María Izquierdo

María Izquierdo (October 30, 1902, San Juan de los Lagos – December 2,[1] 1955, Mexico City) was a Mexican painter.[2] She was born in San Juan de los Lagos in the state of Jalisco; her birth name was María Cenobia Izquierdo Gutiérrez.[2] Her father died when she was five years old and she lived with grandparents afterward in small towns of Aguascalientes, Torreón, and Saltillo. She received her first formal training in art at a school in Saltillo at age thirteen.[2] At age fourteen she was compelled to marry a senior army officer, Colonel Cándido Posadas, and she bore three children before her twentieth birthday.[2]

After moving to Mexico City 1927, she divorced her husband and entered the Academy of San Carlos where she studied for a year.[2] Her instructors included Germán Gedovius and Manuel Toussaint. Diego Rivera also taught there and soon recognized Izquierdo's talent.[2] She became the lover of Rufino Tamayo, then an instructor at the academy, and Diego Rivera. For a short time she and Tamayo shared a studio together.[3] He taught her how to use gouache and watercolor techniques.[4] in 1944 she married again to diplomat and painter Raúl Uribe Castille.[5] The pair divorced in 1953.[5] After leaving the academy she relocated to Aguascalientes and then to Saltillo, the capital of Coahuila in northern Mexico.

Her first solo exhibition took place on November 6, 1929, at La Galeria de Arte Moderno del Teatro Nacional, modern day Palacio de Bellas Artes, in Mexico City. Also in 1929 she exhibited in New York City.[3] In November 1930, Izquierdo's work was exhibited at the Art Center, 65 East Fifty-Sixth street, New York, where she became the first Mexican woman to have a solo art exhibition in the United States.[2]

She died in Mexico City in 1955.

Artistic interests

After 1929 Izquierdo began working in woodcuts.[3] Izquierdo stayed true to her Mexican culture by using the landscape and traditions of Mexico as inspirations for her artwork. Her canvases have a primitivist provincial simplicity, inspired by folk devotional art and French painters such as Henri Matisse and Manet. In particularly, they exhibit a "masterly use of colour" and frequently include cupboards, altars, fruit, horses, portraits, and the circus.[4]

References

  1. ^ Dictionary of women artists. Vol. 1, edited by Delia Gaze. Chicago, Ill.: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1997.
  2. ^ a b c d e f g Kristin G. Congdon and Kara Kelley Hallmark (2002). Artists from Latin American Cultures: A Biographical Dictionary. Greenwood Press. pp. 115–117. ISBN 9780313315442. http://books.google.com/?id=h1oeV7vkPQIC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false. Retrieved 2009-05-10. 
  3. ^ a b c Jane Turner, ed. (2000). Encyclopedia of Latin American and Caribbean Art. Macmillan Reference Limited. pp. 358–359. 
  4. ^ a b Leonor Morales (18 January 2006). "María Izquierdo". Grove Art Online (subscription required). Oxford University Press. http://www.oxfordartonline.com/public/;jsessionid=B5BE57691CF86DBB5164C143FFCD9FD7. Retrieved 2009-05-11. 
  5. ^ a b Delia Gaze (1997). Dictionary of Women Artists. Taylor & Francis. pp. 725–726. ISBN 9781884964213. http://books.google.com/?id=6_0Y0PALzQMC. Retrieved 2009-05-11.