Rufino Tamayo

Rufino Tamayo: The Third Way of Mexican Modernism

In 2003 a woman walking in Manhattan spotted a canvas set out with the garbage and took it home because she recognised, as she later put it, its power. It was *Tres Personajes*, painted by Rufino Tamayo in 1970, stolen from a Houston storage locker in 1987, and at Sotheby's in November 2007 it sold for $1,049,000. That a Tamayo could survive twenty years of neglect and a New York kerb and still detonate on sight is the most literal proof of what Octavio Paz meant when he wrote that the thing distinguishing Tamayo from other painters was, in a single word, the sun.

The Fruit Market and the Academy

He was born Rufino del Carmen Arellanes Tamayo in Oaxaca de Juárez in August 1899, the son of Manuel Arellanes, a shoemaker, and Florentina Tamayo, a seamstress. He was Zapotec, and it mattered to everything he later made. His mother died of tuberculosis in 1911, and the boy was sent to Mexico City to live with an aunt who ran a stall in the fruit markets, where he worked beside her.

In 1917 the aunt enrolled him at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas, the old San Carlos Academy. He tried on Cubism, Impressionism and Fauvism in turn, grew impatient with the instruction, and left to teach himself. By 1921 he was working for José Vasconcelos in the Department of Ethnographic Drawings, eventually running it — a job that put him, daily and at close range, in front of the pre-Columbian ceramics and figures that would become the structural grammar of his art. He did not have to go looking for Mexico's ancient forms the way Paris was looking for Africa's. He catalogued them.

Breaking with the Muralists

Mexican art in the 1920s and 1930s belonged to Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros, and it belonged to the Revolution. Tamayo dissented on both counts. Where they treated the Revolution as the necessary engine of Mexico's future, he believed it would damage the country, and he refused to make painting an instrument of a political programme. He wanted a Mexican identity expressed through form, colour and inherited image rather than through slogan. For this he was called a traitor.

The break was never total — all four were chosen to represent Mexican art at the first American Artists' Congress in New York in 1935, and that same year Tamayo joined the Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios. But the isolation was real, and it pushed him abroad.

New York, and the Education of an Eye

He moved to New York in 1926, seeking the freedom Mexico withheld. Within a month the Weyhe Gallery hung thirty-nine of his works — more exposure in four weeks than he had managed in years at home. In 1928 he saw a Brooklyn exhibition of Ingres, Picasso and Matisse that reorganised his sense of what paint could do mechanically. He returned to Mexico in 1929 for a solo show that drew serious praise, then went back north.

From 1937 to 1949 he lived in New York with his wife, Olga Flores Rivas Zárate, in what was meant to be a temporary stay. He showed at the Valentine Gallery, then Knoedler, then Marlborough. He taught at the Dalton School, where one of his pupils was Helen Frankenthaler. He painted Olga repeatedly, most memorably in the 1934 double portrait *Rufino and Olga*, two figures visibly worn by circumstance. *Lion and Horse* (1942) put pre-Columbian ceramic structure into an animal fight; *Children Playing with Fire* (1947) turned the Revolution's cost into a nursery image.

Bellas Artes, Paris, and the Long Return

His first major retrospective came at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City in 1948. It was contentious and popular, and settled nothing: in 1949 he and Olga left for Paris for roughly a decade. He came home for good in 1959. The murals of the middle years are his most public statements — *Nacimiento de la nacionalidad* (1952) for the opera house of the Palacio de Bellas Artes, *México de Hoy* (1953), *El día y la noche* (1954), *América* (1955).

The Arithmetic of Sobriety

Tamayo's central technical conviction ran against instinct. He told the critic Paul Westheim that "as the number of colors we use decreases, the wealth of possibilities increases," and he built a career on the proposition. He chose colours he considered true to the Mexican environment and warned against reading them as festive: "Mexicans are not a gay race but a tragic one." Paz put the paradox precisely — "Tamayo is a great colourist; but it should be added that this richness of colour is the result of sobriety." *Tres personajes cantando* (1981), built from little more than pure red and purple, is the argument in practice. His last painting, *Luna y Sol*, came in 1990, at ninety.

Mixografía: Commissioning a Medium

From 1974 Tamayo worked with the engineer Luis Remba at the Taller de Gráfica Mexicana on a problem no existing print process solved: he wanted prints with the physical body of paintings. What they arrived at was Mixografía — materials assembled in collage on a master plate, moulds taken, a copper plate produced, and the result pulled as a print carrying genuine volume, relief and texture. Between 1974 and 1977 the workshop produced thirty-two mixografías on industrial paper; the first on handmade paper came in 1978, followed by thirty-five further editions with inking variants. Tamayo made roughly eighty original mixographs in all, among them *Dos Personajes Atacados por Perros*. The motive was not novelty but reach: reproducibility, and what the Museo Tamayo calls the democratisation of his practice.

Why Rufino Is Called a Genius

The specific faculty is chromatic compression — the ability to get maximum expressive force from a deliberately starved palette, which is closer to a composer's problem than a colourist's. Anyone can add another colour. Tamayo's talent was knowing which three to keep and how to weight them so the picture still burned. Octavio Paz, a Nobel laureate not given to cheap superlatives, used the strongest available terms: the sun is in all his pictures, whether we see it or not, and his richness of colour is the result of sobriety. The institutional record agrees, from Mexico's National Prize for Arts and Sciences in 1964 to the Senate's Belisario Domínguez Medal in 1988.

The counter-case deserves stating. Tamayo did not invent a pictorial language; he synthesised one, and the debts to Picasso and to European modernism are visible in almost every canvas — what he supplied was a pre-Hispanic vocabulary and an Oaxacan temperature, not a new grammar. His refusal of muralist politics, which reads today as independence, read to contemporaries as evasion, and the charge of treachery was not made in bad faith by all who made it. Even Mixografía, often filed under his inventions, was engineered by Luis Remba; Tamayo was the demanding client who defined the problem. His genius is best described as a genius of sensibility and judgment rather than of theoretical innovation — which is a real thing, and worth naming accurately.

Legacy

He died in Mexico City on 24 June 1991, having spent his last decades giving his collections away. In 1959 he founded the Museo Rufino Tamayo in Oaxaca to house pre-Hispanic art; in 1981 the Museo Tamayo opened in Chapultepec Park in Mexico City, holding the contemporary works he and Olga had gathered and donated to the nation. His work hangs at the Guggenheim, the Phillips Collection, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Reina Sofía. His deepest influence, though, is regional: Francisco Toledo and the generations of Oaxacan artists after him took from Tamayo the permission to be indigenous, modern and international at once, without asking Europe first.