Great Falls Elementary Art Enrichment – November-December 2017 Rufino Tamayo (1899-1991)

Slide 1 • Rufino Tamayo (1899-1991) is one of the four giants of , but of all of them, he went his own way most of all, and is known and appreciated for his artistic independence. • Tamayo is also admired for his marriage of high modern European and American art Self-Portrait, 1927 traditions with popular Mexican and pre- Self-Portrait (Head of a Boy), 1931 Self-Portrait, 1931 Columbian ones. His work seems both universal and Mexican, both contemporary and pre- or even a-historic. • Above all, Tamayo is a painter of light and color and transcendent beauty, which his friend and Nobel Prize-winning Mexican poet and philosopher considered akin to poetry, “something that deserves to be seen again and again, and never tires us.”

Slide 2 • Tamayo was born to a dressmaker mother and a shoemaker father, both of Zapotec Indian descent, in a small village in Master Singers, 1949 , in 1899. • His first artistic gift was actually for music; he directed his church youth choir at the The Troubador, 1945 age of 8. He loved music, making it a Three Characters Singing, 1981 recurrent theme in his art, and played Spanish songs on the guitar all his life. • Note in Three Characters Singing how much texture the painting has; part of that comes from sand and marble that Tamayo often ground into his paint.

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Great Falls Elementary Art Enrichment – November-December 2017 Rufino Tamayo (1899-1991)

Slide 3 • Tamayo unfortunately knew great sadness and loss as a child. His father left the

Fruit Offering, 1987 family when he was only two, and his mother died when he was 11. • So at the age of 11, Tamayo moved with Mandolins and Pineapples, Phillips Collection, 1930 Five Watermelons his grandmother and aunt to . The capital opened Tamayo’s world, and he would live in big cities all his life –

The Fruit Vendor, 1943 Mexico City, New York and Paris. • Tamayo said he knew he would become a painter at age 11, after he discovered art postcards sold in a city shop and began to copy them. • Tamayo’s family owned a fruit store in an open market, and Tamayo had to work there every afternoon, though he spent more time drawing than working! Happily, the tropical fruits that surrounded him became a lifelong theme of his work, especially the watermelons, his hallmark.

Watermelon Eater, 1949 Watermelons, 1973 Slide 4 • Tamayo’s watermelons are deservedly world-famous, and they vividly demonstrate all the magisterial qualities that Tamayo brought to his painting – the Watermelons, 1968 endlessly rich, warm, layered shades of

Sliced Watermelons, 1939 color, even when limited to a single color like Tamayo’s signature red, plus a few black seeds and a thin strip of green and

Watermelon #1 White Watermelons, 1956 Blue Watermelons with Apple, 1965 white rind. The three colors of the watermelon also happen to be the same as the colors of the Mexican flag. • Tamayo believed “as the number of colors we use decreases, the wealth of possibilities increases.” Renowned art critic Hilton Kramer called Tamayo’s “color that wins us over – color that is unembarrassed to be beautiful.”

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Great Falls Elementary Art Enrichment – November-December 2017 Rufino Tamayo (1899-1991)

Slide 5 • Tamayo’s family insisted that he enroll in accounting school so he could eventually take over the fruit stand, but he secretly began attending art school instead, and entered officially at age 13. • Tamayo grew disenchanted with the school’s traditionalism, however, and left after a year to teach himself. • At age 22, Tamayo was named head of Indigenous Ethnography at the National Museum of Archaeology. Here he came into extensive contact with two critical art traditions that he considered “the source” of his own work -- pre-Columbian art, with its simple and solid forms of stone and clay sculptures, and popular Mexican art, with its colorfully painted clay sculptures, animals and masks.

Dog Barking at the Moon, Smithsonian American Art Slide 6 Museum, 1942 • Here are some of Tamayo’s pictures of animals – dogs and birds were his most common motifs – and masked figures. Oaxaca, the Mexican region Tamayo was

Perro Ladrando a la Luna, 1942 born in, has a rich tradition of hundreds of masked dances, carnivals and festivals impersonating animals – tiger dances, turtle dances, the dance of the fish, and the dance

Girl Attacked by Strange Bird, 1947 of the bears. The Woman with Red Mask, 1940 Carnaval, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 1947

Slide 7 • At age 27, Tamayo felt compelled to move to New York, where he would ultimately live off and on for more than two decades ending only in 1960. “I always thought that New York was the center of the art New York Seen from the Terrace, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 1931 world. I went to New York to get to know what painting really was. We were blind Animals, 1941 here, and New York made me aware of all

Lion and Horse, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 1942 the trends and currents…. My art was really formed there.” • In New York, Tamayo taught art at the Dalton School, visited museums and galleries regularly, and befriended his artist neighbors Stuart Davis and Marcel Duchamp. He studied and incorporated elements of , futurism, and abstract .

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Great Falls Elementary Art Enrichment – November-December 2017 Rufino Tamayo (1899-1991)

• He was particularly influenced by Picasso – his fractured, geometric and schematic planes, as well as the anguished imagery he displayed in works like Guernica, which was especially apt for the anxious time of World War II.

Slide 8 • Tamayo married his wife Olga in 1934, and they would remain married for 65 years until his death. Tamayo’s statuesque and dignified portrait of her is considered one of the most important Mexican paintings of the 20th century. Note the watermelon in the background!

Portrait of Olga, 1964

Slide 9 • Tamayo is also known for the stark and public differences he had with the other three great Mexican artists of his time, Rivera, Orozco and Siqueiros. They were known as “los tres grandes” (the three great ones), and Tamayo was the

Duality, 1964 conspicuous odd man out. • Los tres grandes were all muralists who painted huge public art that they insisted serve the socialist ends of the and its government. They disdained smaller easel paintings like Tamayo’s about subjects that were personal, not political. Siqueiros even said, “Ours is the only path!” • Tamayo disagreed, saying “Can you believe that, to say that ours is the only path when the fundamental thing in art is freedom! In art, there are millions of paths – as many paths as there are artists.”

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Great Falls Elementary Art Enrichment – November-December 2017 Rufino Tamayo (1899-1991)

• Because Tamayo was unafraid to follow his convictions and paint as he wanted, he inspired many Mexican artists after him, and is revered as an example of artistic freedom and independence. • Tamayo eventually made his own large , but they were about very different subjects, like pre-Columbian mythology in Duality, which was adapted as a Google doodle almost unaltered in 2013, on what would have been Tamayo’s 114th birthday.

The Great Galaxy, • Another of Tamayo’s preferred subjects Slide 10 1978 was literally universal – a fascination with

Woman Reaching for the cosmos and man’s place in it. Painting the Moon, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 1946 about space and gave Tamayo a different kind of opportunity to Eclipse, Moon and Sun, 1980 1990 display his mastery of light and color. • As Octavio Paz wrote, “If I could express with a single word what… distinguishes Tamayo from other painters…, I would say, without a moment’s hesitation: sun. For the sun is in all his pictures, whether we see it or not; night itself is for Tamayo simply the sun carbonized.

Slide 11 • Besides being overtly ideological, Mexican art in Tamayo’s time was generally quite solemn and dramatic, with no place for smiles, humor, celebration or good cheer.

El Hombre Feliz, 1947 • Tamayo’s art, as always, was different, frequently full of smiles and fun and often optimistic, festive and comedic.

Toast to Happiness, 1961 Ballerina in the Night, 1946

Children Playing with Fire, 1947

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Great Falls Elementary Art Enrichment – November-December 2017 Rufino Tamayo (1899-1991)

Slide 12 • Tamayo painted eight hours a day for more than 70 years, and lamented “90 years are not sufficient to achieve what I would like. I will never retire, and… I believe I will die painting.” He almost did, at age 91. • There are two important Mexican museums named after Tamayo – the Tamayo Museum of Pre-Hispanic Art in Oaxaca,

Three Characters, 1970 The Pretty Girl, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 1937 and the Tamayo Museum of International Contemporary Art in Mexico City, both of which house collections acquired by Tamayo and his wife. • Although you usually have to go to Mexico to see Tamayo’s art, you can see much of it right here through March 18th at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, which is displaying works that Tamayo painted during his time in New York, including some you have seen in this presentation. • The last painting, Three Characters, has an interesting story. It was stolen from a Houston couple in 1987, and disappeared for 20 years. Then one day in 2007, a New York woman was walking to get her morning coffee when she noticed the painting stuck between two garbage bags on the street and decided to take it for herself. 20 minutes after she did so, the garbage truck arrived, so she really did save it from the dump! She then had the painting for a while before realizing it was stolen, in part thanks to a “Missing Masterpiece” segment of Antiques Roadshow. The woman then returned the Tamayo to its owners, who gave her a $15,000 reward and sold the painting (which they had bought for only $55,000) for more than $1 million!

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