Manuel Rodríguez Lozano

Rodríguez Lozano represents the model of a painter who becomes actively involved in other artistic areas of the post-revolutionary Mexico, as his interests included teaching, promoting culture, the theater, music and literature. He taught the Adolfo Best Maugard drawing method and guided the artistic vocation of the ill-fated Abraham Angel, and that of Julio Castellanos; together with Antonieta Rivas Mercado - a very stately lady, heiress of both social and economic position in the Porfirio Díaz era - he founded the Ulises Theater and encouraged the staging of the works of many internationally famous playwrights, composers and choreographers in Mexico. He was able to sorround himself with the Mexican and international elite who appreciated  and valued the climate of artistic rebirth that was going on at that time. This self portrait of the painter in the Blaisten Collection shows a paused and evasive image of himself, in a reflexive pose, slightly spititual; he is parsimonious with color and with the window in the background he accentuates the metaphysical sense of his surroundings. This is an effigy quite different from the anxiety that would be present later in his life, when he was unjustly imprisoned in 1941, as being supposedly responsible for the loss of the engravings of Dürer and Guido Reni when he was in charge of the San Carlos School of Art.