María Asúnsolo was an art dealer in mid-twentieth-century Mexico City who inspired her clients and friends to create a remarkable series of portraits of her. Situating the portraits in the tradition of the reclining female nude, artists, art historians, and curators have cast Asúnsolo as a beautiful, inspiring, but ultimately passive muse. In this article, I recontextualize the depictions of Asúnsolo as a series. Rather than focusing on the artists who made these likenesses, I am instead concerned with how the portraits functioned in the community that created them. Importantly, the community Asúnsolo was both a part of and fostered was an alternative to the government-controlled mural commissions that dominated the 1940s. The first section of this paper posits that the portraits imitate patron/dealer portraits from late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Paris. As such, they visualize relationships and connections in the Mexico City art community. The second section explores how the images form part of a cohesive rhetoric supporting the notion of a Modern Mexican Renaissance. The third section analyzes slides of Asúnsolo’s portraits taken in the forties by American documentary photographer Florence Arquin. Arquin’s slides position the dealer next to her portraits and sometimes with the artists who created them—exploring ideas of subject, object, and agency in surprising and refreshing ways. Taken together, the three sections present a more nuanced understanding of the portraits, the artistic community in which they were created, and Asúnsolo as an integral member of that community.
Emily A. Fenichel (Wed,) studied this question.