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Lot Essay
“For me personally, Tamayo’s unparalleled watermelons that stimulate vision, touch, and taste, are a continuous homage to Olga…the slice of watermelon is like a sensual mouth, or like a pulpy sex; it is also (someone has remarked) a laugh, and of course, moreover, it is the (Mexican) national emblem,” stated the art critic Teresa del Conde (in “Consideraciones sobre la iconografía de Tamayo,” Rufino Tamayo: 70 años de creación, exh. cat., Mexico, 1987, p. 53). Aptly reading complexity into Tamayo’s repetition of the now-iconic fruit in his oeuvre, his engagement with the watermelon nonetheless appears as a focus in his painting even before his courtship and marriage to the young pianist Olga Flores Rivas in 1933.
From the earliest days of his ambitious artistic career, when he shared a studio on the Plaza Santo Domingo in Mexico City with the painter María Izquierdo in the late 1920s, Tamayo looked to the everyday of his surroundings as a means of formal experimentation. He built his dense still lifes through repetition of form lending his musicality and sense of rhythm to his visual expression. The watermelon sliced open and elongated, was already by that time a motif that he favored. As Juan Carlos Pereda of the Museo Tamayo remarked in reference to Tamayo’s career-long commitment to still life, the artist “ushered in the reinvention of a traditional pictorial genre through his inventive approach” (in “Rufino Tamayo’s Watermelons,” 2019). That inventive approach carried him from an early still life such as Naturaleza muerta (1928) auctioned at Christies in 2016—a compressed composition where the centrally clustered, open watermelon, bananas, pears, cup and ruler rest lightly on a tilted wood table in an interior setting—to his abandonment of any supporting context beyond brilliant color and sgraffitoed texture for his floating semicircular watermelon slices in the current lot, his canvas Cinco rebanadas de sandía (Five Watermelon Slices) of 1959.
Never particularly driven by delivering symbolic meaning, Tamayo’s passion was in achieving an aesthetically pleasing composition through the play of rich color, textured surface, and tactile form. Rejecting an academic, mimetic, and naturalistic approach to the still life genre pioneered in 19th Century Mexico by, for example, Puebla artist Agustín Arrieta, Tamayo found his compass when during his first stay in New York City, from the summer 1926 to the spring of 1928, he discovered the artwork of Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, and Giorgio di Chirico. Upon his return to Mexico, he secured support for his commitment to “arte puro,” art devoid of social or political content, and his internationalizing vanguard vision, by joining young poets, writers, and a few additional visual artists, who comprised the group known as Los Contemporáneos (The Contemporaries) and published a journal under the same name.
That sense of rebellion from the academic, and what he deemed the folkloric indigeneity of the Muralist Movement, extended into the Ruptura (Break) era of the 1950s, when during the escalation of the Cold War, geometric and figurative abstraction emerged in Mexico as an alternative path to post-Revolutionary social realism. Even while residing overseas in Paris, France for much of the decade, Tamayo championed this stylistic shift along with his Mexican peers Juan Soriano, Rodolfo Nieto, and Cordelia Urrueta, to mention only a few of the practicing artists at the time who were visually sympathetic with Tamayo’s “universal Mexican painting” approach. The latter position, which Tamayo described in detail in an interview with Victor Alba in 1956 (in Coloquios de Coyoacán con Rufino Tamayo, Mexico, p. 29-45), is evident in Cinco rebanadas de sandía.
Just as I discussed with his painting Sandías of 1969 in Christie’s Latin American Art catalogue in the November 22-23, 2016 sale:
Tamayo discovered over the course of his career that the possibilities of the watermelon as subject matter were endless; this motif held his interest and challenged him for a lifetime. He returned repeatedly to it in his canvases without becoming formulaic. When sliced open the fruit revealed to him a complex geometry shifting from ellipse, to circle, to half-circle, to triangle, to wedges cut thin or fat; Tamayo found that the repetition of its many forms and seeds could create rhythm and pattern. He made the watermelon with its red, white, and green colors that echo the Mexican flag, (an) iconic symbol of Mexico and Mexicanness.
While at the same time, “Sandías evinces the artist’s commitment to pure plasticity, apolitical content, and Mexicanness defined as essence,” I concluded (p. 66). Merging figure and ground in Cinco rebanadas de sandía, Tamayo immerses his viewer in experiencing the juicy, luscious, and overripe cucurbits. The exquisite canvas appealed to renowned architect and mid-century modern interior designer Florence “Shu” Knoll Bassett such that once she purchased Cinco rebanadas de sandía, she hung it in the foyer of her Miami home, enjoying its rich range of red and pink hues until her passing at 101 years in 2019.
Teresa Eckmann, Associate Professor of Contemporary Latin American Art History, University of Texas at San Antonio
From the earliest days of his ambitious artistic career, when he shared a studio on the Plaza Santo Domingo in Mexico City with the painter María Izquierdo in the late 1920s, Tamayo looked to the everyday of his surroundings as a means of formal experimentation. He built his dense still lifes through repetition of form lending his musicality and sense of rhythm to his visual expression. The watermelon sliced open and elongated, was already by that time a motif that he favored. As Juan Carlos Pereda of the Museo Tamayo remarked in reference to Tamayo’s career-long commitment to still life, the artist “ushered in the reinvention of a traditional pictorial genre through his inventive approach” (in “Rufino Tamayo’s Watermelons,” 2019). That inventive approach carried him from an early still life such as Naturaleza muerta (1928) auctioned at Christies in 2016—a compressed composition where the centrally clustered, open watermelon, bananas, pears, cup and ruler rest lightly on a tilted wood table in an interior setting—to his abandonment of any supporting context beyond brilliant color and sgraffitoed texture for his floating semicircular watermelon slices in the current lot, his canvas Cinco rebanadas de sandía (Five Watermelon Slices) of 1959.
Never particularly driven by delivering symbolic meaning, Tamayo’s passion was in achieving an aesthetically pleasing composition through the play of rich color, textured surface, and tactile form. Rejecting an academic, mimetic, and naturalistic approach to the still life genre pioneered in 19th Century Mexico by, for example, Puebla artist Agustín Arrieta, Tamayo found his compass when during his first stay in New York City, from the summer 1926 to the spring of 1928, he discovered the artwork of Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, and Giorgio di Chirico. Upon his return to Mexico, he secured support for his commitment to “arte puro,” art devoid of social or political content, and his internationalizing vanguard vision, by joining young poets, writers, and a few additional visual artists, who comprised the group known as Los Contemporáneos (The Contemporaries) and published a journal under the same name.
That sense of rebellion from the academic, and what he deemed the folkloric indigeneity of the Muralist Movement, extended into the Ruptura (Break) era of the 1950s, when during the escalation of the Cold War, geometric and figurative abstraction emerged in Mexico as an alternative path to post-Revolutionary social realism. Even while residing overseas in Paris, France for much of the decade, Tamayo championed this stylistic shift along with his Mexican peers Juan Soriano, Rodolfo Nieto, and Cordelia Urrueta, to mention only a few of the practicing artists at the time who were visually sympathetic with Tamayo’s “universal Mexican painting” approach. The latter position, which Tamayo described in detail in an interview with Victor Alba in 1956 (in Coloquios de Coyoacán con Rufino Tamayo, Mexico, p. 29-45), is evident in Cinco rebanadas de sandía.
Just as I discussed with his painting Sandías of 1969 in Christie’s Latin American Art catalogue in the November 22-23, 2016 sale:
Tamayo discovered over the course of his career that the possibilities of the watermelon as subject matter were endless; this motif held his interest and challenged him for a lifetime. He returned repeatedly to it in his canvases without becoming formulaic. When sliced open the fruit revealed to him a complex geometry shifting from ellipse, to circle, to half-circle, to triangle, to wedges cut thin or fat; Tamayo found that the repetition of its many forms and seeds could create rhythm and pattern. He made the watermelon with its red, white, and green colors that echo the Mexican flag, (an) iconic symbol of Mexico and Mexicanness.
While at the same time, “Sandías evinces the artist’s commitment to pure plasticity, apolitical content, and Mexicanness defined as essence,” I concluded (p. 66). Merging figure and ground in Cinco rebanadas de sandía, Tamayo immerses his viewer in experiencing the juicy, luscious, and overripe cucurbits. The exquisite canvas appealed to renowned architect and mid-century modern interior designer Florence “Shu” Knoll Bassett such that once she purchased Cinco rebanadas de sandía, she hung it in the foyer of her Miami home, enjoying its rich range of red and pink hues until her passing at 101 years in 2019.
Teresa Eckmann, Associate Professor of Contemporary Latin American Art History, University of Texas at San Antonio