Izquierdo features in the 2024 Venice Biennale’s “Foreigners Everywhere” exhibition curated by Adriano Pedrosa, and she was the subject of the first monographic exhibition by a Mexican woman artist in New York. Near the end of 1930, Frances Flynn Paine, an entrepreneur and enthusiastic promoter of Mexican art, organized a show at The Art Center in Manhattan, where she was director. At the same time, Izquierdo and her then partner Rufino Tamayo were included in “Mexican Arts,” a traveling exhibition (organized by future Museum of Modern Art director René d’Harnoncourt) that began at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and later traveled to 13 other venues in the United States. Izquierdo’s work was also seen in the 1939 MoMA exhibition “Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art.”

Many of Izquierdo’s subjects paralleled those of Kahlo, and both artists helped strengthen the influence of Mexican popular arts. But while Izquierdo has been treated to a number of academic books, essays, and solo shows over the past two decades, there have been no blockbuster exhibitions, no “immersive experience” spectacles, and certainly no feature films starring Salma Hayek. So why is María not as familiar as Frida?

The answer is both simple and complex. At age 14 Izquierdo entered an arranged marriage to a military officer, and soon had three children. A strong-willed individual, she left the marriage and moved to Mexico City, where she began studies at the National Academy of Fine Arts with some of the stars of the contemporary post-Revolutionary art scene, including Diego Rivera—who called Izquierdo “my favorite pupil.”

As a single mother following her four-year relationship with Tamayo, she did not have the archetype of a “strong man” like Rivera (Kahlo’s husband, and the quintessence of Mexican machismo) behind her to burnish her reputation. More than that, Rivera played a notably destructive role in Izquierdo’s career: in the mid-1940s, he and David Alfaro Siqueiros conspired to block her from executing a commission the municipality of Mexico City had awarded her for a city hall mural. Only a few watercolors and pencil drawings of this unexecuted project remain.

After the Mexican Revolution ended in 1920, a complex new phase of culture, with all its messy contours, began. Gone was the almost slavish admiration for French styles in literature, music, art, and fashion that characterized the long dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz (who effectively ruled Mexico from 1877 to 1911, with a short hiatus between 1880 and 1884). The heritage of pre-Hispanic arts and the incorporation of popular subject matter, derived in part from studies of both Indigenous and self-trained artists, were among the stimuli to which Izquierdo and others of her generation responded. Izquierdo worked for the most part on a modest scale, unlike the best-known muralists of the late 1920s through the 1950s: Rivera, Siqueiros, José Clemente Orozco, and numerous others whose art quickly garnered attention well beyond Mexico.

An interest in scenes of smalltown Mexican life and, especially, views of circus performers, defined Izquierdo’s early phase. In these images, mostly small watercolors painted in the 1930s (of which about 45 remain), she concentrates on female horse trainers and tightrope walkers, in tribute to her earliest childhood memories. San Juan de los Lagos, her birthplace, was a center for trade, with a popular annual fair that provided the occasion for itinerant circuses to visit. The appearance of the Virgin Mary now venerated in the Basilica is even said to have occurred after a circus performance in the 1610s, when a young girl with knife wounds was healed by the miraculous apparition.

Izquierdo’s modest artworks might be the antithesis of male artists’ “heroic” historicizing murals and grand figural compositions for the way they depicted female agency and physical feats. One of Izquierdo’s few works in a US collection—White Horsewoman, also known as Circus Bareback Rider (1932), belonging to the Blanton Museum at the University of Texas at Austin—is a fine example of these themes in its depiction of a woman in a white tutu balancing barefoot on the back of a pony, holding a flexible red baton. It also demonstrates the artist’s characteristic use of subdued color, in this case brown, earthy reds, and grayish whites. These were the years when Izquierdo and Tamayo were close both personally and stylistically; Tamayo employed a similar color scheme in many of his ’30s-era paintings, demonstrating the synergy of back-and-forth inspiration (and also belying the clichéd notion of Mexican painting in this period relying on pinks, fuchsias, greens, reds, and other stereotypical “local” colors).

At the same time, Izquierdo was creating still lifes that combined traditional and contemporary elements: Still Life. The Photographic Camera, 1931, depicts a wooden chair of a kind found in working-class homes in Mexico, a guitar, and a ceramic vessel resting on its seat along with a very modern Kodak Brownie camera. The Telephone, another work from the same year, shows a tabletop with a book, an inkwell, and a telephone.

A number of her self-portraits from the 1940s feature Izquierdo clad in long dresses with a classically Mexican shawl (rebozo) draped around her back—a style of fashion that harked back to both Indigenous and Spanish colonial forms of self-display. Izquierdo’s self-portraits almost always present their creator in a somewhat formal, even stilted manner. They are often enigmatic, as if she were striving to present as few clues as possible to her inner life.

In 1936 Izquierdo met Antonin Artaud, the French artist, writer, and sometime member of André Breton’s Surrealist circle, who had arrived in Mexico in January and stayed less than a year. He was determined to investigate what, according to poet and diplomat Octavio Paz, he called the “real Mexico,” and spent time in the northern state of Chihuahua with the Tarahumara Indigenous peoples, with whom he experimented with hallucinogenic drugs such as peyote. Back in Mexico City, Artaud declared his new friend Izquierdo to be the most “indigenous” artist in the country. This was more or less nonsensical, as Izquierdo had no claims to indigeneity, but Artaud, in his fervor to associate anything Mexican with the “primitive,” was moved to define her that way.

Shortly after he returned to France, Artaud organized an exhibition of Izquierdo’s watercolors (most of which have disappeared) at the Galerie van den Berg, in Paris. These activities parallel interactions between Kahlo and Breton, who visited Mexico in 1938 and declared Kahlo to be a true Surrealist. Was Izquierdo a Surrealist as well?

She (like Kahlo) denied such an association, and aligned herself with the Contemporáneos, a group of writers and painters that sought to establish a “non-Mexicanist” avant-garde in arts and letters. In addition, Izquierdo’s paintings and watercolors do not generally demonstrate anything related to the oneiric experiences that characterize the art of many other painters associated with the amorphous Surrealist style. Then again, several of Izquierdo’s most ambitious pieces, including still life compositions that relate to home altars set up as “offerings” prior to Easter, feature compellingly bizarre juxtapositions of everyday objects, with clay statues of angels and the image of the Sorrowful Virgin.

The Izquierdo painting most convincingly related to Surrealism is her last major work, Dream and Premonition (1947). Here, the artist is seen emerging from a window in an adobe house situated in a dreamlike landscape. She holds her own disembodied head, its hair entangled with the branches of trees that grow from an adjacent second window. Tears drop from the head into a boat-shaped basin with a blue cross standing at its center. Headless figures walking next to the house recede into the distance, passing under heads hanging from the tree branches above them. A troubled nighttime sky and a landscape marked by small mounds that resemble graves complete the scene.

Dream and Premonition may be a cri de coeur or an experiment in the Surrealist visual vocabulary, or both. After she finished it, Izquierdo began to experience serious health problems, with the second of two strokes causing her death in 1955. While her art was by no means forgotten, it was more than three decades before it rose to the level of importance it elicited in the late 20th century, beginning with a monumental 1988–89 tribute exhibitionat the Centro Cultural/Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City. The fact that her work had been declared “national patrimony” and therefore was not exportable for sale from Mexico explains, in part, its absence from the international scene. But why is there such renewed interest in Izquierdo’s art now?

Continuing attention to art by women is one obvious answer, as is the ongoing fascination with all permutations of Surrealism—as evidenced by the 2021–22 show “Surrealism Beyond Borders” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Tate Modern that featured Izquierdo’s 1936 watercolor Allegory of Work. I argue, however, that the cause has more to do with contemporary curiosity about the mixing of genres, a general interest in the “unfinished” (a characteristic present in a number of her paintings), and attraction to the deliberate, self-conscious imitation of so-called primitive forms that Izquierdo favored over the academic modes in which she was trained. All of that resulted in a highly sui generis aesthetic effect.

Antonieta Sosa’s 1965 abstraction Visual Chess is included in “Sur moderno: Journeys of Abstraction―The Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Gift.”

THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK, GIFT OF PATRICIA PHELPS DE CISNEROS THROUGH THE LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN FUND IN HONOR OF ARIEL JIMÉNEZ

Edward J. Sullivan is an art historian and deputy director of New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts and professor at the College of Arts and Sciences. He is a scholar of Latin American art, with a focus on Mexican art of the 20th century, Brazilian and Caribbean art, and the region’s diasporas in relation to modern and contemporary Latinx art. He recently curated the exhibition “Brazilian Modern: The Living Art of Roberto Burle Marx” at the New York Botanical Garden. Below, he considers the presence of Latin American and Latinx art in the Museum of Modern Art’s new permanent collection display and the special exhibition “Sur Moderno: Journeys of Abstraction. The Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection.”

[Read other ARTnews reviews of the new MoMA by critic Andrew Russeth, feminist art historian Maura Reilly, and former museum director Olga Viso.]

Alfred H. Barr, MoMA’s founding director, first met Mexican muralist Diego Rivera in Moscow in 1927. Barr had traveled to study avant-garde painting, and Rivera was in town to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Their friendship would result in a major Rivera retrospective at MoMA in 1931 (two years after the museum’s founding) and, eventually, a commitment on the part of MoMA to the arts of Latin America and the Caribbean that has waxed and waned in the decades since.

The 1940s counted as one of the high points in both the collecting and displaying of art from the region. Barr and his colleague Lincoln Kirstein, an early museum trustee and founder of the New York City Ballet, created a distinguished assemblage of painting and other arts from Latin America. (Kirstein’s impact on MoMA was the subject of an exhibition at the museum earlier this year.) Nelson Rockefeller, another trustee, was also instrumental in bolstering MoMA’s affinities with Latin American art.

After the end of World War II, however, the museum placed a renewed emphasis on collecting European art as a way to create a lineage for what art historian Irving Sandler once called the “triumph of American painting.” From that point on, Latin American holdings were mostly relegated to storage for close to 50 years, with the occasional Mexican mural on view but very few of MoMA’s Latin American treasures seeing the light of day.

Things began to change in 1993 with a major survey—“Latin American Artists of the Twentieth Century,” curated by Waldo Rasmussen—and later, in the early 2000s, with the arrival of Venezuelan collector and philanthropist Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, a board member and founder of MoMA’s Latin American and Caribbean Fund. Her 2016 gift of more than 100 modern and contemporary works heralded a definitive change in the way MoMA treated art from south of the U.S. border.

Another critical part of the effort was the establishment in 2006 of an endowed Latin American art curatorship (with support from collector Estrellita Brodsky) that is currently held by Beverly Adams, who joined MoMA from the Blanton Museum in Austin, Texas in September. With developments of the kind, it seemed reasonable in the run-up to MoMA’s reopening to expect that in the “new” and expanded museum’s reconsidered displays of its collection, Latin American art would play a crucial role.

Installation view of the “Out of War” gallery at the new MoMA, where Maria Martins’s bronze sculpture The Impossible, III (foreground) dominates the space, which also includes paintings by Wifredo Lam (The Jungle, 1943, left) and Roberto Matta (Here Sir Fire, Eat!, 1942, right).

ROBERT GERHARDT/©2019 THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

Many people visiting MoMA’s galleries on the fifth floor, which focuses on the 1880s to the 1940s, are there to see Frida Kahlo, whose Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair (1940) is presented in a room shared by Joan Miró, Roberto Matta, and other Surrealist artists from the Spanish-speaking world. Several recent acquisitions are also on view, including a pair brought into the collection in the past two years: Remedios Varo’s The Juggler (The Magician), from 1956, and Leonora Carrington’s 1953 And Then We Saw the Minotaur.

On the fourth floor covering the 1940s to the ’70s, one of the most gratifying new juxtapositions contrasts Matta’s Here Sir Fire, Eat! (1942) with Wifredo Lam’s most famous picture, The Jungle (1943), in a gallery titled “Out of War.” But what dominates the same space is a rarely seen 1946 bronze sculpture by Brazilian artist Maria Martins: The Impossible, III, an intriguing confrontation between two creatures with spiky heads and tentacles seemingly locked in a battle suggesting brutal violence and post-WWII anxiety.

Martins was a well-known figure in U.S. art circles in the ’40s. She had a solo show at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., and, in 1943, exhibited alongside Piet Mondrian at New York’s Valentine Gallery, a hotbed of early 20th-century modernism. Most of her pieces in the latter show sold—while none of Mondrian’s did—and she bought her Dutch counterpart’s now-renowned Broadway Boogie Woogie, which she donated anonymously to MoMA.

Installation view of the 2019 special exhibition “Sur moderno: Journeys of Abstraction―The Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Gift,” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, which pairs Piet Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942–43), left, with Jesús Rafael Soto’s 1956 Doble transparencia (Double Transparency).

HEIDI BOHNENKAMP/©2019 THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

The Mondrian is on view two floors down among other longtime holdings mixed with newer gifts in “Sur Moderno: Journeys of Abstraction. The Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection,” a special exhibition that considers the 2016 Cisneros donation with the aid of other works in the collection. The international language of Constructivism is taken up there by artists from various backgrounds: Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg (both Dutch), Joaquín Torres-García (Uruguay), and Antonieta Sosa, who was born in the U.S. but whose career developed in Venezuela. The inclusion of her splendid geometric painting Visual Chess (1965) amply shows how notions of Constructivism were extended and gained new, vital life beyond Europe.

Since its beginning in the ’70s, the Cisneros Collection has been a legendary repository of artistic expressions in painting, sculpture, and design with a focus on Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and the Cisneros family’s native Venezuela. For much of the past half century, though, curators and scholars of the region have dealt with each country’s distinct arts scenes as wholly independent, eliding any connections that could easily be made.

The exhibition’s curatorial team—Inés Katzenstein, the head of the MoMA’s newly established Cisneros Research Institute; María Amalia García, a guest curator from the University of San Martín in Buenos Aires; and Karen Grimson, a curatorial assistant in MoMA’s drawings and prints department—has made the unorthodox decision to decouple the collection from geographical and chronological categories. This might sound like a simple gesture, but this material has historically been divided into staid classifications for so long that the pleasures and possibilities for learning more about art we thought we knew quite well are nothing less than extraordinary.

Installation view of the 2019 special exhibition “Sur moderno: Journeys of Abstraction―The Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Gift,” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where the Cisneros collection has never looked better.

HEIDI BOHNENKAMP/©2019 THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

The curators reveal the subtleties of complex two- and three-dimensional artworks by dividing them into such categories as “Cuts and Folds,” “Unsteady Optics,” “A Revolution of Limits,” and “A Modern Worldview,” and the groupings make sense to the visitor who takes time to absorb the refinements that the works themselves reward. It is especially compelling to see how art from Latin America looks fully cohesive as one distinctive part of a global whole.

The Cisneros Collection has traveled extensively over the past decade—to São Paulo, Madrid, London, and Los Angeles, to name just a few—but it has never looked better than it does in its arresting installation at MoMA. Unlike the traditional “white cube” displays that have characterized the museum (and many others like it), the curators emphasize the specifically sensual characteristics of much of the art on view by presenting it against a series of undulating walls that call to mind such elements as Oscar Niemeyer’s signature forms in Brasilia, Roberto Burle Marx’s gardens in Brazil and Venezuela, and the performative nature of artwork by Lygia Pape, Lygia Clark, or Hélio Oiticica.

tallation view of the 2019 special exhibition “Sur moderno: Journeys of Abstraction―The Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Gift,” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

HEIDI BOHNENKAMP/©2019 THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

Virtually all of the big names of geometric abstraction and kinetic art are present. Torres-García, often considered the founding father of Constructivism in South America, is represented with several works including the superb 1938 Construction in White and Black. A number of the irregularly shaped canvases on view by Argentinean artists, like Juan Melé and Raúl Lozza, were created in the ’40s—years before American painters such as Ed Clark and Frank Stella employed them in the decade after.

A connecting thread emphasized by certain selections in the MoMA show is that of landmark exhibitions of the mid-20th century, primarily the first few São Paulo Biennials. The first, in 1951, included a major sculptural piece by Max Bill, the Swiss artist who made an impact in Europe but had an immense influence on the surging forms and spatial experiments by a generation of artists throughout Latin America, including both Lygias (Clark and Pape) and the Hungarian-born Argentinean sculptor Gyula Kosice.

As is true of the new MoMA installations in general, “Sur Moderno” pays special attention to women artists of the movements surveyed. Some of them (Clark, Pape, Mira Schendel, Gego) have virtually become household names in the past few years, and they are paired with others whose contributions are yet to be fully explored. For that and more, “Sur Moderno” is a distinguished next chapter in the unfolding story of abstraction in Latin America for which we have the perspicacity of the Cisneros Collection’s founders to thank.

Hervé Télémaque’s two-panel oil painting No Title (The Ugly American), 1962/64, is on view in a gallery titled “From Soup Cans to Flying Saucers” about Pop art at the new MoMA.

THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK

Back in the permanent collection galleries, one is given the evocative if somewhat kitschy title “From Soup Cans to Flying Saucers.” Along with Pop’s towering figures like Andy Warhol and Richard Hamilton, there’s Paris-based Haitian artist Hervé Télémaque, heir to the expressive qualities of his fellow Haitians from the 1940s (such as Hector Hyppolite, whose Congo Queen is displayed upstairs alongside other self-taught artists from the Caribbean and elsewhere). Télémaque also played a major role in the Narrative Figuration movement of ’60s-era Paris through which artists, like their Pop peers, mined the iconography of everyday commercial life for their imagery.

[Read other ARTnews reviews of the new MoMA by critic Andrew Russeth, feminist art historian Maura Reilly, and former museum director Olga Viso.]

The photographic displays throughout MoMA are replete with the work of prominent and lesser-known Latin American artists in gratifyingly large numbers. Miguel Rio Branco (Brazil) and Graciela Iturbide (Mexico) have their own walls, while Horacio Coppola (Argentina), Alberto Greco (Argentina), Graciela Carnevale (Argentina), and Gertrudes Altschul (Brazil) are also present. A generous spread of Ana Mendieta’s six chromogenic 1972 color prints Untitled  (Glass on Body Imprints-Face) is also inspiring to see.

In a room titled “Print, Fold, Send” about art movements that manipulate various forms of circulation—mail, Xerox, email, internet—are two sets of six linocuts by Beatriz González, Zócalo de la comedia (Plinth of Comedy), 1983, at top, and Zócalo de la tragedia (Plinth of Tragedy), 1983, at bottom.

MAXIMILÍANO DURÓN/ARTNEWS

Equally abundant are works of Conceptual art, mail art, and art defined in part by its political engagement or archival context. In a gallery titled “Print, Fold, Send,” the presence of a splendid mail-art work by Eugenio Dittborn (Survivors, 1982) and two complementary projects about political depredations in Colombia in the ’80s by Beatriz González (Plinth of Comedy and Plinth of Tragedy, both 1983) provide wonderful foils for the large vitrine of videos and ephemera by Conceptualists including Eduardo Kac, Clemente Padín, Regina Silveira, Teresa Jardim, Ulíses Carrión, and more. Many of these pieces are gathered from MoMA’s splendid library.

Although this new hang of MoMA is positive in many ways, there are certainly gaps in the Latin American and Caribbean selections. Most glaring is the lack of Latinx artists—those of Latin American descent who have spent the majority of their lives in the U.S. Other than two works by Mendieta, a clock piece by longtime art-world favorite Felix Gonzalez-Torres is the only other Latinx artist given prominent placement.

A room titled “Idea Art” looks at the experiments of Conceptual art during the 1970s. Here, Ana Mendieta’s 1972 Untitled (Glass on Body Imprints—face).

MAXIMILÍANO DURÓN/ARTNEWS

The generation of Latinx artists that came to maturity in New York, L.A., Chicago, El Paso, Phoenix, and elsewhere are nowhere to be found, with the notable omission of Judith F. Baca, Patssi Valdez, Amalia Mesa-Bains, Luis Jimenez, Juan Sanchez, Pepón Osorio, Carmen Lomas Garza, the collective ASCO, and so many others deserving of serious consideration. Some of them are represented in MoMA’s collection by works on paper, but the museum owns few works by them in other media. And when those paper works are displayed—as with a portfolio of screenprints by Daniel Joseph Martinez hidden near an elevator—they can be easy to miss.

The Whitney has been engaged in the mission of exploring the important contributions of these artists, having hired Marcela Guerrero as assistant curator in 2017 to build up the Latinx component of the museum. In several recent symposia at its New York headquarters, the Ford Foundation has stressed the necessity for diversity and inclusion, specifically in museum settings, by looking more carefully at Latinx artists of all generations. Now it’s time—with so many other shows of improvement in different aspects of the museum all around—for MoMA to pay more attention.