La costurera

Date: 1923

Original medium: Pen and ink drawing

Published in:

1. Irradiador 3 (noviembre 1923)

2. Germán List Arzubide, El movimiento estridentista ([Xalapa]: Ediciones Horizonte, 1927), p. 67.

References: Information to be added

Commentary: Méndez’s 1921 drawing La costurera (The Seamstress), is one of his earliest known works. The image demonstrates his life-long interest in portraying workers at their tasks, and although the seamstress bends over her work in an interior space, she is an actor in the political realm, embedded in a social hierarchy. She is not an upper or middle-class woman in a domestic setting and her sewing is not a pastime, but her livelihood. From this time on, Méndez’s work revolved around the representation of the individual or the group in society, acting out political roles in symbolic ways. At this point Méndez was exploring a number of stylistic possibilities, and La costurera manifests the abstract qualities that were soon to be a distinguishing feature of Stridentist art. (Deborah Caplow)

Catalogue record number: 443