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拍品专文
We are grateful to art historian Juan Carlos Pereda for his assistance cataloguing this work.
Tamayo celebrated his eightieth birthday in 1979 with the opening of a major retrospective, Tamayo: Myth and Magic, at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and with the groundbreaking of the Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City. The year’s many festivities cemented his stature as his country’s greatest painter, a virtuoso colorist and living exemplar of Mexican modernism. “My intention is to continue the Mexican tradition, and by that I mean pre-Hispanic art,” he reflected near the end of his career. “Some artists believe they are following a Mexican tradition because their models are Mexican,” he explained, disapprovingly. “The point is to search for plastic elements that are very characteristic of Mexico and to use them; not in the way they were used in the past, but with a more open, more universal sensibility.”[1] In paradigmatic paintings like Mujer sonriente, Mexican color and form describe the fullness of humanity, their subjects at once age-old and modern.
“The colors have now begun to cool,” art historian James B. Lynch, Jr. wrote of Tamayo’s work in the late 1970s. “They have adjusted as it were to a more detached, introspective mood.” 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 sonriente is encased in just this way; she occupys a shallow space between two textured planes of grey, the hot-pink of her face—features abbreviated and rearranged—spreading into the space behind her. “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.”[2]
“To understand the strange iconography of these recent pictures it is necessary to know Tamayo’s relationship to contemporary Mexican culture,” Lynch continues. “A leitmotif of Mexican literature—one finds it particularly in the novels of Carlos Fuentes—is the idea that the bourgeois world of our time is closed and sterile because it can no longer create myths. In this view myths are the indispensable means to spiritual regeneration. To survive in such a world one must have a recourse to masks, metamorphoses, and different identities. Above all, if one is not to be destroyed by society one must find refuge in solitude.”[3]
The subject of Mujer sonriente has seemingly made peace with her solitude, her mask-like face projecting an ageless, and even indigenous, joie de vivre. Clocks were among Tamayo’s favorite subjects in the late 1920s, and the recurrence of the alarm clock here suggests the passage of (cosmic) time, its blurred face a meditation on timelessness and temporality. Brightly rimmed in vermilion, the clock stands out against a richly mottled ground whose grey pigment invites further queries about the nature of being in time. “Grey, as an ambiguous, dissolvent color, clarifies or obscures the whole according to the individual case,” the critic José Corredor-Matheos observes. “But the ambiguity which in my opinion is introduced by grey, though reflecting insecurity, also gives a work a more lively, dynamic character. Grey in this sense may have connotations of flight, and also—or especially—a flight forward.” If “grey introduces doubt, sincerity, naturalness,” he concludes, “perhaps what [Tamayo] wants above all is an imprecision that gives life to the work itself.” In Mujer sonriente, the flecked granite ground becomes a palimpsest of pigments, tactile and atmospheric, and of time itself. “It is a matter of interrelation between the several colors, which cease to be entire and solid, and become vaporous, gaseous,” Corredor Matheos considers. “It is as though the figures themselves, and the colors embodying them, were to some extent blended into the atmosphere.”[4]
Tamayo’s late paintings are poignant and auspicious, an affirmation of his enduring belief in humanity and in the process of painting itself. “Painting is the sensible translation of the world,” the poet Octavio Paz observed. “To translate the world into painting is to perpetuate it, prolong it. This is the source of Tamayo’s rigor towards painting. His attitude is a profession of faith rather than an aesthetics: painting is a way of touching reality.”[5]
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
Tamayo celebrated his eightieth birthday in 1979 with the opening of a major retrospective, Tamayo: Myth and Magic, at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and with the groundbreaking of the Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City. The year’s many festivities cemented his stature as his country’s greatest painter, a virtuoso colorist and living exemplar of Mexican modernism. “My intention is to continue the Mexican tradition, and by that I mean pre-Hispanic art,” he reflected near the end of his career. “Some artists believe they are following a Mexican tradition because their models are Mexican,” he explained, disapprovingly. “The point is to search for plastic elements that are very characteristic of Mexico and to use them; not in the way they were used in the past, but with a more open, more universal sensibility.”[1] In paradigmatic paintings like Mujer sonriente, Mexican color and form describe the fullness of humanity, their subjects at once age-old and modern.
“The colors have now begun to cool,” art historian James B. Lynch, Jr. wrote of Tamayo’s work in the late 1970s. “They have adjusted as it were to a more detached, introspective mood.” 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 sonriente is encased in just this way; she occupys a shallow space between two textured planes of grey, the hot-pink of her face—features abbreviated and rearranged—spreading into the space behind her. “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.”[2]
“To understand the strange iconography of these recent pictures it is necessary to know Tamayo’s relationship to contemporary Mexican culture,” Lynch continues. “A leitmotif of Mexican literature—one finds it particularly in the novels of Carlos Fuentes—is the idea that the bourgeois world of our time is closed and sterile because it can no longer create myths. In this view myths are the indispensable means to spiritual regeneration. To survive in such a world one must have a recourse to masks, metamorphoses, and different identities. Above all, if one is not to be destroyed by society one must find refuge in solitude.”[3]
The subject of Mujer sonriente has seemingly made peace with her solitude, her mask-like face projecting an ageless, and even indigenous, joie de vivre. Clocks were among Tamayo’s favorite subjects in the late 1920s, and the recurrence of the alarm clock here suggests the passage of (cosmic) time, its blurred face a meditation on timelessness and temporality. Brightly rimmed in vermilion, the clock stands out against a richly mottled ground whose grey pigment invites further queries about the nature of being in time. “Grey, as an ambiguous, dissolvent color, clarifies or obscures the whole according to the individual case,” the critic José Corredor-Matheos observes. “But the ambiguity which in my opinion is introduced by grey, though reflecting insecurity, also gives a work a more lively, dynamic character. Grey in this sense may have connotations of flight, and also—or especially—a flight forward.” If “grey introduces doubt, sincerity, naturalness,” he concludes, “perhaps what [Tamayo] wants above all is an imprecision that gives life to the work itself.” In Mujer sonriente, the flecked granite ground becomes a palimpsest of pigments, tactile and atmospheric, and of time itself. “It is a matter of interrelation between the several colors, which cease to be entire and solid, and become vaporous, gaseous,” Corredor Matheos considers. “It is as though the figures themselves, and the colors embodying them, were to some extent blended into the atmosphere.”[4]
Tamayo’s late paintings are poignant and auspicious, an affirmation of his enduring belief in humanity and in the process of painting itself. “Painting is the sensible translation of the world,” the poet Octavio Paz observed. “To translate the world into painting is to perpetuate it, prolong it. This is the source of Tamayo’s rigor towards painting. His attitude is a profession of faith rather than an aesthetics: painting is a way of touching reality.”[5]
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park