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拍品專文
We are grateful to art historian Juan Carlos Pereda for his assistance in cataloguing this work.
"I'm the first of a new modality of Mexican painting that tries to have a universal voice," Tamayo proclaimed in 1953, clearly distinguishing his practice from what he felt was the provincial chauvinism of the muralists--"Los Tres Grandes"--with whom he was often compared.[1] Tamayo spurned the epithet "The Fourth Great One," insisting on the philosophical distance between his painterly practice and the national polemics of Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco. Yet notwithstanding their rivalries and differences, the four artists together represented Mexico at the XXV Venice Biennale in 1950 to great critical acclaim. Tamayo enjoyed rising international prestige on the heels of his success in Venice, and over the course of the decade his work explored humanist themes drawn from both the postwar existentialism of the School of Paris and the cosmic archetypes embedded in Mexico's pre-Hispanic tradition. In the catalogue to a solo exhibition at the Galerie Beaux-Arts held in late 1950, in which Man with Birds was shown, André Breton and Jean Cassou proclaimed Tamayo "an original among the most original"--a fitting encomium.[2]
Tamayo plumbed a suggestively animist and universal imaginary throughout his career, and his paintings give powerful, dramatic expression to the resilience and vulnerability of the human spirit. In his seminal essay, "Tamayo and Mexican Painting," originally published to accompany the exhibition at the Galerie Beaux-Arts, Octavio Paz declared Tamayo's recent painting a "testimony of the powers that try to destroy us as well as an affirmation of our will to survive." Paz discerned dialectical impulses of imagination and (self-) destruction in Tamayo's painting Aggressive Bird (1948), and Man with Birds presents a similar, spectral image of ominous foreboding and aggression. Here, the four birds that circle the central figure seem to personify contemporary apprehension, anxiety and post-atomic apocalypse, what Paz described as "not only an echo of what modern industry creates, but also the sign of an imagination that takes revenge."[3] And yet their streamlined bodies, even as they recall those of dive bombers in miniature, are all but subsumed into the luminously gray background--perhaps troubling conventional notions of agency and complicity.
The shadowy opalescence of Tamayo's surface imparts an unworldly radiance to the protagonist of Man with Birds as he defends himself against swarming avian aggressors, arms raised and fist clenched. Distended and disfigured, his body stretches the length of the canvas; the shapes of his arms and the swelling of his torso are echoed in the lines and curves that describe the birds that swoop down and around his space. Contrasting warm and cool undertones of red and blue introduce emotional complexity and richness to the painting, adding highlights of translucent color to the silvery shades of gray that sweep across the surface. "Tamayo has achieved an almost unreal delicacy and fineness," Paz remarked of the paintings from this time. "Never had gray revealed to us so many intonations and modulations, as if we were hearing a poem made of a single phrase, repeated over and over and changing its meaning endlessly."[4]
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
1) Rufino Tamayo, quoted in Diana C. Du Pont, "'Realistic, Never Descriptive': Tamayo and the Art of Abstract Figuration," in Tamayo: A Modern Icon Reinterpreted (Santa Barbara: Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 2007), 34.
2) André Breton and Jean Cassou, Rufino Tamayo (Paris: Galerie Beaux-Arts, 1950).
3) Octavio Paz, Tamayo en la pintura mexicana (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1959), 32.
4) Ibid., 34.
"I'm the first of a new modality of Mexican painting that tries to have a universal voice," Tamayo proclaimed in 1953, clearly distinguishing his practice from what he felt was the provincial chauvinism of the muralists--"Los Tres Grandes"--with whom he was often compared.[1] Tamayo spurned the epithet "The Fourth Great One," insisting on the philosophical distance between his painterly practice and the national polemics of Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco. Yet notwithstanding their rivalries and differences, the four artists together represented Mexico at the XXV Venice Biennale in 1950 to great critical acclaim. Tamayo enjoyed rising international prestige on the heels of his success in Venice, and over the course of the decade his work explored humanist themes drawn from both the postwar existentialism of the School of Paris and the cosmic archetypes embedded in Mexico's pre-Hispanic tradition. In the catalogue to a solo exhibition at the Galerie Beaux-Arts held in late 1950, in which Man with Birds was shown, André Breton and Jean Cassou proclaimed Tamayo "an original among the most original"--a fitting encomium.[2]
Tamayo plumbed a suggestively animist and universal imaginary throughout his career, and his paintings give powerful, dramatic expression to the resilience and vulnerability of the human spirit. In his seminal essay, "Tamayo and Mexican Painting," originally published to accompany the exhibition at the Galerie Beaux-Arts, Octavio Paz declared Tamayo's recent painting a "testimony of the powers that try to destroy us as well as an affirmation of our will to survive." Paz discerned dialectical impulses of imagination and (self-) destruction in Tamayo's painting Aggressive Bird (1948), and Man with Birds presents a similar, spectral image of ominous foreboding and aggression. Here, the four birds that circle the central figure seem to personify contemporary apprehension, anxiety and post-atomic apocalypse, what Paz described as "not only an echo of what modern industry creates, but also the sign of an imagination that takes revenge."[3] And yet their streamlined bodies, even as they recall those of dive bombers in miniature, are all but subsumed into the luminously gray background--perhaps troubling conventional notions of agency and complicity.
The shadowy opalescence of Tamayo's surface imparts an unworldly radiance to the protagonist of Man with Birds as he defends himself against swarming avian aggressors, arms raised and fist clenched. Distended and disfigured, his body stretches the length of the canvas; the shapes of his arms and the swelling of his torso are echoed in the lines and curves that describe the birds that swoop down and around his space. Contrasting warm and cool undertones of red and blue introduce emotional complexity and richness to the painting, adding highlights of translucent color to the silvery shades of gray that sweep across the surface. "Tamayo has achieved an almost unreal delicacy and fineness," Paz remarked of the paintings from this time. "Never had gray revealed to us so many intonations and modulations, as if we were hearing a poem made of a single phrase, repeated over and over and changing its meaning endlessly."[4]
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
1) Rufino Tamayo, quoted in Diana C. Du Pont, "'Realistic, Never Descriptive': Tamayo and the Art of Abstract Figuration," in Tamayo: A Modern Icon Reinterpreted (Santa Barbara: Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 2007), 34.
2) André Breton and Jean Cassou, Rufino Tamayo (Paris: Galerie Beaux-Arts, 1950).
3) Octavio Paz, Tamayo en la pintura mexicana (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1959), 32.
4) Ibid., 34.