Self Portrait 

Author: Cordelia Urueta

Title: Self-Portrait (Autorretrato)

Creation Date: 1965

Materials/Techniques: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 55.1 × 43.1 inches

Location: Museum of Modern Art, Mexico City

In Self-Portrait (Autorretrato, 1965), Cordelia Urueta presents a haunting and introspective image that captures the spiritual intensity characteristic of her mature work. Rendered in subdued, earthy tones, the portrait features hollow, luminous blue eyes that evoke a sense of inner vision and detachment. Rather than aiming for a naturalistic likeness, Urueta constructs an image of the self shaped by metaphysical reflection and inward search.

The painting reflects her long-standing engagement with Theosophy, an esoteric movement that deeply informed her artistic sensibility. The ethereal gaze and stylized features recall the early portraits of mahatmas—the spiritual masters venerated within the Theosophical Society—often painted by Theosophist artists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These figures were imagined as embodiments of higher wisdom and subtle planes of consciousness, and their visual representation became central to Theosophy’s iconographic language. Similarly, Urueta’s self-portrait evokes a self not limited to physical appearance, but oriented toward inner transformation and higher states of being.

Exposed to Theosophical ideas during her time in New York in 1929, Urueta would carry these influences into the symbolic language of her later work. In this painting, she appears not only as an artist, but as a seeker—someone who turns to painting as a medium to access and convey the spiritual dimensions of the self.