Rufino tamayo family
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Collection: Rufino Tamayo
Rufino Tamayo was born on August 26, 1899, in Oaxaca, Mexico. Orphaned by 1911, he moved to Mexico City to live with an aunt who sent him to commercial school. Tamayo began taking drawing lessons in 1915 and by 1917 had left school to devote himself entirely to the study of art. In 1921 he was appointed head of the Department of Ethnographic Drawing at the Museo Nacional de Arqueología, Mexico City, where his duties included drawing pre-Columbian objects in the museum’s collection. Tamayo integrated the forms and slate tones of pre-Columbian ceramics into his early still lifes and portraits of Mexican men and women.
The first exhibition of Tamayo’s work in the United States was held at the Weyhe Gallery, New York, in 1926. The first of his many mural commissions was given to him by the Escuela Nacional de Música in Mexico City in 1932. In 1936 the artist moved to New York, and throughout the late thirties and early forties the Valentine Gallery, New York, gave him shows. He taught for nine years, beginning in 1938, at the Dalton School in New York.
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Rufino Tamayo
Rufino Tamayo (1899–1991) was a prominent Mexican artist known for his unique fusion of modern European styles with traditional Mexican themes. Born in Oaxaca, Mexico, Tamayo moved to Mexico City after the death of his parents to live with his aunt, who recognised and nurtured his artistic talent.
Tamayo studied at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas, where he developed his distinct approach, diverging from the politically charged murals of his contemporaries to explore more personal and universal themes. He spurned the epithet ‘the fourth great one’, insisting on the philosophic distance between his painterly practice and the strident ideology of Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco. ‘I'm the first of a new modality of Mexican painting that tries to have a universal voice,’ Tamayo proclaimed, supplanting what he felt was the provincial chauvinism of his Mexican contemporaries with a cosmopolitan, universalising pictorial language.
Tamayo’s work is characterised by its vibrant colours,
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Rufino Tamayo was a 20th-century Mexican painter, printmaker and muralist, whose works combine pre-Columbian aesthetics, European modernist experimentation and personal narrative into a distinctly Mexican figurative abstraction.
Born in Oaxaca, Mexico, in 1899, Tamayo was raised by his aunt in Mexico City following the death of his parents in 1910. He studied briefly at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas at San Carlos, but grew dissatisfied with the pedagogical program, left school, and became largely self-taught. He worked in the Department of Ethnographic Drawings at the Museo Nacional de Arqueología, Mexico City, where he was appointed head at the age of twenty-two. Following the Mexican Revolution and Civil War, Tamayo, who feared that Revolution would harm the Mexican people, remained relatively apolitical in contrast to his contemporaries and friends José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, who championed the peasant or worker hero of the Communist Party. He was somewhat ostracized for perceived treasonous attitudes, and as a result, moved to New
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