Short biography of the painter, printmaker and sculptor Rufino Tamayo, known for his striking works and large collection of Pre-Columbian artifacts.
Rufino Tamayo was born in 1899 in Oaxaca, Mexico to parents of mestizo descent. This mixed indigenous and European lineage would prove to be of great significance in Tamayo’s artistic career.
Following initial studies at Mexico City’s Escuela des Artes Plasticas, in 1921 Tamayo accepted a position at the Mexican Archaeological Museum. Tamayo worked with Pre-Columbian ethnographic drawings, and the exposure to primitive art sparked Tamayo’s lifelong fascination with what he immediately recognized to be a vital part of Mexico’s history.
The Fourth One
As his style developed, Tamayo found himself at odds with his contemporaries – Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siquieros – often known as The Three. Rivera, Orozco and Siquieros had banded together following the 1910 Mexican Revolution and would become famous as political artists, believing that art was meant to convey radical messages and not just individual or aesthetic expression.
Tamayo preferred to keep his subject matter personal and politically non-committal, and for this reason he was not popular with Rivera, Orozco, Siquieros or their followers. Tamayo’s fondness for European styles – blending Cubist, Surrealist, Fauve and Futurist elements along with native Mexican influences – also did not put him in high regard with The Three. Tamayo generally tried to dismiss his detractors, claiming “I am neither the fourth, nor am I great...I am the first in a new modality of Mexican painting that attempts a universal voice.”
New York and Venice
In 1936, Tamayo moved to New York, where he interacted within Manhattan’s creative community and taught at The Brooklyn Museum of Art. He hoped to continue to express his vision of a universal Mexican style recognized by the world, and in 1950 he did achieve international prominence with an exhibit at the Venice Biennale. Other projects included murals for Mexico City’s Palace of Fine Arts and Smith College. Around this time, Tamayo became linked with the school of abstract expressionism, infusing his work with the intense colors of his homeland.
Tamayo later experimented with a form of textured printmaking, known as mixografía. He also would become fascinated by fruit as his subject matter, and then animals. A small 1968 Tamayo painting entitled La Rana, or The Frog, sold for $622,000 at auction.
Legacy
Rufino Tamayo’s legacy is great, even beyond his own artwork. Before his death in 1991, Tamayo and his wife Olga gave numerous paintings to Mexico City's Tamayo Contemporary Art Museum. Among the Tamayos’ donations are works by Pablo Picasso, Mark Rothko and Fernando Botero—to name a few.
Prior to these bequests, Tamayo had founded the Rufino Tamayo Museum in his native Oaxaca. The Oaxaca museum houses Tamayo’s extensive array of Pre-Columbian objects, which he had begun collecting as a young man. Tamayo had felt it important that the people of Oaxaca recognize their cultural heritage, and he had also been committed to a formal housing of these items and not allowing them to enter the illegal trade market.
Trash to Treasure
More recently, in an event that perhaps Tamayo himself would have found amusing, a Manhattan woman rescued one of Tamayo’s paintings from a trash bin and had it hanging on her wall before a friend suggested that the work’s signature might be genuine. It turned out that the 1970 painting, known as Tres Personajes or Three People, had been stolen years before from a Houston collector. How it ended up in a New York alley is still a mystery, but the painting’s "strange power” compelled Elizabeth Gibson to keep it from ending up in a landfill among banana peels and broken glass.
Gibson received a $15,000 reward for helping to return the painting to the widow of its rightful owner, and Tres Personajes sold at Sotheby’s for $1,049,000 on November 20, 2007.
Sources:
- Rufino Tamayo: Answers.com
- Rufino Tamayo: Askart.com
- Artist Dossier: Rufino Tamayo – Artinfo.com
- One Person’s Trash Is Another Person’s Lost Masterpiece – New York Times, October 23, 2007
- Tamayo painting found in dumpster sells for more than $1M – CBC.ca Art News
