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Lot Essay
A champion of Rufino Tamayo’s artwork from his first encounter in the early 1940s on, the Nobel laureate, poet Octavio Paz astutely noted in 1964, “One would say that Tamayo discovered a world of spatial relationships in the ancient sculpture of Mexico and that his color has a living correspondence with arte popular (craft)” (in Privilegios de la vista, Mexico City, 1987, p. 463). Retrato de Olga makes apparent Tamayo’s foundation in pre-Columbian sculptural form, as well as his enjoyment of the vivid palette of Mexican folk art. Of Zapotec heritage and originating from Oaxaca, Tamayo grew up in the vicinity of the pre-Columbian site of Monte Albán. When barely an adolescent and following his mother’s unexpected death of tuberculosis, he was relocated to live with extended family in Mexico City. Following his studies there at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes (ENBA, National Fine Arts School), he secured a position beginning in 1922 as head of Department of Ethnographic Drawing at the National Museum of Archeology appointed by José Vasconcelos, Minister of Education who was, like Tamayo, from Oaxaca. A crucial period in his life where he gained hands-on experience and the intimate study of form that would inform his mature work, he spent his days drawing pre-Columbian vessels and figurines, and regional crafts. Art critic José Gómez Sicre noted the wide variety of objects Tamayo encountered on the job as he “copied clay toys, sugar skulls, paper Judases, cups, grinding stones, and jugs” (in Four Artists of the Americas, exh. cat., Pan American Union, Washington, 1957, p. 66-69).
Tamayo’s work as a primary school teacher for the Pro-Mexican Art Movement in the mid-1920s was additionally impactful on his artistic development. As such, he participated with his peers in disseminating Adolfo Best Maugard’s pedagogical method known as the “Best Method.” With the goal of generating a new Mexican national art, Best Maugard had built a system of drawing based on arte popular or craft design elements found globally. Tamayo incorporated in his personal painting practice lessons learned from his engagement with pre-Columbian objects and arte popular; these manifested especially in his approach to color, as well as his treatment of the human figure as a simplified sculptural form. Art historian Barbara Braun in her 1981 essay “Rufino Tamayo: Indigenous or Cosmopolitan Painter?” published in the journal Art Criticism noted that Tamayo’s colors were the “bright, hard hues of Mexican popular art—blacks, greys, red browns, rose, pink, yellow ochre, egg shell” (p. 59). Detailing Tamayo’s pre-Columbian interests, Braun further underscores that Tamayo was particularly drawn to pre-Classic period West Mexican (Colima and Jalisco) and Classic Veracruz clay figurines, as well as Aztec stone masks and figures (p. 54). She emphasizes Tamayo’s interest in the formal aspects of pre-Columbian art—shape, proportion, and surface—rather than any specific social or religious context. Tamayo’s interpretation of such statuary is evident in Retrato de Olga and other of his contemporaneous works such as Carnaval (1941) or Lovers (1943), of many possible examples, where he builds static bodies (not introducing movement into his painting until the 1950s) from malleable, tubular limbs, thick torsos, and faceted, geometric shapes. Like his colleagues Diego Rivera and Ricardo Martínez, Tamayo amassed a large collection of pre-Columbian art during his life time. Following his death, its donation formed the permanent collection of the Museo de Arte Prehispánico de México Rufino Tamayo (est. 1974) in Oaxaca.
Retrato de Olga is remarkable for not only Tamayo’s modernist consideration of his native country’s ancient material culture, but also his simultaneous dialogue with the School of Paris, as well as the portrait’s at once personal nature, and response to its historic moment. Tamayo produced several portraits of his wife, Olga Flores Rivas de Tamayo, over the course of his career and their long marriage. They met when he was still living with the artist María Izquierdo and painting a mural at the Escuela Nacional de Música, where the talented pianist Olga was a student. The couple married and moved to New York City the following year. Scholar Adriana Zavala in her essay “Tamayo’s Women: Figures of an Alternative Modernisim,” proposes that Olga, willing to give up her future as a pianist to dedicate her energy fully to advancing her husband’s art career, was a more suitable partner for Tamayo than the competitive Izquierdo (in Tamayo: A Modern Icon Reinterpreted, exh. cat., Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, 2007, p. 218).
A gem among the many, varied, and pensive portraits of his partner, Tamayo has captured in Retrato de Olga his subject’s majestic nature. Her dark hair crowning her head in a tall twist, Tamayo has represented his wife as he does the matriarchal women of Tehuantepec, Oaxaca in his small gouaches. She holds her neck and torso long and straight against a high-backed chair in an opaque interior setting. Quietly, with the simple gesture of a hand raised to rest tentatively on her right cheek as she directs her gaze upward, she expresses the traumatic effects of the entirety of World War II. And while Retrato de Olga echoes Pablo Picasso’s portrait of Dora Maar as Weeping Woman (1937), an icon of distress at the carnage of war, Tamayo maintains a more naturalistic representation and contained emotional charge in his homage to his wife. Moved by Picasso’s Guernica (1937), which, according to Gómez Sicre, “urged the austere Mexican towards a more dramatic presentation” (in Four Artists of the Americas, 1957, p. 78-81), Tamayo would explode that mid-century high anxiety and fear in subsequent canvases such as the now-familiar paintings, Girl Attacked by a Strange Bird, and Children Playing with Fire, both of 1947, that, like Retrato de Olga, addressed what Braun recognized as “Human alienation and resistance to the bestiality of war” (p. 61).
Teresa Eckmann, Associate Professor of Contemporary Latin American Art History, University of Texas at San Antonio
Tamayo’s work as a primary school teacher for the Pro-Mexican Art Movement in the mid-1920s was additionally impactful on his artistic development. As such, he participated with his peers in disseminating Adolfo Best Maugard’s pedagogical method known as the “Best Method.” With the goal of generating a new Mexican national art, Best Maugard had built a system of drawing based on arte popular or craft design elements found globally. Tamayo incorporated in his personal painting practice lessons learned from his engagement with pre-Columbian objects and arte popular; these manifested especially in his approach to color, as well as his treatment of the human figure as a simplified sculptural form. Art historian Barbara Braun in her 1981 essay “Rufino Tamayo: Indigenous or Cosmopolitan Painter?” published in the journal Art Criticism noted that Tamayo’s colors were the “bright, hard hues of Mexican popular art—blacks, greys, red browns, rose, pink, yellow ochre, egg shell” (p. 59). Detailing Tamayo’s pre-Columbian interests, Braun further underscores that Tamayo was particularly drawn to pre-Classic period West Mexican (Colima and Jalisco) and Classic Veracruz clay figurines, as well as Aztec stone masks and figures (p. 54). She emphasizes Tamayo’s interest in the formal aspects of pre-Columbian art—shape, proportion, and surface—rather than any specific social or religious context. Tamayo’s interpretation of such statuary is evident in Retrato de Olga and other of his contemporaneous works such as Carnaval (1941) or Lovers (1943), of many possible examples, where he builds static bodies (not introducing movement into his painting until the 1950s) from malleable, tubular limbs, thick torsos, and faceted, geometric shapes. Like his colleagues Diego Rivera and Ricardo Martínez, Tamayo amassed a large collection of pre-Columbian art during his life time. Following his death, its donation formed the permanent collection of the Museo de Arte Prehispánico de México Rufino Tamayo (est. 1974) in Oaxaca.
Retrato de Olga is remarkable for not only Tamayo’s modernist consideration of his native country’s ancient material culture, but also his simultaneous dialogue with the School of Paris, as well as the portrait’s at once personal nature, and response to its historic moment. Tamayo produced several portraits of his wife, Olga Flores Rivas de Tamayo, over the course of his career and their long marriage. They met when he was still living with the artist María Izquierdo and painting a mural at the Escuela Nacional de Música, where the talented pianist Olga was a student. The couple married and moved to New York City the following year. Scholar Adriana Zavala in her essay “Tamayo’s Women: Figures of an Alternative Modernisim,” proposes that Olga, willing to give up her future as a pianist to dedicate her energy fully to advancing her husband’s art career, was a more suitable partner for Tamayo than the competitive Izquierdo (in Tamayo: A Modern Icon Reinterpreted, exh. cat., Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, 2007, p. 218).
A gem among the many, varied, and pensive portraits of his partner, Tamayo has captured in Retrato de Olga his subject’s majestic nature. Her dark hair crowning her head in a tall twist, Tamayo has represented his wife as he does the matriarchal women of Tehuantepec, Oaxaca in his small gouaches. She holds her neck and torso long and straight against a high-backed chair in an opaque interior setting. Quietly, with the simple gesture of a hand raised to rest tentatively on her right cheek as she directs her gaze upward, she expresses the traumatic effects of the entirety of World War II. And while Retrato de Olga echoes Pablo Picasso’s portrait of Dora Maar as Weeping Woman (1937), an icon of distress at the carnage of war, Tamayo maintains a more naturalistic representation and contained emotional charge in his homage to his wife. Moved by Picasso’s Guernica (1937), which, according to Gómez Sicre, “urged the austere Mexican towards a more dramatic presentation” (in Four Artists of the Americas, 1957, p. 78-81), Tamayo would explode that mid-century high anxiety and fear in subsequent canvases such as the now-familiar paintings, Girl Attacked by a Strange Bird, and Children Playing with Fire, both of 1947, that, like Retrato de Olga, addressed what Braun recognized as “Human alienation and resistance to the bestiality of war” (p. 61).
Teresa Eckmann, Associate Professor of Contemporary Latin American Art History, University of Texas at San Antonio