The Art Institute of Chicago
Woman with Bird Cage by Tamayo Author(s): Dorothy Odenheimer Source: Bulletin of the Art Institute of Chicago (1907-1951), Vol. 37, No. 3 (Mar., 1943), pp. 33-35 Published by: The Art Institute of Chicago Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4116273 . Accessed: 05/08/2013 09:24
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34
BULLETIN
OF THE ART INSTITUTE
OF CHICAGO
WOMAN WITH BIRD CAGE BY TAMAYO
and man of the world, Rufino Tamayo is one of the big four in contemporary Mexican art. The others, Orozco, Rivera, and Siqueiros, are celebrated for their powerfully conceived and magnificently executed frescoes, but Tamayo, although he, too, did a fine wall on the stairway of Mexico City's National Conservatory of Music, won his place chiefly by his easel paintings. Delightful water colors in a low key, here and there accented by red or a gleam of yellow, first established his reputation. These studies of Indians paddling at Xochimilco, squatting in the market, selling fruit, making bread, record all the aspects of daily life which have become almost ritual and which have scarcely changed since the Conquest. Tamayo was born in remote, mountainous Oaxaca, one of Mexico's southernmost states, in 1899, of Zapotec Indian stock.' Orphaned in 1907, he went to Mexico City to live with an aunt who kept a little fruit and fuel store. To the wild, imaginative child her practicality and piety became unbearable and he ran away. He haunted the great archaeological museum in Mexico City and rediscovered the past of his own people. In 1917 he entered the National Academy but the official stupidity of its teaching disgusted him so he left the school and continued to study by himself. In 1926 Tamayo's first exhibition was held in a vacant shop in Mexico City and that same year his oils, water colors, and prints were shown at the Weyhe Galleries in New York. There for the first time he saw modern French painting, which he knew until then only from half-tone reproductions.
1The principal sources for information about Tamayo are: MacKinley Helm, Modern Mexican
Painters (New York and London Merida, I also
[C1941]);
RIMITIVE and sophisticate,Indian
Having had strength to resist the vogue for his water colors, which might have led to endless repetition, Tamayo worked on increasingly monumental oils and gouaches. The Art Institute's recently acquired Woman with Bird Cage2 is a fine example of this new tendency. Curiously enough, it was painted in New York where some of his most Mexican work has been done. Tamayo, together with Siqueiros. went to New York in 1936 as a delegate from the Mexican National Association of Artists to the Congress of Revolutionary Artists. Like Siqueiros, he remained there to study and ever since has traveled frequently between New York and Mexico. He works carefully and slowly and has even turned to sculpture, as has many a painter before him, to aid him in his realization of form. His oils are characterized by a dry chalky surface and juicy color. He likes gray and brown and red, which varies from raspberry pink to the deepest redbrown of the Mexican tezontle, a porous stone of volcanic origin. Mexico, land of opposites, where the newest and the oldest meet, often produces exciting parallels. The fusion of the new and the old is implicit in Tamayo's Woman with Bird Cage. At first glance you are likely to say: "Decorative, original in color, but perhaps a bit reminiscent of Braque." However, beyond the pleasing composition and careful balance of grays and blacks, greens, browns, blue and pink, there is a latent ferocity, a masked feeling of menace. This is reinforced by the vivid touches of orange-red which appear everywhere, on dress, draperies, along the contours of the figure, on the mouth, and on the architectural forms, coming to a climax of hor2
E. Schmeckebier, Modern Mexican Art (Minneapolis courtesy of the Pierre Matisse Gallery.
[C1939]); (Mexico, Carlos 1937). Artists Modern Mexican owe certain data to the
Laurence
cm.). Signed and dated, lower right: Tamayo 41 Painted in New York. Purchased through the Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York, for the Joseph Winterbotham Collection. Exhibited: New York, Pierre Matisse Gallery, "Figure Pieces in Modern Painting,"
January 20-February 14, 1942, cat. No. 12.
Oil on canvas,
43/4
x 33/4
inches
(o09.9
x 84.5
Published two issues bi-monthly September-October, April-May, five issues monthly, November, December, January, February, March, by The Art Institute of Chicago at Ioo9 Sloan Street, Crawfordsville, Indiana. Correspondence pertaining to subscriptions may be sent to oo009 Sloan Street, Crawfordsville, Indiana, or to the Chicago office at Adams Street and Michigan Avenue. Entered as second class matter January 17. mailing at special rate of postage provided for in section II03, Act of October 3, 1917, authorized on June 28, I918. Subscription included in membership fee; otherwise $I.oo per year. Volume XXXVII, Number 3.
1918, at the Post Office at Crawfordsville, Indiana, under the Act of August 24,
1912.
Acceptance
for
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BULLETIN
OF
THE
ART OF
INSTITUTE CHICAGO
MARCH NINETEEN FORTY-THREE
WOMAN WITH BIRD CAGE BY RUFINO TAMAYO (MEXICAN, WINTERBOTHAM COLLECTION.
1899-
).
THE JOSEPH
VOLUME XXXVII
THIS ISSUE CONSISTS OF THREE PARTS OF WHICH THIS PART III IS THE ANNUAL REPORT IS PART I
NUMBER 3
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BULLETIN OF THE ART INSTITUTE
OF CHICAGO
35
ror in the orange nails which, suggesting bloody sacrifice, grow out of macabre black fingers. These clutch the golden green cage like those of a rapacious goddess. The lady's long black hair is impaled on a comb of yellow-green whose round ends glisten like gold and repeat the shape of the disk on the lobe of her ear. Her orange-red lips part to bare sharp white teeth and her sightless eyes, like the almond-shaped shell ones of an ancient Aztec mask, seem to stare portentously at the caged black bird. The psychological interest of the painting is concentrated on that imprisoned black and gray pulsating thing. Both bird and cage are superbly painted. Beyond the sophisticated image of this ancestral goddess, who stands behind parted gray curtains (suggestive of a favorite Baroque formula), looms the raspberry architecture and the intense blue sky of Mexico. There is not much space or air in this picture-it is all kept quite flat, the emphasis being on surface pattern with prominence given to linear elements and color areas. The abstract quality of our Tamayo is not inevitably dependent on the influence of painters like Braque and Picasso. Any sensitive intelligent Mexican artist can find an inexhaustible source for such works in
ancient manuscripts, frescoes, bas-relief, and sculpture. To suggest the nature of this material, without attempting to prove any necessary connection, I have reproduced a fragment of a wall painting discovered in the great burial site of the Zapotecan kings at Mitla in Oaxaca. In style these large wall paintings resemble the pictographs found in the manuscript codices. Compare the breaking up of the face into various pattern areas, the bared teeth, the series of disks, the intense impression of ferocity. The Mexican artist seeking the formal and abstract did not need to go to Europe when he had such stirring examples near at hand. The Art Institute now owns two paintings of the important modern Mexican school, Orozco's impressive Zapata, the Leader, of 1930 and this striking work by Tamayo. Our Print Department has one lithograph by Orozco, three by Rivera, and one each by Charlot, Zalce, Jos6 Pavon, forty-eight engravings by Leopoldo Mendez and forty-nine by Posada. We hope that this is just the beginning of a collection which will be a source of pride to Chicago. With increasing economic betterment, Mexico's cultural contribution to the art of the western world will grow ever richer.
DOROTHY ODENHEIMER
FRAGMENT OF A WALL PAINTING DISCOVERED AT MITLA, OAXACA. THE ABSTRACT QUALITY OF THIS AND SIMILAR PRECOLUMBIAN WORK HAS INFLUENCED TAMAYO MORE THAN THE PAINTINGS OF EUROPEANS LIKE BRAQUE AND PICASSO.
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