Rufino Tamayo and his art are paradoxical. His lifeblood and its
artistic expression are deeply rooted in the traditions of ancient
Mexico. The man and his painting are thoroughly Mexican yet they have
been nurtured by modern European art. Tamayo has grasped the essence of
these two disparate worlds and has united them on canvas.
Born in Oaxaca, Mexico, on August 26, 1899, Tamayo was orphaned by the
age of twelve. He moved to Mexico City to live with an aunt who sent him
to commercial school to prepare him for work in her wholesale fruit
business. Tamayo secretly began to study drawing at night; soon
thereafter in 1917, having abandoned business school, he enrolled in a
drawing class at the academia de Arte de San Carlos, Mexico City. In
1921 Tamayo left San Carlos to escape its conservative program and work
independently.
The Mexican Revolution of 1910 to 1921 and its aftermath profoundly
affected the arts and influenced the young Tamayo. In their monumental
propagandistic murals, Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco and David
Alfaro Siqueiros expressed their sympathy with the revolution. Rejecting
foreign art movements, these artists developed a national style suited
to communicating the socialist spirit of the revolution. With the end of
this rebellion and the establishment of a new government a renewed and
powerful interest arose in the heritage of the Mexican Indian and his
earlier cultures. When Tamayo was appointed Head of the Department of
Ethnographic Drawing of the Museo Nacional de Arqueologia, Mexico City,
in 1921, his duties included drawing important pre-Columbian objects in
this museum'ss collection; thus pre-Columbian art became a basic source
for his personal artistic idiom. However, Tamayo did not adopt the
propagandistic narrative style and social content of the muralists; in
fact, he organized his own one-man show in a small, empty shop so that
he could exhibit the lyrical work he head painted as an alternative to
the dominant mural art. He at once rejected the radical social message
and didactic form of he art of the revolution and was inspired by the
renaissance of earlier traditions brought about by the same upheaval.
In 1926 Tamayo also made his first trip to New York and decided to stay
in that city. Shortly there-after an exhibition of his work took place
there at the Weyhe Gallery. The show included early paintings which are
for the most part still life and scenes of daily Mexican life. A
characteristic one of these, Still Life of 1928, is imbued with an inner
warmth and familiarity: through pure colors and perfected technique the
fruits depicted proclaim the Mexican sun and climate yet bear witness to
a knowledge of European traditions of composition.
Tamayo returned to Mexico City in 1928; within the next years he held
various teaching positions and was given periodic exhibitions. He
received his first mural commission from the Escuela Nacional de Musica,
Mexico City, in 1932, for which he completed Musica the following year.
In 1936 the artist came back to New York, settling there for about
fifteen years, but summering always in Mexico. Tamayo worked briefly in
the easel division of the WPA and soon began to exhibit regularly in
both New York and Mexico. In New York he taught art and was exposed to
the work of Europeans such as Picasso and Braque, to Cubism and
geometric abstraction, to Surrealism and to the burgeoning New York
School. During this period Tamayo continued to pain Mexican genre scenes
with massive, heavy figures as well as intimate still lifes.
From 1941 to 1943 Tamayo depicted howling dogs. Typical is Animals of
1941, in which the bodies of creatures are composed of fantastically
colored, simplified geometric forms. Although the shapes are distorted
and exaggerated, there is a sense of naturalism. The strong influence of
Picasso is apparent, yet Tamayo does not take his abstraction as far as
the European painter: his forms still seem real and of this world. His
colors remain pure; emotion is sure and powerful.
In 1943 Tamayo completed a mural commission for the Hillyer Art Library
of Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. The theme and the degree
of abstraction of the fresco, which is divided into two panels, Nature
and the Artist and The Work of Art and the Observer, illustrate the
artist's independence from the Mexican muralists. As Robert Goldwater
pointed out in his 1947 book on Tamayo, Rivera and Orozco treated the
grandiose story of the Creation Tamayo, on the other hand, relinquished Creation for the depiction of artistic re-creation.
Abstraction is more decisive now: the figures in this fresco have been
reduced further than the animals in the preceding howling dog series,
and the entire composition has been meticulously worked out with
particular attention to the use of planes of color and intersecting
lines.
By the Mid-forties Tamayo had focused his attention primarily on man.
Man dances by the sea, reaches for the moon and contemplates nature. He
lives among the elements yet has been released from the earth, for he
has lost the weight and substance which once had anchored him so solidly
to the ground. Lighter and more energetic than before, these figures
never rest but move always within highly stylized settings of broken,
interpenetrating, jutting surfaces. Dynamism prevails.
In 1949 Tamayo made his first trip to Europe and remained in Paris
briefly before returning home to Mexico. From this time Tamayo's work
became well-known throughout Europe and the United States. He has since
then participated in many exhibitions, completed numerous mural
commissions and received awards and prizes for his artistic
accomplishment.
In Tamayo's paintings of the fifties, night skies, the heavens and the
cosmos form backdrops for an often isolated and lonely being. The forms
of the figures are highly abstract yet are identifiable as men or women.
Although Tamayo intends no Surrealist symbolism, the works are
reminiscent of Miro's landscapes of the twenties in which solitary
figures inhabit vast, empty terrains. Instead, his people project
recognizable emotions. Tormented or elated, man is, above all, alone.
Concurrent with these works, in the middle of the decade, Tamayo
produced a body of paintings whos subject appears at first to be those
of the space age. With titles such as Supersonic Plane, Cosmic Terror
and The Astronomer, they indeed seem to be documents of the new ear of
space technology and travel. However, Tamayo, as usual, eschews any
social message in these paintings. He does not record contemporary
events or comment upon the destructiveness of twentieth-century man. On
the contrary, Tamayo was probably moved by the concern with astronomy
manifested in the art of his pre-Columbian forbears rather than by the
discoveries of our own day. The same sun and moon which inspired
pre-Columbian artists are omnipresent forces in Tamayo's painted world,
creating, affecting and perhaps even ending man's life. The artist has
often said that the metaphysics of the ancient people are so deeply a
part of him that without thought or intent they become n automatic
framework for almost every canvas. In The Astronomer of 1954, the deep
browns and rusts of the background evoke a brooding mood. The central
image is comprised of circular, whirling planes of earthen tones.
Discernable within this mysterious form is what may be a face with a
wide-open eye which seems to stare in awe at two bright yellow spheres
with conical projections: the eclipsed sun shedding its light and power
on the moon.
as taken from:
Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (June 1979)