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Lot Essay
Born in Oaxaca in 1899, Tamayo built his career between Mexico and the United States as he began to define a maverick position within the Mexican avant-garde. He held teaching positions in Mexico City and New York in the 1920s and 1930s amid the ascension of the Mural movement, whose ideological arte social-político he countered with a defense of arte puro, a more autonomous, critical model of mexicanidad advocated by the Contemporáneos, a modernist group of artists and writers. Across a celebrated career that spanned the twentieth century, Tamayo dwelled on the motley complexion of humanity, imaged in men and women—mythical and Mexican—who brave the world with resilience and empathy. A brilliant colorist, he gained international renown in the postwar years following his triumph at the XXV Venice Biennale (1950) and undertook a series of high-profile mural projects, among them Nacimiento de nuestra nacionalidad (Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City, 1952), two interpretations of Prometheus (Paris and Río Piedras, Puerto Rico, 1957 and 1958), and El hombre frente al infinito (Hotel Camino Real, Mexico City, 1971). He has been the subject of numerous retrospectives, notably at the Guggenheim Museum (1979), the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (1988), the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (2007), and most recently the Smithsonian American Art Museum (2017).
“The colors have now begun to cool,” art historian James B. Lynch, Jr. wrote of Tamayo’s work by the mid-1970s. “They have adjusted as it were to a more detached, introspective mood. For the most part figures stand mute, transfixed.” The solitude, or “sense of insularity,” of his figures is “enhanced by what seem to be ‘frames’ within the picture frames or ‘paintings’ inside paintings.” The subject of Mujer tras un vidrio is encased in this way; she occupies a shallow space between textured planes of grey, her pinkish body seen both behind and next to a frosted sheet of glass. Her simplified silhouette, described in circles and sinuous curves, is countered by an angular abstraction on the other side of the glass, an even more reduced figure of a woman. “Loss and/or change of identity, a characteristic element of late Tamayos, becomes now even more pronounced,” Lynch suggests. “The head as an expression of identity and self is negated; it is replaced by a mask or converted into a sort of pre-Columbian glyph” (“Tamayo Revisited, “Rufino Tamayo: Fifty Years of His Painting, exh. cat., The Phillips Collection, Washington, 1978, p. 21 and 23).
In Mujer tras un vidrio, the impastoed mineral ground becomes itself a palimpsest of white and tonal pigments, tactile and atmospheric, and of painting itself. “It is a matter of interrelation between the several colors, which cease to be entire and solid, and become vaporous, gaseous,” critic José Corredor Matheos considered. “It is as though the figures themselves, and the colors embodying them, were to some extent blended into the atmosphere…The color is fragmented, broken up, sprinkled like gas. Everything here is nuanced, without any stridency, a strange flowering…Those figures speak to us, yet also withhold speech; we must guess through their silence that which is inexpressible, but which we are invited to perceive in some way” (Tamayo, New York, 1987, p. 13 and 27). Naked and yet inscrutable, even behind translucent glass, the subject of Mujer tras un vidrio is both a spectral and very much a material presence, conjured out of color alone. “Painting is the name we give to the relationships between sensations and the forms they create as they entwine and move apart,” reflected the poet Octavio Paz. “The most immediate and most direct sensations: colors, forms, touch. A material world that is also a mental world, yet retains its materialness: those colors are painted colors. All Tamayo’s critical inquisitiveness tends towards the salvation of painting, the preservation of its purity and the perpetuation of its mission as translator of the world” (“An Art of Transfigurations,” Rufino Tamayo: Myth and Magic, exh. cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1979, pp. 22-23).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
“The colors have now begun to cool,” art historian James B. Lynch, Jr. wrote of Tamayo’s work by the mid-1970s. “They have adjusted as it were to a more detached, introspective mood. For the most part figures stand mute, transfixed.” The solitude, or “sense of insularity,” of his figures is “enhanced by what seem to be ‘frames’ within the picture frames or ‘paintings’ inside paintings.” The subject of Mujer tras un vidrio is encased in this way; she occupies a shallow space between textured planes of grey, her pinkish body seen both behind and next to a frosted sheet of glass. Her simplified silhouette, described in circles and sinuous curves, is countered by an angular abstraction on the other side of the glass, an even more reduced figure of a woman. “Loss and/or change of identity, a characteristic element of late Tamayos, becomes now even more pronounced,” Lynch suggests. “The head as an expression of identity and self is negated; it is replaced by a mask or converted into a sort of pre-Columbian glyph” (“Tamayo Revisited, “Rufino Tamayo: Fifty Years of His Painting, exh. cat., The Phillips Collection, Washington, 1978, p. 21 and 23).
In Mujer tras un vidrio, the impastoed mineral ground becomes itself a palimpsest of white and tonal pigments, tactile and atmospheric, and of painting itself. “It is a matter of interrelation between the several colors, which cease to be entire and solid, and become vaporous, gaseous,” critic José Corredor Matheos considered. “It is as though the figures themselves, and the colors embodying them, were to some extent blended into the atmosphere…The color is fragmented, broken up, sprinkled like gas. Everything here is nuanced, without any stridency, a strange flowering…Those figures speak to us, yet also withhold speech; we must guess through their silence that which is inexpressible, but which we are invited to perceive in some way” (Tamayo, New York, 1987, p. 13 and 27). Naked and yet inscrutable, even behind translucent glass, the subject of Mujer tras un vidrio is both a spectral and very much a material presence, conjured out of color alone. “Painting is the name we give to the relationships between sensations and the forms they create as they entwine and move apart,” reflected the poet Octavio Paz. “The most immediate and most direct sensations: colors, forms, touch. A material world that is also a mental world, yet retains its materialness: those colors are painted colors. All Tamayo’s critical inquisitiveness tends towards the salvation of painting, the preservation of its purity and the perpetuation of its mission as translator of the world” (“An Art of Transfigurations,” Rufino Tamayo: Myth and Magic, exh. cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1979, pp. 22-23).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park