Rufino Tamayo, born in Oaxaca in 1899, was a pure Zapotec indian who became one of the very first painters of Latin America to reach international stature. Tamayo played a major role within the movement of mural painters which was set up during the 1920's and counted Diego Rivera, Siqueiros and Orozco in its ranks.
Contrary to his fellow artists who stuck to pure Mexican forms of aestheticism in producing their frescoes, Tamayo integrated pre-Columbian art and new revolutionary trends in his works.
In 1915, Tamayo attended evening courses to study painting and was admitted in 1917 to the Academy of Fine Arts of Mexico. He however decided to leave that school a few months later to work on his own.
He was then appointed head of the ethnographic drawing section of the National Museum of Archaeology of Mexico, a post which enabled him to discover the sources of Mexican art.
Tamayo took part in his first exhibitions in 1926 in Mexico and in New York where he was to live during several years as part of several stays there.
He taught painting between 1928 and 1929 at the Fine Arts School of Mexico and took part in a one-man exhibition in New York in 1931. He was then appointed Head of the Plastic Arts department of the National Education ministry in Mexico and produced in 1933 a large fresco for the National Academy there.
He settled in 1936 for a while in New York where he had been sent as a delegate of the Artists' Congress. In 1938, he painted a mural fresco for the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico and in 1943 another one for the Smith College of Northampton, Mass.
He started to teach painting at the Brooklyn Museum in 1946 and produced a fresco for the Fine Art Building of Mexico in 1952.
A year later, he executed a mural painting called «El Hombre» for the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts and also another one titled «America» in Houston in 1955.
Tamayo painted many other murals for the library of the University of Puerto Rico («Prometeo»), for the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, for the Israeli liner «Shalom», again for the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico, for the Mexican pavillion at the international fair of Montreal (1967) and that of San Antonio, Texas (1968) or for the Club of Industrialists of Mexico.
Tamayo took part in many exhibitions in Mexico or abroad and had several one-man shows in New York in 1937, 1939, 1940, 1942, 1943, 1946, 1947, 1951, 1953, 1956, 1959 and 1962, in San Francisco in 1937 and 1953, several times in Mexico and in Los Angeles as well as in Paris, in Buenos Aires, in Houston, in Tokyo, in Zurich and in Phoenix notably.
The museum of Mexico organised a retrospective exhibition of his works in 1948 and in 1967-68 while the Venice Biennial devoted a special exhibition room to his paintings in 1950.
Tamayo was awarded several international prizes, including the National Prize given by the President of the Mexican Republic in 1964.
He also produced many engravings, notably for the Ford Foundation in 1964 and in 1968 for a New York publisher.
Contrary to many other Mexican mural painters, Tamayo did not try to pick the most representative aspects of Mexican folklore but strove instead to find poetic equivalences in it. In most of his works anecdotes have no particular significance.
Tamayo was one of the rare South American painters to produce still life paintings. In his European exhibitions, his works were imbued with Picasso's Cubist and Expressionist influences as well as those of the Surrealist artists still with a clear Mexican approach.
Tamayo did not express himself very much in his works. In fact, he painted what he felt and was much attached to silence in giving signs, forms and colours a major rhythmical role. His works are like musical symphonies with all kinds of red, dark blue, orange, green or mauve tones exhaling fascinating symbols that however remain quite hard to decipher.
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