Rufino Tamayo

Sandías, 1965.

Rufino Arellanes Tamayo (Oaxaca 1899 – 1991) Mexican painter. He was contemporary with muralists Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros but his art is markedly different from theirs. His paintings have been displayed in museums throughout the world.

Tamayo painted on an easel and his models were the masters of Modern Art, Picasso, Cezanne, and Braque. His subjects, however abstractly treated, were Mexican to the core. [1] In several paintings of 1946–47 he showed primitive figures gesticulating in terror, awe, or longing at the patterns of astral and planetary orbits. [2]

"Tres Personajes", 1970, a Tamayo masterpiece, was stolen in 1987, and found in 2003 by New Yorker Elizabeth Gibson nestled between rubbish on the street.

Tamayo built an art museum in Oaxaca with collections of pre-Columbian art once owned by artist; another museum, the Tamayo Contemporary Art Museum in Mexico City was opened in 1981. It is a repository for the art collection that artist and his wife Olga acquired during their lifetimes and ultimately gifted to Mexico.

"The important part is the senses, not the intellect," he said of his focus on composition and color rather than on subject matter. "Painting and sculpture and architecture enter through the eyes, and that is the place to begin to understand what they are. The essential goal in the plastic arts is to educate the eyes." [3]