Raquel Tibol, "/? los 90 anos de Maria Izquierdo" pp. 53 and quoted in
Elizabeth Ferrer, "A Singular Path: The Artistic Development of Maria Izquierdo," in
The True Poetry, ed. Elizabeth Ferrer (New York: Americas Society Art Gallery, 1997),
16.
2
Ferrer, 16.

Olivier Debroise, "The Shared Studio," in The True Poetry, 62.

4
Ibid., 62.
3
offer an alternative perspective. He argues that their time together was actually more of a

symbiotic exchange.5 Tamayo and Izquierdo were lovers who shared a studio. They

immersed themselves in formalist concerns that integrated twentieth-century European

models. Together they explored an anti-academic practice that included shape conveyed

by form and color as well as a two-dimensional painting style. The result was visual

language that communicated a poetic force. Both artists used still-lifes and common

domestic objects in odd juxtapositions. They each experimented with objects in tight

spaces, playing with the formalist opportunities of distortion and geometric shape.

Izquierdo and Tamayo considered themselves colorists and felt that the exploration of

tone was integral to the formalist qualities of the image.

Another point of modernist exploration in the work of Izquierdo and Tamayo is

the formalist possibilities of the nude, but this may be where the comparison ends. I

contend that Izquierdo fuses experimentations with modernist trends and explorations of

the female form to focus directly on issues of gender in the culture she lived. This

certainly was not the case with Tamayo.

Some scholars have gone so far as to suggest Tamayo was not even a positive

influence on Izquierdo. MacKinley Helm wrote in 1941 that Izquierdo narrowly escaped

being ruined from too much control by Tamayo. He observed that Tamayo's sway had

the potential to destroy her "naive and primitive style."6 For Helm, Tamayo clearly

5
Luis-Martin Lozano, "Regarding Modern Mexican Painting: Maria Izquierdo,"
in Maria Izquierdo 1902-1955, ed. Carlos Tortolero (Chicago: Mexican Fine Arts
Museum, 1996), 32.
6
Mackinley Helm, Modern Mexican Painters (New York: Dover Publications,
1941),145.
4
exhibited an interest in the European avant-garde. Helm attempted to dissociate

Izquierdo from Tamayo to bolster his thesis that true Mexican art, such as hers, exhibits a

primitive, naive and indigenous quality. Diego Rivera similarly argued that Izquierdo

was "one of the most attractive artists recently discovered in Mexico [and] would succeed

if she would avoid the bastardizing influence of foreign painting."

To deduce Izquierdo's anti-academic experimentation as solely a result of her

association with Tamayo is absurd. Izquierdo experimented freely with new trends, as

did the other major Mexican painters of her era. Izquierdo and her peers also purposely

rebelled against the muralists' political and nationalistic rhetoric and their use of a social

realist style. She chose, not because she was Tamayo's lover, but for her own aesthetic

and political reasons, to have a strong vocal and visual role in this artistic counter culture.

Using a modernist vocabulary gave her an aesthetic arsenal to explore an iconography

that reexamined gender politics. Such a choice stands in stark contrast to the images of

the female figures of the muralists. Her artistic choices also gave Izquierdo the freedom

to explore an imaginary space in her paintings, abandoning the known "physical" world

in order to better analyze the social conditions of her country.

Helm is not the only writer to connect Izquierdo with Mexican primitivism and a

naive style. In 1936, the French Surrealist, Anton Artaud came to Mexico where he

encountered the work of Izquierdo. Tarver in her paper, "Issues of Otherness and Identity

in the Works of Izquierdo, Kahlo, Artaud and Breton," argues that Artaud used

7
Diego Rivera as quoted in Adriana Zavala, "Maria Izquierdo," in The Eagle and
the Virgin: National and Cultural Revolution in Mexico 1920-1940, eds. Mary Kay
Vaughan and Stephen E. Lewis (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 70.

5
Izquierdo's artwork to support a thesis for his own intellectual purposes. Artaud

professes that he came to Mexico seeking a "perfect example of primitive civilizations

with a magical spirit," and that only Izquierdo held his interest.9 He wrote two articles

about her work in Mexican papers. A third appeared in a Parisian newspaper. In one

article, he argued that Izquierdo had become the "Indian spirit that is disappearing [and

that] only the paintings of Maria Izquierdo show evidence of a truly Indian spirit."10 He

labeled her work as "sincere, spontaneous and primitive."11 This position romanticized

and celebrated Izquierdo as "other." In so doing, Artaud made her part of his resistance

against the seemingly tainted European seeds of modernization. Though intended as

praise, Artaud's perspective had the unfortunate consequence of labeling Izquierdo's

work as "primitive." Critics for years have adopted his "primitive" and "intuitive" labels

as definitive explanations of her oeuvre.

Critics also have tended to categorize her work as having a "feminine" motive.

The Mexican poet Rafael Solona wrote an essay on Izquierdo in 1938 in the literary

magazine Taller, in which he celebrated the "primitive," "feminine," and Mexican

qualities in Izquierdo's imagery. He writes,

8
Gina McDaniel Tarver, "Issues of Otherness and Identity in the Works of
Izquierdo, Kahlo, Artaud and Breton," Research Paper Series, (Albuquerque: University
of New Mexico, 1993), 3.
9
Ibid.,3.
10
Ibid.
11
Lozano, 37.
12
Tarver, 4.
13
Lozano, 37.

6
 This thing of Maria Izquierdo is not painting as a conscious action ruled by will
and the intellect, this is a secret painting, in a natural incontinent way, like crying
or bleeding... Maria's painting is not born of the mind but of flesh. . .Two
primordial elements characterize her painting: femininity and Mexicanidad}

Solona's description demonstrates how the counter culture with which Izquierdo

chose to associate came to define her work according to stereotypical gender roles.

Similar to Artaud, Solona categorizes her work as intuitive, not born of the intellect.

This propagates the established view that women artists are mired in an overtly emotional

realm. The reference to "bleeding" marginalizes her images by linking them to female

anatomy. And, finally, in the words "secret painting" Solana places her images squarely

in a predictable feminine sphere of innocence and violation, thus regulating her images to

a private and not public sphere.

Luis-Martin Lozano is the first art historian to take issue with such labeling. He

sees these previous critiques as having a negative impact on Izquierdo's work in that they

have undervalued her artistic and intellectual ability. He writes:

As an artist she was a prolific creator whose style has hardly been studied in-
depth by specialists in Mexican art, who most of the time stay within her
autobiographical content while explaining her art as 'naive' and 'primitive.' Her
training . . . is just the opposite. The deeper one goes into her painting the more
one finds that the aesthetic and stylistic sources that nourished her were many and
of a very diverse nature.15

In the past decade, a handful of art historians have taken positions similar to

Lozano and have begun the process of reexamining the imagery of Izquierdo. Maria

14
Zavala, 77-78.
15
Lozano, 32.
Gonzalez and Nancy Deffebach, as well as Robin Greeley and Adriana Zavala,16 have

begun the process of liberating her work from marginalizing treatment in previous

historical narratives. This new scholarship is a point of departure as all of these

historians explore Izquierdo's imagery in terms of its subversive trajectory.

Gonzalez is one of the first scholars to do an in depth analysis of Izquierdo's

relationship with the Mexican avant-garde. She observes that Izquierdo made a

deliberate move away from the muralists' interest in a patriotic and nationalist trajectory

in the art world. Instead, Izquierdo chose to associate with the radical group that

published Los Contempordneos. This Mexico City based publication deviated from the

main artistic currents and loudly proclaimed its position against the muralists. The group

celebrated homosexuality, sexuality, and those who existed on the margins of Mexican

culture. In her dissertation Gonzalez also explores the political and cultural context of

Izquierdo's early years in Mexico City. Gonzalez takes into consideration how early

women's movements in Mexico had a strong effect on Izquierdo's artistic career. She

also explores her relationship with Tamayo and sees it as having a strong effect on

Izquierdo's artistic choices.

In her dissertation, Deffebach discusses images of vegetation in Izquierdo's work

and concludes that they were a way for Izquierdo to address issues of gender and

nationalism. Similar to Gonzalez, she sites the important effect Los Contempordneos had

on Izquierdo as an artist. Deffebach sees Izquierdo's inclusion of Mexican objects in her

Gonzalez, "The Art of Maria Izquierdo, The Formative Years 1928-1934,"

Nancy Deffebach, "Images of Plants in the Art of Maria Izquierdo, Frida Kahlo and
Lenora Carrington: Gender, Identity and Spirituality in the Context of Modern Mexico,"
Greeley, "Painting Mexican Identities: Nationalism and Gender in the work of Maria
Izquierdo," and Zavala, "Maria Izquierdo."
8
compositions as her way to create a synthesis between Mexican culture and a female

sphere. The result is a female divine energy in nationalistic discourse. She interprets

Izquierdo's depiction of the Virgin Mary in altars and religious spaces as a subversive

effort to preserve a powerful iconic female presence in Mexican culture.

Greeley counters critics who view Izquierdo's work as the emotional venting of a

broken heart. She interprets Izquierdo's work as an intentional move to protest social

discrimination in her culture. She argues that one way in which Izquierdo achieves this is

by synthesizing aspects of female, indigenous and popular culture and then leveraging

these to communicate a more complicated discourse on national identity. Similar to

Deffebach, Greeley is specifically interested in Izquierdo's use of altars and images of the

Virgin as a way of reexamining issues of "feminine" and public art, as well as the

categories of indigenous versus foreign art. Greeley contends that Izquierdo fits neither

into the Los Contempordneos discourse nor the social realist style that permeated

Mexican art. This allows the artist to take a more critical stance regarding the reality of

conditions in Mexico after the fighting portion of the revolution.17

Zavala takes a similar position to Gonzalez and Greeley in terms of their

argument that Izquierdo chose to associate with the Los Contempordneos group as a way

to distance herself from the nationalist rhetoric of the muralists. She concurs with

Greeley's contention that the group specifically chose to support Izquierdo's work

because it embodied a more modern definition of Mexican women than the patriarchal

17
The revolution was fought from 1910-20. The Cultural Revolution existed
from 1920-40. At times in my thesis I will use the term "post-revolution" aware that
during these forty years there were vast differences in the policies of the presidents that
governed the country and that the changes in the cultural environment took on many
different characteristics during these years of reconstruction.
9
representations of the muralists and the Mexican government. In terms of Izquierdo's

imagery, Zavala joins Gonzalez in interpreting the artist's early painting, Desnudo, as a

subversive attempt to depart from established norms regarding the female nude in art.

Like Greeley, she interprets Izquierdo's imagery as a site in which the artist voices

opposition to female oppression.

In her recently published exhibition catalogue, A New Art: The Contribution of

Maria Izquierdo, Zavala argues that Izquierdo's works that embody mythical landscapes

are informed by Freud's notions of "dream thoughts" as a way in which to explore a

poetic style much akin to the surrealists' interest in the subconscious. Zavala writes:

Izquierdo's works are rarely autobiographical, instead, the ambience created,

especially during the 1930's is one of an imaginative world, even if that world is
based on daily life and the Mexican experience. At the same time, Izquierdo's
creative universe is powerfully dream-like and invites allegorical readings.
Again, the dream affords the tool for interpreting her creative tendencies . . . her
works are rarely objective illustrations of events. Instead what characterizes her
1R

work most is the imaginative metaphoric and dream-like world therein.

Further, she asserts that Izquierdo, similar to other artists of the 1920's in

Mexico's avant-garde, believed that art "should be an entity unto itself rather than a

vehicle for political expression."19

The above historians have begun a crucial re-exploration of the implications and

meanings behind Izquierdo's imagery. My goal is to contribute to the body of literature

that is redefining the history of this particular artist. In addition, I hope to take the

analysis a step further by exploring the subtle and not so subtle battles that shaped and are

Adriana Zavala, "/ sueno de ser pintora," in Un Arte Nuevo: ElAporte de

Maria Izquierdo, ed. James Oles, Marie Nakazawa (Mexico: UNAM,2008), 31.
19
Ibid., 31.
10
made manifest in Izquierdo's oeuvre. I begin by addressing the social issues at stake

during Izquierdo's career in order to illustrate the profound impact they had on her choice

of imagery and the unique visual vocabulary that she created. I contend that Izquierdo

did not fit neatly into any art category in Mexico at this time. While she favored the

avant-garde, her imagery was not meant to be an "entity unto itself." It serves as a device

for political expression. This veers from Zavala's contention that her dreamscapes were

only in the expression of the realm of imagination. Instead, I argue that she consciously

used the conventional stylistic tools of Surrealism as a way to a have a conversation

about gender. The choice to transcend a known physical location for an unknown

mythological space made it possible for her to delve more deeply into an investigation of

gender beyond the confines of the nationalist visual repertoire that permeated much of the

art world. The result is a disruption in the dominant discourse allowing for the inclusion

of a dialogue on gender and national identity during the sweeping transformations taking

place in Mexico in the first three decades of the twentieth century.

At the same time, I maintain that Maria Izquierdo's departure from the gender-

based norms of her time was full of divergent and often disparate contradictions. Her

artwork and radio announcements in some instances support the nationalist and

paternalistic perspectives against which she and the Mexican avant-garde rebelled. What

becomes evident is how Izquierdo's complicated and contradictory imagery often times

mirrors those same complications and contradictions at play in her society.

I begin my thesis with an analysis of the policies towards women in Mexico

before and after the 1910 revolution. I examine the position of women in Mexican

society prior to the revolution and civil war in order to provide a context for the gains

11
made in women's rights and at the same time to illuminate the traditions that proved

immovable and privileged the male over the female. I demonstrate how the actions of the

Porfirian presidential administration furthered a paternalist authority that continued to

relegate women to the domestic sphere. I also discuss the dire economic situation in

Mexico and the devastating impact it had on women in terms of physical survival,

literacy, and levels of employment and prostitution.

In the second half of the chapter, I explore the position of women in Mexican

society during and after the 1910 revolution and the civil war. I examine the role of

women during the fighting portion of the revolution, the new role of women as teachers,

the support of maternity by the government as an important aspect in nation building and

the continued dire circumstance of prostitution. I also look at the advent of feminist

activism and its radical position in Mexican culture. The purpose of this analysis is to

demonstrate the conflicting roles of gender during this time in Mexico in order to later

reveal how it parallels the multifaceted and at times ambiguous imagery of Izquierdo.

Chapter 2 opens with an investigation of the Cultural Revolution (1920-1940) and

its effects on the cultural climate of Mexico. I briefly analyze the conflicting

perspectives of the muralist's nationalist agenda with the emerging avant-garde counter-

culture, Los Contempordneos. I then consider the impact this counter-culture had on

Izquierdo, how she chose not only to align herself with this group, but also to explore the

possibilities of their artistic innovations. I then make the point that she purposefully

fused this interest in modernism and existentialism with her awareness of gender

oppression, creating a distinctly individual, radical and disruptive visual iconography.

12
 In the second half of the chapter, I analyze an early painting of a nude woman by

Izquierdo in order to begin discussing Izquierdo's use of the female form as a site of

rupture and deviation. I begin with a brief examination of the history of the female nude

in art. I consider the history of the nude as informed and coded by the eroticized male

gaze. I establish this history of the female nude in order to contextualize the radical

nature of Izquierdo's early painting and demonstrate how it served to upset the previously

accepted aesthetic of the female nude. I argue that this is the beginning of Izquierdo's

first use of a visual vocabulary that serves to displace, rupture and thereby reconstruct in

an innovative way Mexican female identity. I conclude the chapter by comparing

Izquierdo's nude with the muralist's depictions of the female body. I use Rivera's La

tierra fecundado to illustrate the importance of Izquierdo's nude as a challenge to the

social and political structures of her culture.

Chapter 3 is an in-depth analysis of a series of paintings that Izquierdo created in

the 1930s, as well as one from the 1940s. The focus of much of this chapter is to locate a

specific group of Izquierdo's paintings within the political and cultural context of Mexico

in the first half of the twentieth century. This body of work and its depiction of the

female figure are intriguing given the social changes taking place during this time

regarding gender roles. I address the questions that emerge when Izquierdo's images of

the female figure are compared with the female figures in the murals of the three

prominent muralists. Such a comparison underscores the significance of Izquierdo's

womenbound, immobile and under extreme physical and emotional stress. Do her

images serve as a vital rupture to the visual and political structures that dominated her

culture? Does her radical use of the female form reflect a profound contrast with the

13
pictorial conventions that helped perpetuate the post-revolutionary nationalism and

ideologies of a patriarchal system? Does the existence of these paintings serve as a visual

denunciation of the muralists' visual paradigm and their consistent treatment of the

female form as an object of male supremacy?

Chapter 4 investigates Izquierdo's images of motherhood. Her ideological

promotion of maternity echoes the nationalist agenda promulgated within Mexico at this

time by the muralists and the governmentan agenda that in many ways echoed Porfirian

policies toward women. Izquierdo's images of motherhood defy art historians' recent

attempts to fit her imagery into a simplistic box that depicts her as an artist who denies

traditional values in order to fight for female liberty. Her images, as well as her public

statements on the radio admonishing feminism, illuminate the conflict and contradiction

inherent in public discourse and in the artist's own work. This paper argues that taken in

context the ambiguity of these images reveals the hybrid and multi-leveled reality of

women's experience in Mexico. As we begin to pull these images apart, answers are

suspect and questions reoccurring.

My last point of investigation is an analysis of Izquierdo's all too often ignored

mural project. I begin the chapter by examining the role of muralism in the artistic,

cultural and political environment in Mexico at the time. I continue to explore how the

muralist's use of the female body propagates notions of male supremacy under an

umbrella of nationalist fervor. Next I look at the work of the few women muralists

working during this time.

The second half of the chapter focuses on Izquierdo's drawings and paintings for

her mural project. I begin by giving a detailed analysis of her actual imagery to illustrate

14
how the pictorial choices for this mural stood as a threat to the existing male paradigm. I

then recount the events and actions taken against her by the government and the three

leading muralists, Los Tres Grandes and a handful of critics. My purpose is to

demonstrate that although her mural was sabotaged and her reputation diminished, her

work matters because it demanded the inclusion of female participation in the center and

not on the periphery of the public sphere.

In conclusion, I contend that both the artist and her images transcend the cultural

and creative confines of Mexico's male dominated art world. Within her pictorial

imagery there exists an unexpected divergence from the visual trajectories that consumed

much of the artistic community of Mexico during this time. Izquierdo created a visual

iconography that insisted on integration and not seclusion of her sex by taking advantage

of the shifts in gender perception that began on the fields of battle and continued well into

the first half of the twentieth century. Using the female figure as a site of negotiation, she

refused to accept the ideologies of Mexican nationalism on its own terms. Her imagery

reflects the articulation of an alternative position to that of the muralists' in their visual

discussions of national identity. The result is a body of work whose nucleus is a

profound response to gender subjugation during Mexico's emerging social revolution, but

which somehow manages at the same time to serve as a dramatic visual support of her

country's new nationalist commitment.

20
Los Tres Grandes is the term used for Rivera, Orozco and Siqueiros who were
the leaders of the Mexican mural movement.
15
 CHAPTER 2

THE POLITICS OF GENDER: WOMEN IN MEXICO BEFORE AND AFTER THE

REVOLUTION

Izquierdo's life embodied a denunciation of the deeply embedded bias towards

women in her culture. She dedicated her life to art, writing and political actions that

stood up against these inequities. Her very existence personified a constant fight for

equality. In 1927, she chose to divorce her husband, whom she was forced to marry in an

arranged marriage at the young age of thirteen. Divorce had only recently become

possible for women in Mexico. It was difficult to attain and carried a profound stigma.

Izquierdo took full custody of her three children and struggled to support them as a single

mother. At the same time, she chose a career as an artista profession that for the most

part was controlled by men. She immediately became aware of the inequality that

permeated the art world when Diego Rivera singled out her work and praised it for its

artistic sensibilities at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes. He did this by boldly and

publicly proclaiming, "this is the only one" 22 as compared to the other art students. The

predominantly male students were so upset that they poured buckets of cold water over

21
While in 1910 divorce was made legal it often privileged the male when it got
to the court system. In fact, more men sought divorce after 1910 than women. For an in
depth account of divorce at this time see Stephanie Smith, "Divorce and State
Formation," in, Sex in Revolution eds. by Joceyln Olcott, Mary Kay Vaughan and
Gabriela Cano (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).

Debroise, 52.

16
Izquierdo's head. In her memoirs she wrote, "It is a crime to be born a woman, [but] it's

an even greater crime to be born a woman and have talent.'

At the same time, she was aware of a shift within her culture as it was beginning

to accept the existence of women artists in the public sphere. Izquierdo spoke out on the

necessity for women artists to take this opportunity and fight for a better position in the

art world. In 1939, she gave a radio broadcast in which she specifically responded to the

issue:

Many times I have heard it said that women never will equal the great masters of
painting . . . Everyone knows that only in our century women are beginning to be
given opportunities to study and work at what they like. Before, women were not
permitted to do anything other than cooking, embroidering, and attending their
husbands. Have you forgotten about the conditions of women during the middle
ages? Women are only now beginning to be given opportunities to develop their
talent. Because of this it does not seem strange to me that women have not yet
equaled the immortal masters of painting. But I believe that if women continue
winning greater and greater freedom of expression, they will achieve such heights
in the visual arts. Why not? Are not good women painters already arising
everywhere, who even mark out new directions in art?24

Throughout her career Izquierdo, both in her imagery and political actions,

fought to be on the forefront of these "new directions" in art for women artists within her

culture. She joined leftist organizations and fought for women's emancipation. She had

a strong vocal presence in the Liga de escritores y artistas revolutionaries (League of

Revolutionalry Writers and Artists [LEAR]), a leftist union that promoted an active

23
Ibid., 63, footnote 7.
24
Maria Izquierdo quoted in, Maria de Jesus Gonzalez, "The Art of Maria
Izquierdo: Formative Years 1928 to 1934," Doctoral Dissertation (Austin: The University
of Texas at Austin, 1998), 8.

17
critique against the government. In 1945, she designed and drew the plans for a

government-sponsored mural project in which women were the central focus. The mural

was designated for the Edificio del Departmento Central del Distrito Federal. When Los

Tres Grandes helped to convince the government to have her project rescinded, she

courageously fought back by writing a scathing attack against the muralists in one of

Mexico's leading newspapers, El Nacional.

Izquierdo's voice was not limited to the medium of painting. She also seized the

airwaves to encourage reform. In the 1930s, the Mexican government used radio to

promote its nationalist agenda. Historian Alan Knight observes that this particular form

of media was an important tool in expressing revolutionary ideals. It reached the

illiterate and had a profound ability to reach rural women. Izquierdo took advantage of

this popular communication tool to promote the inclusion of women in Mexico's quest

for a new national identity. Throughout her lifetime she gave radio addresses that

analyzed the position of women in both her society and artistic culture.

To better understand Izquierdo's remarkable and disparate body of work as well

as the impulses behind them, it is necessary to follow the social and political climate of

Mexico both in the mid to late 1800s, as well as the decades following the 1910 Mexican

revolution and civil war. Her female figures tied to columns, naked and isolated from a

known world, images of mothers embodying the qualities of the Virgin Mary, women as

victims of Mexico's economic disparity or as represented as an integral component in

25
Ferrer, "A Singular Path: The Artistic Development of Maria Izquierdo" in The
True Poetry, 13.
26
Alan Knight, "Popular Culture and the Revolutionary State in Mexico, 1910-
1940" in The Hispanic American Cultural Review,14. No. 3 (Aug.,1994): 395.
18
Mexico's work force follow the complex social realities of female experience in Mexican

society.

In the last half of the nineteenth century Mexico was steeped in patriarchal

paradigms. It produced a society in which women were restricted to a domestic and

private realm. For the most part, there was little interest in what women thought, felt or

accomplished outside of the home. The Mexican feminist Sofia Villa de Buentello in

1921 wrote, "Women formed a group apart from men because on every level of society

there was a profound moral, political and social separation between men and women.

[The] Mexican woman never ceases to be a child, even if she speaks several languages,

paints, writes or teaches."27 Such a position towards women was well in place decades

before.

Even a cursory examination of Mexico in the 1800s reveals the extent of female

subordination and the decades of oppression that Izquierdo fought to change. Her

depictions of women naked, bound or immobile in physical spaces that are desolate,

abandoned and strewn with phallic symbolism decry centuries of subjugation. In her

seminal book, Against All Odds: The Feminist Movement in Mexico to 1940, Anna

Macias persuasively argues that this subjugation stems from the Aztecs and continues

through both the Spanish colonial era and post-revolutionary Mexico. Macias describes

Anna Macias, Against All Odds: The Feminist Movement in Mexico to 1940
(Westport: Greenwood Press, 1982), 109.

19
Mexican culture as a world permeated with "Machismo extreme male dominance and

Hembrismo extreme female submission."

In the 1800s and well into the 1900s, a woman's existence was for the most part

relegated to the home. Marital rights were designed primarily to protect only the

husband. The Mexican Civil Code of 1884 stated that a husband could seek a maternity

probe while women were forbidden from the investigation of a paternal probe. If a wife

committed adultery, a husband could legally separate. A woman could only attempt a

divorce if the situation was extreme, such as the mistress living in the house. Nor did a

woman have any rights to control or protect her property. This allowed for the husband to

irresponsibly spend his wife's inheritance.30

Throughout the Porfirio Diaz presidency (1877-80, 1884-1911), women were

given access to more education only because they were seen as an important asset in the

government's attempt to create social stability. Before the Porfirian era, the lives of

middle and upper class women were even more restricted. Written observations by

Frances Calderon, the Scottish wife of the Spanish ambassador who came to Mexico in

1839, reflect this condition. Calderon noted that the daughters of the middle and upper

classes were given little intellectual stimulation. She wrote that the intelligentsia

expected little from their daughters, only that they "confess regularly, attend church

See Stephanie Mitchell and Patience Schell, The Women's Revolution in

Mexico 1910-1953 (Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield publishers, 2006), 54.

20
constantly and can embroider and sing a little. Nothing more seems to be required of

them." 31

During the Porfirian presidency policies were adopted to encourage women to

take a more active role in the governing of their families, such as promoting women to be

mothers, to breast feed their babies and to educate their children. There was also a

strong move by the government to reduce the power of the church inside the home. In its

educational campaign, the government sought to transfer religious fervor into nationalist

dedication. The result was to cast women in a specific social rolenamely, that of a

mother who should teach her family to be patriotic, work hard and believe in "progress"

as defined by the government. This move placed the heavy burden of nation building

squarely on the shoulders of women. As Jean Franco observes the effect was once again

to limit the female influence to the domestic sphere, appointing women as caretakers of

social "purity."34 As I will demonstrate in the pages that follow, women continued to

function as a subordinated social group well into Mexico's Cultural Revolution (1920-40)

under the same umbrella of nation building. The difference was that Mexico had

renounced Porfirian's oligarchy for a democracy.

Frances Calderon de la Barca as quoted in Life in Mexico, Howard T. and

Marion Hall Fisher, eds. (New York: Doubleday, 1966), pg 287 and cited in Jean Franco,.
Plotting Women: Gender and Representation in Mexico (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1989), 91.
32
Ibid., 82.
33
Ibid., 81.
34
Ibid., 89.

21
 Franco reveals how the literature during the mid to late 1800's and up into the

mid-1900's repeatedly recast women as society's moral caretaker. In the many high-

toned and allegorical novels of the period, if a woman strayed from her role as mother

and sought mobility or individuality, she was doomed. One such example is the novel,

La Quijotita, written by Jose Joaquin Fernadez de Lizardi. The author begins by stating

that his text is based on "a true story that I witnessed." As the story unfolds, the pivotal

family only achieves success when the wife commits herself to nothing but her family,

strengthening the belief that a functional society must support a wide separation of the

female and male spheres.36 In other works, women are ridiculed if they attempt to

educate themselves beyond the expected primary levels, or in any way try to liberate

themselves within Mexican society.37 Such moralizing literature that systematically

marginalizes women continued well into the twentieth century. Franco sites the 1946

novel, The Tamed Woman, as an example. The novel parodies a girl from the provinces

who attempts self-education. In the introduction the author states that the characters are

based on reality. In 1958, the book was actually republished by the Secretaria de

Educacion. This position, taken by a governmental institution, suggests how deeply

engrained it still was at this time to tether women's existence to a domestic sphere well

into the twentieth century. Carlos Monsivais observes in the literature produced during

the first half of the twentieth century that women for the most part are given a "ghostly"

35
Ibid.
36
Ibid., 83.
37
Ibid., 89.

22
role in Mexico's collective imagination. He acknowledges a slight deviation from this

current in the popular novel, The Underdogs (Los de abajo)(\9\5). The author Mariano

Azuela continues the well-worn narrative of the virgin and the whore in his two female

characters. Where this novel diverges is the fact that the character, La Pintada or Painted

Woman, is an opinionated, strong woman who murders and fights for her land rights.

She represents the vital change that took place during the revolution with the soldaderas

who were not content to submit to a paternalistic society in which they were given few

rights. As Monsivais observes, "La Pintada's character was a warning: without giving

notice, the traditional mentality of women from different sectors, already opposed to the

most atrocious forms of feudal oppression, had begun to break apart." As I will

demonstrate in the following chapters, Izquierdo produces a visual narrative that

represents a similar shift from this "traditional mentality" of female identity in Mexico in

both literature and painting. Instead, she uses the medium of painting to displace the

well-entrenched master narrative and create a space with the female form that functions

as an intervention.

Conditions for the lower class female population, which comprised the majority

of Mexican women both in the Porfiriato and after the revolution, were much worse than

those for women on the upper rungs of the economic ladder. For the most part, these

women lived in abject poverty and starvation. Problems were exacerbated by the fact

that thirty percent of all mothers were single and children had no rights to a legal
no

Carlos Monsivais, "Forward," in Sex in Revolution: Gender, Politics and

Power in Modern Mexico, eds. Jocelyn Olcott, Mary Kay Vaughan, and Gabriela Cano
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 9.
39
Ibid., 10.

23
inheritance from their fathers. In 1885, the liberals banned monasteries and convents in

an attempt to weaken the power of the church. This removed the one place a single

woman could seek shelter during times of economic duress. The result was an increase in

the number of women seeking employment. If a woman worked outside the home, she

was most likely a domestic servant living under conditions close to slavery. Women

were also seamstresses, cigarette makers or textile workers. However, these positions

were so poorly paid that women often fell into prostitution.40 The result was a nation

where illiteracy and prostitution were rampant.41 In 1905, an estimated 120 women per

1000 between the ages of 15-30 were prostitutes.42 In 1907, Mexico City had twice as

many registered prostitutes as Paris despite the fact that Mexico City was one-fifth the
43

size.

Teaching became one of the few jobs encouraged for women during the

Porfiriato, however even this profession was limited because women were only allowed

to teach at primary school levels. From 1876 to 1910, for example, two thirds of the

elementary teachers were women and earned less than two pesos a day.44 Teaching was

considered an unthreatening occupation because men did not seek the position and

women could not progress any further. A few women found jobs as nurses and

government employees. In addition, middle and upper class women were beginning to
40
Macias, 9.
41
Ibid., 12.
42
Ibid., 44.
43
Ibid., 12.

"ibicL.lO.
24
carve out a space in the public arena. They organized labor movements, demonstrated in

the streets, and wrote and published their writing. But these gains, while important, were

still minor. By 1910, less than 9% of Mexican women were employed.

Only after the radical changes of the 1910 revolutionary period and the Cultural

Revolution that followed would women slowly begin to push beyond their restrictive,

prescribed roles. Maria Izquierdo moved to Mexico City in 1923 and began to paint in

the midst of these unexpected changes for women. Her life up until this time had been

dominated by the devastating effects of the revolution and civil war.

Izquierdo was born in 1902 in San Juan de Los Lagos, Jalisco. The small

religious village is located in central Mexico seventy-six miles from Guadalajara. The

Mexican revolution erupted in 1910 when she was eight years old and the conflict that

followed lasted for ten years. The damage to her country was profound. During the
5
fighting, an estimated two million people died in a country often million. Hundreds of

thousands of women were raped and slaughtered or died of disease, starvation or

exposure. During the presidential administration of Alvaro Obregon (1920-1924),

Mexico began the difficult task of stabilizing, unifying, and constructing a new national

identity after decades of dictatorship and massive governmental corruption.

While Mexico suffered severely during the revolution and after the civil war that

followed, its gains were equally profound. Steps were taken to strengthen workers rights,

education, health programs and women's rights while land reform was promised to the

lower class. Such moves provided the beginning of a democratic foundation and a

steadfast rejection against autocratic rule.

45
Ibid., 50

25
 Perhaps the most profound shift can be seen in the Constitution of 1917. A

fundamental set of principles were proclaimed that called for lower class land rights as

well as extending welfare and organizing rights to the working class. The constitution

declared that control of Mexico's natural resources should not be in the hands of foreign

investors. In addition, one of the most crucial and difficult moves by the government was

the strong anticlerical position it took in order to lessen the power of the Catholic Church

in areas of local and national governance.46

Mexico's revolution and the civil war that followed provided women the

opportunity to fight for a public space within the chaos and amidst the ruins of a country

devastated by revolution. In fact, the post-revolutionary politics of displacement,

instability and confusion made it crucially possible for Mexican women to begin altering

the ways in which they could participate in their culture.47 Integration into the public

sphere on a completely new level was suddenly a possibility. Such integration, however,

would complicate the multifaceted planes of Mexico's current and unfolding state.

Tensions, conflicts and challenges to previous gender constructions emerged in the

tangled maze of Mexican society.

While Mexico's gender boundaries were finally challenged, this did not happen

without a violent backlash against women. The new female presence within the public

46
Mary Kay Vaughn, "Pancho Villa, the Daughters of Mary and the Modern
Woman: Gender in the Long Mexican Revolution" in Sex, 22.
47
Shirlene Soto, Emergence of the Modern Mexican Woman: Her Participation
in Revolutions and Struggles for Equality, 1910-1940 (Denver: Arden Press, Inc., 1990),
31.

26
sphere was viewed as "subversive and threatening"48 by many in Mexican culture. It

was not only men who found the change to be a menace to social norms and stability.4

The Catholic Church and its enormous body of upper and middle class women were

appalled at the destruction of their "Victorian morality."50 These "women in black" that

formed a major part of the backdrop of Mexican culture fought tirelessly against the new

modern women who threatened to destabilize the church's incessant pull to keep women

tethered to the church and home.51 But, for the first time in Mexican history, these brave

women who fought for a place in the public space had some support from the

government. The government could not allow church power to remain unchecked.

Historian Mary Kay Vaughn calls the process the "modernization of patriarchy."

Women gained ground in terms of domestic education and health programs, as well as

achieving a movement towards workers' rights for women.

These gains were slow, but incremental. Mexican society did not always embrace

these new reforms. Women who sought an education outside of the vocational schools

that promoted domesticity were often harassed both verbally and physically. There was

violence towards women who chose to cut their hair into a modern "bobbed" flapper

48
Vaughn, Sex, 24.
49
Ibid.
50
Ibid., 25.
51
Ibid., 29.
52
Ibid.

27
style. At one point, a mob of angry men forced a group of women into showers and

shaved their heads.

Another unfortunate consequence of Mexico's patriarchal approach to nation

building was the blatant disregard for the heroic acts of so many women during the 1910-

20 revolution and civil war. During this time, women in Mexico played crucial roles as

spies, commanders, nurses and soldaderas. Women from every socio-economic position

banded together, publishing revolutionary papers, founding hospitals, as well as

purchasing, smuggling and selling arms.54 Women who stayed home kept businesses,

farms and households running as their husbands and sons left for the battlefieldmany

never to return. According to Stephanie Mitchell in, The Women's Revolution in Mexico,

1910-1953, had these women not continued to work, the country would have come to a

"grinding halt."55 In the retelling of the revolution, their actions were largely ignored,

except for romantic ballads sung about the soldaderas.

But these women did something elsethey forever changed Mexico's gendered

space. Mary Kay Vaughan observes that when these women soldiers went into the

battlefield they left the private sphere and entered the public sphere. Vaughan writes,

"Take the soldaderas, those thousands of women who went into the revolution as cooks,

nurses, lovers, mothers, spies, scavengers, undertakers, soldiers and commanders. As

women they represented a uniquely modern force . . . The soldaderas heralded a more

53
For an in depth analysis see Anne Rubenstein "The War on Las Pelonas:
Modern Women and Their Enemies, Mexico City, 1924" in Sex.
54
Soto, 31.
55
Mitchell, 13.

28
open, mobile and experimental womanhood." As Zavala notes that, Izquierdo, as well

as a hand-full of other artists, were among "the first generation of women who realized
en

some of the promises of a more open revolutionary society." This shift towards a more

modern experience in terms of female liberation owes much of its beginnings to the

soldaderas.

At the same time, Mexico, though struggling with its old patriarchal patterns, was

attempting to give more rights to women. From the years 1914 to 1931,

Constitutionalists worked to give women the right to divorce. And even though many of

the courts still sided with husbands in legal disputes and there continued to be a cultural
CO

backlash against women who sought divorce, the right itself was an important step.

Women were, for the first time, given custodial rights to their children that were equal to

men. Paternity legislation gave women and their children rights if children were born out

of wedlock. There was new labor legislation that worked towards recognizing women as

workers, giving them more rights in the work place.59 Nevertheless, changes towards

women's rights only went so far. During the Constitutional Convention of 1917,

someone mentioned that perhaps the new laws should include women's citizenship.

Everyone in the room laughed and then moved onto the next issue at hand.60
56
Ibid., 24.
57
Zavala, UnArte,2S.
CO

See Stephanie Smith, "If Love Enslaves...Love be Damned! Divorce and

Revolutionary State Formation in Yucatan" in Sex.
59
Vaughan, Sex, 23.
60
Mitchell, 20.

29
 Mexican revolutionaries adopted policies towards women that, in many ways,

echoed those of the Porfirian administration. The new revolutionaries believed that

women should play an important role in nation building, but once again as caretakers at

home with children. Women were taught cooking, hygiene and how to best educate

children. The government delegated to women the task of bringing contentment to

marriage. One Yucatan general wrote about the importance of a woman satisfying her

husband when he came home, and added that "only moral and intellectual preparation

will place the woman at the level of the man with whom she has to live."61 In other

words, early revolutionary reforms focused on educating women, but only so that they

could better serve their children, husbands, and nation.

However, a protest movement was brewing. Izquierdo, for one, attacked the

anachronistic stance towards women. In 1950, three years before her death, Izquierdo

wrote an open letter to the women of Mexico and called on them to demand a place in the

workforce. She wrote that when they marry they "will not be converted into a slave.

Because she knows how to earn a living [and] will not feel inferiority complexes before

her husband. [Thus] she will not be converted into a useless being, incapable of

supporting herself, much less her children."62

In 1921 under the leadership of Alvaro Obregon a new focus was placed on

finding women work as teachers. The perceptions of that role, however, changed little.

61
Mitchell and Schell, Women's, 40.
62
Nancy Deffebach, " Images of Plants in the Art of Maria Izquierdo, Frida
Kahlo and Leonora Carrington; Gender Identity and Spirituality in the Context of Modern
Mexico" Doctoral Dissertation (Austin: University of Austin, PhD, 2000), 42.

30
The ministry of education, Jose Vasconcelos, set up a campaign of literacy "missions" to

bring education to the rural poor. He recruited women so that they might secure positions

in the work place and thereby participate in their country's nation building. These efforts

simply repeated the educational reforms of the Porfirian era. Franco notes that they also

continued to link women with maternity because teaching was considered a nurturing

field.63 In addition, female teachers were expected to remain unmarried, recalling the

colonial nuns who taught in the eighteenth century.64 Salaries were so low that these

teachers had little chance of rising up the economic ladder, further relegating women to

their pre-revolutionary status.

The Mexican Cultural Revolution viewed motherhood as an even more important

role for women than teaching. In Lecturaspara mujeres (Women's Readings) (1922), a

publication of the Ministry of Education, the renowned Chilean poet, Gabriela Mistral,

promoted motherhood as a woman's most crucial job. In her article she linked the

spiritual with the maternal.65 The result was a continued and obvious classification of

mother as the Virgin Marythe ultimate spiritual mother. Again, the result is the same as

that of the Porfirian era. Even after the revolution and civil war, Mexico remained a

nation defined by a masculine identity and social trajectory, where men were allowed to

move freely in the public sphere while women, if they wanted to participate in nation

building, were asked to fulfill their maternal instincts through motherhood or teaching.

63
Franco, 103.
64
Ibid.
65
Ibid.

31
Izquierdo would take a similar position when she publicly acknowledged that being a

. mother was a woman's most important role.

As I will later argue in more detail, these doctrines were propagated in the art

world in public works commissioned by the government as a tool to educate Mexican

citizens. In analyzing Diego Rivera's mural, Modem Mexico (1935) at the National

Palace, Franco observes that women's roles were clearly defined here as helper, teacher

and mother. One panel shows Kahlo fighting illiteracy as she reads to a boy from a rural

province. In another, her sister reads to her two children. Franco points out that her

sister's eyes are rolled up as if in sexual ecstasy or some kind of mystical state. Another

panel depicts Kahlo handing out arms. Franco aptly suggests this image relegates

women's position to "helper." In the mural as a whole, supported and paid for by the

Mexican government, women are represented as teacher, mother, helper and/or emotional

hysteric.66

The energy and activism in Mexico City are mirrored by many of the political and

cultural issues that Izquierdo expressed in her art, as well as the conflicting positions

these various issues raised. The revolution's radical cultural politics had given way to

protest. During the 1920s and 30s, Mexico City harbored the beginnings of a dynamic

feminist movement. Mexico City had a much larger population of women than men due

to migration.67 Women rallied in the streets while women's organizations began efforts

to engineer real change for women.

66
Ibid., 106.
fi7
Patience Schell, "Gender, Class and Anxiety at the Gabriel Mistral Vocational
School, Revolutionary Mexico City," Sex,. 113.
32
 It is not surprising that these early feminist gestures were not easily accepted.

Early on feminists were easy and frequent targets. In 1906, Ignacio Gamboa had written

in La mujer moderna that feminism was an affliction on Mexican culture. Gamboa

stressed that women should remain separated from the "spheres assigned to men,"

warning his readers that feminism would be for women "a powerful fact that would carry

her degradation and ruin." He even stated that a woman was "created for reproductive

ends [and] should not distract herself with other work that is not domestic, which is the

only work in which she should occupy herself."68 Andres Molina Enriquez, in Los

grandes problemas nacionales, takes a similar position, writing:

In society, an advanced state of feminism is a veritable absurdity. It takes a

considerable number of women away from their maternal duties to employ them
and force them to share work with men which burdens men and the lives of their
wives and their families.69

Izquierdo often joined the feminist's vociferous critics. In 1939, Izquierdo

delivered a radio interview entitled "Women and Mexican Art," which in some ways

mirrored these critiques of feminism. In the broadcast, she stated her opinion on Mexican

feminists and the role she felt women should have been adopting after the revolution. In

the beginning of the interview she called feminists Intelectualoides or 'pseudo-

intellectuals.' She further castigated them:

They think that bragging out loud makes them better [than men]; but deep inside
they are still full of old prejudices and are just covering up with theatrical
attitudes for their inferiority complex. I think feminists have not conquered
anything for humanity nor for themselves, and instead of helping women grow

Mitchell and Schell, 127.

Ibid., 129.

33
 (who for so many years have been slaves of everything) they get in the way of
emancipation.70

However, in the very same interview she stated:

I think that for a woman to achieve success she cannot be bound, neither by
religions, nor prejudices, nor political parties. She ought to have an ample spirit
of self-criticism and of struggle, and never lose her femininity, feel physically and
spiritually like a woman, feel with force in order to create, never feel inferior or
superior to a man, and always consider him a companion of equal conditions. All
this is difficult to attain, but if a woman achieves consciousness, has ambition,
directs her forces, knows what she wants to conquerin what field and in what
situationthen I am really sure that she will triumph, as long as she can
overcome the obstacles that arise.71

Side by side, these quotations demonstrate the disruption, confusion and

unresolved questions over women's roles in the social environment of the new Mexican

state. In the following chapters I will illustrate how these contradictions within female

identity play out on the canvases of Izquierdo with the female body used as the contested

space for such negotiations. The result is a set of visual narratives that reveal a society

steeped in conflict over female liberation and the traditional role that women participated

in for centuriesa conflict that Izquierdo lived, debated and painted.

70
Lozano, Maria Izquierdo, 46.
71
Deffebach, 37.
34
 CHAPTER 3

CHALLANGING THE NUDE: MARIA IZQUIERDO'S DESNUDO

In 1929, Los Contempordneos printed an image of a naked woman who has just

experienced a sexual encounter. Her hair is cut short like a 'pelona^ and her stockings

and high heels lie on the floor below her. It is an image not about the person who has left

the woman, but about this particular woman's own sexual experience. She represents the

modern Mexican woman who for many threatened to destabilize societal norms. The

painting is by Maria Izquierdo and it is one of the first nudes she had ever painted.

Before I analyze this radical image any further, it is necessary to discuss the artistic

culture that made the public printing of this painting possible.

From the years 1920 to 1940 Mexico experienced what some scholars refer to as

a Cultural Revolution. The political and social transformations of Mexico during this

time had a profound effect on the artistic climate. The government's efforts to unify the

nation by way of a discourse of national identity and the mural movement were

symbiotically intertwined. The government promoted Mestizaje and Indigenismo as a

way to support a particular notion of Mexicanidad, thereby endorsing a government-

sponsored national identity. The government of Alvaro Obregon (1920-1924) and in

particular his minister of education, Jose Vasconcelos, sponsored a public works project

that advocated public monumental art as a propagandistic tool for the administration's

See "The War on Las Pelonas: Modern Women and Their Enemies, Mexico
City 1924," in Sex.
35
populist objectives. Obregon and Vasconcelos for the most part denounced any form of

literature or art that dared to discuss the chaos generated by the revolution.73 Under their

leadership, the Mexican muralist movement flourished, as did the careers of the artists

involved. A heated debate erupted within Mexico City's artistic community, nonetheless,

over how Mexican identity should be defined and expressed. While the muralists loudly

proclaimed a pure nationalist art in both their work and manifestos, a thriving counter

culture fought for an artistic visual language that embodied experimentation and formalist

trends associated with European modernism. Izquierdo chose to identify closely with this

counter culture.

As previously mentioned, one group especially crucial to her success as an artist

was the radical Los Contempordneos (1928-1931).74 The group published a journal that

brought together a diverse group of artists and writers united in their belief that

celebrating Mexican culture meant artists must search for a visual language that spoke in

universal terms, and not the nationalistic rhetoric pervading the muralist movement.75

Predictably, the nationalists would attack Los Contempordneos throughout its existence,

taking aim at the group's celebration of foreign ideas and its promotion of homosexuality,

Salvadore Oropesa, Los Contemporaneos Group: Rewriting Mexico in the

Thirties and Forties (Austin: University of Austin Press, 2003), 4.
74
For an in depth analysis see Maria de Jesus Gonzalez, "The Art of Maria
Izquierdo: Formative Years 1928 to 1934" Doctoral Dissertation (Austin: The University
of Texas at Austin 1988)
75
Edward Mullen, "The Revista Contemporaneos, A New Dimension in
Contemporary Mexican Literature" Language Quarterly, 8 (1969): 27.

36
which was perceived as a direct threat to the revolution's impenetrable image of

masculinity.

Still, Los Contempordneo 's influence was profound. Their journal combined

Mexican authors and artists with writers and artists from Europe and America. The result

was the commingling of European, American and Mexican philosophical, literary and

artistic trends. The images of Izquierdo, Carlos Merida and Rufino Tamayo, for

example, were boldly juxtaposed with the work of Picasso, Matisse and De Chirico.

Contempordneos also published essays and poetry by T.S. Eliot and Paul Valery

alongside those of Mexicans, such as Salvador Novo Lopez and Xavier Villaurritia, to

name a few. The diversity of these artists and writers demonstrated the group's interest

in new artistic styles outside of Mexico and their desire to incorporate them into Mexican

art and culture. The scholar, Merlin Foster, describes this interest not as a "rejection of
77

Mexican heritage," but as a way to inject a new "perspective" into Mexico's artistic

environment. The poet Xavier Villaurrutia, a group member, wrote that he believed
7R

Mexican culture "could be firmly rooted and yet its branches remain free." For these

thinkers and creators, it was crucial to legitimize a new understanding of what it meant to

be Mexican.

Still, in introducing a journal incorporating foreign art and ideas at a time of

nation building the members of Los Contempordneos were put on the defensive. The

Oropesa, 11.

Gonzalez, 24.

Ibid., 68.

37
nation had ousted Diaz in 1911, a dictator whose administration celebrated and adopted

the positivist philosophies of the European democratic bourgeoisie while corrupting them

in order to fit his needs.79 In the end, Diaz solidified the position of the wealthy

landowners who in many ways repeated the previous decades of colonial feudalism.

When the revolutionaries rid their country of his dictatorship, they adopted a staunch

anti-European position. The decision of Contempordneos to incorporate European trends

by vanguard groups invited criticism in the Mexican art world. The magazine was

unjustly accused of ignoring Mexican themes despite the fact that seventy percent of the

journal's content dealt with those themes. Diego Rivera lambasted the journal for

promoting an "elitism and a deviation from the vital currents." Contempordneos

defended itself against such criticism and launched a counter attack. In the June 1928

edition, the Mexican writer Gabriel Garcia Maroto, described Rivera's murals as

"mechanized and unrefined political-social instruments" that were lacking in the

"fundamental values of new art."82

For Rivera and the muralists there was a lot at stake in the fight against the

growing influence of Los Contempordneos. The journal emerged at a time when the

muralist movement had weakened considerably due to a lack of support from the new

right wing government. David Alfaro Siqueiros stopped painting from 1925-1930, while

79
Octavio Pas, The Labyrinth of Solitude (New York: Grove Press, 1985), 130-
131.
80
Gonzalez, 46.
81
Ibid., 47.
82
Gabriel Garcia Maroto quoted in Zavala, 92.
38
Jose Clemente Orozco went to the United States from 1927-1930. Rivera was the last to

feel the effects of the conservative government's retrenchment from the mural program

and stayed in the United States from 1930 to 1933.83

For Izquierdo and other members of Los Contempordneos, European modernism

contained interesting and significant ideas for this counter culture. The journal adopted

what the group considered to be a universal approach toward national themes.84 In the

journal's pages, Torres Bodot, Gastelum, Celestino Gorostiza and Bernardo Ortiz de

Montelano stressed cultural universality in order to justify the magazine's seemingly

or

apolitical stance. In other essays, Ortega y Gasset argued that Mexican society was in

decline precisely because the intellectual elite lacked power, while another point of

discussion dealt with the loss of 'human and spiritual value' in the wake of industrial

progress.86

In terms of turning their attention toward poetry, Contempordneos adopted ideas

by the French writers Breton and Valery. Specifically, they favored giving the

subconscious and the use of metaphor a more prominent position than musical verse or

description. Many Contempordneos writers incorporated existentialism into their

writing to capture a feeling of post-revolutionary despair. In the poetry of Villaurrutia,

83
Gonzalez, 17, and, James Oles, "Walls to Paint On: American Muralists in
Mexico, 1933-1936," Doctoral Dissertation (Yale: Yale University 1995), 17.
84
Mullen, 28.
85
Ibid.
86
Ibid.
87
Ibid.
39
for example, metaphors were used to evoke the existentialist themes of death, solitude

and anxiety.

Los Contempordneos also celebrated the Baroque as a literary style. In, The

Contempordneos Group: Reviewing Mexico in the Thirties and Forties, Salvador

Oropesa defines Baroque literature as a " literature of crisis, an unending social,

economic and ideological crisis where the extremes of individualism and an oppressive
OQ

and absolute state were always in conflict." For writers such as Novo and Villaurrutia,

the Baroque allowed for a freedom that social realism did not support.90 The Baroque

style celebrated "the other," creating a space in which artists and writers could explore,

among other things, their individuality, homosexuality and sexuality. No longer were

they limited to the ideology of an oppressive Mexican nationalism that embraced

heterosexuality, machismo and its marginalization of women and homosexuals. As

Gonzalez Echeverria states, "This aesthetic of difference is another way of saying that

the Baroque incorporates the Other; it plays at being the other . . . The Baroque assumes

the strangeness of the Other as an awareness of the strangeness of being."91

By associating herself with artists who explored, celebrated and demanded a voice

for those in the margins, Izquierdo placed herself within a supportive artistic environment

that enabled her to freely explore and discover her own means of expression. Such

support was crucial to her development as a female Mexican artist. The effect of these
88
Ibid., 29.
8 9 y-v
xviii.
Oropesa,
90
Ibid., 5.
91
Ibid.,6.
40
artistic and philosophical positions on Izquierdo's imagery was profound. In many ways,

Izquierdo incorporated the literary trends into her paintings. For example, she uses

dream-like imagery creating phantasmagorical worlds as a way of exploring as well as

critiquing the realities of her social environment. This is in direct opposition to the social

realist style often used by the muralists. As we will see, her canvases break through the

restrictions of a known physical world and instead embody an undetermined space.

Further, she embraced an incorporation of "other" into her work by exploring female

experience in terms of female sexuality and subjugation.

Recent interviews with Izquierdo's children and friends confirm just how much

she believed Los Contempordneos group impacted her early development as an artist,

especially the contact it gave her with the European avant-garde. She often held social

and intellectual gatherings in her home with members of this community. Artists would

come to discuss each other's art and to paint.94 It was within this artistic community that

she began to develop her own personal image base that served as a space in which to

advocate a new position for women in Mexico.

The Contempordneos journal reproduced her work in the same issues that

reproduced drawings of Matisse and Cezanne. In her dissertation, "The Art of Maria

Izquierdo: The Formative Years 1928-1934," Maria Gonzalez, points out that having her

work shown in the journal was an important achievement for Izquierdo given that there

Zavala. Un Arte, 15.

Gonzalez, 24.

Ibid., 41.
41
were not many women involved in the group.95 In addition, critics praised her work on

the pages of Contempordneos. This had a profound effect on her career as those critics
6
wrote about Izquierdo in newspapers and other journals.

For Los Contempordneos, Izquierdo was an obvious choice. Her life, as well as

her images, promoted the idea of a modern Mexican woman in stark contrast to the

nationalist female construction. Incorporating her work in the magazine bolstered Los

Contempordneos' need to celebrate dissident groups, women and homosexualsthose

working from the margins of Mexican culture.

The decision to reproduce the painting, Desnudo, reflects this need. In this

painting, Izquierdo disrupts the traditional use of the nude in the historical art canon as

well as its treatment on the public walls of Mexico. Such a stance reflected the

philosophical posture of the journal. The selection of this image within the magazine

demonstrates their desire to support a "new" modern Mexican womannude and in

control of her sexual experience. This is a woman who has rejected the traditional role of
0*7

women in Mexico by cutting her hair short and wearing high heels. This is also a

woman who stands as a departure from Izquierdo's 1927 portrayal of a female as a flower

vendor in her image, Flower Vendors, a painting that Rivera once praised for its
OR
celebration of Mexicanidad. In supporting such an image, Contempordneos bluntly

95
Ibid., 51.
96
Ibid., 4.
97
See Anne Rubenstein, "The War on Los Pelonas: Modern Women and Their
Enemies, Mexico City 1924." in Sex.

Zavala, 70.
42
rejects the other newspaper and magazines that were voraciously denouncing these new

"modern" women who openly walked the streets of Mexico City.

In Desnudo (Nude) 1929), a naked woman sits on a bed in the center of the frame.

It appears to be her bedroom. There is a lace pillow, a crumpled bedspread with a flower

print, as well as a picture of a man in a frame on the nightstand. Behind the woman is a

bottle of wine and an extinguished candle. Stockings and shoes lie rumpled on the floor.

The woman stares somewhat defiantly to the right as if she were looking at someone that

the viewer cannot see, and so we are conscious of a presence. The woman is actively

aware of her nakedness as well as her sexuality, but that awareness is communicated with

a body position that connotes sexual unease and possible displeasure.

The representation of the female body in art is always revealing. Within the space

of its lines are a complex set of constructs that manifest norms, ideologies, rules and

societal imbalances as well as revolutions, struggles and oppression. Izquierdo's

painting, Desnudo, suggests how the artistic decisions in her depiction of the female form

can communicate these positions and conflicts. By refusing accepted conventions in the

western canon, she exposes as well as destabilizes the dominant aesthetic of a high art

ideal that uses the female form as a conduit to perpetuate and promote centuries of male

fantasy, domination and conquest. In addition, she reveals the complexity of oppression

within her social environment and the necessity for seismic ideological transformations.

In order to better understand the significance and profundity of this image, it is first

necessary to briefly look at the history of the female nude in art.

43
 As Lynda Nead points out in her book, The Female Nude, the female form

becomes attached to the 'value and significance' of a work of art." This value and

significance are determined by how well the female form is contained and regulated by

the male artist who paints her. As Nead aptly states, "The boundaries of the female form

control that mass of flesh that is women."100 Nead's observations suggest how the female

nude in art has long served as a container of the female interioran interior that if left

uncontained and uncontrolled violates decency and borders on the profane. The female

body also functions as an eroticized object for the male gazebecoming the site for a

"contemplative viewing pleasure."101 In this paradigm, it is the male artist, the artist at

the head of the hierarchy, who defines femininity, female sexuality and experience, and

thereby asserts his control over them.

Nead references Durer's, Draughtsman Drawing a Nude (1525), in which the

female model lies sensually on pillows with her hand placed in a position suggestive of

masturbation. The artist depicts himself drawing the female model through a screen and

onto a graph. In doing so, he is framing and containing the body. Nead points out how

this voyeuristic display serves as a typical example of the male gaze enjoying,

controlling, and defining the female form. Nead also argues that throughout western art

the female body is defined as matter/nature and takes form primarily through the male

99
Lynda Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality (New York:
Rutledge Press, 1992),1.
100
Ibid., 18.
101
Ibid., 2.
102
Ibid., 11.
44
artist and his paintbrush. Without the male artist, it would remain close to nature and

formless. Thus, the female remains the object with the male acting as her creator.103

This narrative in art history continues as a tradition plotting a progression that is

"virtually uninterrupted" from classical antiquity to the Renaissance to modernism.104

In European modernism a profound shift occurred in art history's formalist

aesthetic launching a visual vocabulary that served as the new high art ideal.105 Its

success can be felt in the prestige it found in the art world. Carol Duncan, in The

Aesthetics of Power, argues that the "extreme reductions and distortions of form and

color, all highly deliberated, self-evident 'aesthetic' choices, transpose the sexual conflict

onto a higher plane of art."106 What becomes evident is that this new art historical

narrative still adheres to the domination and control of the female form by male

interpretation. Duncan argues that the European avant-garde essentially embodied the

myth of individual freedom with its rejection of rationalism and capitalism. 07 However

that freedom was, for the most part, reserved for the male gender at the expense of

women. Mainstream art continued to define and promote how men felt about women.

103
Ibid., 19.
104
Ibid., 44. See also Holly P. Clayson, Painted Love, Prostitution in French Art
of the Impressionist Era (Yale: Yale University Press, 1991).
105
The use of this term is obviously problematic in that there were many different
definitions of modernism and modernist trends in and outside of Europe. Such a
discussion is beyond the scope of this thesis. I use this term simply to reiterate that there
was an aesthetic break from previous artistic trends in the mid to late nineteenth century.
106
Carol Duncan, The Aesthetics of Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1993), 99.

Ibid.,101andll2.
45
Duncan posits that this period, instead of being a time of innovation, enabled male artists

to highlight "social relations between the sexes,"108offering a space for male artists to

explore their "fantasies and fears" within a world in flux. One prevalent male fear was

arguably the changing role of women within society. Duncan finds that male artists'

newfound freedom existed at the cost of women's "unfreedom." Further, she observes

that the "drastic reduction of women to objects of specialized male interests embodies on

a sexual level the basic class relationships of capitalist society."110 Women are

represented, for example, as Medusas, femme fatales, or vaginas dentata. What becomes

evident is what Duncan refers to as a "dehumanizing quality." Modernists tended to

depict women as asleep, faceless or as a danger to men,111 while a women's sexual

experience was often defined in terms of male gratification. If they received "positive"

treatment, it would come for the most part through depictions of reproduction and

motherhood. Andreas Huyssen makes a similar point in her book, After the Great Divide,

Modernism, Mass Culture, and Postmodernism. "The fear of the masses in this age of

declining liberalism," she writes, "is always also a fear of woman, a fear of nature out of

control, a fear of the unconscious, of sexuality, of the loss of identity and stable ego
i i ^

boundaries in the mass."

108
Ibid., 82.
109
Ibid., 83.
110
Duncan, 105.
111
Ibid., 86 and 87.
11
Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide, Modernism, Mass Culture and
Postmodernism, (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1990), 52.
46
 The significance of Izquierdo's imagery becomes evident within the context of

such issues. The magnitude of her subversion of the conventional image of the female

figure exists on multiple planesboth in the art world and within the culture in which

she lived. I argue that this early painting, Desnudo, of the female nude transcends and

disrupts the typical use of the female body in western art, in modern art and in the

Mexican muralist movement.

In the painting, Izquierdo disputes the western canon's pervasive use of the

female nude as a space for a contemplative viewing pleasure defined as male desire.

Both Zavala in her essay, "Maria Izquierdo," and Gonzalez in her thesis make the point

that Izquierdo's figure does not embody the quintessential sexualized female posed in the

vulnerable, open and accepting position that has conditioned and ingrained the high art

ideal.113 The female body in the dominant aesthetic is constrained by its voluptuous form

and titillating pose. It is often the product of male erotic desire and encourages a

voyeuristic experience by both the viewer and the artist who painted it. In Izquierdo's

image, by contrast, the figure questions and resists this art historical ideal in a pose that

defies easy interpretation.

Izquierdo constructs a narrative through visual props and positions the woman's

body in such a way that disrupts the canonical female ideal in several ways. One way in

which she accomplishes this is by implying an unseen presence and making evident the

woman's reaction to it. By communicating a somewhat resistant stare, Izquierdo

confronts both the presence and position of the male gaze, as well as its voyeuristic

tradition. The woman's gestures communicate a specific point of view concerning her

113
Zavala, 72.
47
own sexual experience. They are not, therefore, that of male gratification. Furthermore,

a study of a female nude painted by a woman in which the figure is in control of her

gestures and emotions while conveying a sexual experience of displeasure defies and

overturns the gendered and sexualized role of the female subject as mistress/model and

her subordinate relationship with the male painter.114

Izquierdo further communicates the woman's discomfort by abandoning the high

art convention of using sensual or curvilinear lines to depict the female body. Instead,

she applies sharp diagonals to indicate that the limbs are being held in a manner to protect

her genitals. Izquierdo uses another sharp and awkward line in the woman's right arm,

the means by which the woman holds the compromising position in place. She then

employs forceful lines in the creases and folds of the bedcover. This play of lines guides

the viewer to a central focal pointthe apex of a triangle at her genitals. As Nead points

out, historically male artists compartmentalized the female form into several accent

pointsusually the genitals and the breasts.115 They thus organize the body in a way that

fulfills desires while adhering to artistic classifications. Izquierdo's nude adopts and

subversively adapts such reductive carving of the female form by not allowing her figure

to become an object of viewing pleasure. Instead, she uses the accent points of the body

as an intervention in a dominant mode of representation.

Here, decades before feminists turned their attention to art history, she creates a

work that in several ways redefines and contests the female nude in art history. In

114
For an in depth analysis see Nead, " T h e Lessons of a Life Class," in The
Female Nude.
115
Ibid.,7l.
48
Desnudo, her figure refuses to remain in the space allotted to the female form and the

definitions attached to it. In so doing, Izquierdo re-politicizes the female body by

reorganizing existing categories.116 In terms of Izquierdo's oeuvre, I see this nude as

Izquierdo's first steps toward a visual narrative that utilizes the female body as a vehicle

through which to create a dialogue about gender and female experience.

The use of this visual narrative stands in stark contrast to the depictions of women

by the Mexican muralists. The muralists exploited the female form through what Duncan

refers to in modern art as "erotic plays of patriarchal power,"117 regulating, controlling

and defining the roles of women. Izquierdo's image flies in the face of the muralists'

agenda. A comparison of the nude in Desnudo with Diego Rivera's female figures in the

fresco, La tierra fecundado (The Fertilized Earth) (1925), at the Escuela Nacional de

Agricultura, Chapingo, Mexico, further illustrates the impact of Izquierdo's early nude.

Rivera's image is part of a larger mural that focuses on the useful functions of

Nature, Air, Water and Fire in the modern industrial world. Rivera uses his pregnant

lover Guadalupe Marin as an allegorical model to represent the fertile earth. Such a

choice makes La tierra fecundado as much about Rivera's particular sexual fantasies and

his virility as it is about nationalist agenda. He employs the high art aesthetic of the

female nude in western art history using curvilinear lines to highlight Marin's voluptuous

form. The contours of her body satisfy our gaze as we follow the seemingly endless lines

of her long form. Rivera endows his lover with full breasts and depicts them with such

I am using Grosz terminology "reorganizing existing categories" to refer to

Izquierdo's work. Elizabeth Grosz, "Corporeal Feminism", Australian Feminist Studies,
5 (1987): 3.
117
Duncan, xiv.
49
perfection that Marin was once quoted as saying, "What I like the most are my tits. But,

gordito, what are the people going to say in Guadalajara when they see that I am

completely naked in the middle of the chapel? Let's be fair: my tits are better than

Diego's chile."118

Rivera also emulates the high art ideal through the use of the academic tradition

of female allegory, which in the case of La tierra fecundado promotes post-revolutionary

nationalist fervor.119 The result is Marin's naked and sexualized body on the public

ceiling of the ExCapilla Universidad Autonoma de Chapingo, served up as a symbol of

national prosperity. The painting also supports the post-revolutionary position that a

woman's most useful act is that of reproduction. Her body rises from the soil, fertile,

pregnant and ready to be consumed. In her right hand she holds an erect plant, an

obvious phallic symbol. The contour of her body follows the lines of the hills

synthesizing her form deeply with that of earth. Predictably, the central focus point is the

triangle formed at the space of her genitals. Below her sits yet another woman, looking

once again, supple and naked. Her arm covers her eyes. The lines of her body are soft

and relaxed in contrast to the hard lines of the muscular men who occupy a major portion

of the fresco. A third woman sits passively watching a man who stands with a farming

instrument. His back is chiseled with muscle and he stands ready to work the land in

order to actively participate in the agricultural prosperity of his country.

Guadalupe Marin as quoted in, Oropesa, 337.

119
Mary Coffey, "Angels and Prostitutes: Jose Clement Orozco's Catharsis and
the Politics of Female Allegory in 1930's Mexico," The Centennial Review 4, no. 2
(2004): 195.
50
 Rivera explains and justifies his representation of women as symbols of fertility.

He writes, "... at the bottom of the wall is fertilized soil, the wind is behind her like a

maternal force, like water and fire, that produces energy: almighty electricity at the

service of human kind."120 The quote defines female identity in terms of one useful

actionreproduction and that action is driven not so much by her, but by nature's forces.

Thus, Rivera's images and descriptions alike reify the binary opposition of nature/

women versus male/action.121 The public placement and governmental funding of the

murals suggests how inculcated these depictions and definitions of female identity were

in Mexican culture.

In this chapter I have shown how Izquierdo's Desnudo challenged the norms that

prevailed for many centuries in the work of male artists, as well as the pervasiveness of

female images in her own culture. In the next chapter, I will analyze a series of paintings

created between 1930 and 1938, as well as one from the 1940's that deviate even further

from the norm. I contend that these images address a taboo subjectthe actual

experience and reality of women in the decades following the 1910 revolution.

120
Diego Rivera as quoted in, Oropesa, 334.
121
Nead, 24.
51
 CHAPTER 4

IZQUIERDO'S WOMEN: RE-IMAGINING THE FEMALE FIGURE IN POST-

REVOLUTIONARY MEXICAN ART

Izquierdo's imagery from 1930 to 1938 shows the construction of an alternative

site that explores the complex position of women in Mexico's new revolutionary state. In

the following images I am going to demonstrate how the utilization of a personal

iconography serves as a strategy that employs a specific system and logic in order to

foreground the experience of women in Izquierdo's culture. What becomes evident is

that in her choice of subject matter, elements of form, use of repeated symbols, narrative,

and an expressive style Izquierdo systematically develops a particular point of view. The

result is a pictorial system that examines the complexity and burden of oppression, which

she then merges with the possibility of a transcendence that does not support escapism.

In so doing, she captures the social circumstance of her country where activism and

oppression in many ways followed parallel tracks.

In all of the images that follow the theme of female oppression is prevalent.

Women are physically bound and/or in positions of extreme emotional distress. Often the

women stand together in anonymous worlds that exude an existential uncertainty. At

times, the figures stand with their arms outstretched toward each other, but they are

unable to interact. In the end, they exist in isolationalone in a cosmos where

communication is futile and screams go unheard. A world of solitude, anxiety and death

52
prevails, illuminating the reality of women's struggle to survive in the turbulent decades

following the 1910 revolution and civil war. These depictions of oppression provide a

viewpoint on various aspects of the female position in Mexican society. I interpret some

of the subjects in these images as relating to Mexican women's position in the work

force, as well as her relationship towards the agrarian reforms that were taking place.

Other images illuminate profoundly the misery of female subjugation.

In the treatment of her female figures, Izquierdo employs stylistic choices that

express a peculiar emotional experience. This expression plays with the unexpected

interactions of entrapment versus pliability and acceptance versus refusal. She achieves

this by manipulating and almost distorting the body's form to convey an exaggerated

softness of shape and an absence of bodily detail. She then combines these

manipulations with a lack of muscular tension in the figure's gestures of extreme pain.

The result is a visual metaphor of lightness in the face of horror. The lightness reads as

resilience, communicating the possibility of freedom.

Izquierdo's women illustrate an alternative way of representing the female body.

Her artistic choices move away from any kind of voyeuristic experience. She rejects the

muralist's often-used social realist style, favoring a modernist vocabulary of the human

form in which details of the body are omitted. She softens the lines of the figures and

creates a loose surface with her brushstrokes. This simplification allows the figure to

function as an expressive vehicle for emotion within the space. But it operates on another

level as well. By simplifying the female form and then combining it with a narrative of

female entrapment, the artist dismisses the stylized, eroticized, and idealized female

nudes that dominate the walls of the Mexican muralists.

53
 Izquierdo places these figures in a symbolic landscape and employs a repetition of

visual motifs to communicate a point of view. A varying combination of arid mountains,

stormy skies with lightning bolts, crescent moons, deserted architectural structures, and

white columns, standing and fallen, serve as the bleak and uninhabitable backdrop for the

figures. Men are absent in these paintings. A color scheme of browns, reds and blues

combines with a coarse brushstroke. She seldom uses sharp lines. And, when she does,

she does so sparingly. Izquierdo simplifies the forms in nature to evoke a more direct

emotional relationship between the viewer and the objects and figures in the painting.

She often plays with a two-dimensional picture plane in such a way that pushes the

figures into the foreground, thereby augmenting a feeling of entrapment.

The desolate landscapes offer no escape or physical comfort. They are devoid of

growth or vegetation. The arid environment implies that there is nothing for milesno

protection to draw upon. The location hints at the characteristics of the remote Mexican

countryside, but there is nothing particularized about the setting. Its lack of specificity

and its somber tone accentuate the emotional disparity of the figures. The relationship of

the female body to the land is revealed to be a conflicted, painful, 'no exit' kind of hell.

Solitude and solace combine with oppression and physical pain, leaving the viewer in a

space that is not only unexpected, but also uncomfortable and perplexing.

Her images tend towards an expressive style that serves her highly charged

emotional content. These paintings echo the existential perspectives that were expressed

in the writings of Los Contempordneos. At times the tone of her imagery is reminiscent

of Villaurrutia's poetry. Both Villaurrutia and Izquierdo transcend the physical world for

a dream-like one. Villaurrutia's poetry reflects a vision of the world where anguish,

54
isolation and death prevail. Izquierdo, in the paintings examined below, masters the

expression of a similar hopelessness, but then manages to fuse it with a discourse on

gender oppression and the experience of women during her era. Such an approach

distinguishes her from Los Contempordneos and puts her in a unique category at this time

in her artistic culture.

The techniques and strategies described above work together to create a location

of resistance that challenges the social boundaries of her culture by contesting its male

centric power base. Izquierdo achieves this result by utilizing an original, personal and

disruptive iconography that forces a renegotiation of gender identity. She repeatedly uses

the female body as a political object within this subversive space as a conduit to question

and contest gender positioning in Mexico.

It is important to note that throughout the 1930s Izquierdo was exhibiting her

work in galleries in Mexico City alongside the work of the most prolific artists of the

avant-garde. In 1935, she helped to organize a group exhibition of women artists called

Carteles revolutionaries de las pintoras del sector femenino de la section de artes

pldsticas, Departmento de Bellas Artes (Revolutionary Posters by Painters of the

Women's sector of the Visual Arts Section, Department of Fine Arts). The show was a

traveling exhibition sponsored by the National Revolutionary Party, the leading political

party of Mexico. It incorporated posters with political content by ten women artists,

including Izquierdo. Her poster for the show, "Pulqueria: El Atoron," visually supported

the Cardenas administration. In 1939 she gave a radio address entitled, "a mujery el

arte mexicano" (Women and Mexican Art). Izquierdo's active participation in Mexico's

55
artistic culture makes clear that she was an artist who fought to have a public voice both

in her actions and artwork.

The first four paintings I will discuss point towards visual imagery that directly

addresses the experience of female oppression: Esclavas enpaisaje mitico (Slaves in a

Mythical Landscape) (1936); .PraoHeras(Prisoners)(1936); Desnudos, (Nudes) (1938);

Sirenas (Sirens) (1938).

In Esclavas en paisaje mitico, two women kneel on the earth with their hands

bound by ropes and their legs immobilized by their skirts. One figure speaks to the sky

while she holds up her bound arms as if to plead for freedom; the other woman drops her

head in a gesture of resignation. The latter woman's hands are tied behind her naked

back as her body bends towards the earth. The landscape consists of a brown barren hill

and a night sky. The bleakness of this unknown world accentuates the hopelessness of

the situation for the two women.

Izquierdo paints a night sky with two moons and a planet represented by a large

orange globe. I argue that by positioning the two female figures in relation to the two

moons (the moon is often mythologized as female) Izquierdo restores value and presence

to the female principle. She chooses to depict the moons in the crescent stages of their

monthly phases. The symbol of a crescent moon in early and late phases reflects the shift

in the moon's cycle from full and back to new again. In mythology such a moon has

often symbolized protection because of its continuing presence across the night sky.

The new moon can also be a symbol for the Virgin Mary, or for a Pre-Columbian deity in

12
David Fontana, The Secret Language of Symbols and their Meanings (San
Francisco: Chronicle Press, 1994), 56.
56
its ascent from the underworld. Taken in this context, I interpret the moon in this image

as a symbol of renewal, rebirth and change.123

In placing these moons above imprisoned women, Izquierdo may be drawing on

mythology for political ends by calling attention to the ignored needs of women within

her culture. One way in which she alludes to such needs is by the moons in the painting

mimicking the direction as well as the emotional pleas of the figures. Like the women,

one moon faces up and the other moon is bent towards the earth. By correlating a similar

emotional response and physical position between the figures and that of the moons,

Izquierdo alludes to the moon's gravitational pull. The moon on the side of the kneeling

figure tilts towards the earth in a similar position of physical resignationits eyes are

closed, its mouth slightly ajar. The other moon looks up to the sky at an angle similar to

that of the figure on the left. It seems to appeal to the universe on behalf of the woman.

Izquierdo emphasizes the relationship between the women and the moons by having the

shades of white and gray of their clothing echo that of the two moons.

In ancient Mexico, the waning and waxing of the moon was called "waking" and

"sleeping." In Izquierdo's image, one moon's eyes are closed as if asleep, while the other

moon is awake. The one moon that is awake may symbolize the voyage from light to

darkness, while the sleeping moon represents darkness.124 One possible reading is that

the two phases of the crescent moon refer to the need for a shift in the experience of

women from darkness (the private sphere) to light (the public sphere).

Jules Cashford, The Moon: Myth and Image (New York: Four Walls Eight
Windows, 2003), 62.
57
 In Prisoneras, three naked women are tied to classical columns that stand on

barren brown hills. The classical column throughout history has long been a

conventional symbol of democracy and freedom. Here the columns that bind the women

at the cost of their freedom may also represent men given the obvious phallic nature of

these forms. The constricted arms of the women communicate various stages of

entrapment. One woman protects herself by crossing her arms to cover her body. The

hands of the second woman are bound behind her back, while the third has her arms

tightly drawn to her side as her neck is craned over her shoulder. She alone of the three

bound figures does not bow her head. Instead, her eyes are closed as if cringing from the

horrors of her entrapment. The other two figures drop their heads to their chests. A

fourth woman lies prostrate on the ground at the foot of the three bound women.

Above the four figures there is a crescent moon; its distressed face appears to cry

out for help, casting the moon as the symbolic voice for the Mexican women. Izquierdo

paints the crescent moon at the tip of one of the mountains. In so doing, the painter could

be inserting a female symbol on top of the male symbol of mountains, often used to

represent masculinity.125 Or it may be intended as a female symbol on top of another

female symbol because in Mesoamerican times mountains were associated with earth

goddesses that represent fertility, birth, and death.

In terms of identity politics, Izquierdo emerges as a female artist painting

entrapped female figures. During this time in Mexico, she was the only woman

repeatedly using the female nude in painting. Frida Kahlo depicts her own nude body,

Fontana, 114.
58
but not with the repetition that we see in Izquierdo's oeuvre. Izquierdo's use of the

figurative genre can be interpreted as a subversion of previous aesthetic uses of the

female form in art, as well as an attempt to draw attention to the position of her gender in

Mexican culture. In, The Aesthetics of Power in Modern Erotic Art Carol Duncan argues

that in modern art, "the subjugation of the female will appear to be one of the primary

motives in erotic art.'127 She views this erotic iconography as a play of power by male

artists to gratify their sexual desire as well as to support their need for supremacy over

women. In Prisoneras, Izquierdo overturns this narrative by giving a female artist's

perspective through imagery that includes women in poses of entrapment, thereby

challenging an iconography that perpetuates male supremacy and desire. Her depiction

of three non-eroticized naked figures bound to phallic columns resists the categorical use

of the female nude as a space for male viewing desire. In foregrounding female

oppression in her compositions, Izquierdo forces us to consider sexual power relations in

modern art and culture. Her image reclaims the space of the female body as a site to

question the meanings and values of female experience, and in the process she expands

Mexico's visual culture.

In Prisoneras, there is nothing to sustain the women's existence. One possible

reading is that the barren landscape is a metaphor for Mexican women's existence and

their lack of freedom, imprisoned in and doomed by an environment bereft of sustenance.

And yet, this painting was executed at a time in Mexico when women were forming new

communities that critiqued their society's position on gender and that fought for public

126
Zavala, Eagle, 71.
127
Duncan, 109.
59
support of women in the work force as well as their inclusion in the nationalist project.

In the 1930s legislature, three feminist congresses fought for women's rights including

welfare programs designed to help poor working mothers. The National Congress of

Women Workers and Peasants defended women's rights in the work place. The

Maternity Security Fund of 1939 provided for mothers in need of maternity care and

pharmaceuticals. The feminist writer Sofia Villa de Buentello circulated her self-

published books, "La mujery la ley" and "La verdad sobre el motiomorio," to promote

an awareness of women's legal inequality. Vocational schools became a new public

space in which gender issues were explored. In these new communities that were

comprised mostly of women, debates on gender and women's new emerging role within

Mexico were discussed.

The government under Lazaro Cardenas' presidency (1934 -1940) also fought for

women's rights. Cardenas encouraged women to organize and was an avid supporter of

the Sole Front For Women's Rights. This group not only fought for women's

emancipation but for other social benefits, such as child care, education and public

healthto name a few.129 In 1937, he drafted a bill that would give women the right to

vote and sent it to the Chamber of Deputies. Unfortunately, the bill was denounced and

defeated because even though the president was behind it, the congress feared that, if

given the right to vote, women would vote on the side of the church, giving or preserving

the political power of the Catholic church and its a strong hold on Mexico's

128
Ibid., 124.
IOQ

Monsivais, Sex, 17.

60
population. The painting in this context reads as an assertive statement in the fight

against oppression as these new communities became proactively involved in the

reconstruction of Mexico. It also may read as positive support of Cardenas' socialist

policies and his rhetoric concerning gender issues.

In the painting, Desnudos, Izquierdo continues her visual dialogue regarding the

extreme hardship experienced by women during the 1920s and 1930s in Mexico. In this

painting, three nude women occupy a strange and barren space that alludes to a rural

setting. The gestures and body positions of the figures communicate the anguish of their

situation. One woman leans on a tree stump with her head in her hands. The figure

seated next to her sits morosely with her head in one hand. They are in close contact, but

the women do not interact. The third woman stands holding a shroud-like cloth that half

covers her body. She also appears to be about to cover and protect the other two women.

This gesture is a break from the isolationist trajectory in the series.

The use of space accentuates their tragic plight. The composition is tight, with the

figures and the building in close proximity. There is little space for the small piece of sky

in the background. Behind the figures stands an abandoned building. Its simple

geometric form and ominous bare entryway accentuates the desolation of the image. The

building also communicates the sense of an unknown future because it is unclear where

the hallway leads. The women occupy the area just outside of the building. The tree,

which has been cut down, offers no food or shelter. It may also read as a symbol of

death. The land does not sustain life. The location is deprived of sustenancedesolate,

dry and without vegetation.

61
 Izquierdo's image stands as a distinct disruption to Rivera's use of the female

body as a symbolic repository for a notion of peace and progress. Her use of the female

form within this desolate space is antithetical and even antagonistic to such symbolism.

The third nude's gesture with the shroud to protect the two other women suggests the

need to shield them from the experience of their dismal condition.

In Desnudos, the female body is placed in a location that cannot support its

existence. Izquierdo thereby represents not the fruits of nationalism, but rather an

alternative view, the idea that rural women cannot participate in the rebuilding of their

country and that their dire circumstances must be acknowledged and changed.

In Sirenas, three landlocked sirens greet a naked female figure. The image of a

siren is in and of itself a complicated symbol. Its obvious connotation is that of the sirens

in Homer's Odyssey who tried to lure Odysseus and his companions to their death.

Earlier incarnations of sirens in western art, however, were seen as hybrid figures that

followed warriors and sailors into war. To complicate matters further, they could also be

symbolic of both death and immortality, as in images found on funeral urns depicting

sirens who beat their chests and pulled out their hair in response to a death. Izquierdo's

utilization of this imagery is ambiguous, as she seems to combine different symbolic

meanings. One siren plays a flute, but to whom? There is neither water in the image nor

a male presence to lure or entrap. In fact, in this image it appears that the land entraps the

sirens.

In Sirenas, the landscape consists of a band of red earth that takes up a majority of

the canvas. In the left foreground is a mound in the shape of a small hill. The

background consists of an ominous dark sky with a crescent moon. Two of the sirens are

62
the same color as the earth, while the siren playing a flute and the naked woman

approaching them echo the color of the hill. Such a use of color implies a strong

relationship between the female forms and the space they occupy, but it is not necessarily

a positive relationship. The blending of the colors of the background with those of the

figures conveys a sense of entrapment. The confinement is further accentuated by the

inability of the landlocked sirens to move, as their movement is confined to their inert

arms. Two of the sirens gesticulate towards the approaching women with outstretched

arms. One holds her arms up, while the other moves her arms down towards the red

earth. The third siren looks away as she blows into a flute.

The naked female figure stands with her back to the viewer. She holds one hand

to her head in a gesture of anguish. In her left hand she clutches a dark red cloth as if to

show the sirens. The shroud is a repeated symbol in Izquierdo's imagery. Here, the cloth

is stained a deep red implying it is soaked in blood. The blood soaked cloth may

symbolize the blood shed by women in Mexico both during and after the revolution. It

may also symbolize their difficult position in this particular culture. The emotionally

distraught woman shows the red cloth to the landlocked sirens. But all is futile, as the

sirens cannot move towards her without water. The fact that she shows the cloth to

immobile sirens creates an air of futility. The paralysis of the sirens reads as the absence

of hope. The female figure appeals to the sirens for aid, and yet the situation is dire.

There is no water, only brown dry earth for seemingly endless miles. The true measure

of the utter helplessness of the situation is made manifest in the blue ball that lies

between the woman and the closest siren. This siren seems to watch the ball as it has

63
rolled away, but she cannot move to retrieve it. Izquierdo inserts her own presence in the

painting by signing her name in the same color as the ball.

I interpret the paintings Alegoria a la libertad (Allegory of Liberty) (1937) and

Alegoria al Trabajo (Allegory of Work) (1936) as an exploration of the relationship

between gender and the workplace in Mexico. In Allegory of Liberty, Izquierdo explores

a visual discourse that addresses the many restrictions on women. In this painting, five

decapitated female heads are pulled by their hair through a polluted and ominous night

sky by an unidentifiable angel. A factory chimney spews black soot into the sky, while

the angel navigates the women past sharp lightening bolts. A crescent moon, this time

faceless, hangs in the smoke-filled sky.

In both the image and the title, Izquierdo's painting stands in opposition to

Rivera's female allegorical figures. Mary Coffey addresses Rivera's emphasis on this

particular academic convention in her article, "Angels and Prostitutes." She describes

Rivera's mural, Allegory of California (1930-31), at the Pacific Stock Exchange in San

Francisco, as one that "reifies gender difference through the academic tradition of female

allegory," and she sees it as a "reversion to classicism and tired symbolic rhetoric of

academic allegory."131 Coffey observes that in Rivera's mural the body of the tennis

champion Helen Wills Moody "is presented not as an active tennis champion, but rather

as an icon of an indigenized and sexualized landscape."

When comparing Izquierdo's image of women in Allegory of Liberty with

Rivera's allegorical use of the female body Allegory of California, it becomes evident

131
Coffey,109.
132
Ibid., 194.
64
that Izquierdo's image and title stand to reject the allegorical paradigm of the female

body in art. Izquierdo depicts only the women's heads and not their bodies, thus, denying

an allegorical use of the female body in art, as well as a repository for national prosperity.

Allegory of Liberty clearly serves a political purpose. I interpret it as potential

indictment of the existing social order that calls into question the liberty won for women

during the revolution. Both the painting and its title, Allegory of Liberty, read as a

condemnation of the government's denial of liberty owed to women after the revolution.

Such a use of the female figure was the antithesis of the muralists' use of the female form

as a symbol for liberty won during the revolution.

Another possible interpretation is that this image reflects the injuries of women

and the use of their bodies in their work environment. As previously stated, women

working in factories were forced to resort to prostitution as a way of surviving economic

instability. Furthermore, the work in factories was difficult and workers were fraught

with worker abuse. One highly recognized Mexican industrialist of this time, Jesus

Rivera Quijano, described the realities of working conditions as having "unhygienic

conditions, with neither limits on the daily shift nor a just salary scale." Women were

often forced to work without overtime pay or maternity care.133 In this particular image,

the angel pulls the women by their hair through the sky and away from a factory, an

environment that offered them little compensation.

The image of smoke spewing from the factory's chimney also speaks to the

human cost of industrialization. The head closest to the smoke is the only head with open

133
Susan M. Gauss, "Working Class Masculinity and the Rationalized Sex:
Gender and Industrial Modernization in the Textile Industry in Post Revolutionary
Puebla," in Sex, 187.
65
eyes. As this disembodied figure is carried away, she watches the soot rise into the night

sky, witnessing the negative effects of industrialization. Such a depiction stands in

marked contrast to Orozco's deployment of the female body as a signifier for the

destructive aspects of modern society on humankind as seen in his mural, Catharsis

(1934) at the Palace of Fine Arts. Instead, Izquierdo illustrates an alternative viewpoint

on the effect that modernity had on women and their survival.

In Allegory of Work, Izquierdo directly addresses the conflict of women working

within the limitations of Mexican society. As I outlined in Chapter One, even after the

revolution, Mexico remained a nation defined mostly by a masculine identity and agenda.

Women fought for their rights in virtually every context. They resisted the national

government's attempts to bind them to jobs as domestic servants or as underpaid

teachers. They struggled against the church, their local governments, and the

communists who fought only for male workers' rights. Women demanded the right to

work in tortilla, coffee, and sewing factories and corn mills. For the first time, they

worked alongside their male peers in positions previously held by men.134 These women

survived the continuing onslaught against their reputations by men and women who

considered workingwomen "social deviants" that were "sexually promiscuous."135 They

were often excommunicated from the church as they negotiated their way past the

patriarchal authority that dominated their culture. These courageous women also made

134
Ibid., 168.
135
Ibid., 17.

66
important gains in women's rights by fighting against the male unions that saw women in

factories as a direct threat to their fight for union rights.

As women entered the work force there still existed a crisis in Mexican society in

with prostitution. Anna Macias estimates that from 1910 to 1917, when hunger was as

high as it was in the late eighteenth century, half'the female population was forced to

engage in prostitution in order to survive. Perhaps in an attempt to shield her from this

problem, Izquierdo's grandparents put her in an arranged marriage at the age of thirteen

to an older general in the army. After the revolution, the problem of prostitution rose to

an even greater level than that during the Porfirian dictatorship. Often women working in

factories resorted to prostitution to supplement their low wages. Prostitution would

remain a problem in Mexico well into the 1930's. The male dominated Mexican society

did not see prostitutes as victims of economic duress; it viewed them as criminals. The

result was the bifurcation of Mexican women for the most part into two roles, prostitutes

or mothers. Such a classification confined the female gender to a focus on their bodies

and sexuality.

In Allegoria de trabajo, the image is filled with male symbolism. A naked

woman sits in a mountainous terrain. On one mountain are two large white columns.

One column stands at the tip of the mountain while the other lies on the ground directly

facing the woman's genitalia. Above the female figure rise two gigantic male legs. The

clouds mask the rest of the male figure's massive body. A circular sphere holding the

universe replaces the male genitals. Within the orb, Izquierdo places a moon. The moon

136
Ibid., 168.
137
Macias,l3l.
67
is directly above the female figure uniting the moon with the woman. The moon's face

tilts upward and again seems to implore the universe on the woman's behalf. The woman

sits facing away from the male giant and holds her head in despair. The title of the

painting combined with the pictorial elements speaks in direct and poignant terms to the

emotional experience of women in the male workspace.

In addition to exploring the position of women in the workplace, Izquierdo

focuses on the experience that agrarian reform had on women at this time in Mexico.

Saturno (Saturn) (1936), Mujer con dos caballos (Women with Two Horses) (1938) and

La tierra (The Earth) (1945) all seem to point to the complicated equation that existed

within these reforms.

In Saturno, Izquierdo paints five naked women with blue ropes tightly binding

their wrists. The ropes are tied to one of the rings of Saturn. On the planet is painted

three stars and a crescent moon. Izquierdo plays with a strange ambiguity here. The

women appear trapped by the ropes. At the same time, they seem to be trying to pull the

planet towards the earth, perhaps in the hope of receiving aid. Their naked bodies are in

various poses of extreme anguish. Menacing storm clouds hover above them. The

women exist in the same space, but are unable to assist or communicate with each other.

One of the women pleads to the moon, which seems to respond back to her.

The physical space in Saturno is severely cramped with the sky and earth

compressed together. The clouds stop at the end of the canvas, and the feet of the women

almost fall out of the foreground. Izquierdo thrusts the bodies further forward by slightly

flattening their forms. A majority of the space is filled with the naked female form in

various positions of entrapment. One of the bodies seems to struggle to rise further,

68
highlighting the heightened emotional image of her bondage. By crowding the space

with their bound bodies, Izquierdo enhances the sense of oppression.

In terms of symbology, Saturn represents an agricultural god with much of its

meaning cast in sowing and planting seeds. The shape of the sickle in the constellation is

often meant to symbolize equality for all citizens. The artist's juxtaposition of entrapped

women with a symbol that connotes agriculture and equality may be interpreted as a

comment on Cardenas' agrarian land reform measures and their unfair treatment towards

women. Jocelyn Olcott in her book, Revolutionary Women in Post-revolutionary Mexico,.

observes that Cardenas' agrarian land reform was a program "structured around male

heads of household and patriarchal families."138 Only men could obtain land on the

ejidos (collective landholdings that resulted in community farmed land.) Ben Fallaw

makes a similar point. He writes, "The Cardenista agrarian reform in Mexico reinforced

men's supposed prerogatives as heads of families and emphasized a more assertive

masculinity." But the reality may be more complicated than either of these

perspectives. Cardenista agrarian reform was a complex and difficult process that

historians are just now beginning to understand. By mid-1936 it was close to failure due

to feuding, lack of funds, resistance by landowners, corruption at the local level, peasant-

peon antipathy, the problems of boss politics, as well as a host of other difficulties. It is

also important to note that the Cardenistas fought to integrate women, peasants and

peons into a "corporate political structure" that worked to advance agrarian land

Jocelyn Olcott, Revolutionary Women in Post-revolutionary Mexico (Durham:

Duke University Press, 2005), 68.
1
Ben Fallaw, Cardenas Compromised: The Failure of Reform in the Post
Yucatan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 91.

69
reform.14 While true reform was not fully realized, the reforms that were introduced

planted the seeds of change as seen in the rallies, strikes and demonstrations on the streets

of Mexico. Another indication is the fact that the Caciques (local political bosses) were

less successful in using intimidation with their workers.141

In Satumo, it is clear that these bound and naked women are not benefiting from

the hard won "freedoms" of land reform. Instead, they remain trapped by the inequalities

of their culture. The meaning here may be twofold as Saturn also symbolizes general

limitations and constraints impossible to overcome. Thus, the women tied to Saturn's

rings echo the disparity of their position and the immense challenges they face.

However, the very fact that an image such as this existed in Mexico at this time in regards

to women and agrarian reform points to the massive shift in political and cultural

structures at play in 1930's Mexico. Here a woman artist is exploring where and how her

gender fits into the complicated mechanisms of agrarian reform. Two decades earlier a

work like this would most likely not have been painted.

In Izquierdo's Satumo we do not know who the five women are and the space and

the narrative are ambiguous and imaginary, which gives Izquierdo a broader artistic

freedom to address political issues. The result is a visual narrative that is palpable within

the intense political environment of the Cardenas era in Mexico. But what is not

ambiguous and reads as the main thrust of the image is the intensity of their oppression,

as well as the isolation these women experience.

140
Ibid., 161.
141
Ibid.,
70
 In Mujer con dos caballos, Izquierdo creates a mythical landscape where

indigenous women and their existence take on a symbolic significance. In the painting

she combines a blood red cloth that binds the woman's wrists, a white horse, and the

image of a crescent moon. I interpret this as metaphorical imagery that questions the

treatment towards women who fought for their country's freedom during the revolution

and civil war, as well as for their position after the war.

The space consists of a hill and a night sky. At the top of the barren hill behind

her are the ruins of two arches. There is nothing specific in the location to orient the

viewer. Instead the arches allude to mythological dream-like imagery. The space is

cropped in such a way that reifies the confined position of the distinctly Indian woman

who rides a white horse. Izquierdo crops the edges of the composition so there is little

space between the objects and the edge. The woman on the white horse is naked and her

wrists are tied with a red rope. She awkwardly raises her arms towards the sky.

The red in the rope may again symbolize blood as we saw in the stained red cloth in

Sirenas. The blood possibly represents both the actual blood shed by indigenous women

as soldaderas during the revolution, as well as the struggle of their current circumstances.

In Sex in Revolution, Carlos Monsivais observes that the constructions of sexual identity

of the soldaderas in literature and music reflect the continued marginalization of women

by erasing the heroic actions of these women. He writes:

The Mexican Revolution has been unified in order to be understood as a

whole . . . and has been characterized however the regime pleases, which
prohibits understanding its complexity. Yet, within the realm of generalities, one
thing is notorious: women (the gender, the groups, and the enormously dynamic
individuals) mean very little in political and social terms and practically nothing
when set before the deity of those times: History, an exclusively masculine
territory... Although women's participation in the revolution may have been

71
 influential in many ways, patriarchy is nothing if not an endless strategy of
concealment.142

Mary Kay Vaughan makes a similar statement by observing that, "The historiography of

the revolution eliminated [women] entirely from the drama."143 The lyrics of soldaderas

ballads perpetuated the marginalization of women's role in the revolution as these

musical and poetic constructions often ignored the fact that the soldaderas suffered

greatly.144 The reality was that the soldaderas during the revolution suffered horrific

experiences including rape. In 1925, the Secretary of Defense General Joaquin Amaro

referred to them as " the main cause of vice, diseases, crime and disorder." He then had

them dismissed from the military barracks.145 It was common practice to discount the

important work of these women. The women who served in the army during the

revolution were not given retirement pensions. They could not belong to the Legion of

Honor, nor were they allowed to rejoin the army. 46 Mitchell observes that by denying

the existence of their actions, it became easy to justify their exclusion from the "spoils of

war," which included political influence, economic opportunity and land reform.

Historian Julia Tunon's observations on indigenous peoples in Mexico also serve as a

pertinent backdrop to Izquierdo's image. In her essay, "Femininity, Indigenismo and

Nation," Tunon writes:

142
Monsivais, Sex 5.
143
Ibid., 22.
144
Ibid., 6.
145
Ibid., 8.
146
Ibid., 16.
72
 [The] age-old distinction between the contemporary Indian, seen as a hindrance to
modernity, and the pre-Columbian Indian, endowed with heroism and dignity,
was clear. Despite explicit valorization of the indigenous, Indians had occupied
an inferior position in the social hierarchy since the sixteenth century. The only
options open to them were adaptation to the dominant culture, which implied
losing their own characteristics, or marginalization wherein they would remain
apart form the advantages of development.147

I interpret Mujer con dos caballos as an alternative to the narratives in literature

and music about the soldaderas. The image also addresses the marginalized position of

indigenous women and brings their reality to the center of the discourse. Izquierdo

accomplishes this by creating a matrix of symbolic imagery that speaks to the complex

and contradictory experience of indigenous women in Mexico at this time. In the

painting, a white horse leads the woman forward, while a brown horse sits passively next

to the white horse. Izquierdo combines the symbols of the new moon and the white horse

to communicate an idea of hope and freedom. The white horse throughout history has

symbolized an animal that comes to the rescue in a moment of need. In Mexican culture

this idea is intensified with the image of Zapata on his white horse. As Desmond

Rochford writes, "Zapata and his white horse have become part of the visual iconography

of the Mexican revolution." The image is ingrained in the historical narrative of the

revolution as it represents the freedom sought in the revolutionary fight for agrarian

reform for the Mexican Indian. Rivera painted this image in 1932 in his mural, Revolt

and the New Religion (1929-32), at the Cortes Palace in Cuernavaca. The image of

147
Julia Tufton, "Femininity, 'Indigensimo' and Nation: Film Representation by
Emilio "El Indio" Fernandez" in Sex, 83.

David Rochfort David, Mexican Muralists: Orozco, Rivera and Siquieros (San
Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1998), 197.

73
Zapata was a revolutionary "symbol of the right to land." As I observed earlier,

however, the actual redistribution of land in the 1930's benefited very few women.150

Izquierdo's image draws attention to this fact. She paints a distinctly Indian woman on a

white horse. The woman does not ride freely across the land. Instead, a blood red cloth

binds her wrists as she struggles to raise her arms.

The two symbols of freedom, the moon in its crescent phase and the white horse,

are juxtaposed with the image of an indigenous woman whose hands are tied as she rides

down a barren hill. Such a choice is especially poignant. Even after the 1910 revolution,

the civil war, and the period of agrarian and labor reforms that followed, the female

gender was still in many ways without freedom. It would not be until 1971, with the

passage of the federal Agrarian Reform Law, that all women would become eligible for

ejidal (agrarian collectables) rights. Before 1971, land was available only to widows or

single women who were supporting a family. In addition, the practical impact was much

different. During the land re-distribution period of the 1930's it was generally difficult

for women to gain ownership of land, even if they were widowed or single.151

In 1945, Izquierdo painted La tierra, which proved to be one of the most

profound works of art within her oeuvre. In this painting, executed eight years after the

other paintings I have discussed, she created an image that takes the above themes and

149
Lynn Stephen, "Rural Women's Grassroots Activism, 1980-2000: Reframing
the Nation from Below," in Sex, 245.

It should be noted that agrarian land reform was one of the professed
successes of the Mexican revolution. In the early 1920's Obregon redistributed three
million acres. In the mid-1920's Calles redistributed eight million acres, and in the late
1930's Cardenas redistributed fifty million.
74
synthesizes them into a succinct, yet extremely complicated vision of Mexican women.

The painting resonates deeply, but it refuses to fix. Instead, La tierra hovers in the

tension between burden and transcendence combined with lightness and tragedy. The

result is an image that speaks to a multifaceted experience. According to art historian

Elizabeth Ferrer, the image was intended for Izquierdo's ill-fated mural project. In the

painting, Izquierdo places a distinctly Mexican woman with the darkened skin tones of a

Mesitza in the center of the canvas. Her massive body occupies the majority of the space,

allowing her monumental body and its relationship to the land to serve as a site for

dialogue that investigates the complex position of women in post-revolutionary Mexico.

The image is filled with visual ambiguities. The significance of these ambiguities

is that they create a space that is not rigidly defined, which allows the image to express

differing positions. By creating a space that is open to questions a dialogue ensues that

supports a renegotiation of the parameters that define female experience.

The name of the painting is La tierra, which in Spanish means "the earth." The

title combined with the image suggests the symbolic representation of woman as Mother

Earth. Elizabeth Ferrer states that the image is, "An allegorical representation of the land

as woman . . . In conflating this figure with earth, Izquierdo identifies the woman as

fertile, powerful and solid."

I contend that this image goes much further than straightforward allegory. What

Izquierdo has created here is a hybrid figure. Indeed, the woman in La tierra seems to

symbolize mother earth, but she also represents freedom, suffering, strength, oppression,

152
Ferrer, 27.
153
Ibid.
75
as well as the effects of agrarian reform on women. This is not a simplistic allegory of

woman and her association with nature. Instead, this image exposes the many

intersections that comprise her existence.

In the painting, the woman kneels on the earth, but her pose suggests that she is

beginning to rise. Her right hand is resting on the ground, while the other is halfway

raised. Her body is naked, except for a white cloth that covers her head and genitals.

Izquierdo uses her aptitude as a colorist to synthesize the color of the woman's body with

that of the earth. Golden tones highlight her skin, echoing the same gold that represents

the land. At the same time, her dark skin contrasts with these tones, separating the body

from the ground. The earth the figure occupies is a sublime combination of softened

golds, reds, and browns. The sky is black and blue, suggesting a potential storm. The

upper right corner of the sky has golden clouds lit in such a way that it is uncertain as to

whether the sun is rising or setting. The question of whether it is day or night is an

important part of the symbolic ambiguity that drives the narrative of the painting.

It is overtly evident in the emotional and physical burden that the woman clearly

bears that she is not free. In the woman's struggle to rise, Izquierdo reveals the

complexity of female Mexican identity in terms of women's association with the land.

Izquierdo does not denounce this association, but shows it to be a concept worthy of

reevaluation. The Mexican woman as earth mother is, as we have seen, a common theme

in the muralists' visual repertoire. Izquierdo offers an alternative to the female body as a

symbol of national and agricultural prosperity, thereby refusing to completely and

unquestioningly legitimize the nationalist visual discourse. At the same time, she does

not disown it. This is evident in the heroic stature of the figure, captured in the strength

76
and monumentality of the woman's body. As the historian Lynn Stephen contends,

peasant agriculture in the 1940's came to rely on rural women and their ability to

organize and defend compesino rights.154 La tierra boldly communicates women's

position within such reforms and their refusal to succumb to a passive position regarding

land reform.

Izquierdo asks the viewer to look beneath the surface of the visual motifs that

abound in her culture in order to explore the multitude of experiences of Mexican

women. She celebrates the bounty and beauty of the Mexican landscape through her

skillful use of color, while at the same time she gives us a figure whose experience

illuminates the question of how women will fit into the social equation. Izquierdo's use

of color ties the figure to the Mexican landscape. It seems as though the earth is giving

the oppressed woman strength and power since her hand and foot are planted securely in

the ground. The position of her body, however, also communicates suffering and

emotional pain. The land, therefore, appears to both elevate and repress her. Were the

figure to rise easily, the image would fit into the previous allegory of women as fertile

beings who symbolize Mexican nationalism. The emotional and physical struggle in

Izquierdo's figure, however, defies an easy interpretation of Mexican women's identity.

The woman in La tierra is united with the earth and yet she attempts to free herself from

it.

On a deeper level, the image demands a place for women within the nationalistic

agenda. The viewer cannot escape the image of the woman's conflicted body as it

dominates the entire canvas. Her upper body hovers over the horizon. By depicting such

154
Ibid., 31.
77
a large figure and placing her front and center, the viewer is forced to acknowledge the

struggle that she endures. In addition, the very monumentality of this female form

presumes a heroic female presence within the Mexican landscape that is usually

motivated by a male agenda as evidenced in the muralist program. As we will see in the

next chapter, civic authorities in Mexico City would soon chose not to feature such a

depiction of a woman on the public walls of a government building.

Another interesting aspect of La tierra is Izquierdo's creation of an invisible

space that holds the fragility of freedom and the strength of oppression in suspended

animation. The image serves up the moment before the outcome, as the figure struggles

to stand. In essence, she is depicted mid-flight. Will the woman succeed in rising, or

will she fall to the ground? This uncertainty is communicated in the physicality of the

figure's movement. One leg has risen, while the other is still grounded on the earth. One

arm pushes her body up, but we do not know if the arm has the strength to lift the rest of

her body. The left arm is raised halfway, perhaps in a gesture of protest, but it is only

half raised, and to further communicate uncertainty, Izquierdo paints her hand half

opened. It is not quite a fist poised in armed defense. It is the same with her eyes. They

are either half-open or half-closed. The intensity of her facial expression and the physical

struggle of her body communicate to the viewer that she has not finished fightingin the

strength of her body there is the strength of millions. It is in this figure's force that

Izquierdo conveys the idea of hope and the necessity of the struggle to overcome

oppression. Izquierdo's hybrid figure not only raises questions, she reminds us that there

are multiple answers, and that change may depend on a dialogue that demands

78
multiplicity if women are to secure an identity within the complex world of post-

revolutionary Mexico.

Izquierdo's visual narratives in the above paintings stand in stark contrast to

depictions of women by the muralists. Under the auspice of social reform, the muralists

repeatedly promoted the fetishization, consumption and diminution of the female figure

in art. In their images they regulate, control, and define the role of women by exploiting

the female form.

Rivera's murals at the Escuela National de Agricultura in the Chapel at Chapingo

(1926-7), best exemplify such use of the female body. His treatment of the theme of

agricultural production constitutes an essentializing discourse regarding female gender.

He uses the female body as a site for erotic male gratification. Ironically the theme of the

mural was taken from a quotation by Zapata that Rivera inscribed on the mural: "Ensenar

la explotacion a la tierrayno la del hombre.'" (Here one teaches to exploit the land and

not other people). Looking at the portrayals of women as faceless vessels of male desire,

it becomes evident that the exploitation of "other people" refers for the most part to men.

In the imagery, a majority of the women are depicted with voluptuous bodies, full

breasts, and erect nipples. In the mural, The Wind and Rain (1926), rain is symbolized as

milk coming from a woman's lactating breasts as she squeezes them toward the viewing

audience. We cannot see the faces of the other women in the panel, only their hair. In

Chaos (1926), many of the women's bodies are in positions of repose. At times they

seem to fall through space in a kind of sexual ecstasy that is beyond their control. One

woman with large breasts lies on the ground with her knees up, her legs spread open, and

her arms raised as if pushing an imaginary figure off her body.

79
 In Fruitfulness (1926), the female figures sit naked with their hands full of fruit

that they pensively and quietly look down upon. In the background there is a tropical

paradise abundant with foliage and fresh fruit hanging from a tree. The image of naked

women holding fruit is as an obvious reference to the biblical story of Eve who yields to

temptation and takes the apple. It also symbolizes fertility, which again relegates women

to the role of motherhood. In the center of the image is a fruit-bearing tree with a large

black hole that resembles a bodily orifice or female genitalia.

In Earth Mother, the female body personifies the worn-out allegory of the female

as Mother Earth. The image echoes that of La tierra fecundada. Here the woman lies

with her long hair covering her eyes. Her mouth is slightly ajar as if she were groaning in

sexual ecstasy. In her hand she holds an upright plant, blatantly phallic. Her stomach is

round and pregnanta symbol of agricultural prosperity. Diego Rivera is clearly

identifying women in terms of national identity as a vessel of reproduction.

Rivera's bodies of men, however, are chiseled with muscle. Their physical forms

are not immobile, but seem to burst from the constraints of the mural's frame. In

addition, their faces are expressive. They are not naked, but semi-clothed in white

garments. In its entirety, Rivera's mural elaborates a visual narrative of male supremacy,

virility and sexual gratification.

Diego Rivera was certainly not alone. Siqueiros' mural, Democracy Freeing

Herself, in the Upper Gallery of the Palacio de Bellas Artes (1945), is a depiction of the

female body symbolizing Democracy breaking from the chains that bind her. Here

Democracy is represented as a half nude female with monumental breasts that have

painted highlights around erect nipples. These breasts are the focal point of the image,

80
commanding the viewer's attention. The intention of the artist was most likely to

promote the idea of democratic reform of government on the walls of Mexico. Yet he

achieves this through a highly erotic image of a woman bound by chains, thereby reifying

the art historical pattern of male fantasies of desire and entrapment. In so doing,

Siqueiros counters his primary argument.

In Catharsis, Coffey argues that Orozco uses the female body as a "critique of the

post-revolutionary project" that "questions rather than confirms the rhetoric of national

progress." In addition it serves as a metaphorical container for male fears and desire in

the face of industrial modernity and technology.155 Orozco's graphic image, which

borders on the pornographic, features a prostitute outlined in an eerie green hue, lying

diagonally in the foreground. Her legs are splayed open. She stares out at the viewer,

laughing at the gruesome violence that surrounds her. In the mural, a hand stabs a knife

into a body and masses rebel against an unknown force, while a burning inferno

consumes the background. Industrial rubbish litters the right portion of the canvas.

Orozco heightens the sense of violence and conflict with opposing diagonal lines.

Coffey observes that while Orozco's choice of imagery was more about his fears

of the dangers of modern technology, fascism, and the corruption of the current

administration, his choice was "insensitive" to the position of women in his culture. She

writes:

We need only to look at Frida Khalo's art to understand just how insensitive
Orozco was to the violent implications of the construction of women in the visual
discourses of Mexican Nationalism and aesthetic modernism. It is important to
recall that Post revolutionary struggles over urban development presented

155
Mary K. Coffey, "Angels and Prostitutes: Jose Clement Orozco's Catharsis
and the Politics of Female Allegory in 1930's Mexico," The Centennial Review 4 no.2
(2004): 187.
81
 prostitution as the prominent barometer of social hygiene, class politics and
economic dependence. When Eugenicists, feminists and policy makers colluded
at the end of the 1930's to abolish state regulated prostitutes, they did so in
defense of "good motherhood." Motherhood was the only acknowledged form of
female citizenship.156

Orozco uses the image of the prostitute to connote the cyclical nature of history

from tragedy to redemption and to represent the pitfalls of commodity culture,

technology and capitalism. As previously discussed, prostitution remained a serious

problem in Mexican society long after the revolution. Because of the booming sex trade,

prostitution contributed to the economic prosperity of the country.157 Women were seen

as the catalysts for this societal dysfunction and not the victims of economic duress. It

was this view that Orozco chose to immortalize on the public walls of Mexico.

The mural examples I have presented underscore the problematic and complex

notions about women in Mexico at this time. By means of the mural program the

government and the male muralists monopolized the visual representation of female

identity and propagated a limited vision.

In the next chapter I will make evident the nuances in Izquierdo's perspectives. I

will analyze the paintings in which she affirmed Mexico's traditionalist and patriarchal

paradigm that motherhood was the most important role for a woman in Mexico. This

apparent contradiction reveals how deeply engrained traditionalist views were at the time.

In the space of her varied canvases lies the intense ideological battle that consumed her

nation. These disparate images reflect the actual experience of modernization and the

Ibid., 207.

Ibid., 199.
82
complex circumstances in the 1920's, 30's and 40's in Mexico as women began to break

down the barriers that pervaded Mexican culture.

83
 CHAPTER 5

SHIFTING CONSTRUCTIONS OF MOTHERHOOOD IN THE IMAGES OF MARIA

IZQUIERDO

Izquierdo throughout her career persisted in engaging in a visual dialogue that

analyzed the varying experiences of women in the decades following the revolution and

civil war. While the paintings in the previous chapter represent a critique, it is essential

to recognize that a large percentage of her paintings show a sincere love and support for

her country. As mentioned in the introduction, I see Izquierdo's images as a reflection of

the hybrid nature of women's experience. The varying perspectives in the space she

creates reflect the contradictions, conflicts and ambiguities that characterize her era

during the forceful reconstruction of her country.

Izquierdo's images of mothers with their children seem to contradict the stark

reality of the repressive images described in earlier chapters. In fact, I contend that these

images of mothers with their children demonstrate how Izquierdo's vision of women in

her society was significantly layered and nuanced. These images of motherhood reveal

that Izquierdo was willing to promote some aspects of the post-revolutionary program at

the same time that she critiqued her country's antiquated view of gender

disenfranchisement.

An image of a mother and child at this time in Mexico was a loaded one. The

very concept of motherhood and where it fit into the nationalist agenda filled the

84
discourses raging around the country. Motherhood became one of Mexico's most

complicated ideological constructions.

Izquierdo' s paintings of mothers with their children serve as a visual

documentation of the complexity of the views about women's roles as mothers during the

1920s, 30s, and 40s in Mexico. In her lifetime, the role of mother in her culture was a

constantly changing construction. It evolved from being a means by which the Catholic

Church controlled a large majority of its members to becoming a viable tool used by the

government to promote nationalist sentiment and boost the population after the

devastating loss of life during the revolution.

Historian Ann Blum observes how in the late 1930s, during the second phase of

the Cristero crisis, the Cardenas administration "articulated and promoted a secular
1 SR

version of motherhood" in order to weaken the position of the Catholic Church. In

1936, the administration created celebrations, such as the Department of Labor's,

"Homage to the Proletarian Mother," as well as Mother's Day ceremonies.159 The

administration organized mother's clubs and day care centers for single mothers and

distributed sewing machines and other devices that helped save time for the working

mother. In addition, the notion of motherhood became a vehicle for feminists in their

struggle to secure a more public space for women in Mexican Society as mothers took to

the streets to demand rights for their families.160

Ann S. Blum, "Breaking and Making Families: Adoption and Public Welfare,
Mexico City, 1938-1942" in Sex, 141.
159
Ibid., 142.
160
Ibid., 115.
85
 One of the government's most ambitious programs was the creation of vocational

schools. In 1922, the Chilean poet, Gabriela Mistral, was invited by the minister of

culture, Jose Vasconcelos, to come to Mexico in order to secure the gains made during

the revolution. Mistral was asked to run one of the government-sponsored vocational

schools that promoted a role for women that adhered to the "model of the revolutionary

family."161 Maternity and being an educated housekeeper were said to be the best way

for women to promote the nationalist fervor that consumed much of Mexican society.

The vocational schools trained women to be good housekeepers within their own

homes and gave them job training as domestic servants so that they could supplement

family income. Patience Schell observes in her essay, "Gender, Class and Anxiety" that:

...while the focus on domesticity in vocational education indicates continuity with

Porfirian education, the rationale behind these schools had changed. Domestic
education now contributed to the process of "modernizing patriarchy" to fashion
rational, orderly families raising the future workers who would strengthen Mexico
and develop its economy.

Women were now allowed access to the educational system, but only to be taught

how to be better mothers and wives in the name of nationalism. As Blum notes "it was

through motherhood that women could participate in the revolutionary project." The

Mexican government believed that "bettering" mothers "betters" Mexican society.

In her writings for her vocational school, Mistral indicated motherhood is

something that is greater than just the relationship between the mother and child. She

161
Ibid., 114.
162
Ibid.
163
Ibid., 115.
86
taught that all women are mothers in how they participate in their community. Indeed,

motherhood was seen as an imperative in the new revolutionary state. The Mexican

population had suffered greatly due to casualties during the actual fighting, as well as

migration to the United States.

The promotion of motherhood continued the justification for the paternalistic

paradigm of keeping women in the home and away from the public sphere. Women were

given more rights, but these rights were often contingent on their choice to be mothers.

The public outcry against Mistral's vocational school when one of the teachers discussed

the importance of using birth control is an example of this point.165 The idea of a woman

controlling when and if she would reproduce was not something that many were ready to

accept. It reveals the complexity of the gender issues at stake in Mexican society.

Throughout her career, one of Izquierdo's re-occurring images was that of the

mother and child. As evidenced in her radio interviews, and in her imagery, Izquierdo

took a stance similar to the government's nationalistic definition that motherhood was the

most important job a woman can do for her family.

Izquierdo's images of maternity often resemble the Christian image of the Virgin

and Childan icon that has existed since early Christianity. In terms of style these

portraits often reflect the folkloric. It is also interesting to note that men are once again

absent. There are no fathers in these images. Such a choice points to a trajectory in these

paintings that is purposefully about the experience of women as mothers in a sphere

separate from the male public sphere. While the image of mother and child is obviously

Ibid., 122.
87
a part of the art historical cannon, I interpret Izquierdo's repeated use as away in which to

restore a female presence in her culture. Thus, she once again uses the canonical genre

to achieve a specific strategy as we saw in her early portrait of the nude woman in

Chapter Two.

Izquierdo produced a constellation of imagery that hints at the nuances of ever-

changing definitions of motherhood and that at the same time confirms motherhood as

one of Mexico's most important cultural concepts. As Jose Maria Vigil wrote in the

nineteenth century, "Woman in Mexico is, literally, the angel of the house, of that

sanctuary which has not been penetrated by those theories harmful to family which is the

most solid keystone of social edifice."166 Even after the revolution this definition of

motherhood held meaning. In the following paintings I will demonstrate how Izquierdo

was in fact contemplating where these evolving cultural definitions of motherhood fit

within her county's new landscape.

In her 1943 painting, Laprimavera (Springtime)(1943), Izquierdo suggests that

the image of motherhood in Mexican society, for the most part, was shifting from a

concept controlled by the Catholic Church to one that the Mexican government co-opted

in order to impose its vision upon a large portion of the population. Izquierdo's

Virgin/mother is a pliable image that is unexpectedly adaptable.

In La Primavera, Izquierdo paints a woman who resembles herself holding a

naked infant boy in her arms. The baby holds a stem of white flowers in his right hand

while his left hand reaches under the mother's chin as if to pull off a mask that is the

woman's face. The image of the child pulling off the mask of its mother likely serves as

166
Greeley, 58.
88
a metaphor for the changing roles of women as mothers, as well as their relationship with

the Catholic Church.

The image overtly supports the Catholic Church as it echoes the classic

characteristic pose of the Virgin and Child. Pious sentiment is evident in the serene

expression of both the mother and child. The Virgin's red tunic duplicates the proverbial

clothing that is seen in depictions of the Virgin. On her head is a gold mantel that often

replaced the Virgin's blue headdress. The white lily in the child's hand is a frequent

component of Virgin/Child paintings, symbolizing peace and purity. At the heart of the

painting is its moving tribute to both motherhood and the Catholic faith.

What is interesting about the painting is its ambiguity. Izquierdo gives us what

seems like an iconic celebration of both religious purity and the joys of motherhood, but

the child is beginning to pull off the mother/Virgin's face. This implies that all is not

stable. These definitions of motherhood and religious piety are perhaps not as clearly

defined as in the previous decades before the revolution. There were movements at this

time in Mexico among more radical working women and mothers to promote "an image

of a 'New Woman' in the public sphere: radical, anticlerical and political."167 These

women took a similar position to the government in that they wanted to lessen the female

presence within the Catholic Church. Izquierdo does not denounce the Catholic Church

in the image, but instead suggests that its role may be redefining itself as are the

perceptions towards the role of mother. The mask must be removed in order to discover

a truer form of female identity.

Maria Teresa Fernandez-Aceves, "The Struggle between the "Matate" and the
"Molinos de Nixtamel" in Guadalajara, 1920-1940" in Sex,149.
89
 It is important to note in looking at the religious trajectory of this painting that

Izquierdo was not a strict follower of the teachings of the Catholic Church as an adult.

Izquierdo was raised as a child in an extremely strict Catholic environment, but as an

adult she only periodically attended church. According to her daughter she respected the

Catholic Church, but followed a religious philosophy that was based more on a spiritual

practice of many different religions, including an interest in Buddhism and Islam. Yet, as

Deffebach points out, Izquierdo is one of the very few avant-garde artists to still use
1AR

religious subject matter in her paintings. Deffebach interprets her use of religious

imagery as a radical way in which to retain a rightful female presence in Mexican visual

culture.169 In addition to the religious tone, the title of La Primavera serves as a reminder

that change is happening and is as unavoidable as the change in seasons. The metaphor of

spring also reminds Mexico that both life and the nation can be renewed through

motherhood.

Many more of Izquierdo's images of a mother with child reflect a similar

religious tone. Often these women are wearing a headdress similar to the virgin as seen

in paintings such as, Mafrew'daJ(Maternity)(1943), Madonna(l943), Invierno (Winter)

(1943) and Primavera (Springtime)(1945). In Invierno, Izquierdo draws a distinct

correlation between the Virgin Mother and maternity by painting the proverbial dove of

peace. In most of these images the background is a stormy sky alluding to the constant

transformations at work. In the peaceful demeanor of her subjects by contrast she reveals

her belief that through all these changes the bond between mother and child will endure.
168
Deffebach, 82.
169
Ibid., 82.
90
 By depicting the Virgin and Christ child as the ultimate parental relationship she

offers an alternative to the government's overt and vigilant attacks against the Catholic

Church and its stance on motherhood.170 Mexico was awash in anticlerical reform

promoted by the government. Izquierdo seems to promote a balance between the

nationalist agenda and how it pertains to motherhood while maintaining the importance

of the Virgin as the ultimate spiritual mother within Mexican Societya female image

that in Izquierdo's mind should not be so quickly destroyed.

While the Mexican government sought to sever any connection between the

church and motherhood, Izquierdo's images communicate the necessity for a potential

compromise. Alan Knight observes that in this time,

... old traditions [were] being pragmatically and selectively invoked to justify new
practices, new allegiances and new policies. Agrarianism is given a Catholic
veneer, radical sentiments are expressed in traditional forms (such as corridos,
popular ballads)... thus the traditional baggage was often the last item to be
171

discarded along the path of "modernization."

Izquierdo upholds the tradition of the Virgin Mother, but as one in the midst of

transformation. In affirming and updating the Virgin Mary iconography, Izquierdo

challenges both the artistic culture around her and the government's anti-clerical

campaign. These subversive images call for a forceful, persistent and powerful role for

women in Mexican society.

In Maternidad, Izquierdo depicts a mother as a crucial player in Mexican

prosperity. She portrays the mother as a central, not a cursory figure, though she is still

tethered to the domestic sphere of motherhood, which Izquierdo shows to be entirely

170
See Knight, "Popular Culture and the Revolutionary State in Mexico, 1910-
1940."
171
Knight, 399.
91
appropriate. Izquierdo's image differs from the muralists' masculine trajectory. In the

painting it is a woman with her child that holds the key to Mexico's progression. There

are no male figures in the painting. The mother stands front and center in the image with

the land behind her. She holds her child in her arms as they both look out at something

on the horizona possible metaphor for Mexico's future. There is a monumentality to

the figure of the mother. She does this by placing her in the center of the canvas with her

body filling the space. She is a muscular woman with her sleeves rolled up as if she has

been working the landseemingly her land. Again, such an image within the context of

Mexican culture at the time is arguably radical. It is a woman whose work on the land is

an integral component of her country's success. While Izquierdo's image affirms the

government's claim that motherhood is important, she extends that vision to countenance

the importance of women to agrarian production. Izquierdo moves beyond the muralists'

restrictive vision of mothers bound to the private sphere of domesticity to a more

progressive view of women as landowners in the public sphere.

Izquierdo continued to paint in many styles, yet in each avenue of creative

expression, one drive remained constanther desire to capture the experience of women

in her culture. She continued to explore an image base that challenged dominant

constructions of a national identity that promoted an essentially masculine trajectory

within Mexico's visual culture. As we will see in the next chapter, it is in the drawings of

her mural project, a commission project that was publicly criticized by Los Tres Grandes

and rescinded by the Mexican government, that she most fully disrupts established

categories. Unfortunately, neither the Mexican art world nor the government was ready

for such a reconstruction of gender on public walls in Mexico City.

92
 CHAPTER 6

IZQUIERDO'S MURAL

The first obstacle that a woman must overcome is the old belief that a woman
belongs in the home with her domestic duties. When she succeeds in convincing
society that she can create, she meets a great wall of incomprehension caused by
the envy or superiority complex of her male colleagues [...] Almost never do
male artists see a woman who paints as just another colleague who is as dedicated
as they are to the same creative labor. No, on the contrary, they see in her an
obstacle, an inferior competitor whom they must attack venomously. (Maria
Izquierdo 1942)

The Mexican mural movement was intended to serve as a unifying force in the

creation of a post-revolutionary ideological system. The movement began under the

Obregon government and was initially headed by Jose Vasconselos. Vasconcelos

encouraged artists both financially and publicly to collaborate in the "re-making of

Mexico."172 The young post-revolutionary state needed something to bind it together.

This public works program supplied the government with a tool that had the potential of

validating its point of view while at the same time sanctifying the gains made after ten

years of bloody revolution. The program initiated a complex visual conversation that

was designed to mend the fragmentation of a culture decimated by civil war. Muralism

was unquestionably the central art form in Mexico in the first decades of the twentieth

Octavio Paz, "Social Realism in Mexico: The Murals of Rivera, Orozco and
Siquieros,"v4m Canada 36 (1979-1980):56.
173
Ibid.
93
century. Artists continued to produce murals through 1968. It is estimated that from

1921 to 1968 there were 1200 murals produced in Mexico.174

The muralist movement would develop in many different directions from 1920-

1940. It created an in depth visual description of Mexican politics in an environment in

which, as historian David Craven aptly observes, it offered a much needed "unified

historical narrative."175 In this public works program, artists explored Mexico's new and

developing post-revolutionary culture. The murals offered a visual public space in which

Mexico's national heritage could be monumentalized. Aztec and Pre-Columbian images

abounded. The murals celebrated agrarian land reform and the Constitution of 1917.

They also celebrated industry and modern technology.

In addition, the public walls often became the catalyst for polemical debates, even

inciting riots, defacement, and in some cases the destruction of images. In the case of

Orozco, the walls became a place to unleash his scathing attack on humanity in general.

Other murals served as a tool that promoted the far left's engagement with communism.

In general, Mexican muralism functioned as a positive example of an art

movement that allowed a profound exploration of history, politics, and cultural identity.

It became the public space for discourse on the various philosophical positions that were

taking hold within Mexican culture. The murals offered the opportunity for these

positions to be explored visually as the new Mexican state worked to define itself. In

Shifra M. Goldman, "Six Women Artists in Mexico," Woman's Art Journal 3

no. 2 (1982): 2.
175
David Craven, Art and Revolution (Yale: Yale University Press, 1993), 60.
94
terms of international artistic success, Mexican muralism is considered one of the most

profound artistic developments of our century.

Yet, with all of its artistic, political and social innovations, Mexican muralism

often failed to move beyond the patriarchal discourse that negatively defined half of its

population. While many of the muralists touted socialist ideals and the importance of

equality, they remained for the most part impervious to the inequities facing women.

My analysis in the previous chapter of the use of the female figure in the muralist

movement illuminates this failure.

In looking at the murals produced during the first half of the twentieth century,

the viewer is immediately struck by the prevalent use of the human form as a means to

communicate particular agendas. The art historian Leonard Folgarait observes that in

terms of a visual expression in Mexico "there is no better container for the ideologies of

its time."176 The post-revolutionary moment was about the survival of the physical body

following the intensity of violence done to it after the revolution. The muralists used the
* 177

body as a way to assume a position of constructive recovery.

In the murals, images of the male body engaged in action predominate while

female bodies are fewer in number. When women are depicted, their role is often one

that connotes a passive position. As previously discussed, the female form often falls

into distinct categories: grieving women, mothers, teachers, vessels for the ills of

humanity, or inactive and allegorical symbols of national and agricultural prosperity. As

Mary Kay Vaughan writes:

Leonard Folgarait, Mural Painting and Social Revolution in Mexico, 1920-
1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 69.
177
Ibid.,7l.
95
 Diego Rivera painted the nation in a patriarchal narrative relying on another tired
trope; women represented fertility and nature; men were the rational conquerors
of nature, the makers of politics, science, technology and finished goods...
[Women were depicted] as corn mothers, flower vendors, gaunt wives of
suffering workers, school teachers and even, in the case of Frida Kahlo, as a red -
shirted revolutionary.178

It is important to consider within the context of this argument how the effect of a

mural on the viewer has a much stronger impact than that of easel painting. The sheer

size of the wall forces a different kind of engagement. Furthermore, the viewing of

this art form constitutes in many ways a public act. Viewers can witness the actual

process of creation. They read about it in their periodicals. They see the scaffolding go

up, the walls prepared for the paint, and then the sketches blown on with chalk. The

images unfold slowly, revealing a narrative, as the different panels are painted. Perhaps

the viewer stops to watch a face, body or the shadow of a hillside spread across the wall.

The viewing public is also attentive of the artist who becomes a well-known figure in the

public eye. Rivera was well aware of the importance of this act. He intentionally wore

overalls while he painted to promote his notion of the "artist as worker," which was a

crucial part of his communist beliefs.

Folgarait correctly observes that murals were created with the intention of
lftl

"making a difference beyond the viewer's aesthetic dimension." Such intent within

this visual artistic moment suggests that one of the purposes of the public works program
17ft

See Franco and Vaughn, Sex. 25.

179
Folgarait, 28.
180
Ibid., 29.
181
Ibid., 32.
96
was to educate and perhaps even to guide the viewer's perception. That said, it must be

noted that the reception of an artwork is difficult to ascertain in that it is varied, complex

and individuals can discern a variety of meanings. But the question of what notions of

gender were being constructed in Mexico at this time, and how they were elaborated in

this very public art program, is worth asking. It is also important to consider, what was at

stake for the government and the artists it hired?

The answer may lie in the challenging position in which the Mexican government

found itself in the 1920s and 30s as it struggled to find its way out of years of oppression

and corruption. The representation of women's bodies was obviously not on the forefront

of issues that needed to be addressed. Fighting to keep corruption out of the government,

dealing with angry hacienda owners who were less than anxious to give up their land to

agrarian reform, and mollifying peons that were demanding basic human rights were the

major tasks of the day. As were peasant revolts, deeply engrained local corruption, the

struggle to educate an illiterate country that had known little else than day to day

survival, alcoholism, widespread disease and poverty and the constant battle against the

powerful influence of the Catholic Church that viewed revolutionary figures as antichrists

and mounted the bloody Cristero revolt.

In looking at the circumstances of Izquierdo's rescinded mural project it becomes

evident that, indeed, there was a strong imperative within Mexico's political hierarchy to

legitimize the patriarchal traditions within the public sphere through the muralist

movement. But, prior to that analysis, it is helpful to examine the work of the few female

muralists in Mexico that preceded Izquierdo to get a better understanding of why

182
Knight, 402.
97
Izquierdo's mural posed such a threat to both the government and Los Tres Grandes at

this time of nation building.

Muralism was an art field dominated by men. By 1969, women had executed less

than 10% of the Mexican murals in existence. As art historian Edward Sullivan observes,

"Muralism equaled powerspecifically male power, and the artists were loath to concede

any of the real or symbolic potency gained by wielding the thick paintbrush and covering

vast spaces of the walls to women."

There were some women artists, however, who fought for a place within this male

dominated field.184 During Izquierdo's lifetime, only seven women were known to have

worked on murals in Mexico. Perhaps the most well known are the Greenwood sisters

from the United States. They worked for several years painting images that contested the

rise of capitalism and fascism and depicted the plight of Mexico's working class. Before

the Greenwoods, women only worked as assistants to male muralists. These included

Robinson and Maxine Albor and the Mexican painter, Isabel Villasefior.

Grace Greenwood was the first woman to paint a mural on the walls of a Mexican

building. The mural was painted on a well-known hotel in Texaco, Mexico. The

government did not commission it, but instead the commission came from the hotel

owner, who wanted to promote the arts community in the city of Texaco. Two wealthy

Edward Sullivan, Mujer en Mexico /Women in Mexico (Monterrey: Museo de

Monterey, 1991): liii.
184
Goldman, 2.
185
01es, 121.

98
American friends of Greenwood who were traveling with her in Mexico also helped to

fund the project.

It is important to note that Grace Greenwood relied heavily on the tutelage of

other artists who were adept in the complicated painting process. This was a common

occurrence in Mexican muralism. This observation bears importance when we later

discuss the government, as well as Rivera and Siqueiros' vocal and public act to sabotage

Izquierdo's mural project. In the case of Greenwood, her patron and friends, the Herbsts,

paid for Paul O'Higgins to come and help Greenwood with the project. He brought with

him Ramon Alva Guadaram who had been Rivera's assistant. The subject of the first

female Mexican mural was the local Sunday market in Texaco.

In 1933-34, Grace and her sister Marion Greenwood along with Ryah Ludin were

commissioned to paint a mural in Morelia, Michoacan, by the prestigious Universidad

Michoacana de San Nicolas de Hidalgo. The murals address the effects of machine

technology on modern times. Because of the precariousness of the political conflicts

between supporters of the governor Lazaro Cardenas and the Catholic Church,

Greenwood refrained from taking a political position in her mural.

During the course of the experience, Marion Greenwood wrote home to vent her

frustration about the entrenched gender hierarchies and the difficulties of being a woman

and working on murals. Both the men and women of the town often heckled her for her

clothing and its lack of femininity. She wrote to Herbst, "This damn place and all the

criticism has made me even more bitter about being a woman. If I was a man everything

would be easier. I want to revenge myself on men, they've all treated me like hell for no

99
God damn reason."186 She later would write, "The Mexican woman has no more

freedom than a harem."187 She was forced to order a smock to cover her pants to keep

the students at the university from gawking.

Greenwood's experience demonstrates the difficulties of women operating in the

public sphere and more specifically participating in Mexico's male dominated muralist

movement. Interestingly, her only visual treatment on the position of women artists in

Mexico may be read in Grace's inclusion of her signature on the skirt of a Mexican

woman folk artist who is grinding pigment. As Oles observes, in his PhD thesis, "Walls

to Paint On," Greenwood draws a "parallel" between the woman in the image and her

work as a woman muralist~"both working for the community for little remuneration."188

Yet, when looking at her oeuvre, Greenwood seldom used the female form as a major

element in her visual vocabulary. Such a choice made her murals acceptable with the

masculine trajectory of the muralist movement.

The United States artist Rhay Ludins was given a commission to paint a mural on

the walls of a museum in Morelia. Again, the trials it took to get the mural started point

to the difficulties of women working in the public sphere. Because she was married to a

Mexican, the government suspended her salary and other funds necessary to produce the

mural because by law the husband was responsible for the financial support of his wife.

It would take four months to convince the government to at least pay for the supplies.

She forged ahead with no pay and before a heckling audience that, again, took offence to

186
Ibid., 121.
187
Ibid., 165.
188
Ibid., 153.
100
a women wearing pants and climbing scaffolding on a governmental building. Ironically

the mayor said to Ludins, " You are free to choose any subject you wish and interpret it

in any form you wish. I want to give you the freedom and opportunity to express

yourself as an artist, an opportunity which your country does not give, especially to
i ko

women." Ludins responded by writing, "I know the truth of that statement as there has

never been an artist without years of experience, reputation, publicity and 'pull' who was

ever commissioned to decorate a wall in a government building and certainly never a

woman."190 The painting was both a celebration of industry in Mexico and its negative

effects on the workers.

Ludins, after completing her mural in Morelia, painted a mural on the new

building of El Nacional newspaper in Mexico City. It is important to note that she

received both support and advice from Rivera on the technical aspects of painting the

mural.

The first three murals by women in Mexico were done by Americans. Oles

contends that not only were Mexican women artists not interested in creating murals but

also that they did not have what it took. American women on the other hand did. He

writes, "It was precisely because of their 'American-bred' independence that the three

artists discussed here were able to achieve the murals they did." ' He continues,

"These three women obtained major commissions in the city of Morelia not just because

they were friends or students of O'Higgens, but because, as American women, they had
189
Ibid., 173.
190
Ibid.,l73.
191
Ibid., 183.
101
come to expect equal treatment and had a drive and determination to complete their

work." To bolster his argument he negates the importance of Aurora Reye's

monumental and historically crucial Ataque a la maestra rural (Attack of the Rural

School Teacher) (1936) depicting a rural schoolteacher being attacked. He explains that

she only painted a "single panel as part of a collective project... and [this panel] can

hardly compare with the vast walls decorated by the Greenwoods and Ludins." He

then implies that she lacked interest and/or ability by stating directly after this quotation

that she did not receive another commission until 1959.

The Reyes mural stands as a profound statement against the violence perpetrated

against female rural schoolteachers in the 1930's. An active and vocal feminist, Reyes

used the mural project as an opportunity to visually protest the women being beaten and

killed during the Cristero Revolt by religious fanatics and mercenaries.194 In the

gruesome image, two male figures brutally attack a female schoolteacher. One grabs her

hair while the other hits her with the butt of his rifle. In the background, children watch

from behind a pole. The mural stands as a scathing indictment of such violence and gives

a voice to rural communities that supported the government's program of socialist

education.

Oles does not take into account the importance of other women muralists that

produced work during and after the Greenwood's stint in Mexico. In 1943, Frida Kahlo

192
Ibid., 192.
193
Ibid., 188.
194
Dina Comisarenco Mirkin, "Aurora Reyes', "Ataque a La Maestra Rural: The
First Mural Created by a Mexican Female Artist," Woman's Art Journal 26 no. 2
(2005/2006) 22.
102
and Fanny Rablel worked together on a mural. Rabel, one of Kahlo's students, worked

under her supervision, as Kahlo was in poor health and too frail to paint the mural. Rabel

later painted five more murals. In 1957, she completed her best-known mural, Survival

of the People, on the walls of the Centra Deportivo Israelita in Mexico City. In addition,

Angelena Beloff, Rina Lazo, Olga Costa, and Esther Luz Guzman all worked on murals

during Izquierdo's lifetime.

In terms of Izquierdo, Oles underestimates the artistic importance of her sketches

for the cancelled mural project. Oles writes, "Admittedly, as the artist's surviving

sketches reveal and as Rivera and Siqueiros and others declare at the time, the would be

mural was of little plastic interest."195 He continues his critique against both Izquierdo

and female Mexican artists by arguing against art historian Edward Sullivan's

observations (quoted earlier) on the difficulty of Mexican women artists breaking into the

male dominated muralist community. Oles responds to Sullivan's assertion by stating

that:

This is one reading of the 1945 controversy involving Izquierdo, though not
altogether accurate. Her mural had been designed for a major public building in
the heart of Mexico City, not for a hotel or school or provincial museum. Had her
proposal been equal to her talents in easel painting and watercolor, it seems
unlikely the contract would have been cancelled.1 6

In his next paragraph he praises the American women for their "decisiveness" and

"boldness." For Greenwood "neither the grind nor the social criticism . . . was enough to

Oles, 189.

Ibid., 191.

103
deter her from continuing to work." He continues his argument in a footnote where he

writes that "no amount of historical recuperation can avoid the fact that comparatively
10R

few women in Mexico achieved successes before the 1950's."

Oles' thesis reflects the continued marginalization of Mexican women artists by

art history critics well into the late twentieth century. His position is ironically indicative

of what Izquierdo faced in her rescinded mural project. His implication that Mexican

women artists did not have the "interest" or "drive" to paint murals ignores the fact that

Izquierdo fought a long, bitter, public and courageous battle for two years in an attempt

to get her mural project back. He also fails to mention that a group of highly achieved

artists and writers publicly came to her defense.

In looking at the preparatory drawings that Izquierdo produced, we can better

understand how these images on a public edifice challenged the mainstream pictorial

rhetoric of the muralists on gender. While a cursory examination of her plans reveals

choices that do not in any way seem radical in nature, a deeper investigation of her visual

strategy reveals her desire to give female and not male a predominant position. In so

doing her images challenge the patriarchal system that for the most part defined Mexican

culture in the first half of the twentieth century.

As previously mentioned, Izquierdo and the Mexican government agreed upon,

"the arts" and "the progress of the city of Mexico" as the themes for her project. The

surviving drawings include the previously discussed painting La tierra, as well as the

97
Ibid.
98
Ibid., 190.

104
later completed La muerte del heroe (The Death of a Hero) (1945). More drawings may

have existed, but it is believed they have been lost or destroyed.199

In one group of drawings, Anteproyecto para los murales de los plafones de la

escalera monumental del Palacio del Departamento (Central) del Distritio

Federal,(l945) Izquierdo designed nine panels that represent the arts. The studies for

this section of the mural are allegorical depictions of women representing music,

painting, literature, sculpture, tragedy, comedy and poetry. In these images she utilized

similar iconographic choices to those made by Rivera in his 1922 mural, Creation at the

Ministry of Education in Mexico City. This is evident in the use of the female body in

somewhat classical clothing to symbolize the artsa custom that has a long tradition in

the history of art. Izquierdo's employment of these conventional and allegorical elements

would likely help her to gain acceptance from a viewing audience. In addition, the

incorporation of an iconography akin to that of Rivera was symptomatic of the work of

many lesser-known muralists. 200 Her decision may have protected her from having her

mural supervised too heavily by Rivera. Previously, the government had hired Rivera to

be in charge of the "aesthetic values"201 of muralists other than Los Tres Grandes.

According to Oles, Rivera used this position of influence to encourage artists to produce

murals that revealed the inherent weaknesses of the capitalist system while celebrating

communist themes.202 In the murals of Mercado Rodriguez, Rivera was hired for just

199
Sullivan, liii.
200
Oles,19.
201
Ibid., 228.
202
Ibid., 235.
105
this purpose. The Greenwoods, although concerned with social injustice, purposely

chose themes that supported Rivera's views in order to retain his support.203 In addition,

neither of the two muralists depicted included women as leading forces in the

revolutionary struggle. The female figures in their images were generally passive,

marginalized figures. They stand on the periphery as victims of their society's inequities.

Izquierdo's allegorical drawings of the arts are at first glance unthreatening. But,

what soon becomes apparent is that her monumental female figures are intensely and

emotionally engaged in the various art forms that they are representing. These are not the

passive female figures that represented the arts in Rivera's Creation. In Rivera's image,

the mural is divided into two sections with a man sitting on one side of the panel and a

woman sitting on the other. On the male side are women symbolizing Fable, Tragedy

and Erotic Poetry; they share the space with Knowledge and Tradition. The women

representing the arts sit passively with their arms in their laps. The shape of their bodies

are slumped and rounded. The image of Erotic Poetry is represented by a blond haired

woman whose rolled up eyes allude to some kind of sexual ecstasy. The other figures

look blankly away or towards the male figure. On the right side of the panel, Rivera

paints female allegorical figures of Dance, Song, Music and Comedy. Music plays the

flute while Dance smiles down on her and claps her hands. Dance is represented by a

woman whose physical form is emphasized by long sensuous lines of her dress. Her

raised arms are static as she poses with limp wrists in a contrived dance-like movement.

Ibid., 273.
106
In looking at both of Rivera's panels, it becomes evident that there is an aura of passivity

among these women representing the arts.

Izquierdo's imagery stands in stark contrast to Rivera's. Her female figures

embody an almost godlike strength. Take for instance La tragedia (Tragedy)(1945).

Here the massive female form steps forcefully forward as she rips off her mask with brute

force. Her legs and arms are large and muscular. The feet are thick and powerful as the

left one pushes away from the ground. Her large right hand gestures as if to dramatically

grab at the tragedy that the body resists. Nowhere is there the passive female form that

occupies Rivera's panels. This is a body in the midst of an unstoppable action. And it is a

female not a male body.

In one of the panels corresponding to Music, the same force is applied to the

female figure. Here the woman is consumed by music that she feels reverberating

throughout her body, creating the same monumental quality as in La tragedia. The

strong legs and buttocks move as if she were heaving herself through space with great

emotion. One arm is raised while the figure's back is propelled backwards as if thrust by

the rhythm. It seems as though the power of the music would cause her to fall to the

ground if it were not for the great strength of her body. In this figure, as in La tragedia,

there is a raw and all consuming relationship between the power of the arts and that of the

female body.

Izquierdo chooses to depict a female painter and sculptress to represent the visual

arts. In the panel of the painter, the artist paints a woman who bears a distinct

resemblance to Izquierdo. In so doing, Izquierdo includes herself directly in the public

sphere. In another panel, a female artist sculpts the legs of a woman and not of a man. In

107
fact, the male gender does not have much of a presence except in the panel that depicts a

music conductor. His back faces us and his body does not communicate the same

forceful energy found in the female figures in the drawing. What Izquierdo has achieved

in this particular public works program is a distinct reversal of the artistic conventions for

the female body and its relationship to action. She also boldly inserts a female presence

in the arts in Mexico.

In the mural designed for the front staircase of the building, she presents the

female figure as a major player in industrial progress. At this time in Mexico the

economy was growing at a steady pace. Industry saw massive growth as factories

multiplied and agricultural exports increased. World War II offered Mexico the

opportunity for industrial growth, and president Manuel Avila Camacho (1940-46) made

industrial progress one of his main agendas. Mexico exported raw material and laborers

to the United States while it also set up factories to make war equipment. By the end of

the war Mexico's exports had almost doubled.

In this image, women are shown working the land and operating machines that

stand as symbols of agricultural and industrial progress. The women contribute as much

as the men in terms of labor. They do not sit passively on the sidelines. They occupy the

foreground of the pictorial space and not just the margins. Men still have an active and

crucial presence. The result is an image that celebrates equality and harmony between

both sexes in the workforce.

In La muerte del heroe, Izquierdo features the heroic and tragic experience of the

death of a Mexican hero. Eleven grieving women and a young girl encircle a covered

body. On the far right a man points to the deceased figure. The image parallels the

108
muralists' iconography of the tragic sacrifices made during times of war. In this case it

may be the death of a soldier from the Second World War. The gestures of the twelve

grieving women communicate the intensity of their suffering. Their arms are in differing

poses of extreme emotional anguish. Arms are raised as if imploring the heavens to end

their suffering, while the other figures hold their heads in their hands as they mourn the

loss of the hero. One woman facing the viewer points to the fallen body as if demanding

justice. There is nothing passive about their suffering. The figures are not marginalized

instead Izquierdo illustrates the tragedy primarily through them. This composition is as

much about the death of the unknown hero as it is about women's active experiences of

such tragedies.

Izquierdo's image is the reverse of that of Rivera in, Burial of a Worker with

Furies (1923) located on the stairway of the Secretaria de Education Publico in Mexico

City. In this image, only men mourn the loss of the worker. Women are represented as

naked furies that fly in the sky. One reclining female figure raises her torso in a pose that

oddly hints at fornication while below her stands a group of grieving men. Women are

represented as nude allegorical figures. They are not depicted as participating in the

mourning of the death of the worker. Women's experience and existence is once again

minimalized.

In looking at Izquierdo's plans for her mural, Progress of the City of Mexico, it

becomes evident that she was defying the muralists' male centric imagery. In her design,

progress is heralded by a woman who stands as a crucial participant. The tired tradition

of relegating women to a marginalized and private sphere is boldly refuted. Instead,

Izquierdo includes women as central to Mexican progress. In so doing, she displaces the

109
narrative of the Mexican post-revolutionary "hero" with that of the Mexican post-

revolutionary "heroine."

Izquierdo divides the image into the past and present. The left side symbolizes

Mexico's Pre-Columbian past. Here an Aztec stands holding a page from the Codex

Mendoza that shows the toponym (place sign) for the Aztec capitol, Tenochtitlan, which

is present day Mexico City. This place sign which is the image of an eagle on a nopal

cactus, signifies the greatness of the Aztec empire. Behind the Aztec is a pyramid that is

a likely a visual reference to the Aztec religious precinct. She also includes the waters of

Lake Texcoco as Tenochititlan was an island on a lake.

Behind the Aztec figure is a maguey plant, which holds a particular importance in

Mexican cultural history. In Aztec mythology, Quetzalcoatl and the goddess, Mayauel,

were attempting to escape from the star demon, Tzitzimine. They disguised themselves

as branches of a tree in order to find protection from the star demon. Tzitsimine

recognized Mayauel and cut her into pieces. Quetzalcoatl buried the pieces of the

goddess in the ground and from that place came the first maguey plant. It was considered

sacred to the Aztecs and from its juice they made the alcoholic beverage, pulque that was

used in many of their rituals. The plant is linked both to the moon and fertility and holds

an important symbolic function in Mexican culture. By including this plant, Izquierdo

may have been alluding to a female presence in the ancient history of Mexico.

On the right side of the mural, Izquierdo depicts the present moment in Mexico

with a woman in the center of the image. In the painting, a Mexican woman stands

holding a large site plan of what is likely the city of Mexico. Its position echoes that of

the Codex that the Aztec figure holds. Behind her is a modern building and a railway

110
signifying industrial progress. At her feet is a man who kneels while holding a rifle

together with the levers of a machine. Directly behind the woman is a tripod with field

survey equipment, a symbol of urban growth of Mexico. The survey device may also be

a way of showing that gender spaces are being re-defined to include women, just as

surveying equipment is used to define land boundaries.

The focal point of the image is that of a woman standing in the center, holding

the plans of the city. Izquierdo surrounds the woman with emblems of industrial

progress, thereby suggesting that progress will require women's public participation.

Although the mural would never don the walls of the Palacio de Departamento Distrito

Federal, Izquierdo managed to leave a record. Her preliminary sketches record the

disruption of the male dominated artistic paradigm of her time. In its place she offered

the tabooed theme of women as leaders of progress.

At this point it is necessary to discuss the quality of the work in the preparatory

drawings and paintings. There are great variations in style and quality. For instance, the

difference between La tierra, and her drawing of the woman holding the plans of Mexico

City, is extreme in regards to both style and quality. La tierra is a finished oil painting

that boasts a fully modeled nude with variations of tone and shadow. Izquierdo's

expertise as a colorist is evident. She uses brown and gold to sculpt the body and then

fuses it with a golden color for the earth. She adds just enough splashes of red to give

contrast.

The sketch of the woman holding the plans is just thata sketch. The lack of

bodily detail and facial expressions suggests that Izquierdo was at the beginning stages of

a drawing. In the center is a portion of the wall that she has yet to design making it

111
obvious that this is in no way a finished product. Greeley writes that, "The composition

lacks the compactness and force of her landscapes, and Izquierdo retreated from claiming

the female figure as it coincided with images of the proletariat as the focal point of her

work."204 She agrees that the image of a woman holding plans is a radical and

subversive choice as it disrupts the male paradigm. She feels that Izquierdo was "herself

unsure of its value." Greeley adds in her footnote that after this Izquierdo focused on

female portraiture and Virgin images. This does not take into consideration Victimas de

la guerra en Rusia (Victims of the Russain War)(1945), Dolor y pobreza (Suffering and

Poverty)(1945), Tragedia en China (Tragedy in China)(1945), La lavandera (The

Laundress)(1945) and China (1945). These were done in the same year as the sketches

for the mural project. Such works indicate that Izquierdo was incorporating the

proletariat in her visual narrative, but as experienced by women. Thus women remain the

focal point. While it is true that in 1946 Izquierdo painted many portraits and images of

the virgin, I would argue that this was due to the fact that her images of portraits and

altars with weeping Virgins were popular in this particular arts community. Such a

choice in subject matter was a way in which she could begin to survive the assault on her

reputation and support herself financially as an artist. It was not because she felt it

necessary to "retreat" from the portrayal of women as leaders in her society.

In Izquierdo's sketches of the arts there is a similar level of quality. These pencil

and paper drawings are rudimentary. They were not finished works of art, but plans in the

embryonic stage. Nor do we have the entire collection of drawings because they were

either lost or destroyed. Further, in looking at Izquierdo's landscapes and images of the

204
Greeley, 59.
112
human figures in her paintings it is obvious that she had the 'talent' to produce quality

works of art, which is clearly why Izquierdo was offered a commission.

On February 19, 1945, Izquierdo signed a contract to paint a mural on the walls of

the central staircase of the Palacio del Departamento Distrito Federal, Mexico City. The

building was home to the capitol district's administrative headquarters. The surface of

the mural was to cover 154.86 square meters: the cost was to be 34,843 pesos. The agreed

upon theme was "7 progreso de la ciudadde Mexico" (The progress of the city of

Mexico), and on the ceiling lamps she was to paint "Las artes en generaV (The arts in

general). Within four months, Izquierdo bought the materials, raised the scaffolding, and

hired assistants to help with the chemical process involved in producing frescos. She also

enlisted a bricklayer who had worked as an assistant to Diego Rivera. In addition, she

made the drawings for the mural as well as the necessary plans for dividing the images

onto a grid.

As she climbed the scaffolding on the first day of the project, the government

official who served as the supervisor and engineer for the project announced that "e/

andamio estd mal construido." (The scaffolding is badly constructed.) Izquierdo

suspended the project and let go of the carpenter. But this began an onslaught of

investigations by officials who were looking for reasons to sabotage her mural. For

instance, she was accused of having cans of paint covered with trash. The government

then stalled with fictitious architectural changes that were to occur on the building,

ostensibly making the mural project an impossibility. Then in October came the final

verdict. The government officials consulted with Rivera, Siqueiros and Governor Xavier

Rojo Gomez. The muralists, together with government officials, determined that
113
Izquierdo was not practiced enough in the art of fresco and that a commission of this

scale on the Palacio's walls was a grave mistake. One critic wrote, "Maria Izquierdo is

not a muralist, she is an outsider in this branch of painting, she does not have the right to

take over functions that do not pertain to her." The art critic, Luis Islas Garcia, wrote a

letter to the governor asking, " Do you actually believe that someone who has not been

able to work out even the minor problems of a portrait's background will be able to figure

out the huge problems of a monumental decoration?" The department used this as

reason to cancel the project and instead suggested a mural on a market wall or school.

Izquierdo found the offer an insult and refused it.

There were some in the arts community that came to her aid, writing open letters

to the public in the arts magazine Esto. They declared that Izquierdo's work was of

national and international value. The poet, Villaurrutia went so far as to publicly

denounce Los Tres Grandes by sarcastically asking, "Tres Grandes Que?" ("What Tres

Grandes?")207 The writer, Margarita Michelena also came to Izquierdo's defense and

wrote an article entitled, "The Gestapo in Painting, or the Terrible Story of the Secret

Junta." In the article she loudly proclaimed her disapproval at what had happened to

Izquierdo. She wrote, " From move to move, intrigue to intrigue, and weakness to

weakness. . . A big injustice has been consummated." For her own part, Izquierdo

205
Lozano, 49.

Sylvia Navarrete, "Maria Izquierdo," in Maria Izquierdo, eds. Lucia Garcia

Noriega and Nieto (Mexico: Centro Cultural, 1988), 93.
207
Ibid.
208
Lozano, 50.
114
challenged the government's decision. In order to prove that she had the artistic ability to

complete the mural, she made two portable panels of La musica and La tragedia. She

announced to the press that the government had treated her unjustly when they rescinded

her contract. She made the panels to prove her capability in the art of fresco including

her ability to do a work of monumental proportions. Unfortunately, the government

stood by its decision. 209

Even before she began painting the mural, Izquierdo fell victim to negative

commentary in the press. While she was working on the drawings for the murals,

newspaper articles spoke out vehemently against the project. Articles were published

that decried the use of public funds to "decorar" (decorate) the public walls, even though

for two decades Los Tres Grandes had enjoyed public and governmental support of such

"decorating." Another article accused government officials of facilitating a "vanidad

principesca " (vanity project).

After the project was cancelled, Izquierdo's career and reputation suffered greatly.

Articles entitled, "Tormenta sobre Maria Izquierdo" (Storm Over Maria Izquierdo) and

"Artist's Scandal" were published. There were even cartoons that ridiculed her position.

Lozano writes that Izquierdo fell victim to a " well orchestrated, systematic campaign

that resulted in the loss of her prestige."211

209
Ibid., 93.

Luis-Martin Lozano, Maria Izquierdo: Una verdadera pasion por el color

(Mexico: Consejo nacional para la clutura y las artes, 2002), 47
Q 4 -j
Greeley makes
Greeley makes <a similar argument in her essay, "Painting Mexican Identities'
Oxford Journal 23.1, 2000
115
 In the 1946 January edition of Nosotros, one author wrote, "Maria Izquierdo is no

muralist. She is a newcomer to the trade and to painting and therefore doesn't have any

right to usurp attributions that do not belong to her."212 The critic Antonio Rodriguez

continued the attack against Izquierdo by lambasting her artistic talents. In the article, he

included the views of other artists who questioned her ability to solve the compositional

problems of the portion of the mural located at the staircase. He sites the conclusion of

Los Tres Grandes that, "She does not possess the least bit of talent necessary to finish a

work of this scope."213

Izquierdo fought against these verbal attacks by writing an article for El Nacional

newspaper entitled, "Maria Izquierdo vs. Los Tres Grandest In the article, she defended

herself against the actions taken against her by the government and Los Tres Grandes.

She wrote that" Los tres llamados grandes" (those three called great) had a monopoly on

mural painting.214 She continued to defend her reputation, and in December of 1945

wrote a letter to the governor demanding that she be compensated for the lost time and

the damage to her reputation as an artist. In the letter, she states that she dared to go to

the press with her article against Los Tres Grandes. For the first time she publicly

vocalized her beliefs that she had kept quiet for years in regards to "M monopolio de la

pintura muraF (a monopoly of the mural painting.) She also brought to the attention of

"Maria Izquierdo no es un muralista! Es una advenediza en este ramo e al

pintura y por lo tanto no tiene ningun derecho a usurpar atribuciones que no le
corresponden!" My translation. Lozano, Una verdadera, 47.
213
"No posee el minimo de las condiciones indispensables para poder llevar a
cabo una obra de tal envergadura." My translation. Ibid., 47.
214
Greeley, 55.

116
the reading public that the big mural projects were being reserved for a handful of male

artists who included Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros.

She stated that these three artists were plotting against her as an artist. Izquierdo hoped

that in going to the press a community of artists would come to her defense, but in the

end, only a few stood by her side.

In looking at the actions of Rivera, Siquieros, the art critics, and the Mexican

government, it is necessary to ask why from the outset she was forced to defend her

project and herself as an artist. Up until the mural incident, Izquierdo's reputation, while

hard won given her gender, was positive. Izquierdo had been exhibiting and producing

art in Mexico City for twenty some years. Her work hung on the walls of Mexico's most

prestigious art galleries. In addition, she was an active voice in the arts community and

had written extensively on the arts in Mexico. She even enjoyed success in the

international circuit. She was the first Mexican woman to have a solo exhibition in New

York City, and to have her work shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She

exhibited in France and Venezuela, while critics from all over the world praised her

work.

For years, Rivera and Siquieros had engaged in public disagreements as to what

muralism should encompass. Rivera, a Trotskyite, held views that clashed with

Siqueiros, who was a vocal supporter of Stalin. In 1945, they found common ground

when they worked with the government to put an end to Izquierdo's project. The result

was a loud and public denunciation of her work. In their actions they intimated what was

215
Ibid., 47.
216
Ibid., 47.
117
not acceptable in the mural movementa women artist depicting female figures as the

main players in a public works project.

Part of their argument was that Izquierdo lacked the experience to execute a

fresco. If this were true, why did they not offer support to help her in the fresco process?

In Mexico, it was often the case that artists adept in fresco painting guided those new to

the medium, as it was not traditionally taught in the art academies. Both Rivera and

Siqueiros helped to teach the mural process to other painters. Obviously they knew,

based on the success she had experienced both in Mexico and internationally, that

Izquierdo was a capable and prolific artist. As previously demonstrated, there were

women that preceded Izquierdo in the execution of murals on the walls of Mexico.

Rivera had supported their work, as had Siqueiros. In fact, Rivera was quoted in the

Washington Post as saying that the Greenwood sisters "were the greatest living women

mural painters."217

Izquierdo's unconventional images on the public walls of a government-building

make evident the problems inherent in the government sponsored muralist program and

the ideological values inscribed therein. The muralists were promoting freedom within

their visual discourse, but were continually constructing images of the female body

within the confining context of a male hierarchy. In making women the central focus in

images not driven by male sexual desire, fear or dominance, Izquierdo exposed the

sexism at work within the arts and her culture. She planned a socio-political statement

that had the potential to upset previous gender assumptions by fusing the nationalist

imperative with the need for women's liberation.

917
Washington Post, April 12, 1936, quoted in Sullivan, li.
118
 Maria Izquierdo's mural project as a whole reveals the stakes were high in her

long fought struggle against the myopic limitations placed on women at this time in

Mexico. The suggestion that Izquierdo lacked the talent to accomplish her project seems

disingenuous. In making monumental, forceful and proactive women the central focus of

her mural she called into question the previous messages and images that permeated the

Mexican muralist movement. The Mexican government made the ultimate paternalistic

gesture in 1945. They brought an end to the project before she could paint her images on

the walls of the Palacio del Departamento Distrito building in Mexico City.

119
 CHAPTER 7

CONCLUSION

I also think that in this governmental period I will have more comprehension and
help, now that the president of the Republic, Sr. don Adolfo Ruiz Cortines, has
promised women the same rights as men in politics and culture. I believe that in
the present no one will suffer the injustice like I did. It seems that now it will not
be a crime to be born a woman. Maria Izquierdo, December 7, 1952

The varying avenues of visual expression found on the canvases of Maria

Izquierdo illuminate what happens when a painter uses the female form as a site for

radical discussion, and how such choices impact the artist and the structural systems that

exist within that artist's culture. The result is an unexpected opportunity for cultural

examination and discussion.

Izquierdo's work makes evident the multifaceted nature of female identity and

experience in the decades following the revolution and the civil war. While it is

impossible to escape critiquing the gendered positions at play, it is crucial to bear in mind

that Mexico's radical break from dictatorship, and its efforts to secure legal rights for its

people are what made it possible for a dialogue to begin in terms of women's rights. The

revolution marked the beginning of a true integration of women into the public sphere.

Maria Izquierdo not only experienced this ideological upheaval, but she also

dared to paint it. She deeply lived the social contradictions of her time. She believed that

motherhood was the most important act of creation, but not the only one. Many of her

paintings are a celebration of family and motherhood. She took issue with feminists, but

120
also demanded sexual equality. She described her paintings as having nothing to do with

the politics of her culture, but her images speak directly to the experience of female

subjugation and to the violence done to women in Mexico during and after the revolution.

She, as had many others, used the female form as a signifier for nature, mother earth, and

fertility and agricultural prosperity, but she also used it to question the uneven effects of

agrarian reform.

Izquierdo assumed women were an integral part of Mexico's new national

identity and used the female form as a central feature of nationalist iconography. The

result is that Izquierdo's work, words and actions throughout her life were a complex

matrix that pushed and pulled in many directions. Her disparate images reflect the hybrid

nature of her experience as a woman artist in post-revolutionary Mexico. She moved

freely within an ever-changing narrative that took into consideration differing positions

regarding gender. The opportunities, conflicts and contradictions of Mexico's new

nationalistic agenda and the status of women therein were born out in the space of her

female figures.

121
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