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Izquierdo painted at least twelve ofrendas between 1940 and 1948. They are populated with toys, sweets, and crafts related to popular Mexican heritage and Catholic occasions. Viernes de Dolores, like her other paintings in this series, faithfully captures the customary contents of Mexican Catholic home altars. The altar is erected on ascending tiers, and the shelves are lined with papel picado, a traditional Mexican craft of hand-cut, brightly colored paper. Local pottery, wares, fruits, and flowers signify the products of the land and the people of Mexico, as they do throughout Mexican post-colonial and modern art. One of Izquierdo's earliest explorations of the cabinet motif came in her Alacena of 1942. Trigo crecido (Growing Wheat), from 1940, presents objects and symbols with distinct local and traditional significance through a transnational modernist vocabulary. Usually grouped with Izquierdo's series of domestic interior tableaux, Trigo crecido was the first home altar that she painted. A late domestic cabinet composition from 1952, La alacena (Viernes de jugueteria ), comes full circle back to Izquierdo s home altars of the previous decade. By titling the work Viernes de jugueteria (Toy Store Friday), Izquierdo playfully connected the painting to the Viernes de Dolores altar series. The composition includes elements typically found in her altars, such as the drawn lace curtains, extinguished candles, toy figurines, and papel picado. Naturaleza viva con huachinango, 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 in 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.

Classified by some as a surrealist painter, María Izquierdo never identified herself as a surrealist. Izquierdo was celebrated as an artist with a genuine understanding of native and rural traditions, and her altar paintings were recognized at the time for "their delightful indigenous ingenuousness." Her naive painterly technique, intended to recall the folk painting of regional artisans, heightened the effect. Still, many of her paintings contain unusual subject matters and interesting juxtapositions. 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. Known for her use of bold, rich, and bright colors, most of Izquierdo's paintings were done using oil paints or watercolor. Although she was and is still often compared to Frida Kahlo because both woman launched their careers at similar times, the two have very individual styles. At the beginning she would paint still life and portraits. She experimented with many different styles and techniques; such as, oil painting, watercolor, still life, and landscape. During her time as Diego Rivera's star pupil, he described her artwork as "proud yet modest". Maria's portraits are mature studies in interpretation, they are stylistically very feminine and unmistakably Mexican. In 1937, reviews of her work began to use words like "primitive" and to define her work as primitive, these comments gained certain regional isolationism. Maria Izquierdo painted a significant number of works with religious themes that fall into a category of imagery, about folk Catholicism or popular art or both. Some representations of popular devotion could be interpreted as religious subjects or as homages to the popular and artisan traditions of Mexico, especially rural Mexico. This category, which is often ambiguous in its intent, is exemplified by María Izquierdo’s Calvario (Calvary) of 1933. Izquierdo painted most of her images from memory. Her friend the poet Margarita Michelena recalled that they often went to the country together, and Izquierdo dedicated herself to just looking. Izquierdo evoked memory in her paintings in two ways. First, she used formal means to create a sense of time past. Prior to 1940 she employed loose brushstrokes and avoided detail. Throughout her life she created paintings that lack the directional light and cast shadows that would suggest a specific time of day. Second, after 1940 she portrayed traditional aspects of Mexican culture that were known to be vanishing, such as coscomates (granaries) and altars to the Virgin of Sorrows. The tradition of making Viernes de Dolores altars began to vanish in the 1940`s. This is precisely the decade in which Izquierdo painted her series of Viernes de Dolores altars.

In the panorama of twentieth-century painting in Mexico, Frida Kahlo is generally thought to stand as the sole woman artist of note. The recent Images of Mexico exhibition (Frankfurt, Vienna, Dallas, 1987-88) showed a group of striking paintings by Maria Izquierdo (1902-55) that announced to a non-Mexican audience the powerful presence of another painter of almost equal stature and originality. The career of this outstanding artist was the subject of a recent ground-breaking exhibition organised by the Centro Cultural/Arte Contemporaneo in Mexico City. Izquierdo's work shares many of the same themes and pre-occupations as that of Kahlo. Her paintings often refer to tragic elements in her life and incorporate the type of dream-like fantasies that are to be found in the work of artists of the Mexican School. The exhibition included 160 works, virtually her entire known wuvre (though there are many more works whose location is unknown). The excellent catalog presents five biographical and interpretive essays, with a complete bibliography, chronology and exhibition history. The vast corpus of photographs of both the artist and her work gives a visual repertory of virtually every known painting, drawing and print. It is an essential addition to the bibliography of modern Mexican painting.

In 1945 Izquierdo became the first woman to be granted a major governmental mural commission, in the central stairwell of the Department of the Federal District government building. In the initial stages of its execution, however, Mexico City's governor revoked the commission due to the interference of Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, who claimed that Izquierdo lacked the necessary experience for such a high profile project. Izquierdo received an enormous amount of critical backlash in the press for speaking out against the idea that woman are treated and disrespected as something else in the work force, but she never backed down from her insistence that she deserved the commission from the mural. Izquierdo debated diligently again the way men have been treating woman as a lower half of the spectrum as woman never gain the true acknowledgment in the work force and more critical in art. Izquierdo had a large debate and talk with a large amount of woman to make people understand woman need more respect and get better grasp of their skills in what they love to do. She says in a article debate "Añadiría una precisión: incluiría entre los intangibles a la subjetividad. Porque todo eso de lo que estamos hablando y la dirección que toma depende de la subjetividad: emociones y procesos cognitivos" (I would add a precision: include between the intangibles to the subjectivity. Because that is what we are all talking about and the direction that we take depends on the subjectivity: emotions and process cognitive). Even though she was a female Mexican artist who painted near the same time as feminist Latin American painters, Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington, Izquierdo did not identify herself as a feminist. A believer that women should have the chance to explore different professional realms, she also held strong to the traditional family roles instilled in her by her aunt and grandmother. Maria criticized feminism and "pseudo-intellectual" women stating that "they think that bragging outloud makes them better [than men]; but deep inside they are still full of old prejudices and are just covering up with theatrical attitudes for their inferiority complex. I think feminists have not conquered anything for humanity, nor for themselves, and instead of helping women grow (who for so many years have been slaves of everything) they get in the way of emancipation." While her painting, The Jewelry Box, sends a satirical message surrounding the roles of woman roles and her work, Alegoría del trabajo (Allegory of Work) does provoke the idea of female oppression. Her 1940 painting, Mis Sobrinas (My Nieces), shows how much she valued family ties and the female obligation to the family. She often depicted females in a variety of social settings and backgrounds, but only painted herself with her family or alone. She was part of the Contemporáneos, they offered alternative depictions of masculinity as well as offered a different representation of women in modern Mexico. A new "chica moderna" or "modern girl" was developing in Mexico. Izquierdo embraced this new image, often seen in the characteristically dressed in modern clothes, lit cigarette in mouth. In association with the Contemporáneos, the group critiqued the specific ideology of masculinity, the warrior hero had been used to define national identity by the Muralists. The Contemporáneos defined alternative concepts of national identity, resisted the notion of the warrior hero and promoted more comprehensive representations of women. The first time Izquierdo was cited on women’s rights was in 1935 during a trip to Guadalajara for the opening of an exhibition of posters by women artists. In response to a question posed by a leftist journalist about the role of women in the revolutionary struggle, she replied: “Above all women must unite and fight together strongly to improve their condition. Women have to cease being luxury objects and transform themselves into a factor within the class struggle; they ought to evolve socially and participate directly in the revolutionary struggle.” This is the only time that Izquierdo argued for group action. Izquierdo's paintings, 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 hinge point for a variety of pictorial explorations.