Maria Izquierdo...Painted The Soul of Mexico

December 05, 2013

Maria Izquierdo...Painted The Soul of Mexico

Alegoría de la libertad (1937)
Acuarela / papel
21 x 26.5 cm

Maria Izquierdo...Painted The Soul of Mexico

By Federico Correa

There are certain select artists that once viewing thier painted image one never forgets. I do not know how or why this phenomena occurs. Perhaps it is magic. Perhaps it is unexplainable.

Mexican painter Maria Cenobia Izquierdo painted poetry. It is magic. Hers is not about the terrible or the horrible that attracts. Hers is about a love that runs deep from within her corazon Mexicano.

I have always admired Maria Izquierdo. Her oeuvre is fecund with the heart and soul of Mexico. Izquierdo's beginnings were humble and not easy. Born in 1902 in San Juan de Los Lagos, which was then a small village in the state of Jalisco, her father died when she was five years old. Izquierdo was subsequently raised by an aunt and grandmother.

Maria Izquierdo's work is amazing. I am attracted to Izquierdo's aesthetics on many levels....mostly those generating from the heart. Unlike the painted publicity stunts of Frida Kahlo, I suppose what attracts me most and what I find most striking in Izquierdo's imagery is her honesty and sensuality along with her subliminal mysticism that lurks in all her work. The thrust of her imagery...her basic matter of thought ...was of the common folk, hardly bourgeoisie. It is this closeness to the earth, the ground she walked on...her immediate spiritual intuition of truths...that shines in her painted image. Most of all, it is her Mexican corazon that celebrates. In a word..... Izquierdo's oeuvre defines MEXICANIDAD.

"small but powerful center of magnetic radiation"

"The Mexican poet, Octavio Paz wrote that the day one writes the real history of Mexican painting of the twentieth century, the name of Maria Izquierdo will be a small but powerful center of magnetic radiation. Vigorous strokes, strong color and texture, and a world of primitivism and dreams - so typically Mexican, yet so universal in expression - are Izquierdo's strength"

In 1948, Izquierdo suffered a paralysis of her right side forcing her to train her left hand. She continued painting. Maria Izquierdo died in Mexico City in 1955.