Journal of Surrealism and the Americas 1 (2007), 72-76

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Review of Tamayo: A Modern Icon Reinterpreted

Diana C. du Pont, ed. Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 2007

Julia Marta Clapp
CUNY, The Graduate Center
Tamayo: A Modern Icon Reinterpreted, is the first major U.S. exhibition of
Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo’s (1899 - 1991) work in nearly thirty years. Diana C.
du Pont, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Santa Barbara Museum
of Art, organized the show and edited the catalogue, to which she contributed the
essay “‘Realistic, Never Descriptive’: Tamayo and the Art of Abstract Figuration.”1
From Santa Barbara, the show traveled to the Miami Art Museum (MAM) in Miami,
FL, where Assistant Curator René Morales oversaw its coordination. Next year,
Tamayo will close at the Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City.
At the Miami Art Museum, the exhibit’s mandate is apparent in the titular
promise of reinterpretation. The show is divided into three parts, each of which is
then separated into thematic groupings. “Tamayo’s Reenvisionings,” work the artist
created primarily during the 1920s and 30s, focuses on Tamayo’s explorations of
various forms of modernism, especially European. “Tamayo’s Abstract Figuration,”
his paintings from the 1940s and 50s, is the heart—and the splendor—of the show.
It explores the artist’s representations of the human figure and the human condition.
The paintings he created during the period from the 1960s through the 1980s are
grouped as “Tamayo’s Universal Humanism.”
Paisaje (1921), a post-Impressionist street scene, and Paisaje con Rocas (1925),
a Cézanne-like proto-Cubist construction (including decidedly un-Cézanne-like
maguey plants) initiate “Reenvisionings,” the first and chronologically earliest section
of the exhibition, introducing a crucial premise of the show: Tamayo’s controversial
negotiation of the national and international art worlds and his development of
“fusion modernism,” the blending of motifs and techniques of European and
Mexican schools.2 The exhibition characterizes “Reenvisionings” as “points of
departure in his oeuvre,”3 and a “reenvisioning [of] these artistic directions from a
Julia Marta Clapp: julmarcla@gmail.com
Copyright © 2007 (Julia Marta Clapp). Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative
Works 3.0 Unported License. Available at http://jsa.asu.edu/

Journal of Surrealism and the Americas

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Mexican perspective.”4 However, most of the works in “Reenvisionings” actually
appear to be fairly direct interpretations of art of the European avant-garde. In her
essay about this period, Karen Cordero Reiman cites the influence of two Mexican
schools of art, the Best-Maugaurd Drawing Method and the Escuelas de Pintura al
Aire Libre, “both of which, in different ways, questioned the traditional approaches
of art academies.”5 In the exhibition, however, it is difficult to discern whether
Tamayo’s exploration of “marginalized genres” is best attributed to Mexican or to
European schools, many of which had been also challenging tradition.6
In the catalogue, du Pont argues that Tamayo developed a European-Mexican
fusion, but not with the goal of assimilation.7 In other words, while Tamayo
drew upon Mexican and international styles and motifs, he strove to maintain a
distinctly Mexican character in his work. “Still Lifes”—a subset of “Tamayo’s
Reenvisionings”—is notable for its inclusion of his trademark sandías (watermelons),
as well as traditionally Native American motifs such as corn. “Reenvisionings”
is certainly a “point of departure” in the artist’s career, but it remains unclear
whether this period is best characterized as one of innovation in fusion modernism,
as the impact of European art on the works presented is more potent than the
incorporation of Mexican motifs. The paintings in this group mostly suggest
that during the 1920s and 30s, Tamayo was sharpening his skills as an artist and,
indirectly, a serious student of modern art. Informed and studied paintings that he
created during this period seem inspired by the masters of European modernism:
Gauguin, Cezanne, Matisse, Chirico and Picasso. Tamayo’s skillful incorporation of
such diverse styles and motifs indicates a sophisticated and nuanced understanding
of international art.
Movemiento Fabril (1935) exemplifies one of the exhibit’s missed opportunities
for reinterpretation. In subject and composition, it is comparable to the brand of
social realism made famous by los tres grandes. The condensed, repeating forms of
the depicted factory strike echo Diego Rivera’s work without quoting too directly.
An unexpectedly humorous touch is Tamayo’s signature, which appears on a sign
held by a worker at the center of the painting. In the catalogue, du Pont argues that
Tamayo—while decidedly at odds with the Mexican muralists’ socialist art—was at
times subtly political.
Regrettably, this idea is not explored deeply in either the catalogue or the
show, although it would have been an opportunity to generate truly new ideas
about the artist. For instance, Discusión Acalorada (1953), Tamayo’s famous image
representing his ideological battles with the muralist Siqueiros receives its own wall
text. However, the tantalizing mention of their debates over the nature and purpose

Journal of Surrealism and the Americas

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of art only hints at the question of politics, giving short shrift to both the conflict
and to Tamayo’s relationship with the muralists in general.
Similar to Movemiento Fabril, several other paintings in the show (Homenaje a
Juárez of 1932 and Homenaje a Zapata of 1935, for example) exhibit similarly overt
politics. In contrast to du Pont’s literal reading of such paintings as direct homage—
and therefore evidence of Tamayo’s political sensibility—Reiman argues that Tamayo
instead painted such works as metacritiques of political painting of the era, providing
a more interesting and complex interpretation.
The focal point of Tamayo is the second large grouping from the 1940s and
‘50s, “Tamayo’s Abstract Figuration,” a collection of his most exciting work. During
this period, the artist concentrated on the human figure and solidified his trademark
“fusion modernism.” “Personifications of Fear” encompasses some of his most
interesting and most discussed images of human anxiety and torment. It is here that
the artist initiates his obsessive examination of the human experience, expressed
in superb coloration, and in his self-proclaimed style of “nondescriptive realism.”8
From this period, Mujer Temblorosa (1949) is an exceptional work with powerful hues
and nuanced brushwork (as is often the case, such details are far more extraordinary
in life than in reproduction). The painting depicts—in bruise-like purples and
reds—a woman standing in a candlelit room, across which a diagonal wall slices,
leading only to another wall. The claustrophobic interior and ominous title recall
the troubling scenes of such Metaphysical, proto-Surrealist paintings as Giorgio de
Chirico’s The Melancholy and Mystery of a Street (1914). However, in Tamayo’s painting,
the anxiety is primarily generated by the figure, while the empty, shadowy streets and
acutely foreshortened perspective in de Chirico’s painting create its anxiety.
“Reconciliation and Renewal” proposes the arguable idea of post-War
contentment. Incongruously, this section also includes Tamayo’s wonderful and
haunting Desnudo Blanco (1943), a portrait of his wife, Olga. However, the painting
fits neither the chronological nor thematic category of post-War, peacetime alegría.
In the catalogue, du Pont characterizes the figure’s apparently red face as brown,
discussing the painting in terms of race, and focusing on Tamayo’s interest in
José Vasconcelos’s treatise La Raza Cósmica of 1925. She then links the image to
Picasso (particularly his 1907 Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon), in regard to primitivism
and race.9 While the painting does have a figural pose and composition similar to
Les Desmoiselles, Picasso clearly delineates mask and body, whereas Tamayo—whose
figures frequently bear mask-like faces—extends the red coloration across the torso
and limbs. Further, the color here does not seem to be a racial signifier, especially
compared to the distinctly brown faces in La Familia (1936). Because, as du Pont

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writes, the artist had publicly associated this painting with an abortion Olga had in
1943, Desnudo Blanco appears mostly to address sexuality and violence, not race.10
Tamayo’s well-documented inspiration by indigenous sources is touched
upon in scattered moments throughout the show, generally without specificity. The
group entitled “Wartime Allegories” comprises Tamayo’s paintings of fearsome dogs,
commonly understood as responses to wartime terror. Interestingly, Tamayo also
cites birds as pre-Columbian symbols of attack. Amigo de los Pájaros (1944), also on
view in the exhibition, is a strange painting in which a figure with a distinctly Mayan
profile sits on a platform, with a pyramid in the distance. Echoing the shape of the
pyramid, a group of birds fly toward the man’s outstretched hand. This enigmatic
and infrequently discussed painting is especially interesting in the context of preColumbian forms and symbols, which receive only nominal attention in this show.
Finally, “Tamayo’s Universal Humanism,” the last section of the exhibition,
addresses a “romantic definition of the human condition,” and includes the artist’s
experiments with Abstract Expressionism and his explorations of the subject of
death.11 With the notable exceptions of Encuentro Num. 1 (1961) and Retrato de Olga
(1964), these paintings are sobering successors to his mid-career work. After dozens
of Tamayo’s early modernist paintings, a splendidly frenzied momentum occurs with
his vivid, beautifully constructed work of the 1940s and 50s, a joy that ends abruptly
in this final section. The small selection of his later works—collected under a title
better suited to the show as a whole—is ultimately a foil to the heart of the exhibit.
The “universal humanism” that is ostensibly suggested by the paintings’ drastically
generalized features is far less compelling than Tamayo’s mid-career work. The
paintings of the 1940s and ‘50s more intensely depict the ideas and emotions of
universal humanism: joy, fear, love, and anxiety. His later work simply seems more
generalized than universal. The question of how to reinterpret a body of work—of
an “icon” no less—through exhibition is a difficult one, which may account for
why Tamayo’s extraordinarily complex relationship to Mexican and international
modernism is not entirely clear in this show. Unfortunately, the curators undertook
a project that may have been beyond the scope of such an exhibition. Had they
adjusted the focus, the ideological underpinnings of the show could have been as
strong as the work itself. Where Tamayo: A Modern Icon Reinterpreted really succeeds
is with its repeated, nuanced emphasis on the artist’s obsession with the human
condition, and most importantly, in its dazzling presentation of a large collection of
exquisite paintings.
1 Diana C. du Pont, ed., Tamayo: A Modern Icon Reinterpreted (Santa Barbara, CA: Santa Barbara

Journal of Surrealism and the Americas

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Museum of Art, 2007).
2 Exhibition text, Tamayo: A Modern Icon Reinterpreted, Miami Art Museum, September, 2007.
3 Karen Cordero Reiman, “Appropriation, Invention and Irony: Tamayo’s Early Period, 19201937,” in Tamayo: A Modern Icon Reinterpreted, ed. Diana C. du Pont (Santa Barbara, CA: Santa Barbara
Museum of Art, 2007), 167.
4 Exhibition text.
5 Reiman, 168.
6 Reiman, 168.
7 Diana du Pont, “‘Realistic, Never Descriptive’ Tamayo and the Art of Abstract Figuration,” in
Tamayo: A Modern Icon Reinterpreted (Santa Barbara, CA: Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 2007), 60.
8 du Pont, 35.
9 du Pont, 88.
10 du Pont, 88.
11 Exhibition text.