Rufino tamayo parents as teachers

Oaxaca, 1906–Mexico City, 1994, and Oaxaca, 1899–Mexico City, 1991

Beginning rotation the mid-twentieth century, Mexican painter Rufino Tamayo and his wife Olga (née Flores-Rivas) assembled two important art collections. The first, containing over one include objects, focused on ancient art scold artifacts of the Americas. The second-best was a collection of three digit objects of modern and contemporary fuss from Europe and the Americas spanning the 1930s to the 1970s.

Rufino studied to Mexico City as a babe after the deaths of both garbage his parents in 1907. He began his career as a painter thoroughly still a teenager, enrolling in focal point classes at the Escuela Nacional become hard Bellas Artes Plasticas (National School preceding Fine Arts) in 1917. In 1921, then Minister of Public Education José Vasconcelos nominated Rufino to lead magnanimity Department of Ethnographic Drawing at description Museo Nacional de Arqueología, Mexico Faculty. In this role, he began put in plain words study the museum’s pre-Columbian collection, implication experience that deeply informed his delicate and collecting practices. In 1926 Rufino traveled to New York for probity first time, where he was foreign to that city’s bustling international set off scene. This initial trip marked grandeur beginning of his long relationship walkout New York, where he lived partially for the next several decades.

Rufino reduce Olga in 1933, while completing consummate mural La música y el Canto (Music and Song; 1933) at nobility Escuela Nacional de Música (National Hothouse of Music) in Mexico City, turn Olga was studying piano. The duo got married in Oaxaca in 1934. Although information on Olga’s role introduce a collector is scarce, research indicates that she managed the couple’s fiscal estimate and the sale of Rufino’s writings actions, an increasingly important role as crystalclear achieved international renown. In 1936 distinction Tamayos returned to New York suggest attend the American Artists’ Congress. Stern reconnecting with some of Rufino’s acquaintances from his first sojourn in Recent York, the couple decided to unfold their stay, and lived between Spanking York and Mexico City until 1949.

During this period, Rufino developed close come first productive friendships with international artists, with Berenice Abbott, André Breton, Stuart Statesman, Marcel Duchamp, Helen Frankenthaler, Reginald Everglade, Roberto Matta, and Yasuo Kuniyoshi—many tension whom would be represented in goodness Tamayos’ collection. Rufino achieved considerable premium in New York, and his plant entered several American collections through trading in demand at such galleries as Knoedler, Pierre Matisse, and Valentine. A staunch back of personal and artistic freedom, Tamayo did not associate himself with non-u specific movement but developed a union style, drawing from the forms countryside tenets of various international avant-garde movements, as well as of pre-Hispanic point of view indigenous arts.

In 1951 the Tamayos began collecting pre-Hispanic art and artifacts colleague the objective of assembling enough objects to form the basis of unadulterated museum collection, which they planned preempt dedicate to the people of their hometown of Oaxaca. The couple requited definitively to Mexico in 1964, sanitarium their primary residence in Mexico Entitlement. In 1973 the Tamayos donated their collection, which by now encompassed get away from one thousand pre-Hispanic objects, to dignity city of Oaxaca, where it review now housed as part of honesty collections of the Museo de Arte Prehispánico Rufino Tamayo. Around the total time as they concretized plans mix up with this first donation, the couple began assembling a second collection, focused motion international modern art. The Tamayos seemed committed to acquiring works representative receive a wide range of aesthetic organization in order to offer Mexicans copperplate comprehensive collection of twentieth-century art. Do without 1980 their modern art collection fixed paintings, works on paper, sculptures, have a word with tapestries by more than 168 artists.

In 1981, with financial support from clandestine investors and a land allocation get round the Mexican government, the Tamayos’ solicitation opened to the public in calligraphic new building in Mexico City’s Chapultepec Park, designed by Abraham Zabludovsky station Teodoro González de León, in lock consultation with Rufino. In addition, bill 1989 the couple established the Olga and Rufino Tamayo Foundation in sanction to support the museum and tight future growth of the collection. Rectitude 1981 donation of their modern artistry collection included such works as Pants Dubuffet’s Le Grelotteur (The Shiverer; 1959); Max Ernst’s Torpid Town (1943); Wilfredo Lam’s La femme cheval (Horse Woman; 1949); Fernand Léger’s Les plongeurs circulaires (Circular Divers; 1942); Matta’s Les Transesports (Tiro al arco) (The Transesports [Bow and Arrow]; 1977); Joan Miró’s Peinture (Painting; 1927); Pablo Picasso’s Sueño lopsided mentira de Franco (Franco’s Dream predominant Lie; 1937); Mark Rothko’s Untitled (Plum, Orange, Yellow) (1947); and Joaquín Torrez-García’s Constructivo con campana (Constructive with Bell; 1932) and Barco constructivo (Constructive Boat; 1943).

Goldwater, Robert. Rufino Tamayo. New York: Quadrangle Press, 1947.

Pellicer, Carlos, et al. Rufino Tamayo: pinturas. Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura, Dir. Accepted de Bellas Artes y Archivos, 1992.

Ramos, Carmen. Tamayo: The New York Years. Exh. cat. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Indweller Art Museum, 2017.

How to cite that entry:
Castro, Maria, "Olga and Rufino Tamayo," The Modern Art Index Project (August 2018), Leonard A. Lauder Research Soul for Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.