This volume documents the first international retrospective of one of Mexico's greatest artists, Maria Izquierdo. Trained privately, as was common for women of good social standing, she was unusual in also studying at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, where she was first a disciple of Diego Rivera and then developed intellectual bonds with Rufino Tamayo. Her work was included with theirs in a 1930 show of Mexican painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 1936, Antonin Artaud visited Mexico seeking "a perfect example of primitive civilizations with a magical spirit", which he found in Izquierdo's paintings.

María Izquierdo (1902–1955) and Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) were the first two Mexican women artists to achieve international recognition. During the height of the Mexican muralist movement, they established successful careers as easel painters and created work that has become an integral part of Mexican modernism. Although the iconic Kahlo is now more famous, the two artists had comparable reputations during their lives. Both were regularly included in major exhibitions of Mexican art, and they were invariably the only women chosen for the most important professional activities and honors. In a deeply informed study that prioritizes critical analysis over biographical interpretation, Nancy Deffebach places Kahlo’s and Izquierdo’s oeuvres in their cultural context, examining the ways in which the artists participated in the national and artistic discourses of postrevolutionary Mexico. Through iconographic analysis of paintings and themes within each artist’s oeuvre, Deffebach discusses how the artists engaged intellectually with the issues and ideas of their era, especially Mexican national identity and the role of women in society. In a time when Mexican artistic and national discourses associated the nation with masculinity, Izquierdo and Kahlo created images of women that deconstructed gender roles, critiqued the status quo, and presented more empowering alternatives for women. Deffebach demonstrates that, paradoxically, Kahlo and Izquierdo became the most successful Mexican women artists of the modernist period while most directly challenging the prevailing ideas about gender and what constitutes important art.

Best known for her engaging portraits and sensuous still lifes, Mexican artist Maria Izquierdo (1902-1955) created a remarkable body of work that is deeply personal and profoundly affecting; yet she has often been overlooked amid the muralists who were her contemporaries.While European modernism was important to Izquierdo, Mexico's traditional culture, popular arts, and rural landscapes provided her with a lifelong source of subjects. Her numerous paintings lovingly depict the foods and hand-crafted objects used in popular ritual and devotion. In her later life, she produced a number of hauntingly surreal compositions that show vibrant tableaux of typically Mexican foods before barren, somber-hued landscapes with unusually deep perspectives.This book, based on the first comprehensive presentation of her oeuvre in New York, confirms Izquierdo's place in the history of Mexican art. In addition to bringing together some sixty outstanding paintings and works on paper by the artist, the book features three essays on her life and work: curator Elizabeth Ferrer presents an overview of Izquierdo's oeuvre; art historian Olivier Debroise analyzes the artistic relationship between Izquierdo and her mentor Rufino Tamayo, and Elena Poniatowski explores Izquierdo's position as a woman in the Mexican art world.

Marta Traba, one of Latin America's most controversial art critics, examines the works of over 1,000 artists from the first 80 years of the 20th century. This book is an indispensable reference for anyone interested in studying the evolution of Latin American art.

The self-portraits of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo are renowned for their dream-like quality and emotional intensity. A passionate woman endowed with an indomitable spirit, Kahlo overcame injury and personal hardship to become one of the world's most important female artists. Celebrated by the surrealists in her own lifetime, she has attained cult-like status both for her extraordinary art and her tempestuous love-life with her husband, Diego Rivera, Mexico's most prominent modern painter. An outstanding selection of paintings by Kahlo and Rivera form the core of this catalogue, which accompanies the National Gallery of Australia's exhibition. Jacques Gelman, the Russian emigre film producer, and his wife, Natasha, built up their collection over many years of acquaintance and collaboration with Mexico's greatest creative artists. It is now widely regarded as the most significant private holding of twentieth century American art.

Philippa Levine is the Mary Helen Thompson Centennial Professor in the Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin. Her books include Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire, and The British Empire, Sunrise to Sunset. --

This intriguing study of Mexico's participation in world's fairs from 1889 to 1929 explores Mexico's self-presentation at these fairs as a reflection of the country's drive toward nationalization and a modernized image. Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo contrasts Mexico's presence at the 1889 Paris fair—where its display was the largest and most expensive Mexico has ever mounted—with Mexico's presence after the 1910 Mexican Revolution at fairs in Rio de Janeiro in 1922 and Seville in 1929. Rather than seeing the revolution as a sharp break, Tenorio-Trillo points to important continuities between the pre- and post-revolution periods. He also discusses how, internationally, the character of world's fairs was radically transformed during this time, from the Eiffel Tower prototype, encapsulating a wondrous symbolic universe, to the Disneyland model of commodified entertainment. Drawing on cultural, intellectual, urban, literary, social, and art histories, Tenorio-Trillo's thorough and imaginative study presents a broad cultural history of Mexico from 1880 to 1930, set within the context of the origins of Western nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and modernism. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1997.