Dolores Asúnsolo López was born in 1904 into an aristocratic family from the state of Durango. She married Jaime Martínez del Río in 1921 and the couple relocated to Mexico City. After the painter Adolfo Best Maugard introduced them to director Edwin Carewe, they moved to Hollywood in 1925, where the rebaptized Dolores del Río quickly emerged as a leading actress. After remarrying and starring in numerous films, her U.S. career began to fade in the early 1940s, and following the end of an affair with Orson Welles, she returned to Mexico in 1943. In his bust, Juan Cruz Reyes shows the movie star staring forward, with full lips, wide brown eyes, and raised eyebrows. Unlike the conservative portraits done in bronze in the same period by her uncle, sculptor Ignacio Asúnsolo, the surface here is soft, the style less harsh, and the format closer to Italian Renaissance prototypes, like Andrea del Verrocchio’s famous terracotta bust of Lorenzo de Medici (c. 1485, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). Cruz Reyes’s sculpture has been dated by scholars to around 1940; if true, it must have been done during one of del Río’s return visits to Mexico, as there is no evidence that Cruz Reyes ever worked in California. The year 1940 was a trying one for the actress: along with professional concerns, she divorced her second husband in March and her father died in Los Angeles in July. It is much more likely that the bust was created sometime after her permanent return to Mexico in 1943. As in Diego Rivera’s tender portrait of 1938 (INBA), in which the actress wears a low-cut peasant blouse, as in the roles she would play in films like Flor silvestre (1943) and María Candelaria (1944), Dolores del Río appears in Cruz Reyes’s bust as a simple, even rural Mexican beauty: her hair is tied up with braided cloth, typical of indigenous women. The sculptor thus confirmed del Río's new identity as a national star, rather than that sophisticated “Latin” flapper who had had “abandoned” her homeland for Hollywood in the 1920.

Vide James Oles, Arte moderno de México. Colección Andrés Blaisten. Mexico, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2005.