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Painting Mexican Identities: Nationalism and Gender in the Work of María Izquierdo Author(s): Robin Adèle Greeley Source: Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 23, No. 1 (2000), pp. 53-71 Published by: Oxford University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3600461 Accessed: 23-03-2015 13:53 UTC

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Painting Mexican Identities: Nationalism and Gender in the Work of Maria Izquierdo

Robin Adele Greeley

1. Diego Rivera, exhibition catalogue for Maria

Izquierdo 1929. This paper was presented in its

early stages at the National Association for Chicano Studies (1991) and owes much to the discussion of it there. It has benefited

particularly from the comments of Erika

Naginski, Anne Wagner, T. J. Clark, Arturo Aldama, Evie Lincoln, and Erik Mar.

2. Anderson stresses the printing trade as essential to the consolidation of nationalist sentiment. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso: London, 1983). E. J. Hobsbawm, taking his cue from Ernest Gellner, provides a rather different conceptualization of what constitutes national identity, equating the 'national unit' with the 'political unit'. See E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780.

Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1990), p. 9. But all three -

Anderson, Gellner, and Hobsbawm - are interested primarily in how nationalist discourses cohere, rather than the opposite.

3. A representative sampling might begin with

Siqueiros himself, who insisted that 'there is no

way but ours'. Quoted in Carlos Monsivais, 'Perspectives on the Arts of Mexico', Latin American Art, Fall 1990, p. 25. Edward Lucie- Smith writes: 'From [1922], Muralism became the expression of a new Mexican national consciousness . . '. Lucie-Smith, 'A

Background to Latin American Art', in Art of the Fantastic: Latin America, 1920-1987, exhibition

catalogue (Indianapolis Museum of Art:

Indianapolis, 1987), p. 29. John Coppola writes:

'Perhaps more than any other media or outlet, the murals helped create a sense of national

identity and purpose among Mexicans.'

Coppola, 'Diego Rivera, Of Time and Color', in Diego Rivera, exhibition catalogue (Museum of Latin American Art: Long Beach, 1997), n.p.

Su persona es como su pintura, clasicamente mexicana ... Diego Rivera of Maria Izquierdo1

I

What does it mean to forge a unified body out of groups and individuals with

disparate senses of their own identity? In much recent writing, nationalism has been examined as a process of centralizing power through the active

suppression of individual differences. Writers like Benedict Anderson are

primarily interested in tracking the mustering of energies towards providing a sense of community - however 'imagined' - among otherwise diverse individuals, and only secondarily in the ways in which such attempts either do not achieve hegemony or do so only at the expense of radical shifts in their

ideological makeup.2 In this essay, I shall examine those latter concerns, particularly for what they can tell us about the concept of 'nation' as a process of struggle between competing constituencies and discourses, in which the voice of the periphery not only can be discerned, but also can be perceived as

forcing the centre to shift its position. I am interested in the ways in which closure does not happen, in tracking the fragmentary, heterogeneous aspects of those discourses which nonetheless posit themselves as totalizing, logical, and universal. I am interested in those moments when one version of nationalism can be used to pick apart and expose the continuing thread of (neo)colonialism in another nationalist discourse, especially with regard to gender subordination.

And I am especially interested in how such struggles are manifested in, and formulated through, visual culture. Latin America gives us many instances of culture being fertile ground for developing and maintaining a complex sense of national identity in opposition to centres of power; nationalist culture can be enlisted against imperialism and transnational capitalism, or mobilized in the

perhaps more equivocal struggle against 'internal colonization' as it occurs within nationalist movements themselves. In this essay, I shall explore the role of painting in various struggles over the concept of Mexican nationalism in the 1930s and 40s, after the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920.

Many writers have taken the Muralists, particularly Los Tres Grandes- Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros - to be virtually the sole visual architects of post-revolutionary Mexican national identity, neglecting the rich cultural dynamic of which they were an integral part.3 But in fact, the struggle to articulate a cultural identity in a society which had

experienced not only the impact of colonialism but also the first great social revolution of the twentieth century produced (and continues to do so) a

widely varied set of responses to the issue of Mexicanidad. Images such as Naturaleza viva con huachinango (Fig. 1), painted in 1946 by Maria Izquierdo, countered the Muralists' view of Mexican identity with a vision deeply opposed to it. In contrast to the Muralists' images of human and class struggle, this landscape contains no overt human presence. Human activity is instead

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Robin Adele Greeley

Fig. 1. Maria Izquierdo: Naturaleza viva con huachinango, 1946, oil on canvas, 60 x 75 cm. Private Collection, Mexico City.

manifested in windowless, abandoned buildings and untouched food set out for unknown, unimagined diners - an ironic and absurd display of abundance which only serves to point out the poverty of the surrounding landscape. Human presence is excluded, relegated to marginal existence within an endless, desolate landscape. Overt class struggle, the euphoria of workers'

triumph, and the beauty of indigenous culture- such prominent features of the Muralists' aesthetic programme4 - have here been replaced by a more all-

consuming spiritual desolation which finds its metaphorical counterpart in the

physical devastation of the Mexican countryside. While images such as this seem at first less strident in their advocation of

specific concepts of Mexican-ness than those of the Muralists, they in fact

provided a focal point for those artists and writers attempting to construct a

concept of Mexicanidad radically different from that of the Muralists. In 1944, Pablo Neruda spoke publicly of Izquierdo's work, saying:

4. Mari Carmen Ramirez-Garcia, The Ideology and Politics of the Mexican Mural Movement: 1920-1925 (UMI: Ann Arbor, 1989) provides an excellent examination of the populist politics of the early Mural movement.

5. 'Me gusta saludar tu pintura atravesada de suenio y tierra, tu pintura loca y racial, y por eso grande . . . Te doy la bienvenida, gran pintora de Mexico. En tu lenguaje vivo, sabio e infantil [ . . . ] Descubramos de nuevo nuestros anchos territorios. Libertemos de nuevo neustra America.' Pablo Neruda, quoted in Maria Izquierdo: nacionalismo cultural (Partido Revolucionario Institucional: Mexico City, 1988) pp. 18-19. All translations are mine unless otherwise noted.

I am pleased to salute your painting pierced through with dreams and earth, your painting so tied to its roots, both local and racial, and for that reason great... I bid you welcome, great painter of Mexico. In your living language, wise and childlike . . . [I]et us discover again our wide territories. Let us liberate anew our America ...

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Painting Mexican Identities

6. Rodolfo Ramirez, quoted by Jose Pierre in 'La situacion de Maria Izquierdo en la pintura mexicana', in Maria Izquierdo (Centro Cultural/ Arte Contemporaneo: Mexico City, 1988) p. 25.

7. Jose Pierre, 'La situaci6n de Maria

Izquierdo', p. 25. Other examples which describe Izquierdo in nationalist terms can be found in the catalogue Maria Izquierdo: nacionalismo cultural in the essays by Margarita Michelena, p. 19; Rafael Solana, p. 19; Horacio Quinones, p. 18; or the entire catalogue.

8. Margarita Nelken, 'Bellas Artes: Maria

Izquierdo', in Maria Izquierdo, p. 57.

9. After having signed a contract with Izquierdo for the commission to paint the main stairwell of the Palacio del Gobierno Federal in Mexico

City, the government inexplicably rescinded its offer. By all accounts of the event (with the

exception of Siqueiros'), Izquierdo was the victim of discrimination on the part of Rivera and Siqueiros. Jose Pierre claims outright that Rivera and Siqueiros felt affronted at the

thought of a woman painting a major mural. See Jose Pierre, Maria Izquierdo, pp. 18, 24. In

response to Izquierdo's accusations of a 'secret tribunal' amonst the Muralists to deprive her of the commission, Siqueiros claimed the

following: 'I proposed that in the case of Maria

Izquierdo, as in that of any mural, it should be the painters who had the most experience in the

corresponding style of painting (mural painting) that aided Maria Izquierdo, as with any other

painter, to realize her definitive work.' See 'Alfaro Siqueiros aclara el incidente con Maria

Izquierdo', Excelsior, 25 July 1946, p. 1, 3rd section. Logically, the painters with the 'most

experience' as muralists would have been

Siqueiros himself, Rivera and Orozco. Although Siqueiros was careful to critique Izquierdo's mural proposal solely in terms of her alleged technical inexperience while making no overt mention of the artist's gender or talent, Izquierdo herself had no doubts as to the real issues at stake. 'Los Tres llamados Grandes', she

argued, had a 'monopoly' on mural painting and

deliberately excluded all they deemed deviant from their aims. See 'Maria Izquierdo vs. Los Tres Grandes', El Nacional, Mexico City, 2 October 1947, p. 4, 2nd section, and Arturo Adame Rodriquez, 'Existe Monopolio en la Pintura, Dice Maria Izquierdo', Excelsior, Mexico

City, 13 February 1947, p. 1. As early as 1942 she stated that: 'The first obstacle that a woman

painter 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 also 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.' Quoted in English in

Neruda's language is deliberately nationalist and politicized; it foregrounds those elements which in 1944 would immediately have triggered Mexican nationalist sentiments: race and culture. But it is the seeming oddity of Neruda's move that concerns me: why was it that he and others chose this

body of work, so devoid of those themes of colonialism, class war, and

imperialism foregrounded by the Muralists, so insistent in its sense of desolation - and this artist- a woman from the provinces - as representative of Mexican identity?

From the 1930s to the present, Izquierdo's work has provoked a flood of nationalist acclaim. Neruda is only one of many who enthusiastically, repetitively name Izquierdo 'a Mexican painter, genuinely Mexican'6 or

'perhaps the greatest of all Mexican painters'.7 The consensus invites

explanation: the key to a more thorough understanding of the view of Mexicanidad these pictures offer, I shall argue, is not to separate the paintings from their reception, but rather to examine such opinions as responses to these

particular images, and in turn the images as themselves consciously developed in relation to their reception. Looking at the situation from this angle turns up certain significant points: the painter's status as female proved crucial, as it intertwined with discourses on class and race, to a nationalist discourse meant to undermine the Muralists' public image as socialist champions of Mexican workers and peasants. Importantly, the paintings can also give us insight into how an artist's work developed under such circumstances, at times exceeding the bounds of that same nationalist discourse.

II

Izquierdo was born in 1902 in the rural town of San Juan de los Lagos, Jalisco, into a lower middle-class family of mestizo heritage. She was married young to Candido Posadas, with whom she had three children. In 1923, the family moved to Mexico City, where Izquierdo began to paint as an alternative to domestic life. Soon after, she divorced her husband, took the children, and entered the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes. Diego Rivera, then director of the school, 'discovered' Izquierdo in 1929, declaring her 'the only one' of worth out of all the students. To quote one critic: 'Indignation. Scandal. General Protest.' Students threw buckets of water at her and Izquierdo ran from the school in tears exclaiming 'It seems a crime to be a woman.'8 Rivera, no doubt thoroughly pleased with the fuss, continued his paternalist support of

Izquierdo, arranging an exhibition for her, and introducing her to the international art patrons of France and New York. Izquierdo took energetic advantage of this network of support to carve out a highly visible place within Mexico's artistic circles. She integrated herself into the avant-garde cultural scene of Mexico City most concerned with establishing the country's stature

among the world's leading cultural movements, befriending among others Rufino Tamayo, Xavier Villaurrutia, Jorge Cuesta, as well as Manuel and Lola Alvarez Bravo.

In the paragraph above, I have sketched briefly the fashioning of a career by a strong-willed woman who placed herself solidly within avant-garde circles

surrounding the Mural movement. But the 'patronage' of the Muralists turned out to be double-edged: in 1945, when the Mexican Federal Government commissioned murals from Izquierdo to decorate a major public building, Rivera and Siqueiros vetoed the project, outraged that it had been given to a

young, inexperienced, andfemale artist.9 I bring up this anecdote for two reasons: first, to point to the terms of

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Robin Adele Greeley

exclusion from the Mural movement by its leaders as they orchestrated the

pictorial construction of a national identity. And second, to point to the

typicality of this account of exclusion from the canon as it affected female artists. The documentation of the ways in which women have been kept out of cultural and political practices is large and does not bear repeating here. 1 The

problem I wish to take up is not an exploration of exclusion, but rather a

peculiar history of inclusion, of the fact that in the 1930s and 40s, Izquierdo was chosen as a representative of cultural nationalism in opposition to the Muralists. That is, I want to investigate why and on what terms her exclusion from one type of nationalist discourse (that of the Muralists) resulted directly in her becoming a major figure in another (that of the avant-garde opposed to Los Tres Grandes), and why her identity as female proved crucial to this

negotiation. 'Libertemos de nuevo nuestra America .. .', the passage from Neruda I

quoted above is one of the more evocative in a discourse on Mexican nationalism that focused on the work of Izquierdo and which questioned many of the ideologies concerning national identity that the Muralists helped put into

place.1 Begun in the pages of the magazine Contemporaneos (1928-1931), this discourse challenged the Mural Movement on a number of levels, from its

political rhetoric and use of indigenous culture to its audience and form.12 The

poets and playwrights associated with the magazine rejected the quasi-socialist rhetoric of Siqueiros, Orozco and Rivera, particularly as it became clear that the social ideals for which the revolution had been fought were less and less

upheld by a government which soon ceased to be socialist but which still claimed the Muralists as its main cultural ambassadors. The Contemporaneos claimed that the Muralists' Marxist focus on the working class was detrimental, serving only to pull attention away from the issue of Mexican nationalism. And, while acknowledging that the Muralists had made it possible to turn to indigenous culture as a means of constructing a national identity, they argued that the Muralists were opportunistic in their use of indigenous culture.'3 The Contemporaneos pointed to Izquierdo's work as a potent example of a more 'pure' use of indigenous and popular forms of visual

representation within a modernist framework.'4 All these things were said outright- the clash between Marxist rhetoric of

class struggle and Mexico's need to define a national identity; the use of class rhetoric by artists who were not working class to promote a government which was growing markedly less concerned with those workers and peasants who had put it into power; the eliding of indigenous culture and the 'Indian

question' with class in a way which both obscured and exploited the native

peoples.'5 There was an underside to the critique begun in Contemporaneos, however:

the critique of the way in which a specific ideology of masculinity - that of the warrior hero - had been utilized in large part as the structural framework for the defining of national identity. The Muralists in their representations, their

politics and their practices of art production further entrenched the idea of male virility as the basis for nationhood that had been used to formulate the concept of Mexicanidad at the expense of women and homosexual men since the sixteenth century.16 The Contemporaneos, in their efforts to define alternative concepts of national identity, resisted this notion of the warrior hero, especially as it was equated with the production of socially relevant art and literature, invoking instead the homoerotic, the intuitive, the melancholy, and concentrating on the inner experience of the individual.7

But whereas the Contemporaneos sought to utilize Izquierdo's work to

Raquel Tibol, 'Maria Izquierdo', Latin American

Art, Spring 1989, pp. 23-4.

10. See, for example, Jean Franco, Plotting Women. Gender and Representation in Mexico, (Columbia University Press: New York, 1990) or Anna Macias, Against All Odds: The Feminist Movement in Mexico to 1940, (Greenwood:

Westport, CT, 1982).

11. See Enrique Franco Calvo, 'Xavier Villaurrutia y la crftica de arte', in Rafael Olea Franco and Anthony Stanton (eds.), Los

Contemporaneos en el laberinto de la critica, (Mexico City: El Colegio de Mexico, 1994) p. 130.

12. Contemporaneos showcased writing from the

'grupo sin grupo' which included many of the founders of modern Mexican poetry, from Carlos Pellicer, Xavier Villaurrutia, and Salvador

Novo, to Gilberto Owen and Jaime Torres Bodet. The Contemporaneos advocated a

depoliticized 'pure poetry' that concentrated on the inherent structures of language rather than social issues.

13. The first issue of Contemporaneos (1928) carried an article by Gabriel Garcia Maroto on

Diego Rivera which so infuriated the painter that he harangued the magazine's editors in a

speech given at the National Preparatory School. Garcia's essay set the tone for the face-off between the Contemporaneos and the Muralists; while continually praising Rivera for being a masterful 'tecnico' (p.68), Garcia repeatedly damns the latter's work for succumbing to a 'facile melody . . . in his forgetting of certain fundamental values of the new art [i.e.

contemporary modernism] . . . ' (pp. 70-71).

Garcia argues that, in attending to 'the human sea of his fatherland' (p. 71), Rivera sacrifices true Mexican feeling, leading the spectator to a terrain very far from that which corresponds to a perfect aesthetic valor [and making] of art a

political-social instrument, a mechanical

instrument, mechanizing, unrefined . . . '

(pp. 64-65).

14. Carlos Pellicer was interested in what he saw to be the magical and immortal creative character of indigenous culture, and its

importance for contemporary culture; see Carlos Pellicer, Museos de Tabasco. Guia Critical, (Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia: Mexico City, 1959). Contemporaneos no. 16

(September 1929) showcased Izquierdo's paintings. Xavier Villaurrutia wrote that her

extraordinary talent as a colorist derived from her 'feminine sensuality' and her 'spiritual journey' through the problems of Mexican

painting. Villaurrutia, 'Maria Izquierdo', Time in

Spanish (December 1930), reprinted in Maria

Izquierdo: nacionalismo cultural, p. 46.

15. Jaime Torres Bodet, 'Perspectiva de la literatura mexicana acutal, 1915-1928', Contemporaneos, vol. 2, no. 4, July 1928. The

Contemporaneos' version of indigenismo was, of

course, equally marked ideologically; their

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preference for European (especially French) culture is notorious. See Marc Cheymol, 'El mito de la cultura francesa en los

Contemporeaneos', in Rafael Olea Franco and

Anthony Stanton (eds.), Los Contemporaneos en el laberinto de la critica, (El Colegio de Mexico: Mexico City, 1994).

16. Jean Franco, Plotting Women, p. 101.

17. Enrique Franco Calvo, 'Xavier Villaurrutia', p. 132. Franco Calvo later claims that homosexuality was not a precondition for

joining the Contemporaneos so much as an 'acto de confluencia' that served as a model for a

conceptualization of modernism (p. 134).

18. Raquel Olea, 'Feminism: Modern or Postmodern?' in John Beverley, Jose Oviedo, Michael Arronna (eds.), The Postmodern Debate in Latin America (Duke University Press: Durham, 1995), p. 194.

19. Jean Franco, paraphrased from Plotting Women, p. xii, and 'Beyond Ethnocentrism: Gender, Power, and the Third-World

Intelligentsia', in Cary Nelson and Lawrence

Grossberg (eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (University of Illinois Press: Urbana, 1988), p. 504.

20. Leslie Bethell (ed.), Mexico Since Independence; Everyday Forms of State Formation, (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1991); John Hart, Anarchism and the Mexican

Working Class 1860-1931, (University of Texas: Austin, 1987); John Hart, Revolutionary Mexico, (University of California Press: Berkeley, 1987).

undermine the cultural hegemony of the Muralists and to replace it with their own trajectory, her work refused to fit securely into the role assigned it. In presenting Izquierdo's work as linked more closely to indigenous and popular arts, the Contemporaneos were obliged to pose the 'Indian question' and issues of class in terms of the role of the feminine in the production of national identity in such a way as to reopen the question of Mexican nationalism along lines which were unintentionally subversive. I shall argue that much of her most provocative work resulted from her refusal/inability to fit herself tidily within the Contemporaneos' version of nationalism.

The historical circumstances of Izquierdo's peculiar inclusion into a Mexican nationalist discourse suggest ways of bringing together several sets of discourses too often kept separate: those of Latin America, of feminism, of modernism, and of nationalism. Raquel Olea has stated what seems at once obvious and terribly complex: that Latin America has a markedly different relationship to the formation of a feminist discourse than does the United States or Europe.18 As Jean Franco argues, the terms of feminism as yet rarely account for the role of women in societies 'formed by conquest and colonization', in which the constitution of modem, independent nation-states has relied upon the violent incorporation of whole populations into social structures which those peoples have never been able to view as their own.19 We have learned that it is not enough merely to substitute one form of domination for another. It is not enough, as is fashionable these days for instance, to substitute the 'feminist' Frida Kahlo for her 'machista' husband, without examining the underlying reluctance of First World feminism to address questions of ethnicity and class. The hierarchies of power instituted by the particular configuration of the colonial struggle, in which the centre subordinates manual labour, the indigenous, and the female, need to be re- examined as they affect national discourses as well. Izquierdo's paintings, importantly, give us a deconstruction of 'heroic' Mexican nationalism using the marginalized identity of the female on two distinct levels: (1) the more conventional one of protesting social discrimination against women, and more

intriguingly (2) as a hingepoint for a variety of pictorial explorations. These latter range from paintings which take up an explicitly feminized content-

images of the Virgin, portraits of proletarian women and self-portraits, for

example - to those which posit the feminine as a means of integrating high culture and popular culture in the service of a national identity - as a means of

reexamining the categories of 'craft' versus 'art', 'foreign' versus 'indigenous', or 'domestic' versus 'public' culture, and so on.

III In order better to situate Izquierdo's work, it is useful to backtrack a bit to the

problem of how nationalist discourses instituted after the Mexican Revolution did or did not differ from colonialist discourses, particularly concerning gender subordination. The Revolution, which opened up the field of

specifically Mexican experience as a viable territory for cultural (and political) exploration in the modem era, was a blend of class struggle within Mexican

society and nationalist rejection of foreign military and economic powers. During this period, Mexico faced not only the reality of class conflict but also the problem of constituting itself as a nation in the face of heavy foreign investment and outright military invasion, occurrences which themselves grew out of the country's problematic history as a Spanish colony.20 The struggle to

develop the idea of Mexico as a nation, as an entity which could sustain itself

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Robin Adele Greeley

against foreign domination, involved not only land claims and border disputes, governments and peoples; it also depended on the development of symbolic systems and cultural narratives centred on the indigenous populations which

provided the framework and coercive power necessary to form a coherent, unified body from a diverse group of individuals. As Bruce King points out, undifferentiated notions of 'the people' are often a key component of nationalism:

Nationalism is an urban movement which identifies with the rural areas as a source of authenticity, finding in the "folk the attitudes, beliefs, customs and language to create a sense of national unity among people who have other loyalties. Nationalism aims at ... rejection of cosmopolitan upper classes, intellectuals and others likely to be influenced by foreign ideas.21

The Muralists, particularly Rivera and Siqueiros, loudly proclaimed their investment in indigenous culture, their rejection of European modernism, and their affiliation with the proletariat to signal their Mexican-ness.22 The Mural movement pursued the question of indigenous culture mainly through a version of Marxism which sought to link problems of colonialism with those of class struggle and which mediated Marxism's internationalist focus through the intricate particulars of Mexico's history. The difficulties of laying out the common ground between these issues often led the Muralists to elide the native peoples with the working class. Thus in 1933 Rivera could claim that:

21. Bruce King, The New English Literatures

(Macmillan: London, 1980), p. 42.

22. See, for instance, the 'Manifesto of the Union of Mexican Workers, Technicians, Painters and Sculptors', El Machete (1923), translated in Dawn Ades, Art in Latin America

(The Hayward Gallery: London, 1989), pp. 323-324.

23. Diego Rivera, 'Nationalism and Art', Workers Age, vol. 2, no. 15, June 1933.

24. Jose Maria Vigil, 'La mujer mexicana' in Poetistas mexicanas, pp. lxviii-lxxviii, quoted in

Jean Franco, Plotting Women, pp. 94-95.

The only national bases which the art of America can have are: first, continental and peasant sources; and second, universal and industrial sources. It is indisputable that all art must have profound roots in the soil in which it is produced and the only artistic production which it has on this continent is the Indo-American peasant art which has as magnificent and brilliant a tradition as that of Egyptian or Greco-Latin art. 23

The conceptual contortions Rivera goes through here say perhaps as much about his own love of grand public pronouncements (no matter how

contradictory they might be) as they do about any concrete definition of a Latin American aesthetic programme, but they nevertheless attest to the

necessity felt by the Muralists of focusing on indigenous culture as a defining aspect of Mexican culture.

Similarly, the position of women was crucial to the concept of Mexico as nation. Women were lauded increasingly after independence as mothers of the

country's new leaders and as caretakers of the family and private sphere. Symbolically, women's place was constructed as that territory which remained

separate from the 'impure' worlds of politics and big business, and which was the stable, domestic counterpart to the turmoil of public life. Jose Maria

Vigil's observations, written in the late nineteenth century, remain largely valid even today: ' . . . 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 the social edifice'.24 As the concept of social identity gradually shifted away from the religious towards that of nation, the family was made to carry much of the burden of national identity, and women were given the task of upholding the family. The female was therefore a contested symbol of power, but one whose space was the private sphere and in contradistinction to the masculine space of the public sphere.

This conception of society in binary, masculine-feminine terms, extended after independence to the concept of national identity, was further solidified as such by the revolution. In the famous passage from The Labyrinth of Solitude, Octavio Paz characterizes Mexico's identity in terms of male dominance over the female 'passiveness' that opened the country to foreign invasion. He writes

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25. Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude, trans.

Lysander Kemp (Grove Press: New York, 1961), p. 86.

26. Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude, p. 86.

27. Franco, Plotting Women, p. 131

28. Anna Maclas, Against All Odds. See also 'Feminismo en Mexico: Antecedentes',fem, vol. 8, no. 30, October-November 1983; Angeles Mendieta Alatorre, La mujer en la Revolucion Mexicana (Biblioteca Nacional de Estudios Historicos de la Revolucion Mexicana: Mexico

City, 1961), and Shirlene Ann Soto, The Mexican Woman: A Study of Her Participation in the

Revolution, 1910-1940 (RE Research Associates: Palo Alto, 1979).

29. Rivera's condescending attitude towards art made by or about women can also be seen in his double-edged praise of Frida Kahlo's work: . . it was the first time in the history of art that a woman had expressed with absolutely naked and we might even say calmly ferocious

sincerity those general and particular facts

particular to women'. Quoted in Raquel Tibol, Frida Kahlo: una vida abierta (Editorial Oasis: Mexico City, 1985), p. 96. But it should be

emphasized that Rivera was by no means unusual; in fact he was more open than most to the possibilities of women's participation in the

public realm.

30. This is not to say that the image of woman

drops out of Izquierdo's work; the artist tended, however, to relegate it to portraiture or

religious images of the Virgin rather than to sustain it in conjunction with images of peasants or labourers as did both Siqueiros and Rivera.

of La Malinche, the Amer-indian mistress of Cortes considered a traitor to her

people, and the ambiguous representative of post-Conquest Mexico: 'Her

passivity . .. , open to the outside world, causes her to lose her identity: she is the Chingada. She loses her name; she is no one; she disappears into

nothingness; she is Nothingness. And yet she is the cruel incarnation of the feminine condition.'25 The Mexican male subject, according to Paz, has been constituted as a violent rejection of this shameful mother: ' . . . as the small

boy will not forgive his mother if she abandons him to search for his father, the Mexican people have not forgiven La Malinche for her betrayal'.26 The

problem of Mexican national identity is thus presented largely as a problem of male identity, subordinating female identity continually to a degraded status.

Jean Franco notes that 'in national allegories, women became the territory over which the quest for (male) national identity passed, or, at best . . . the

space of loss and of all that lies outside the male games of rivalry and

revenge'.27 The revolution, despite its rhetoric of women's liberation, did little to change this situation. Instead, it promoted a view of social transformation associated with masculine virility in a way that further

relegated women to secondary status. Despite records, for instance, of active and autonomous participation of women in the struggle,28 the so-called

'progressive' view of women was still to be found in images like those by Rivera in the Ministry of Education which defined women's positions in the

new Mexico as those of helper-comrade or of liberated housewife - that is,

continually secondary to the heroic revolutionary male. Discourses on the

social role of gender differentiation instituted by colonialism continued quite

happily, it seems, into the postcolonial period.

Izquierdo's relationship to the Muralists gives us a point of entry into the

difficulties of disrupting colonialist discourses on gender in the search for a

national pictorial vision. Izquierdo herself began her public career under the

aegis of the Muralists, producing many works within the political and aesthetic

framework established by the Muralists. But the relationship which began as

one between master(s) and student-prodigy soon became one in which the

pictorial languages Izquierdo developed under the Muralists were turned to

different ends, or found to be insufficient altogether. Thus in the late 1930s

and 40s, the stylistic similarities she developed first to one then to another of

the Muralists' visual languages demonstrate, not an attempt to fit her work

within their dominant paradigm, but rather the necessity of engaging in a

public dialogue with the discourse provided by the Muralists in order to state

her differences from it. The sketch for her vetoed mural (Fig. 2), for instance, establishes comparisons similar to those of Rivera's La Raza Hospital mural

(Fig. 3) between Aztec culture and the culture of modern Mexico. Both artists

recognize that the peculiarities of Mexico's position as a former Spanish colony made it ideologically imperative to construct a national identity centred

around the indigenous peoples. Yet it is clear that, while both artists construct

the male as the dominant figure of Mexico's indigenous past, Izquierdo's view

of woman in control of modernism's technological and cultural future is

decidedly not shared by Rivera.29 Izquierdo's allegorical image of a female city

planner never finds its counterpart in the La Raza mural, where women act

only as helpers, never as leaders. Not only did Rivera and Siqueiros find Izquierdo's image of woman too

threatening to allow, but Izquierdo herself seems to have been unsure of its

value. 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.30 Instead, she called painting

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Fig. 2. Marfa Izquierdo: sketch for mural project for Department of the Federal District government building, 1945, gouach, 30 x 41 cm. Private Collection, Mexico City.

the 'realization of the hidden',31 and turned the terms of Mexican cultural nationalism sharply away from the more rhetorical rendition offered by the Muralists, towards a version seemingly disinterested in politics. Her decision to pursue this ideological position, rather than that advocated by the Muralists was, I am convinced, a calculated move to ally herself with those critics who

objected to the Muralists, calling them 'the devourers of walls'32 who had created 'an enormous abscess that has infected all [of Latin America]'.33 Whereas the Muralists constructed a pictorial and verbal discourse in which race was linked to class struggle and a clear call to socialism, both Izquierdo and her critics offered her work as a representation of Mexican identity beyond politics, an image of Mexico and its peoples which touched on some 'essential' more basic than the supposed vagaries of political ideologies. Horacio Quiiiones described Izquierdo's work in these terms:

I have a concept of Mexico which I see expressed in the painting of Marfa Izquierdo ... it is formed by unknown roots of time immemorial: a voice of ancient blood boils at the core of this spirit, mixed confusedly with childhood memories; with restless and vague signs, with sound, color, smell and ambiance: shadows of women, echoes of rustic festivals, fulminating images of the popular aesthetic .. . .34

The aim of this kind of writing is clear: to mark out Izquierdo's painting (and Mexican culture generally) as rooted in something more fundamental than the class struggle fought by Zapata and Pancho Villa, and as uninflected by foreign - European - influence. In opposing the strident socialist politics of the

31. 'El arte es la realizaci6n de lo oculto.'

Izquierdo, quoted by Jose Pierre in Maria

Izquierdo, p. 25. This is very similar to the

Contemporaneos' wish to make visible the invisible. See Vicente Quirarte, 'El coraz6n en los ojos: pintura sonora de los Contemporaneos', in Rafael Olea Franco and

Anthony Stanton (eds.), Los Contemporcneos en el laberinto de la critica (El Colegio de Mexico: Mexico City, 1994), p. 107.

32. 'Los devoradores de paredes.' Margarite Michelena, quoted by Jose Pierre in Maria Izquierdo, p. 18.

33. Marta Traba quoted in Shifra Goldman, Contemporary Mexican Painting in a Time of Change (University of Texas Press: Austin, 1981).

34. Horacio Quifiones, 'Tengo un concepto de Mexico que veo expresado en la pintura de Maria Izquierdo . . . ignotas raices del tiempo inmemorial lo forjan: bulle en el fondo del

espiritu una voz de antigua sangre, mezclada confusamente con recuerdos de la ninez; con

estampas vagas, con sonido, color, olor y ambiente: sombras de mujeres, ecos de fiestas pueblerinas, fulmineas imagenes de la estetica popular . . . ' no date. Quoted in Jose Pierre, Maria Izquierdo, p. 18.

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:'" V.iii? I.- >r r . e v ; j' r ~''r~ ~.'i"":

Fg. 3. Diego Rivera: The History of Medicine in Mexico: the People's Demand for Better Health, 1953, freesco, approx. 7.4 Raza, Mexico City. (Photograph by author. Reproduction authorized by INBA.)

35. The PNR changed its name eventually to the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional), the name it is known by still today. On the

problem of historical accuracy in PRI-supported public art, see Leonard Folgarait, So Farfrom Heaven (Cambridge University Press:

Cambridge, 1987). Folgarait discusses Siqueiros' mural, The March of Humanity (1964-1971), as

reformulating the artist's earlier calls for immediate socialist revolution into an uncritical

acceptance of the PRI regime and its

engagement in market capitalism.

36. Raquel Tibol describes Izquierdo's work as

turning 'away from academic formulas, toward a

primitive ingenuousness; away from reality, toward allegory; away from neoclassic ostentation, toward the crude magnificence of traditional handicrafts'. Tibol, 'Maria Izquierdo', Latin American Art, Spring 1989, p. 23. Olivier Debroise claims that both Izquierdo and Tamayo painted not a 'window open to the world', but rather a world apart, timeless, peopled with

images of things, pure image'. Debroise, 'Maria

Izquierdo', in Maria Izquierdo (Centro Cultural/ Arte Contemporineo: Mexico City, 1988), p. 33. Izquierdo, he writes, 'presents herself as a visionary; she uses painting to unveil her obsessions' (p. 41). He constantly refers to

x 10.8 m. Hospital de la

Muralists, writers like Quifiones proposed not so much a revision of those

politics as much as an eradication from painting of politics altogether, a view which coincided well with the needs of Mexico's ruling class from the mid- 1930s onward. For the governmental representative of that class, the Partido Nacional Revolucionario, any discussion of politics in relation to the Indian

question was highly volatile. Under pressure from the PNR, Mexican

indigenous and popular cultures were recoded on all fronts as containing values which remained intact despite, and separate from, centuries of political turmoil.35

The timelessness of a native and popular culture developed apart from

politics, for example, was a concept read into Izquierdo's images of country circuses and domestic religious altars, a reading which the works themselves do little to undermine.36 Her circus scenes (Fig. 4), although commentaries on worker and peasant life, have nothing in common with Rivera's views of industrious workers finding fulfillment in daily chores; rather they depict the

space of distraction and wonder which constitute both the release from the

mundanity of working life, and the other side of that life in which its tumultuous emotional aspects are addressed as separate from life's everyday necessities. The figures are stiff, the spaces flattened and hierarchized to affect the 'untutored' look of popular works. The open brushwork and rich coloration evoke a sense of spontaneity that critics associated with popular and

contemporary indigenous culture in opposition to the studied rationalism of

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Fig. 4. Maria Izquierdo: Suertes de Circo, 1940, watercolour on paper, 40 x 56 cm. Private collection.

Western culture.37 Her work consciously denies any of the sophistication of the European avant-garde in favour of stylistic ties to Mexican popular imagery.

In providing a curious pictorial intersection between popular life and its more unregimented and depoliticized spiritual side, Izquierdo opens that realm to an interpretation markedly more feminized than that offered by the Muralists. At the same time, however, feminized traditional life is presented, not as socially constructed and therefore open to social change, but as a static

fixity, as a primordial or universal entity unaffected by historical processes. It

pulls public experiences back into the realm of private, miraculous defiances of the laws of the rational world. To detail one visual example: Izquierdo rejects both 'rational' Albertian perspectival and Cubist organizations of space, as did the Muralists, considering them inappropriate for the development of a non-

European, Mexican modernism. Yet her pictorial conception of space also refuses many of the Muralist spatial techniques. She rejects Siqueiros' bold

spatial distortions, whose production by mathematical fusions of architectonic and painterly principles the artist equated with political revolution. Neither does she accept Rivera's historicizing tactics which filter a version of the Aztec codices' hierarchized, non-mimetic space through a strident emphasis on social structures and class antagonisms. The spatial constructions to be found in her

images hark back to Aztec conceptions of space, but as they have been filtered

Izquierdo's 'primitive' or 'naive' style, which he asserts was her clever solution to the problem of having been largely self-taught (p. 39). Lourdes Andrade writes that Izquierdo's 'rural scenes [ . . . evoke for us a world weighed upon by an ancestral heritage, and in which time seems to have stopped'. Andrade, 'Maria

Izquierdo: entre la magia y la conciencia artfstica', Maria Izquierdo, p. 117

37. See previous note.

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Painting Mexican Identities

through centuries of Mexican Catholicism's insistence on the inexplicable, irrational aspects of quotidian existence. Thus, horses 'float' above the heads of humans, immune to the effects of time or gravity, as do the figures in retablos who give evidence of divine interruption of the course of history, changing personal tragedy into spectacular miracle.

Izquierdo's altar scenes perform similar work in recalling popular cultural forms outside the traditional political arena (Fig. 5). They present neither miracle nor anti-miracle; rather, they are openings onto the private,

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Robin Adele Greeley

domestic spaces in which such altars are set up, and refer to that space without any self-conscious distancing from it. All throughout Izquierdo's work, spiritualism is associated with the female as it coincides with the popular and the indigenous. These images mark out similar territory to that version of Mexicanidad offered by the Contemporaneos: the private space devoted not to reason and rationalism, nor to social change, but rather to mysticism, and internal dialogues concerning death, faith and salvation.

Biographical notes on Izquierdo's life stress her rural upbringing and her

indigenous ethnicity as that which give her images of popular traditions their

supposed authenticity. Margarita Michelena writes not untypically of 'her beautiful Indian face - that of an Aztec princess weaver of feathers',38 or we can read Margarita Nelken's description of Izquierdo as 'pure Indian, in body, spirit and art . . .' whose work is 'a pristine indication of the character of her

people and her time'.39 She came from social spaces valorized by the

Contemporaneos as being separate from the 'cultured' spaces associated with

Europe and the United States - poor, country, and female - and although her

living patterns indicate that she rejected those very spaces on a practical level, both she and her critics maintained the fiction of her indigena life as an

ideological support for her work. Despite the fact that she had fled rural Jalisco for cosmopolitan Mexico City, divorced her husband and set herself up as an

independent member of Mexico's avant-garde culture (that is to say, she behaved in a highly non-traditional manner), it is her birthplace and family background which provide her with the authority to represent native culture.

The essence of national identity is thus determined through the life and work of a woman who found that to gain access to a prestigious cultural

identity ('art' as opposed to 'craft') meant endorsing those myths of the child- like, the primitive, the spiritual, and the uncultured anti-European associated

throughout Mexican culture with the female.40 Critics surrounding Izquierdo found it necessary to maintain this fiction - that her origins determined her

identity - in order to perpetuate the fiction concerning their own authentic links to the plebeian against the perceived intellectual elitism of the Muralists.

Timothy Brennan has discussed the conjunction of urban intellectual with

popular cultures in the production of fertile ground for the formation of a national consciousness; such a conjunction involves the elevation of popular experience as legitimate subject matter for the development of a unilaterally coherent national identity (never the reverse: 'abasement' to the level of the

popular).41 His observations do not take into account the effects of gender on this relationship, however. And for the Contemporaneos' generation, the

manipulation of an alliance between concepts of 'female' and concepts of

'indigenous' and 'popular' towards the formation of a national identity was determinant in their promotion of Izquierdo.

That the version of cultural nationalism I am discussing had to be built on some myth of female essence which coincided unproblematically with the

myth of an Indian essence can be seen by comparing the public persona of

Izquierdo with those of Tamayo and Frida Kahlo. Kahlo consistently rejected an unproblematized categorization of herself as a native Mexican woman, making it difficult for her work to be taken up as representing Mexican nationalism. She refused to accentuate her indigenous heritage at the expense of her European background (neither would she do the reverse) - a factor which grated against all contemporary versions of nationalism calling for rejection of Euro-American ties. In My Two Fridas, for instance, she separated bodily her European self from her native self (her father was German and her mother was Mexican), but painted them as linked and as having equal stature.

38. Margarita Michelena, in Maria Izquierdo, p. 20

39. Margarita Nelken quoted by Pierre, 'La situacion de Maria Izquierdo', p. 20.

40. See Jean Franco's argument concerning 'craft' as a category relegated to women and the lower classes. Franco, Plotting Women, p. 99

41. Timothy Brennan, in Homi K. Bhabha (ed.), Nation and Narration (Routledge: London,

1990), p. 52. Brennan also makes interesting points concerning the construction of nationalism by the bourgeoisie as a class-based issue, but which is presented as being 'above' class issues (i.e. outside class struggle).

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Painting Mexican Identities

42. See Franco, Plotting Women, p. 112.

43. Xavier Villaurrutia, 'Rufino Tamayo', El Nuevo Diario (Nicaragua: August 1991).

44. See Julian Gallego, 'Rufino Tamayo, mexicano universal', in Rufino Tamayo (Centro de Arte Reina Sofia: Madrid, 1988).

45. Henry Seldis, 'The Politics of the Palette in Mexico City', Los Angeles Times, 17 March 1974.

Or in Self-Portrait on the Borderline, she depicted herself literally standing on the border between Mexico and the United States, 'rooted' in both cultures.

Additionally, she rejected views of indigenous culture which portrayed it

idealistically as a bulwark against contemporary strife. Her images of herself in

Tejuana dress invoke neither an idyllic escape from the traumas of modernity nor the myths of transcendary (male) heroicism which played so prominent a role in the dominant constructions of Mexican nationalism. Instead she offers

up the body (her body) as continually invaded and tormented by the

technologies of the modern world, and her native clothing as a record of her

pragmatic attempts, successes, failures to come to terms with the complexity of twentieth century Mexico.42 Unlike Kahlo, Izquierdo rarely investigates the

relationships between modernity and the past, or between Euro-American and

indigenous cultures, as they play themselves out across particular, personalized bodies.

Tamayo, like Izquierdo, utilized themes propagated by the Contempor- aneos: solitude, personal anguish, introspection. Like hers, his work became

popular in the late 1930s and 40s, during the post-Cardenas years in which the socialist aims of the Revolution were dropped and the bourgeoisie became

firmly entrenched. This class turned to paintings such as those of Izquierdo and

Tamayo in its search for an art that was 'nationalist' while carrying no overt social messages, and which called for an 'educated' sensibility and nuanced

readings inappropriate to the earlier years of the revolution. Yet Tamayo was brought into the mainstream of the international art

market as an artist who represented the human universal through his

comprehension of the Mexican universal. His version of that universal focused less on popular rituals of daily life than on myths and animal imagery associated with pre-conquest Mexico; Xavier Villaurrutia named him the 'universal Mexican painter' who avoided political themes and 'proselytizing' in order better to concentrate on the 'irreducible qualities' of painting - colour and form. Villaurrutia claimed that it was through Tamayo's investigations of the 'essence' of painting, stripped of contemporary social references, that the artist arrived at expressing the 'spirit of his race'.43 Tamayo himself seconded this opinion, asserting that to paint the essence of the Mexican spirit did not mean offering narratives about native life but rather an involvement with the formal elements and myths of indigenous culture in order to eliminate the 'otherness' of that culture.44

Tamayo not only vehemently rejected those themes of modern Mexican life and history preferred by the Muralists, but also avoided investigations of those

pictorial and social spaces associated with the female which play such a large part in the work of Izquierdo. Unlike Izquierdo, Tamayo's campaign against the political propaganda of the Muralists led him to become not a figure of Mexican nationalism so much as a cultural representative of Mexico tolerable to the wealthy post-World War II international art patron.45 His semi-mystical images of mythic creatures and figures proved safely distanced from both the direct threat (to the bourgeoisie) of the Mexican Revolution, and from any more ambiguous references to contemporary Mexican society's failure to live

up to its revolutionary promises, enough for critics such as Villaurrutia to elaborate comparisons to such European masters as Picasso, Miro, and Braque, and to stress his ties to the post-War New York avant-garde rather than his ties to popular Mexican culture. Izquierdo's work took a markedly different course from this.

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Robin Adele Greeley

IV

Up to this point I have been describing the tailoring of Izquierdo's life and work to fit a particular version of Mexican-ness; that is, the particular terms of its inclusion into the discourse of the Contemporaneos generation, and above all, their refusal of the rhetorical standards of nationalism set by the Muralists. Yet the strategies of refusal I have been describing as they were mapped out across the persona and work of Izquierdo seem themselves merely the flipside of those stereotypes enforced by the Muralists. Izquierdo managed to lay claim to a public identity within Mexico's artistic avant-garde, in spite of its heavy patriarchism, but was able to do so only by embracing patriarchal discourses associating the female with indigenous and folk cultures. The continued difficulties of female artists in breaking through this barrier demonstrates the extreme tenacity of this ideology; this remains the all-too-familiar notion of Culture-as-Male versus Nature/Primitive-as-Female.46 It does not serve fully to explicate the production of the mid-1940s landscapes.

Those landscape paintings - Izquierdo's most powerful and haunting works - gain their strength precisely from their inability (or unwillingness) to fit

46. Kahlo, the only woman to disrupt its tenets to any great degree, was not considered a 'nationalist' painter during this time period on the scale of Los Tres Grandes or even of Izquierdo.

Fig. 6. Marfa Izquierdo: Naturaleza viva, 1946, oil on canvas, 45 x 55 cm. Private collection, Monterrey, Mexico.

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Painting Mexican Identities

47. Olivier Debroise describes this series of landscapes as 'the representation of a world in ruins'. Debroise, 'Maria Izquierdo', p. 41.

themselves smoothly into the stereotypes, from their open reckoning with the ambivalence of that nationalist discourse as it slips too closely towards replicating the stereotypes of colonialism. The deliberate strangeness of the view of Mexico she produced in response to the Contemporaneos' version of cultural nationalism indicates some of the difficulties Izquierdo had in manoeuvring her way through it. In fact, if Naturaleza viva con huachinango (Fig. 1) pictures Mexico circa 1946, we are presented with an image of the country radically out of sync with the positive, laudatory views we find elsewhere. The display of abundance in the foreground, curiously placed out- of-doors, is quite literally out of proportion with the desolate emptiness of the surrounding countryside.47 The literal disjunction becomes a metaphor for a land stripped of both its physical and spiritual resources, in which cultural production still occurs in all its rich and colourful plenitude, but the land which produces it seems to have been exhausted. In Naturaleza viva, also of 1946 (Fig. 6), the tension between abundance and exhaustion, between richness and desolation is reinforced by the exaggerated perspective of the wall

Fig. 7. Maria Izquierdo: Manzanas, 1947, oil on canvas, 100 x 80 cm. Collection Josefina 0. Vda. de Gorostiza.

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Robin Adele Greeley

as it moves toward the horizon, and the abruptness with which it cuts off any chance of exit from this landscape. This extreme spatial distortion is itself

abruptly contradicted by the flatness of the clouds, which in turn resonates with the flatness of the paint. The same spatial wrenchings are even more evident in the painting Manzanas (Fig. 7), in which the sea becomes an odd block of colour preventing the escape of the tiny running figure. Here

additionally, the truncated branches mirror the bared roots of the trees, visually linking the stagnated growth of the countryside with an almost literal

uprootedness. Whereas Tamayo's works offer a release into some myth of a Mexican past

in which European civilization had not yet robbed Amer-indian life and

religion of their regenerative power, Izquierdo offers no such idealized views of history. Although the desolation of the landscape makes it difficult to place the time period exactly, Izquierdo includes occasional markers - telephone poles, salt shakers, utensils - which indicate the time to be the 1930s and 40s, and which ultimately refuse to allow us to separate the view on offer from the historical circumstances of 1940s post-revolutionary Mexico. Unlike Tamayo's images, these are not images of a Mexican past which avoid confronting the

present; rather, they represent a strange circumvention of the usual public image of Mexico in the 40s as a prosperous, economically and spiritually healthy

48 country.4

Izquierdo's refusal to take the path chosen by Tamayo indicates her

willingness to return continually to the problem of the new Mexican nation as one which needed to be addressed not through an obliterating haze of anti- historicism, but rather through visual address to contemporary issues. And, tangentially, her having been 'liberated' from the requirement of depicting an overt socialist politics allowed her to avoid the trap of having forever to

48. In 1952, she titled one such desolate

landscape, Infancia del pais, ('Childhood of the

Country').

Fig. 8. Jose Clemente Orozco: La casa blanca, 1925-7, oil on canvas, 62 x 76 cm. Familia Orozco Valladares; Reproduction authorized by INBA.

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49. See note no. 35 above.

50. We might even read the trees, overpowering the tiny female figure with their stark verticality, as subliminally representing the machismo of previous cultural traditions. Rafael Solano, hinting at this, noted in 1937 that 'man never appears in Maria's painting except as represented by a column or, more valiantly, by a horse'. Quoted by Jose Pierre, 'La situacion de Maria Izquierdo', p. 24. Pierre goes further to say that 'consciously or not, there is here an obvious rejection of the order imposed by man, and more precisely, a rejection of patriarchy. Something which, I imagine, Rivera and Siqueiros intuited in 1945 . . . ' p. 24.

represent the Mexican government as revolutionary, despite that govern- ment's slide into conservatism. This latter issue was the dilemma which frames the late works of both Rivera and Siqueiros,49 and is one which Izquierdo avoids, at least partially, in the refusal of these last paintings to provide an uncritical view of 1940s Mexico. Her work engages not Siqueiros, Rivera, or even Tamayo; it enacts instead a fraught return to, and re-engagement with, that 1920s Muralist discourse which addressed itself to the transformatory violence of the Revolution as it threatened to tip over into chaos - that of Orozco. Izquierdo's use of the tree motif in Manzanas (Fig. 7) re-enacts Orozco's in his painting, La casa blanca (Fig. 8), to shift the reference made

away from the Revolution itself towards a more general reading of post- revolutionary malaise.50 Izquierdo comes into even closer dialogue with Orozco in Desolacion (Fig. 9); in both paintings, human anxiety and terror have been displaced onto the white adobe house.

The strangeness of Izquierdo's landscapes comes in part, I believe, from the

peculiar bind in which she and those intellectuals criticizing the Muralists found themselves: in order to maintain a public voice of opposition, they found it necessary to invoke Izquierdo's gender in relation to her cultural

Fig. 9. Maria Izquierdo: Desolacidn, 1947, oil on canvas, 100 x 80 cm. Private collection, Mexico City.

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Fig. 10. Marfa Izquierdo: Sueino y presentimiento, 1947, oil on canvas, 45 x 60 cm. Private collection, Monterrey, Mexico.

production. Offering the feminine as a sphere of power directly in opposition to the Muralists' evocation of masculine virility proved a profoundly unsettling concept for all concerned, however, and Izquierdo found it necessary to

perform an odd side-stepping of the issue of gender in relation to national

identity. 'Feminine' in her most powerful work is not evoked

straightforwardly through the fact of her gender; nor is it evoked as a utopian allegorical entity in direct opposition to the masculine (as it was, for instance, in her mural proposal). To do either would have been merely to reverse the

gender roles without significantly challenging the underlying social structures. 'Feminine' is evoked instead through reversal and displacement of the terms in

opposition; at her best, Izquierdo uses the fact of her gender not to counter machismo directly, but rather tangentially to open up a reassessment of the 'national' as a continual, multilayered process of identity negotiation.51

What I have done in this essay is track the construction of a national identity in relation to a highly particularized, personal manoeuvring through the various discourses on offer. Izquierdo's image of nationhood gets constructed

against the dominant discourse (that of the Muralists) and in the cracks, as it were, of the depoliticized rhetoric of the Mexican nation into which she was

placed. That is, it matters that the vision Izquierdo paid closest attention to was not that of Rivera, Tamayo, or Siqueiros which avoided the particular in favour of the universal, but that of Orozco, which tried in its own troubled way to

51. Gayatri Spivak notes the necessity of this

type of reversal/displacement of binary oppositions in undermining (neo)colonial gender hierarchies: 'Without this supplementary distancing, a position and its counter-position ... will keep legitimizing each other.' Spivak, In Other Worlds (Routledge: New York, 1988), p. 250.

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52. These two motifs - deracinated trees and

sharply receding walls of houses - are repeated often throughout the works of both Izquierdo and Orozco.

53. Both Raquel Tibol and Olivier Debroise describe Sueino y presentimiento as a premonition of the heart attack Izquierdo suffered a few months after completing the painting. Debroise, 'Maria Izquierdo', p. 53; Tibol, 'Maria

Izquierdo', p. 25.

address the negative side of a very real and dirty revolution in order to bring it into some kind of alignment (albeit an uneasy one) with the Mexican Revolution's utopian goals. The conjunction of bare, uprooted trees with the threatening facade of a white house in Izquierdo's Desolacion is too similar to Orozco's La casa blanca to go unnoticed.52

And it matters as well that this same motif then becomes the setting for Izquierdo's shocking instance of fragmented self-imaging, Suenioy presentimiento (Fig. 10). In this 1947 painting, Izquierdo figures herself into the architecture and landscape, used in Desolacion to represent the devastation of Mexico, in the form of a horrific double self-portrait- the artist holding her own severed head. While in Orozco's La casa blanca the running figures register their terror of a menace approaching them from somewhere just outside the picture frame, in Sueio y presentimiento the trauma is pictured within the work, in visual layers of meaning which reverberate back and forth from the personal to the national: Izquierdo's severed head is visually and metaphorically tied to the deracinated trees floating out of the next window down the length of the building. In addition, the figure of her own decapitated body is repeated alongside the stumps of the trees in such a way as to link the personal fate of the artist to that of her country. These motifs are held together and given focus (both within the painting and through reference to Desolacion and Orozco's La casa blanca) by the stark white walls of the building receding powerfully into the distance.

Pointedly, the critical literature treats this image only as a statement of personal anguish.53 To do so, however, is to relegate the feminine once more to the ineffectual periphery, and to ignore the implications for national identity evidenced by the picture itself. Izquierdo's aims in Suenio y presentimiento are much higher: by calling up a pictorial history of her own grapplings with the vizualization of 1940s Mexico, she forces the feminine into scandalous conjunction with the national.

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 23.1 2000 71

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