The images and information presented below are for the instruction of students and scholarly research.
Rufino Tamayo
(1899-1991)
With a career
spanning almost an entire century, Rufino Tamayo is
considered one of the world's leading international
artists. Born in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, Tamayo was
a full-blooded Zapotecan Indian. After the death of his
parents at a young age, he moved to Mexico City to live
with a relative. There he studied at the Escuela
Nacional de Artes Plasticas (San Carlos Academy). His
stay there was short-lived, however, as he preferred to
learn independently.
It was during this time that Tamayo helped to create the
technique of Mixographia. This style of art entails
using plastic forms and integrating them with colors and
textures to create the style that Tamayo became famous
for. He would use vivid colors, reflective of his
Mexican heritage to add depth to his work. Tamayo wanted
to reach deep into his Mexican ancestry through his
earthy, yet bold colors.
Later on, he would use Mixographia to create prints in
75 to 100 counts. He would arrange a collage out of
textured media, such as rope or wood, then cast it in
copper and use that as his prints template. It was
through this method that Tamayo was able to capture
depth in each of his printts the way that he wanted.
Tamayo even made his own paper so that it would react
with the ink the way that he wanted.
During the beginning of his career in the 1920s and 30s,
Tamayo butted heads with his contemporaries. Other
Mexican artist of the time like Rivera and Siqueiros
valued popular public art, such as murals, which highly
expressed political and social issues. Tamayo simply
wanted to paint whimsically, expressively and
decoratively; for enjoyment rather than to make a
political statement. Due to the pressure from other
artists, Tamayo fled to New York in 1926. He also lived
in Paris for a while, and it was his exposure in the
United States and Europe that gained him acclaim. It
wasn't until much later that his home country valued his
talent.
In 1941, Tamayo was appointed the head of the department
of Ethnographic Drawing and Archaeological Museum. This
period introduced him to folk art, and this influence
can be seen in his work from the 1940s on.
Even though Tamayo's prints are highly recognizable and
carefully labeled and numbered, his oil paintings are
not as easy to distinguish. His prints have a very
recognizable style and color palate, but his oil
paintings vary, though not drastically. Tamayo strays
from his warm color scheme of reds, yellows and earth
tones in his painting "Women of Tehuantepec" (1939). In
this scene, painted from the memory of his aunts fruit
stand, he uses white, blues and greens. The background
is still reflective of his warm color scheme, but these
colors tend to pop out more.
Women of Tehuantepec
Tamayo, while a
borderline abstract painter, was also capable of
painting beautiful portraits, such as "Retrato de la
Senora Natasha Gelman" (1948). Though still highly
reflective of his style, Tamayo embraces classical
elements with this piece. For this reason, an early
Tamayo portraiture done in the classical style may be
floating around in Europe or the Americas somewhere,
possibly dated around 1926 through the early thirties.
During this period, he was just beginning to be known,
so his work may have been misplaced or set aside.
Retrato de la Senora Natasha Gelman
While Tamayo was a
muralist, an oil-painter and a print maker, he is
grouped with no particular school or style of art. His
themes are often surreal, as "Atormentado" (The
Tormented,1948) shows. However, his compositions, which
are based on ancient Mexican sculpture, edge toward the
ideas of Cubism. His bright color palate and sometimes
wild styling has also pegged him a Fauve. He has even
been called an abstract expressionist. In essence, he is
just Tamayo, working in a style all his own, and
considered one of the most revered Latin artists of all
time.
