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Lot Essay
We are grateful to art historian Juan Carlos Pereda for his assistance cataloguing this work.
There currently exist two opposed tendencies in Mexican art. One is social realism and the other is poetic realism, to which I pertain. I do not trust a strictly national attitude…I lean towards universality, which undoubtedly isolates me in some way from Mexicans and is at the root of an increasingly heated controversy. –Rufino Tamayo, 19501
A public display of acrimony between Rufino Tamayo and the “Three Greats” (Mexican muralists David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco) played out in Mexico City’s local newspaper El Nacional in the fall of 1947 upon Tamayo’s return to Mexico following more than a decade of his self-exile in New York City as headlines read: “Mexican Painting is in a State of Decadence Says Tamayo, Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros in Decline”; “Orozco Doesn’t Change, Investigate, He Always Repeats Himself: Tamayo is Ready to Defend Himself and the Controversy Continues its Course”; “I Am Not a Copyist Says Tamayo”; and “Tamayo is a Bombastic Sufficiency Says Siqueiros: Mexican Painting is Not Sick or Decadent.”2 Three years later, in 1950, the very year that Tamayo painted Dos amantes contemplando la luna, the debate continued as these four artists were selected to represent Mexico in the country’s first time ever invitation to participate in the Venice Biennial.
At the Mexican Pavilion, 16 of Tamayo’s paintings hung in a room dedicated solely to his work. His loss of a Biennial award to his anathema Siqueiros only propelled Tamayo to further advocate for an opening in Mexican art; Tamayo called for a movement away from a closed, nationalist, social realist, political, picturesque and folkloric art of epic scale as he envisioned Mexican art expanding in stylistic diversity. “Mexico’s art is not uniform, limited to a single modality, rather, it is multifaceted, diverse,” he argued.3 Summarizing his position he stated:
I believe that we should contribute with the Mexican experience to this universal current. The fundamental point is that we are part of everything, not an independent island. We know very well that the School of Paris was formed in large part by foreigners, that it is universal and not Parisian…That understood, the roots of my painting are Mexican, but my plastic language is universal.4
Repeatedly Tamayo insisted that Mexican art needed to grow beyond Siqueiros’ infamous 1944 claim in defense of politicized muralism, “No hay más ruta que la nuestra (There is no other path but ours).” For Tamayo, truly revolutionary art was one open to experimentation, a rebellious one, dissatisfied, produced by artists both courageous in making mistakes and finding solutions, and not formulaic.5
This long-running dispute was not simply a theoretical one; as art historian James Oles points out, at mid-century Mexico’s state-run Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes commissioned a large canvas from Olga Costa to be included in an exhibition curated by Fernando Gamboa for Paris’ Musée D’Art Moderne. La vendedora de frutas (The Fruit Seller) presented a costumbrista (genre) painting of a bronze-skinned laborer behind a market fruit stand, a bounty of detailed, lush, Mexican native fruits laid out before her to tempt the viewer’s palate. Painted in the highly naturalistic manner of Hermenegildo Bustos’ 19th Century still lifes, what was representational, narrative, easily recognized as the exotic fruits of the land—not abstraction, not formal concerns—is what was considered representative of “The Mexican School” and official mexicanidad (Mexicanness).6
Tamayo maintained that he expressed his inherent Mexicanness in his painting, but not through legible, iconic subject-matter. He affirmed, “My painting, in addition to being Mexican in spirit and in essence, is international and contemporary.”7 Neither narrative or naturalistic, Dos amantes exemplifies the artist’s self-identified “poetic realism” that he named in the epigraph above, as he painted the everyday, absent of demagoguery. Additionally, an avid guitar player and singer of Mexican ballads, he brought his love of music and sense of rhythm to his paintings, the two lovers’ bodies recalling upright instruments. As a student and collector of pre-Columbian art, Tamayo further charged his abstracted figures with his study and knowledge of sculptural form, notably the thick bodied, short limbed ceramic animal and warrior figurines of Jalisco and Colima in West Mexico. Whereas, in La vendedora Costa meticulously illustrated calabazas, papaya, coco, tunas, cacahuate, jicama, piña, mango, aguacate, platano macho and tobasco, zapote, guanabana, tamarindo, mamey, and more, Tamayo ingested local color and texture, translating experience onto the canvas, sometimes hot and aggressive as with his Niña atacada por un pajaro extraño of 1947, and sometimes, as is the case here with Dos amantes, cool and subdued, while anthropomorphically provocative.
It was in Europe that Tamayo likely painted Dos amantes given that he had left New York in the summer of 1949 setting off on his first trip to Europe, where he would remain for nearly two years visiting England, Italy, Holland, Belgium, Spain, and France, making Paris his home base.8 1950 was a banner year for the artist; in addition to his participation in the XXV Venice Biennial from June 8-October 15, he presented a solo exhibition at the M. Knoedler & Co. Gallery in New York from April to May, with subsequent iterations of the exhibition at the Galerie de Beaux-Arts in Paris in November-December of the same year, and at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels from December 1950 to January 1951.9 Dos amantes was included in the latter two exhibitions as confirmed by Juan Carlos Pereda, Chief Curator at the Tamayo Museum in Mexico City through his committed research.10 It was in the Paris catalogue that Octavio Paz published his groundbreaking essay “Tamayo en la pintura mexicana,” where he acknowledged Tamayo’s role as a “black sheep” who would renovate the arts of Mexico.11 Indeed, Tamayo’s mid-century stance against “gangsterismo” in Mexican art pioneered the way for a younger generation of artists such as José Luis Cuevas, Juan Soriano, and the group Nueva Presencia to rebel against The Mexican School and the “ruta única” bringing about, in the late 1950s and 60s, the Ruptura (Break) in Mexican art.12
Teresa Eckmann, Associate Professor of Contemporary Latin American Art History, University of Texas at San Antonio
There currently exist two opposed tendencies in Mexican art. One is social realism and the other is poetic realism, to which I pertain. I do not trust a strictly national attitude…I lean towards universality, which undoubtedly isolates me in some way from Mexicans and is at the root of an increasingly heated controversy. –Rufino Tamayo, 19501
A public display of acrimony between Rufino Tamayo and the “Three Greats” (Mexican muralists David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco) played out in Mexico City’s local newspaper El Nacional in the fall of 1947 upon Tamayo’s return to Mexico following more than a decade of his self-exile in New York City as headlines read: “Mexican Painting is in a State of Decadence Says Tamayo, Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros in Decline”; “Orozco Doesn’t Change, Investigate, He Always Repeats Himself: Tamayo is Ready to Defend Himself and the Controversy Continues its Course”; “I Am Not a Copyist Says Tamayo”; and “Tamayo is a Bombastic Sufficiency Says Siqueiros: Mexican Painting is Not Sick or Decadent.”2 Three years later, in 1950, the very year that Tamayo painted Dos amantes contemplando la luna, the debate continued as these four artists were selected to represent Mexico in the country’s first time ever invitation to participate in the Venice Biennial.
At the Mexican Pavilion, 16 of Tamayo’s paintings hung in a room dedicated solely to his work. His loss of a Biennial award to his anathema Siqueiros only propelled Tamayo to further advocate for an opening in Mexican art; Tamayo called for a movement away from a closed, nationalist, social realist, political, picturesque and folkloric art of epic scale as he envisioned Mexican art expanding in stylistic diversity. “Mexico’s art is not uniform, limited to a single modality, rather, it is multifaceted, diverse,” he argued.3 Summarizing his position he stated:
I believe that we should contribute with the Mexican experience to this universal current. The fundamental point is that we are part of everything, not an independent island. We know very well that the School of Paris was formed in large part by foreigners, that it is universal and not Parisian…That understood, the roots of my painting are Mexican, but my plastic language is universal.4
Repeatedly Tamayo insisted that Mexican art needed to grow beyond Siqueiros’ infamous 1944 claim in defense of politicized muralism, “No hay más ruta que la nuestra (There is no other path but ours).” For Tamayo, truly revolutionary art was one open to experimentation, a rebellious one, dissatisfied, produced by artists both courageous in making mistakes and finding solutions, and not formulaic.5
This long-running dispute was not simply a theoretical one; as art historian James Oles points out, at mid-century Mexico’s state-run Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes commissioned a large canvas from Olga Costa to be included in an exhibition curated by Fernando Gamboa for Paris’ Musée D’Art Moderne. La vendedora de frutas (The Fruit Seller) presented a costumbrista (genre) painting of a bronze-skinned laborer behind a market fruit stand, a bounty of detailed, lush, Mexican native fruits laid out before her to tempt the viewer’s palate. Painted in the highly naturalistic manner of Hermenegildo Bustos’ 19th Century still lifes, what was representational, narrative, easily recognized as the exotic fruits of the land—not abstraction, not formal concerns—is what was considered representative of “The Mexican School” and official mexicanidad (Mexicanness).6
Tamayo maintained that he expressed his inherent Mexicanness in his painting, but not through legible, iconic subject-matter. He affirmed, “My painting, in addition to being Mexican in spirit and in essence, is international and contemporary.”7 Neither narrative or naturalistic, Dos amantes exemplifies the artist’s self-identified “poetic realism” that he named in the epigraph above, as he painted the everyday, absent of demagoguery. Additionally, an avid guitar player and singer of Mexican ballads, he brought his love of music and sense of rhythm to his paintings, the two lovers’ bodies recalling upright instruments. As a student and collector of pre-Columbian art, Tamayo further charged his abstracted figures with his study and knowledge of sculptural form, notably the thick bodied, short limbed ceramic animal and warrior figurines of Jalisco and Colima in West Mexico. Whereas, in La vendedora Costa meticulously illustrated calabazas, papaya, coco, tunas, cacahuate, jicama, piña, mango, aguacate, platano macho and tobasco, zapote, guanabana, tamarindo, mamey, and more, Tamayo ingested local color and texture, translating experience onto the canvas, sometimes hot and aggressive as with his Niña atacada por un pajaro extraño of 1947, and sometimes, as is the case here with Dos amantes, cool and subdued, while anthropomorphically provocative.
It was in Europe that Tamayo likely painted Dos amantes given that he had left New York in the summer of 1949 setting off on his first trip to Europe, where he would remain for nearly two years visiting England, Italy, Holland, Belgium, Spain, and France, making Paris his home base.8 1950 was a banner year for the artist; in addition to his participation in the XXV Venice Biennial from June 8-October 15, he presented a solo exhibition at the M. Knoedler & Co. Gallery in New York from April to May, with subsequent iterations of the exhibition at the Galerie de Beaux-Arts in Paris in November-December of the same year, and at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels from December 1950 to January 1951.9 Dos amantes was included in the latter two exhibitions as confirmed by Juan Carlos Pereda, Chief Curator at the Tamayo Museum in Mexico City through his committed research.10 It was in the Paris catalogue that Octavio Paz published his groundbreaking essay “Tamayo en la pintura mexicana,” where he acknowledged Tamayo’s role as a “black sheep” who would renovate the arts of Mexico.11 Indeed, Tamayo’s mid-century stance against “gangsterismo” in Mexican art pioneered the way for a younger generation of artists such as José Luis Cuevas, Juan Soriano, and the group Nueva Presencia to rebel against The Mexican School and the “ruta única” bringing about, in the late 1950s and 60s, the Ruptura (Break) in Mexican art.12
Teresa Eckmann, Associate Professor of Contemporary Latin American Art History, University of Texas at San Antonio