Lot Essay
We are grateful to Art Historian Juan Carlos Pereda for his assistance in cataloguing this work.
Mujeres synthesizes many of the characteristics for which Tamayo's mature work is celebrated. Set in a room with a louvered window, two female figures, reduced to elemental lines and circles, stand before a large, looming form of an animal. Inspired by Cubism, the geometric shapes overlap and conflate the figures, thereby challenging traditional perspective and composition. The tight spatial relationship between the women and the animal suggests the interconnectedness of humanity and nature. Likewise, modernity and antiquity fuse in Mujeres. The areas of pattern that cup the left and right shoulders of the women, for example, mimic a jaguar's coat and a feathered wing, alluding to representations found in Mesoamerican codices and murals. Overall, the painting represents a continuum of a culture spanning from the origins of Mexican civilization up to the present and into the future.
The animal depicted in Mujeres lacks the aggression and violence imparted in Tamayo's paintings of animals of the 1940s, which were allegories of war and destruction. In the postwar and Cold War years in which Mujeres was painted, Tamayo and other artists were preoccupied with sublime and humanist concerns.(1)
Tamayo's longstanding, paramount interest in color and form, in the pursuit of a "pure art," arte puro, fed an ongoing debate between Tamayo and muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros about the social role and pictorial ideal of modern Mexican art. Compared to the highly politicized and social realist pictorial program of the Muralists, Tamayo's work presents a stark contrast. The figures depicted in Mujeres and other paintings of his mature period are indeed stripped down to elemental forms, but Tamayo never abandoned figural art. Tamayo contended that "returning painting to its 'pure qualities' did not necessarily mean no subject matter or pure abstraction but rather an emphasis on technique and the act of painting."(2) Dedication to this principle produced a body of work which, through the eyes of Octavio Paz, "does not give us the sensation of reality: it confronts us with the reality of sensations. The most immediate and most direct sensations: colors, form, touch."(3)
Tamayo and his wife Olga took up residence in New York City in 1936, and they later resided in Paris. Tamayo fused his encounters with the art of the Abstract Expressionists and the French modern masters into his provocative style, while always maintaining his steadfast Mexican artistic identity. "I took advantage of all that I saw for the purpose of having a painting that had a Mexican stamp but that was universal at the same time."(4) In 1960, the same year that Mujeres was painted, he and Olga decided to return to Mexico permanently.
Celeste Donovan.
1) D. C. DuPont, "'Realistic, Never Descriptive': Tamayo and the Art of Abstract Figuration," in Tamayo: A Modern Icon Reinterpreted, Santa Barbara, CA., Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 2007, 75.
2) R. Tamayo, Textos de Rufino Tamayo, Raquel Tibol, ed., Mexico City, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, 1987, 30.
3) O. Paz, "An Art of Transfigurations," in Rufino Tamayo, Myth and Magic, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1979, 22.
4) R. Tamayo, Textos de Rufino Tamayo, 89.
Mujeres synthesizes many of the characteristics for which Tamayo's mature work is celebrated. Set in a room with a louvered window, two female figures, reduced to elemental lines and circles, stand before a large, looming form of an animal. Inspired by Cubism, the geometric shapes overlap and conflate the figures, thereby challenging traditional perspective and composition. The tight spatial relationship between the women and the animal suggests the interconnectedness of humanity and nature. Likewise, modernity and antiquity fuse in Mujeres. The areas of pattern that cup the left and right shoulders of the women, for example, mimic a jaguar's coat and a feathered wing, alluding to representations found in Mesoamerican codices and murals. Overall, the painting represents a continuum of a culture spanning from the origins of Mexican civilization up to the present and into the future.
The animal depicted in Mujeres lacks the aggression and violence imparted in Tamayo's paintings of animals of the 1940s, which were allegories of war and destruction. In the postwar and Cold War years in which Mujeres was painted, Tamayo and other artists were preoccupied with sublime and humanist concerns.(1)
Tamayo's longstanding, paramount interest in color and form, in the pursuit of a "pure art," arte puro, fed an ongoing debate between Tamayo and muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros about the social role and pictorial ideal of modern Mexican art. Compared to the highly politicized and social realist pictorial program of the Muralists, Tamayo's work presents a stark contrast. The figures depicted in Mujeres and other paintings of his mature period are indeed stripped down to elemental forms, but Tamayo never abandoned figural art. Tamayo contended that "returning painting to its 'pure qualities' did not necessarily mean no subject matter or pure abstraction but rather an emphasis on technique and the act of painting."(2) Dedication to this principle produced a body of work which, through the eyes of Octavio Paz, "does not give us the sensation of reality: it confronts us with the reality of sensations. The most immediate and most direct sensations: colors, form, touch."(3)
Tamayo and his wife Olga took up residence in New York City in 1936, and they later resided in Paris. Tamayo fused his encounters with the art of the Abstract Expressionists and the French modern masters into his provocative style, while always maintaining his steadfast Mexican artistic identity. "I took advantage of all that I saw for the purpose of having a painting that had a Mexican stamp but that was universal at the same time."(4) In 1960, the same year that Mujeres was painted, he and Olga decided to return to Mexico permanently.
Celeste Donovan.
1) D. C. DuPont, "'Realistic, Never Descriptive': Tamayo and the Art of Abstract Figuration," in Tamayo: A Modern Icon Reinterpreted, Santa Barbara, CA., Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 2007, 75.
2) R. Tamayo, Textos de Rufino Tamayo, Raquel Tibol, ed., Mexico City, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, 1987, 30.
3) O. Paz, "An Art of Transfigurations," in Rufino Tamayo, Myth and Magic, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1979, 22.
4) R. Tamayo, Textos de Rufino Tamayo, 89.