TAMAYO, RUFINO

(b. Aug. 26, 1899?/1900?, Oaxaca, Mex.d. June 24, 1991, Mexico City), painter who combined modern European painting styles with Mexican folk themes. Tamayo attended the School of Fine Arts, Mexico City, but was dissatisfied with the traditional art program and thereafter studied independently. He then became head of the department of ethnographic drawing at the National Museum of Archaeology (192126) in Mexico City, where he became interested in pre-Columbian art. Tamayo reacted against the epic proportions and political rhetoric of the paintings of the Mexican muralists, who had dominated the country's art production since the Mexican Revolution. Instead, he chose to work on small canvases, using Cubist, Surrealist, and other European styles and fusing them with a basically Mexican subject matter involving figures, still lifes, and animals. By the 1930s he had become a well-known figure on the Mexican art scene. He exhibited his paintings at the Venice Biennale in 1950, and the success of his work there led to international recognition. He went on to design murals for the National Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City (Birth of Nationality and Mexico Today, 195253) and for the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization in Paris (Prometheus Bringing Fire to Man, 1958), among others. The varied styles of Tamayo's easel paintings range from the stolid Cubist figures in Women of Tehuantepec (1939) to the expressive violence of the barking mongrels in Animals (1941). Tamayo generally used vibrant colours and solid compositions to depict natural subjects in a symbolic, stylized, or semiabstract mode.