Monday, Mar. 08, 1954
Painter's Year
For Rufino Tamayo, the Big Fourth of Mexico's famed artistic quadrumvirate (the others: Orozco, Rivera and Siqueiros), 1953 was a fat year. In twelve months crowded with work and honor, Tamayo completed two huge murals in Mexico City's Palacio de Bellas Artes, painted a monumental El Hombre for the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, and won a first prize of more than $5,000 for a roomful of paintings in Sao Paulo's biennial exhibition. He also found time to paint more than a dozen smaller pictures. Last week 17 of his new canvases went on view in Manhattan's Knoedler Gallery.
In his 1953 pictures, Tamayo has cut down on both the size (the current show includes the smallest canvases he has ever painted) and the violence of his work. He is now tempering with compassion and even humor the terror which he suggests by intense colors and dimly defined, erratic shapes. Tamayo can still terrorize, as in his Seized Cat, which shows an unworldly animal screaming and clawing in a frenzy of fury, but he seems now to want to avoid upsetting his audience. Heated Discussion, although done in disturbing flame reds, shows two comically human figures locked in eternal argument; each figure has his eyes and ears turned away from his antagonist, more interested in his own arguments than his opponent's.
Smoky Dizziness. Tamayo confesses that Heated Discussion has personal roots. It reminds him of his arguments with David Siqueiros, who opposes Tamayo's work because it does not reflect the Marxist ideology which Communist Siqueiros insists is part of the Mexican heritage. Tamayo has also put some personal feeling -and a touch of his new humor -into Inexpert Smoker, which portrays a head gripping a pipe and surrounded with smoke, ashes and dizziness. Several years ago, Tamayo's wife bought him a pipe in London; he likes the feel of a pipe, but much smoking makes him turn green-sick.
Aside from such comments, Tamayo is hesitant to interpret the meaning of his pictures. Says he: "I think painting should be a window through which the spectator lifts himself and his imagination." But he admits that he has tried to capture in his canvases the "aggressiveness -the violence and uncertainty in which we all live." He is also "very much interested in motion; it is characteristic of our time."
Unwanted Ghosts. To turn out so much in one year, Tamayo keeps himself to a hard schedule. He gets up early in the morning, works regular hours. "I practice painting as a trade," he says. "I don't believe very much in the muses gathering round you and inspiring you. I get up, have breakfast and go to work. It's all very hard work."
Many of the works in the current show are done in Vinylite, which Tamayo likes because of its quick-drying qualities. And, says he: "If you don't like what you have just painted, you can wipe it out with acetone. In oils, if you decide to do something different, you paint over it, and later, ghosts appear through the overpainted oil."
Manhattan buyers like the results so well that almost half of Tamayo's new pictures were grabbed up before the current show was two days old; seven of the paintings were sold at prices ranging from $1,800 to $3,250. For a peasant-born painter who was once happy to earn $2 a day teaching, this was the best proof of his new popularity. Says modest Rufino Tamayo, who came to the U.S. for the Manhattan show: "1953 was a good year."
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