RUFINO TAMAYO A PORTRAIT

RUFINO TAMAYO. A PORTRAIT

Rufino Tamayo A Portrait

Rufino del Carmen Arellanes Tamayo was born on August 25th, 1899 in the Carmen Alto neighborhood, at the center of the city of Oaxaca. His mother died of pulmonary tuberculosis in 1911, shortly before the father had abandoned the family. The future artist was in the care of his uncles: Amalia, Leopold and Sebastian, who left to Mexico City in the same year and began a fruit store in the Merced Market. According to Tamayo himself, his first contact with art was through collecting, and copying modest postcards reproducing famous paintings, which he acquired on Palma street, where the artist took his first art lessons. When he finished his primary education, he was enrolled to study accounting with the intent to take over the family business. However, the young Tamayo left these classes soon after to attend the National Fine Arts School as a listener before entering formally in 1917. In his early years as an artist, Tamayo vated a language based on elements some of the European avant-garde emerged during the late nineteenth and PREVIOUS TAMAYO IN PARIS, 1950

cultifrom that early

twentieth centuries, marking the rapid advent of modern art. Tamayo experimented with ideas and forms from Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism and Futurism, among others, creating new forms with a primitive spirit associated with the Mexican. In the following years after the end of the armed phase of the Mexican Revolution (1910 - 1917), Tamayo also explored the nature, sensitivity and spirituality of ordinary people, creating intimate everyday life scenes, saturated with a subtle poetry. Tamayo's art was heavily criticized by the dominant group of nationalist painters, who recognized his talent but reproached him for not using it for the social and political ideals of the time. Tamayo was referred to as an alleged betrayal of the"Revolutionary Ideals". The exacerbated nationalism environment was a powerful motivation for the artist to leave to the United States after his first exhibition, in April 1926. This exhibition was conducted, by his initiative and resources, in an improvised space on Avenida Madero that the young Tamayo rented for a week. Once in New York, he found the freedom needed to achieve an aesthetic proposal that mixed elements of con-

RUFINO TAMAYO. A PORTRAIT

temporary European art with insights from the creative freedom of the ancient Mexican cultures. Expressed in his sculptures ceramics and folk art from Mexico and other civilizations, they built a highly expressive iconography and unpublished beauty. Many of the most important works of his first creative period were made while the artist resided in New York City, where he lived intermittently between 1926 and 1929; and permanently between 1934 and 1949, with summer stays in Mexico. By the 1940s, Tamayo managed to develop a new synthetic figurative way. After testing shapes and colors with various genres of painting, the human figure was his most important aesthetic concern. His characters became solemn figures, sometimes terse, symbolic and monumental, due to the clay sculptures created by the ancient cultures of Mexico. However, with a primitive yet sophisticated style, they established a dialogue with the aesthetics of Picasso and Matisse, showing a unique personality that earned him one of the most beloved characters in a cosmopolitan and demanding New York, that at the time received many of the most important European artists. After the Secon World War, Tamayo devoted his painting to the representation of the human experience, without departing from the modernist formal experimentation. His painting resigned the harmony of beauty for a thoughtful art that arouses the viewer's interest. He then sought to address the most complex and innovative range of human

emotions, always away from the description and literary message, and looking for a symbolic depiction of a synthesis that the artist called poetic realism. While living in New York or Paris, Tamayo had a constant presence in Mexico, where, in 1948, organized a major retrospective which later helped him to be invited to paint two murals for the most important art exhibition space in the country: the Palace of Fine Arts, where Orozco, Rivera and Siqueiros painted previously. Tamayo began the 1950s with an invitation to represent Mexico in the XXV edition of the Venice Biennale, which took place from June to October 1950, and it was the first time that Mexico took part in this important global event. The sample contained works of the four most important painters of the time: José Clemente Orozco, who died a year earlier, Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and Rufino Tamayo. The organizers of the biennial gave the artist award to Siqueiros, but the European press turned to analyze and disseminate the work of Rufino Tamayo. The critics comments multiplied in newspapers and art publications, valued the work of the oaxacan artist as one of the most innovative and purposeful and with more personality. This fact, among other things, opened Tamayo expectations as he abandoned his New York residence to settle in Paris, which became the artistic center of Europe after the end of Secon World War. Tamayo arrived to Paris with an aura of celebrity, he had access to the most significant

RUFINO TAMAYO. A PORTRAIT

cultural spaces, exhibited in major museums and the most exclusive galleries in France, Italy and England, who sought to represent his work. Many of his paintings became part of the most important European collections, both institutional and private. Tamayo would establish its activity center in Paris, while visiting New York as well as Mexico. His residence in France produced a new change in his painting, which was topped by the powerful intellectual environment involved in an existentialist component and an reflective and vital atmosphere, which sought to recover the meaning of life. European cities, at the time, damaged as a result of the last war, became a stage for the artist who eventually lead to a darkening of his palette. Previous saturated and contrasting colors turned dark and ashy, of austere ranges. The colors were accordingly to the new concerns of the artist, who considered the “cosmic” as an alternate scenario to figuration. Tamayo became aware of the darkening of the painting and for various reasons he decided to return to Mexico, after nearly ten years of residence in Paris. However, he had an intense mobility around the world, since the painter was already a celebrity asked to exhibit in different continents. He also had some orders, for example, for the painting of two murals in Paris as well as two large paintings on canvas with the topic Israel Today and Israel Yesterday,which were intended to be the central part of the decoration of the main hall of the luxury liner Shalom. RUFINO TAMAYO PAINTING MURALS OF BELLAS ARTES, 1952

RUFINO TAMAYO. A PORTRAIT

Their arrival to Mexico was celebrated with mural painting titled Duality (1964), painted for the lobby of the recently opened National Museum of Anthropology in Chapultepec Park. For this important official commission, Tamayo devised one of the most significant scenes of modern Mexican painting and synthesis of his aesthetic ideas. The mural shows a scene on the symbolic struggle between two pre-Hispanic deities that embody universal complementary opposites: Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca. They represented complementary opposites concepts: day and night, good and evil, war and peace, male and female, all seen through an indigenous beliefs. Tamayo also inaugurate a retrospective for the Museum of Modern Art. In 1964 he was awarded with the National Prize of Arts of Mexico. Surveys and national and international exhibitions succeeded each other. Tamayo was already an established artist internationally and nationally, and the rest of the decade of the sixties brought awards, tributes and official commissions of importance, like the murals El mexicano y su mundo for the Mexican pavilion of the World Expo held in Montreal, Canada, in 1967, (now at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs) and the mural Fraternidad for the International Fair HemisFair 68 in San Antonio Texas, (now in the UN building in New York). In 1969 he painted Energia for Industrial Club .That decade Tamayo turned 50 years of artistic work, which was

celebrated with a show at the Palace of Fine Arts in 1968. In the seventies Tamayo rethinks its aesthetics and begins a process of synthesis. In that period the forms were refined, but their colors acquired a juicy opulence, seen in the characters of his paintings through an austere geometry; each character or element began to have the same sober strength of sculptures created by indigenous cultures. However, these forms were also saturated with a certain poetic enigma. As part of the State recognition to the artist, a batch of 33 works from different periods becomes part of the collection of the State, designed to enrich the collections of the National Institute of Fine Arts. At this time, Tamayo is painting a mural for the Hotel Camino Real, entitled El Hombre Frente al Infinito, which condenses its humanistic ideals. He also paints another mural for Grupo Industrial Alfa, El Universo. In 1973 he created, with his own funds, the Pre-Columbian Art Museum of Mexico, which he donated to his hometown of Oaxaca. He had exhibitions in New York, Paris, Florence, Tokyo and Caracas. The Sao Paulo Biennale XIV pays tribute to him with a retrospective exhibition that includes 185 easel paintings and two murals, recognizing him as one of the most significant artists of Latin America. In 1979, The Solomon R. Guggenheim New York, celebrates his 80th anniversary with a retrospective. The National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) grants him a honorary doctorate.

RUFINO TAMAYO. A PORTRAIT

Tamayo began the decade of the eighties creating works of monumental format, three sculptures and a mural made of glass plates. The sculptures are designed to Monterrey, San Francisco Airport, California, and UNAM. He opens the International Contemporary Art Museum Rufino Tamayo, with a collection of more than three hundred works of modern and contemporary art, acquired by him. The museum building has the connotation of a work of art of that collection, and is designed by architects Abraham Zabludovsky and Teodoro González de León in a privileged area of Chapultepec Park. The inventiveness, quality and variety of his work is recognized by the prestigious Vienna Abertina Graphische Sammlung. He is revered by the universities of St. Luke in Rome and the Royal Academy in London, the Spanish monarchy awarded him with the Medal of Merit in Fine Arts and invited him to exhibit at the then newly opened Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid. The Italian government awarded him with the Order of Commendatore of Arts. In Mexico, a national tribute for his 70 years of artistic creation is organised; in Mexico City a monumental exhibition of his work is exposed at the Palace of Fine Arts and the Museum Tamayo. Over 500 easel paintings, some of his murals, a selection of his artwork and drawing, plus an extensive selection of photographs and diplomas realize his dazzling achievements in history. PREVIOUS RUFINO TAMAYO IN HIS STUDIO, 1981 PHOTOGRAPHY: RAFAEL DONÉZ

During his last years of life Rufino Tamayo enjoyed an outstanding recognition with a traveling exhibition that was presented in Moscow, Oslo and Leningrad in the Hermitage Museum --which opened its doors for the first time to accommodate the work of a living artist-- later travelling to Berlin and New York. He saw his first mural restored, El canto y la música painted in 1934 in the then National Conservatory of Music, where he met his wife Olga. He also finished what would be his last painting, which he entitled El niño del violón. Rufino Tamayo died long lived without a decline in its pictorial proposal, which is universally recognized. His ashes rest in the museum he founded in Mexico City.

RUFINO Y OLGA AT HOME, 1949