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“Autorretrato (Self-Portrait)” by Cordelia Urueta (Mexican) - Oil on canvas / 1965 - Museo de Arte Moderno (Mexico City, Mexico) #WomenInArt #CordeliaUrueta #CordeliaUruetaSierra #Urueta #MAMMexico #selfportrait #MexicanArt #WomensArt #WomanArtist #WomenArtists #art #artText #MuseodeArteModerno #MAM
In this vertical canvas, a light-skinned woman (the artist herself) is shown from the waist up against a softly mottled field of tans, rust, and grey. Her short, pale hair frames a high forehead where the paint thins to a milky patch, as if light is washing across her brow. The lines of her face are delicately drawn yet firm: a long, straight nose, closed lips set in a quiet, almost stubborn line, and a strong jaw. Her extremely blue eyes, ringed by fine graphite-like contours, look hauntingly past us, giving her gaze a distant focus. She wears a simple, high-necked garment in muted brown-rose tones that dissolves into the background, so that her head, shoulders, and the backdrop seem carved from the same atmospheric haze. Thin, sketchy marks and scraped layers of paint reveal earlier gestures beneath the surface, emphasizing texture and the slow, searching process of looking at herself over time. Painted when artist Cordelia Urueta was an established figure in Mexican modernism, this self-portrait shows how she shifted from early indigenista figuration toward a more introspective, nearly abstract language of color and line. Rather than surrounding herself with symbols, she lets the charged blue of her eyes and the restless light brown field carry the psychology of the image to suggest alertness, fatigue, and resilience all at once. Born into an intellectual, politically engaged family in Coyoacán, Urueta trained in the Escuelas de Pintura al Aire Libre and later worked abroad in New York and Paris, absorbing avant-garde ideas while remaining committed to Mexican subjects. By the 1960s, she was celebrated as a great colorist and “gran dama del arte abstracto,” using paint to protest injustice, oppression, and silence. Here, the scraped, luminous surface becomes a kind of emotional weather around her face, presenting an artist who has lived through revolution, exile, and recognition, and who now insists on her own presence within a male-dominated art history.
December 6, 2025 at 1:26 AM