Portrait of Eternity

Date

1935

Creator

Portrait of Eternity (Retrato de lo eterno) is one of Álvarez Bravo's photographs of the early 1930s that is distinctly Mexican in its style and imagery. It represents a young woman dressed in a traditional Tehuana native costume. The model for this photograph was Isabel Villaseñor, known to friends like Manuel and Lola Álvarez Bravo by the diminutive nickname Chabela. She was a noted beauty of the day, but she was also a visual artist, poet, musical composer and singer. Villaseñor was a sculptor, having studied with Francisco Díaz de León at the Santiago Rebull Popular Painting School and with the school's founder, Gabriel Fernández Ledesma. She was one of only two women whose work was included in the seminal Mexican Arts exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1930. The following year a solo exhibition of her work was presented at the National Library of Mexico. At that time, Angelina Beloff--the wife of Diego Rivera--described Villaseñor as "a girlfriend of Gabriel (Ledesma)...She was a petite woman with indigenous features. She sang Mexican folk songs beautifully." However, Villaseñor was respected by her post-revolutionary colleagues as an outspoken advocate of the political left. She met Álvarez Bravo when both were working on Eisenstein's ¡Qué viva México! Villaseñor starred as María in the unfinished film. In this photograph, the young woman sits on a wooden floor, leaning against a wall as she brushes her long, luxuriant black hair. In the dark interior, her face is illuminated by sunlight, as she turns her head to look into a small hand mirror. While her eyes are hidden in shade, she gazes at her brightly illuminated face, which appears in profile in a bright silhouette. Her raised arms and hands elegantly bracket and emphasize her delicate features. One can sense the warmth and comfort of the morning sunshine, which gives a temporary quality to this ordinary daily ritual. In Western art, a young figure gazing into a mirror symbolizes the brevity of life, which seems at odds with Álvarez Bravo's title, Portrait of Eternity. from Acton, A History of Photography at the University of Notre Dame: Twentieth Century (Notre Dame, 2019)