Rufino Tamayo
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. 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.
If you own a work by Rufino Tamayo
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
Write to info@whitebankfineart.co.uk, or start below.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.