Rufino Tamayo was a Mexican painter born in Oaxaca in 1899, of Zapotec descent, who died in Mexico City in 1991. He refused to paint politics while the great muralists covered Mexico's walls with it, and built his own art from pre-Hispanic form, saturated color and slices of watermelon.
He lived in New York and Paris, invented the printmaking technique called mixografia, and gave Mexico two museums.
In the Mexico he grew up in, a serious painter was expected to put the Revolution on a wall. Tamayo painted a slice of fruit instead.
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That choice cost him. Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros wanted painting to serve the Revolution, and Siqueiros announced that theirs was the only path. Tamayo answered that the fundamental thing in art is freedom. Some called him a traitor, and he spent much of his career working in New York and Paris.
Then, in 1964, Mexico City opened a new Museum of Anthropology, and the painter who had refused to preach painted a wall for its opening. It shows two ancient gods locked in combat. As a young man Tamayo had run the department that drew the objects in the national archaeology museum, and the forms he copied there never left his work.
The man some called a traitor to Mexican art ended up on a wall of its national museum of ancient Mexico. How a boy from a fruit stall got there is the story below.
What You'll Discover
Where his first job pointed him.
What he answered the muralists.
Why a slice of fruit took over.
How cotton pulp changed his prints.
What he gave back to Oaxaca.