Rufino Tamayo valuation
Zapotec painter who refused Mexican muralism's politics and painted watermelons and figures in dusty colour.
Rufino Tamayo was born in Oaxaca in 1899 of Zapotec descent, was orphaned young, and worked in his aunt's fruit stall in Mexico City — which is where the watermelons come from.
What a work by Rufino Tamayo is worth
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Bio
Rufino Tamayo was born in Oaxaca in 1899 of Zapotec descent, was orphaned young, and worked in his aunt's fruit stall in Mexico City — which is where the watermelons come from. He set himself deliberately against the political programme of Rivera, Orozco and Siqueiros, arguing that painting should be about painting, and paid for it with years of hostility at home and long residence in New York and Paris. The mature work combines pre-Hispanic form with European modernism in a chalky, mineral palette of pinks, ochres and greys. He gave two museums to Mexico and died in 1991.
The leading name in the modern Mexican market alongside Rivera and Kahlo, with prices set in New York and Mexico City. Tamayo is heavily forged, and expert opinion together with the catalogue raisonne work by Juan Carlos Pereda and the Tamayo museums is the standard reference. He also invented the Mixografia process with Luis and Lea Remba — a printing technique producing genuine three-dimensional surface relief on handmade paper — and those editions are substantial works in their own right, quite distinct from his ordinary lithographs.
At a glance
- Born
- 26 August 1899, Oaxaca de Juárez
- Died
- 24 June 1990, Mexico City
- Movement
- Modernism
More on Wikipedia.
San Carlos, Bellas Artes and the Mixographs
Tamayo's aunt enrolled him at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas at San Carlos in 1917. His first major retrospective was at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City in 1948, and his murals there include Nacimiento de la nacionalidad of 1952. His wife, Olga, appears in many of his portraits.
With the printer and engineer Luis Remba he made some 80 Mixographs, among them Dos personajes atacados por perros, and his graphic work runs from 1925 to 1991 in woodcut, lithograph, etching and Mixografia. He died in Mexico City in June 1991. A print is identified by its title, its edition number and the workshop that printed it.
Vasconcelos, the Weyhe Gallery and the Dalton School
Tamayo's mother was a seamstress and his father a shoemaker. Dissatisfied with the academy at San Carlos, he studied on his own, and in 1921 went to work for José Vasconcelos in the Department of Ethnographic Drawings, which he later headed. He left for New York in 1926, and a month after he arrived the Weyhe Gallery showed 39 of his works. From 1937 to 1949 he lived in New York with Olga, showing at the Valentine Gallery, Knoedler and Marlborough, and taught Helen Frankenthaler at the Dalton School.
He told Paul Westheim that the fewer colours he used, the more possibilities opened up, and Octavio Paz, who wrote a book on him, saw the richness of his colour as the product of restraint. Lion and Horse, of 1942, draws on pre-Columbian ceramics. After a decade in Paris he and Olga returned to Mexico in 1959, and he founded the Museo Rufino Tamayo in Oaxaca; the younger Oaxacan painter Francisco Toledo followed his example. Tres personajes, of 1970, stolen from a storage unit in Houston in the late 1980s, turned up among rubbish on a Manhattan pavement in 2003 and was sold at auction in New York in November 2007.
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