Rufino Tamayo

Rufino Tamayo (1899-1991), Mexican painter, muralist, and sculptor. Tamayo’s paintings and murals are characterized by intense color and partially abstract, flattened figures that derive from a number of sources, including Mexican folk art, pre-Columbian art, and the work of Spanish painter Pablo Picasso. Tamayo’s work stands somewhat outside the mainstream of Mexican art, as he opposed the epic mural style of Mexican artists Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Tamayo felt that these muralists put too much emphasis on political and social issues at the expense of artistic quality. Although Tamayo painted numerous murals, he also pioneered a return to easel painting in Mexico.

Tamayo was born in Oaxaca of Zapotec Indian parents but went to live in Mexico City in 1911, after his parents died. He studied art at the San Carlos Academy of Fine Arts in Mexico City from 1917 to 1921. From 1921 to 1923 he worked for the National Archaeology Museum in Mexico City as head of the Department of Ethnographic Drawing. His close study of pre-Columbian objects there, along with his early memories of Native American culture in Oaxaca, inspired the solidity of his forms, his use of vivid colors, and the subject matter of many of his works. For instance, Animals (1941, Museum of Modern Art, New York City) depicts dogs that resemble pre-Columbian ceramic dog sculptures from the state of Colima.

Tamayo resided in New York City from 1926 to 1928, and upon returning to Mexico, he taught art and headed the Education Ministry’s Fine Arts Department. His first mural commission, The Music and the Song for Mexico’s National School of Music, was completed in 1933. In 1936 he moved back to New York City, where he spent most of each year until 1949. Important for Tamayo’s artistic development during this period was a 1940 Picasso exhibition at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art. Tamayo especially admired the expressive power of Picasso’s mural Guernica (1937, Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain). In such paintings as Women of Tehuantepec (1939, Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, New York), Tamayo placed the strong, monumental figures of traditional Mexican art in a subtle, complex composition influenced by Picasso’s advanced cubist works.

In 1943 Tamayo painted his first completely abstract mural, Nature and the Artist (Hillyer Art Library, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts). In many paintings of the 1950s this tendency toward abstraction developed into a highly personal, emotional style. He received recognition in the United States and Europe earlier than in his own country. Tamayo’s murals include Man (1953, Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, Dallas, Texas), America (1955, Bank of the Southwest, Houston, Texas), Prometheus (1957, Library of the University of Puerto Rico, San Juan, Puerto Rico), and Prometheus Bringing Fire to Man (1958, UNESCO building, Paris, France), as well as Israel Today and Israel Yesterday (1963, for the Israeli ocean liner Shalom). In Mexico City he painted The Birth of Nationality (1952) and Mexico Today (1953), both at the Palace of Fine Arts, and two murals for the National Museum of Anthropology (1938 and 1964). Later in his life, Tamayo also worked as a sculptor, creating monumental figures in metal that resemble those in his paintings.

Tamayo donated his large collection of pre-Columbian art to found the Museum of Pre-Hispanic Art in his native Oaxaca in 1974. A museum dedicated to his work, the Rufino Tamayo Museum, opened in Mexico City in 1981.