Guillermo Meza

As a young boy, Guillermo Meza helped support his humble family by collecting illustrations from the rotogravure sections of Mexico City newspapers, cutting them up and watching his father color them for resale. The artist later recalled how this exposed him to the masterpieces of Michelangelo and Peter Paul Rubens for the first time. Meza had some formal training at the Escuela Nocturna de Arte para Trabajadores No. 1 in Ixtapalapa, but his early introduction to the healthy, muscular nudes of the European masters was a major influence on his subsequent work, as is evident in Nude Woman and so many other examples of his work of the 1940s. This image of a female bather belongs to one of the oldest traditions in Western painting. Seated on a white sheet and a checked cloth that might represent her garments, the woman rests by a small pool fed by a little waterfall. She clasps her oversized hands under one knee, a position that helps conceal as well as support her body. The angle of her left leg elegantly follows the curves of stone and water behind her. Judging from the stone outcroppings, the setting is harsh and arid rather than lush and tropical, as in Diego Rivera’s paintings of bathers in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. Though her skin is dark, richly worked by the artist using a variety of pigments, her blue eyes and light hair indicate that she is not indigenous. Her delicate, mask-like face, characteristic of Meza’s paintings, further confirms her position as an eternal and international archetype of feminine sensuality.