Oaxaca, 1899 – Ciudad de México (México), 1991
By Francisco Alambert
Painter, muralist, and graphic artist, descendant of Zapotec Indians, Rufino Tamayo became an orphan at the age of eight. At twelve, he moved to Mexico City, where he studied at the San Carlos Academy (1917) while selling fruits in the city market. During this time, he met Roberto Montenegro and began to advocate for cultural nationalism. In 1921, he became head of the Ethnographic Drawing Department at the National Museum of Archaeology, which had been dedicated to classifying the pre-colonial legacy since the Mexican Revolution of 1910. This work strongly influenced his art, characterized by the integration of pre-Columbian forms with modernist achievements (from cubism to abstraction).
Also in 1921, he was in New York, holding his first exhibition at the Weyhe Gallery, followed by another in Mexico City in 1926. Between 1928 and 1930, he taught at the National Academy of Fine Arts and the San Carlos Academy (then directed by Diego Rivera), and in 1932, he headed the Visual Arts Department of the Secretariat of Public Education. The following year, he produced frescoes for the Conservatory of Music in Mexico City, featuring themes that exalted both Mexican nature and the workers of the Revolution. In 1936, he participated with José Clemente Orozco (1883-1949) and David Alfaro Siqueiros in the Mexican delegation at the Artists’ Congress, and in 1938, he created the socially themed mural La Revolución (at the National Museum of Anthropology).
Between 1939 and 1949, he lived in New York and taught at the Dalton School. During this period, he exhibited numerous times in the U.S. and Mexico. In 1948, a comprehensive retrospective of his work was presented at the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City, where the artist also completed a large and striking mural entitled México Hoy in 1952. In 1950, the Venice Biennale (to which he returned in 1968) granted him a special room. He was awarded at the Carnegie International in 1952 and, in 1955, received the Grand Prize for Painting at the II São Paulo Biennial (to which he returned in 1993 at the XXII edition). Also in 1955, he completed the mural El Hombre for the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts and another at the Palace of Fine Arts, addressing the birth of Mexican nationality.
In the 1950s, he painted easel works with abstract forms and surfaces marked by distinct textures, such as Bestia Herida (1953) and El Hombre del Teléfono (1956), which are part of major museums worldwide. In 1956, he received the Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur award from the French government, the same year he created the mural América for a bank in Houston, United States, perhaps his most significant work. The following year, he moved to Paris. In 1958, he created the mural Prometeo for the Conference Room of the UNESCO building in Paris and won the Guggenheim International Award. In 1959, he participated in Documenta II. In 1961, he was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters before returning to Mexico in 1964.
He was honored in cinema with the film Tamayo (1970) by Max Pol, and in La Vida Artística de Rufino Tamayo (1973) by H. Cokin. In 1974, the Mexican painter donated a collection of around 1,300 pieces of pre-Columbian art to his hometown, which are now displayed at the Rufino Tamayo Pre-Hispanic Art Museum. In 1981, the Rufino Tamayo Museum of Contemporary Art was established in Mexico City, housing his collection of contemporary art and works by over 150 artists. From 1981 to 1982, he served as director of the School of Fine Arts at the Benito Juárez Autonomous University of Oaxaca. In 1987, an exhibition featuring over seven hundred of his paintings was presented in Mexico City at the Palace of Fine Arts and the Tamayo Museum.
