Manuel Rodríguez Lozano

Towards the end of his trip to Mexico City in the summer of 1930, Carl Zigrosser, director of the Weyhe Gallery in New York, visited the studio of Manuel Rodríguez Lozano, where he bought four paintings, including Maternidad (Motherhood), noting in his diary that they were “among the most interesting in Mexico.”…

In the 1920s, Manuel Rodríguez Lozano created fewer than forty paintings, of which the majority remain lost. Apart from an occasional landscape, most are figure studies, either portraits or genre scenes, rendered in bright colors on cardboard, an inexpensive support that testifies to his precarious economic status. In Maternidad, he reveals stylistic devices common to his works of this decade: his soft bodies seem formed from clay, their…poses barely evident beneath thick layers of cloth; facial features are childlike more than pre-Hispanic, with ears, noses, and lips exaggerated for effect. These devices, drawn largely from children’s art, were shared by several of Rodríguez Lozano’s contemporaries, including Jean Charlot and Rufino Tamayo…

At times, there seem as many madonnas in twentieth-century painting as there were Madonnas in the Renaissance: though religious meanings slipped away, the symbolic import of fertility and sacrifice remained. In Rodríguez Lozano’s Maternidad, the kneeling woman nurses a tightly-swaddled infant, a vertical appendage to her pyramidal form. She wears a dark shirt trimmed in delicate lace, a long gray skirt that conceals her lower body, and a rust-red shawl (or rebozo de jaspe, identified by the lighter staccato brushstrokes that represent the weave) over her head, its long, fringed ends hidden behind her back. The artist—following a compositional strategy employed by Diego Rivera—places his subject on a richly-grained wooden floor, set tightly against a rear wall that is rendered in two tones of mottled pink paint. A similar space appears in other paintings of this period, including Desnudo de mujer sentada (Seated Female Nude) (1925; Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico City).

Maternidad is at once replete with specific references to history, anthropology, and popular culture, and an elegant and modernist abstraction of those same references.

— Edited excerpt from James Oles, "Four Mexican Paintings from the Weyhe Gallery: A Ballad of Rediscovery," New York: Schoelkopf Gallery, 2024