One of the most significant Mexican painters of the twentieth century, María Izquierdo (1902-1955) was an internationally recognized modernist. Unlike Frida Kahlo, whose fame was largely posthumous, Izquierdo had more than twenty solo exhibitions during her lifetime and was the first Mexican woman to have a solo show in the United States. An active writer, speaker, and cultural ambassador, Izquierdo centered women in her easel paintings at time when Mexican art was nearly synonymous with heroic male figures and muralism.

“Madona” is from the mature period of Izquierdo’s career, when she skillfully combined muted and vibrant colors, sculptural figures, and surreal backgrounds to make an old art historical subject look new. Affiliated with Los contemporáneos (The Contemporary Ones), a loosely defined group of artists and writers who rejected the notion that art should serve politics, Izquierdo began to incorporate distinctly Mexican imagery into her work by the 1940s, depicting arte popular and modernizing the traditional theme of the Madonna and Child. This composition also relates to self-portraiture, as the important French-Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska commented of Izquierdo’s Madonnas: “to free one’s self is to self-represent like the Madonna with Baby Jesus in her arms. All of María Izquierdo’s virgins display her face and the curvature of her lips. All are powerful, strong, inevitable.”

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