Rufino Tamayo: The Complete Story
Rufino Tamayo was the fourth great Mexican painter, the one who refused to put politics on the wall. Born in Oaxaca in 1899, of Zapotec descent, he answered the muralists with watermelons, constellations and pre-Hispanic form, and outlived them all, dying in 1991 at 91.
Rivera, Orozco and Siqueiros painted revolutions. Tamayo painted colour itself, and spent half a century being punished for it. Here is his side of the argument.
Tamayo at a glance:
Born in Oaxaca in 1899, orphaned young, raised selling fruit in Mexico City markets.
Refused the muralists' politics and paid for it with decades of exile.
Invented mixografia printmaking in the 1970s.
Gave Mexico two museums: pre-Hispanic art in Oaxaca, contemporary art in the capital.
Died in 1991 at 91, vindicated as the fourth great Mexican.
The boy from Oaxaca at the fruit stall
Orphaned young, Tamayo was sent to Mexico City around 1911 to live with an aunt who sold fruit at the market of La Merced.
He never stopped painting what he saw on that stall: the watermelons that recur through his whole career are Oaxaca reds and greens carried out of childhood.
In 1921 he took a job drawing the collections of the National Museum of Anthropology, and pre-Hispanic sculpture became his true academy.
The quarrel with the muralists
In the Mexico of the 1920s and 30s, the muralists ruled and painting was expected to preach. Tamayo refused.
He argued that Mexican art could be Mexican through form and colour, not slogans, and the establishment treated the position as treason.
In 1926 he left for New York the first time, and from 1936 to 1949 he lived there, teaching and painting, while Mexico argued about him at a distance.
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The myth: the apolitical decorator
The muralists' camp cast him as a painter of pretty fruit with nothing to say.
Look at the wartime canvases and the charge collapses: his snarling dogs and screaming figures of the 1940s carry as much dread as anything painted in Mexico, and his 1952 mural for the Palacio de Bellas Artes, Birth of Our Nationality, answers Rivera on Rivera's own wall.
He was not apolitical. He simply refused to reduce painting to a poster.
Paris, the print revolution, and the return
From 1949 he spent years in Paris, where European critics gave him the standing Mexico had withheld. Back home he changed printmaking itself: in the 1970s, with the printer Luis Remba, he invented Mixografia, a technique that gives prints real relief and texture, now used by artists worldwide.
The two museums he gave away
Tamayo turned his collections into public gifts.
In 1974 he opened the Museo Rufino Tamayo in Oaxaca to house his pre-Hispanic pieces, and in 1981 the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City's Chapultepec Park, built around his international collection, from Picasso to Bacon.
The painter accused of abandoning Mexico left it two museums.
Where to see Tamayo
The Museo Tamayo in Mexico City and his Oaxaca museum are the two pilgrimages; the Palacio de Bellas Artes keeps his answer to the muralists on permanent view, and MoMA and the Phillips Collection hold him in the United States.
The fruit stalls inside the paintings
Tamayo spent his adolescence in his aunt's fruit business, and the watermelons never left: sliced sandias recur for seventy years.
The reds and pinks he mixed for them became his signature palette, pigment ground with sand and marble dust for texture you can hear.
The quarrel with the big three
Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros wanted murals as political weapons; Tamayo answered that Mexican painting deserved to be painting first.
The muralists called him a traitor, and he worked from New York and Paris for decades. Mexico eventually built his argument into museums.
Mixografia: prints with a body
In the 1970s, with a Mexico City workshop, he developed mixografia, prints cast in relief on handmade paper so the surface itself sculpts.
The technique now serves artists worldwide, a printmaking invention as distinct as his color.
The Rufino Tamayo questions that keep coming up
What is he known for? Watermelons, moons and figures painted in saturated colour rooted in pre-Hispanic art.
Why did he fight with the muralists? He rejected painting as propaganda; they read that as betrayal of the Revolution.
What is Mixografia? The relief printmaking technique he invented with Luis Remba in the 1970s.
When did he die? In Mexico City in 1991, at 91, still painting into his last year.
What is mixografia? The relief printmaking process Tamayo developed in the 1970s: paper cast against a carved plate, producing prints with real depth and texture.
Why did Tamayo leave Mexico? The muralist establishment treated his refusal of political painting as betrayal, so he built his career from New York and Paris before Mexico reclaimed him.
More secrets to unlock
One last fact
His name is now permanently off the planet: the International Astronomical Union, which names the craters of Mercury after artists, gave one of them to Tamayo. The boy from the Oaxaca fruit stall shares the smallest planet with Titian and Hokusai.