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Lot Essay
We are grateful to art historian Juan Carlos Pereda for his assistance cataloguing this work.
“I want to plant the national flag very firmly and I believe there is every chance that I can do so,” Tamayo wrote in 1949, assuming the mantle of what he declared “a new phase of Mexican painting” over the following decade.[1] He enjoyed newfound prestige by the end of the 1950s as he reoriented the Mural movement around plastic, rather than ideological, values and took his place as an ambassador of modern Mexican painting abroad. In the wake of his critical triumph at the Venice Biennale in 1950, Tamayo embarked on a series of prominent commissions—among them El Hombre (1953, Dallas Museum of Art), Prometheus (1957, University of Puerto Rico), and Prometheus Handing Fire to Mankind (1958, UNESCO headquarters in Paris)—that manifested the increasingly humanist, universal dimensions of his work. His paintings and murals from this period distill European and Mexican sources, tapping postwar existentialism and indigenous aesthetics in renderings of archetypal men and women, his most enduring subjects. “In Tamayo’s painting the monumentality of the human figure gives man greatness in his relationship with the cosmos,” critic José Corredor-Matheos observed. “An ambivalent relationship, for the disproportion, however conventional, must be evident, and man is appraised, tragically, in the face of the void and the whole.”[2]
Tamayo plumbed myriad humanist themes throughout his career, giving extraordinary expression to the resilience and vulnerability of the human spirit. “His subject now is man,” Paul Westheim wrote in the late 1950s, “man, who, apart from his condition as a collective being, is discovering himself as an individual and intransferable being, whose essence cannot be transferred any more than his life can be lived by anyone but himself.”[3] That affirmative subjectivity defined Tamayo’s work of the 1950s, seen in men and women that face the cosmic abyss, their bodies laden with dualities of life and death, past and future, myth and memory. “I am interested in Man,” he declared. “Man is my subject, Man who is the creator of all scientific and technological wonders. To me that is the most important thing in existence.”[4]
Tamayo’s figures became increasingly simplified over the 1950s, their features effaced in ways that suggest their vaunted universalism and that acknowledge, as well, his intensifying interest in pre-Hispanic art, which he had begun to collect. “My sources are mainly pre-Columbian art and after that, the popular arts of my country because they are the roots of our great classical tradition,” he explained. “The real roots of a Mexican School” lay in a native “sense of proportion” and, signally, in color: “my palette may sometimes seem similar to the reds and oranges of ancient pottery,” he allowed, “which are part also of Mexico.” Mexico’s indigenous past materialized in resonances and symbologies of form, Tamayo insisted, rather than in iconographic description. “The plastic problem interests me more than anything else,” he continued. “I am trying more and more to express the essence of things, and to do so, I am limiting my palette as much as possible and simplifying and restricting shapes. Faces no longer have eyes; they have no noses either because I consider them superfluous. What is important is the structure of the figure. And it is the same with the colors. I don’t try to use many colors because I consider it unnecessary. With two or three colors at the most you can express more than plenty.”[5]
The eponymous, gray-ocher figures of Dos Mujeres stand before a preternaturally textured red façade, framed by a doorway that opens into infinite nothingness. Stolid and schematic, their bodies are minimally defined by highlights of orange and umber, their faces nearly featureless. Their unspoken, psychic reciprocity is conveyed by the lucid materiality of Tamayo’s color; their figures appear almost phosphorescent against the darkened field and the cochineal-red wall, here as elsewhere evocative of Mexico’s pre-Hispanic past. “Tamayo’s art is a dramatic expression, saturated with conflicts and tensions, collisions of destructive forces; an art that reflects how fate sifts down onto man, and man’s heroic struggle against this fate that is sifting down onto him,” Westheim observed. “Death lurks in the background, casting its shade over every being and every event—the same shade cast by the Aztec concept of Coatlicue, the horrifying and sublime Earth Goddess, in which birth and death, the beginning and the end of all earthly things, are linked together. Form and color are brought together in this plastic concept as an expression of vital anxiety. This constant, often desperate, search after the meaning of being gives Tamayo’s art an added dimension of spiritual depth.”[6]
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
1 Rufino Tamayo, quoted in Ingrid Suckaer, “Chronology,” in Tamayo: A Modern Icon Reinterpreted, ed. Diana C. Du Pont (Santa Barbara: Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 2007), 421-22.
2 José Corredor-Matheos, Tamayo (New York: Rizzoli, 1987), 24.
3 Paul Westheim, Tamayo: A Study in Esthetics (Mexico City: Ediciones Artes de México, 1957), 11.
4 Tamayo, “A Commentary by the Artist,” in Tamayo (Phoenix: Phoenix Art Museum, 1968), 4.
5 Ibid., 2-4.
6 Westheim, Tamayo, 15.
“I want to plant the national flag very firmly and I believe there is every chance that I can do so,” Tamayo wrote in 1949, assuming the mantle of what he declared “a new phase of Mexican painting” over the following decade.[1] He enjoyed newfound prestige by the end of the 1950s as he reoriented the Mural movement around plastic, rather than ideological, values and took his place as an ambassador of modern Mexican painting abroad. In the wake of his critical triumph at the Venice Biennale in 1950, Tamayo embarked on a series of prominent commissions—among them El Hombre (1953, Dallas Museum of Art), Prometheus (1957, University of Puerto Rico), and Prometheus Handing Fire to Mankind (1958, UNESCO headquarters in Paris)—that manifested the increasingly humanist, universal dimensions of his work. His paintings and murals from this period distill European and Mexican sources, tapping postwar existentialism and indigenous aesthetics in renderings of archetypal men and women, his most enduring subjects. “In Tamayo’s painting the monumentality of the human figure gives man greatness in his relationship with the cosmos,” critic José Corredor-Matheos observed. “An ambivalent relationship, for the disproportion, however conventional, must be evident, and man is appraised, tragically, in the face of the void and the whole.”[2]
Tamayo plumbed myriad humanist themes throughout his career, giving extraordinary expression to the resilience and vulnerability of the human spirit. “His subject now is man,” Paul Westheim wrote in the late 1950s, “man, who, apart from his condition as a collective being, is discovering himself as an individual and intransferable being, whose essence cannot be transferred any more than his life can be lived by anyone but himself.”[3] That affirmative subjectivity defined Tamayo’s work of the 1950s, seen in men and women that face the cosmic abyss, their bodies laden with dualities of life and death, past and future, myth and memory. “I am interested in Man,” he declared. “Man is my subject, Man who is the creator of all scientific and technological wonders. To me that is the most important thing in existence.”[4]
Tamayo’s figures became increasingly simplified over the 1950s, their features effaced in ways that suggest their vaunted universalism and that acknowledge, as well, his intensifying interest in pre-Hispanic art, which he had begun to collect. “My sources are mainly pre-Columbian art and after that, the popular arts of my country because they are the roots of our great classical tradition,” he explained. “The real roots of a Mexican School” lay in a native “sense of proportion” and, signally, in color: “my palette may sometimes seem similar to the reds and oranges of ancient pottery,” he allowed, “which are part also of Mexico.” Mexico’s indigenous past materialized in resonances and symbologies of form, Tamayo insisted, rather than in iconographic description. “The plastic problem interests me more than anything else,” he continued. “I am trying more and more to express the essence of things, and to do so, I am limiting my palette as much as possible and simplifying and restricting shapes. Faces no longer have eyes; they have no noses either because I consider them superfluous. What is important is the structure of the figure. And it is the same with the colors. I don’t try to use many colors because I consider it unnecessary. With two or three colors at the most you can express more than plenty.”[5]
The eponymous, gray-ocher figures of Dos Mujeres stand before a preternaturally textured red façade, framed by a doorway that opens into infinite nothingness. Stolid and schematic, their bodies are minimally defined by highlights of orange and umber, their faces nearly featureless. Their unspoken, psychic reciprocity is conveyed by the lucid materiality of Tamayo’s color; their figures appear almost phosphorescent against the darkened field and the cochineal-red wall, here as elsewhere evocative of Mexico’s pre-Hispanic past. “Tamayo’s art is a dramatic expression, saturated with conflicts and tensions, collisions of destructive forces; an art that reflects how fate sifts down onto man, and man’s heroic struggle against this fate that is sifting down onto him,” Westheim observed. “Death lurks in the background, casting its shade over every being and every event—the same shade cast by the Aztec concept of Coatlicue, the horrifying and sublime Earth Goddess, in which birth and death, the beginning and the end of all earthly things, are linked together. Form and color are brought together in this plastic concept as an expression of vital anxiety. This constant, often desperate, search after the meaning of being gives Tamayo’s art an added dimension of spiritual depth.”[6]
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
1 Rufino Tamayo, quoted in Ingrid Suckaer, “Chronology,” in Tamayo: A Modern Icon Reinterpreted, ed. Diana C. Du Pont (Santa Barbara: Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 2007), 421-22.
2 José Corredor-Matheos, Tamayo (New York: Rizzoli, 1987), 24.
3 Paul Westheim, Tamayo: A Study in Esthetics (Mexico City: Ediciones Artes de México, 1957), 11.
4 Tamayo, “A Commentary by the Artist,” in Tamayo (Phoenix: Phoenix Art Museum, 1968), 4.
5 Ibid., 2-4.
6 Westheim, Tamayo, 15.