Rufino Tamayo

(1899-1991)

Rufino del Carmen Arellanes Tamayo was born on August 26, 1899 in the city of Oaxaca, Oax. into a family of indigenous origin.

Orphan, in 1911 he moved to Mexico City. He entered as a regular student at the National School of Plastic Arts, where he acquired a training that he would later overcome. The beginning of Tamayo's work as a painter coincided with the heyday of Mexican mural painting. Tamayo decided not to repeat the formulas of political rhetoric or the Mexican School of Painting. He opposed a personal one to the national style. The painting of its first era already has its own formulas. His incursion into the field of graphics contains concerns of experimentation, although he only produced wood engravings at the time.

Between 1926 and 1938 Tamayo painted still lifes and urban landscapes in line with Paul Cézanne; along that road he later reached George Braque. Tamayo did not make Cubist paint, but expanded the consequences of that movement. Other fabrics of that same period were based on a freer and lyrical inspiration that defines the exaltation of color and the themes of everyday life. In these works he also incorporated sensuality and exoticism, which were mixed with a certain primitivism. By then his graphic work reached an international presence.

The decade of the 1940s was the first great creative period, which took place in New York City where the artist resided for almost 20 years. In 1949 he traveled to Europe where he held several exhibitions. In that decade, Tamayo's true contemporaries emerged, such as Jean Duduffetm Francis Bacon, Balthasar Balthus, Willen de Kooning. With whom he shared the most affinities was with Roberto Matta and Wilfredo Lam. In those years he painted a series of violent, sometimes gloomy canvases; others exalted and always intense and reconcentrated. This is where Tamayo discovered the metaphorical faculty of colors and shapes. The painting became the plastic counterpart of the poetic image, not in the visual translation, the verbal poem - as happened in the painting of the surrealists - but a metaphor. Tamayo created an art of transfigurations, as valued by Octavio Paz.

In the 1950s, Tamayo had consolidated his international fame. In the first five years of that decade, the murals Birth of Our Nationality, Today's Mexico, Tribute to the Indian Race, Night and Day, Still Life and two versions of Prometheus ended. At the end of the decade, he took advantage of the technical advances to print on his graphic work an unusual delicacy and a surprising originality, giving his forms a great elegance. Lithography was for Tamayo an appropriate technique for his sensitivity and a field of innovation.

In 1964, after 6 years in Paris, Tamayo and his wife, Olga, returned definitively to Mexico. Where he would have to make six more murals, among which is Dualidad, a work that has become an icon of Mexican painting. In the graph he achieved not only virtuosity but also expanded his inexhaustible inventiveness.

The artist's pictorial creation and serial work ran in parallel in the 70s. In the painting he eliminated the superfluous with intelligent computer and refined discipline. In the graphic he introduced various materials and used the collage achieving unlimited possibilities in the texture and quality of his works. In the middle of the decade he began to rehearse with a new process until, together with Luis Remba, director of the Mexican Graphic Workshop, mixography. Both designed new tools and special machinery to integrate color and texture into the paper, becoming a substance and part of it.

In the eighth decade of his life, the plastic rigor and the imagination that transfigured the object are the poles where Tamayo's painting is defined. The complex synthesis that the creator came to included pre-Hispanic art, popular art and features of the different international avant-gardes. The artist's work can be summarized in the following words of Octavio Paz: "the reflexive element is half of Tamayo, the other half is the passion that is never degraded... beauty is not ideal proportion or symmetry but character, energy, rupture, expression."

In 1990 he finished what would be his last painting, The Violin Boy. He died on June 24, 1991. His remains were deposited in the museum of contemporary art that he founded in Mexico City and that bears his name.

About his work Tamayo expressed "...in a way all my work speaks of love. I came to the conclusion that love is the best reason to live... love in a universal sense... love of nature, objects, work itself... I contemplate the earth and space, I observe, paint and I feel that a great love is emerging in me."