Rufino Tamayo (Oaxaca, México 1899 - Cidade do México, México 1991)
In his painting, Rufino Tamayo reached a very deep poetic dimension. In its tones and expressive means, it appears as an elaborate, inward revival of ancient myth, nourished even more strongly, however, by the experiences of modern art.
Tamayo was born in Oaxaca, Mexico, in 1899. Of Indigenous (Zapotec) descent, he moved to Mexico City in 1911 to live with an aunt after losing his parents. Four years later, he began taking drawing lessons.
He attended the Escuela de Artes Plásticas (Academia de San Carlos) in Mexico City between 1917 and 1921. He was appointed head of the Department of Ethnographic Drawing at the Museo Nacional de Arqueología in Mexico City. From then on, the influence of Mexican folk art and pre-Columbian art can be seen in his works.
He spent two years in New York, from 1926 to 1928, where he saw European art in museums and galleries. He met Stuart Davis and saw the Henri Matisse exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in 1928.
Back in Mexico, he taught painting at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas (Academia de San Carlos) between 1928 and 1929. Like María Izquierdo, with whom he shared a studio from 1929 to 1934, he produced figurative works and still lifes, sometimes based on tropical fruits, with broad and intense chromatic registers. At a time when the politically committed art of the muralists was being celebrated, Tamayo's modernist sensibility, as well as his non-utilitarian aesthetics, his political neutrality and his international outlook, went against the current. In 1929, he exhibited at the Galería de Arte Moderno of the Teatro Nacional in Mexico City. Three years later, he was appointed head of the Department of Visual Arts of the Ministry of Education. In 1933, he painted a mural at the Escuela Nacional de Música and then another at the Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. In these murals he develops themes from national history in an interpretation with a hallucinatory atmosphere, in which unsettling forms and colors stir and stretch out into a luminous nightmare substance, reaching the most secret tones, deep fusions of the figures in the enigmatic, extinguished cry of color.
He returned to New York in 1936 as a delegate of the League of Revolutionary Writers and Artists to the American Artists' Congress. He remained in the United States for about twelve years, teaching at the Dalton School from 1938 to 1947. The Picasso exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1939, made a strong impression on him. A series of paintings of violent animals in the mid-1940s had its roots in Mexican folk art, but it also reflected the anxieties caused by the Second World War. He painted a mural at Smith College, in Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1943. He established the Taller Tamayo at the Brooklyn Museum Art School in 1946. His 1948 retrospective at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City was attacked in the press by David Alfaro Siqueiros for its high degree of abstraction. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, he painted a series of pictures in which human figures confront infinite celestial spaces.
He moved to Paris in 1949. He exhibited at the Venice Biennale that year and in 1968. He exhibited at the Instituto de Arte Moderno in Buenos Aires in 1951. The following year, he painted a mural at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City. He exhibited at the São Paulo Biennials of 1953 and 1977. He painted another mural at the UNESCO building in Paris in 1958. In the 1950s, his figures became flatter and more schematic, while his colors tended to explore the intense harmonies of a single tone.
He returned to Mexico in 1964 and painted a mural at the new Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City. Retrospective exhibitions of his work were held at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City in 1967 and 1987, at the Phoenix Art Museum in 1968 and, that same year, at the National Museum in Belgrade. In 1973, he began working in mixografía, a new technique of printing in relief. The following year, he donated his collection of pre-Columbian art to the city of Oaxaca, which gave rise to the Museo de Arte Prehispánico de México Rufino Tamayo. He exhibited at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City in 1974; at the Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo in 1976; at the Fundación Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas in 1977; at The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., in 1978; and at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1979. The Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Internacional Rufino Tamayo opened in Mexico City in 1981; a retrospective of the artist's work was held there in 1987, and another at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid in 1988.
Rufino Tamayo poetically revived, with the ardor of a whole and keen imagination, the mysterious deities, the warriors, the nocturnal echoes, the musicians, the shadows of the men and places of his land, expressing above all an immense solitude, as if the darkness of a desperate melancholy were falling upon the domains and the rulers of the People of the Sun.
Tamayo kept working until the last days of his life. He died of a heart attack on June 24, 1991, in Mexico City.
Awards
Tamayo is considered one of the leading artists in the history of Mexico, on a par with figures such as Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, although his work does not take a political approach as theirs does. Tamayo received numerous awards and honors, among them:
2nd Prize at the Pittsburgh International Exhibition
Grand Prize for Painting at the 2nd São Paulo Biennial
National Prize for Arts of Mexico, in 1964
Calouste Gulbenkian Prize of the Institute of Arts of Paris
Officer of the Order of the Legion of Honor of France
Commander of the Italian Republic
Title of Favorite Son, granted by the government of Oaxaca
Florence Gold Cup
Albert Einstein Medal from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology
Medal of Merit in Fine Arts from King Juan Carlos I of Spain
Belisario Domínguez Medal of the Senate of the Republic
Honorary member of the Faculdade Nacional, on May 21, 1991
Sources:
SULLIVAN, Edward J. Artistas Latino-Americanos del Siglo XX. Madrid: Ed. Nerea, 1992.
ROBLES, Luiz G. FEZZI, Elda. Pintores Americanos. In: Galeria Delta da Pintura Universal. Rio de Janeiro: Ed. Delta S.A., 1972
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