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Lot Essay
We are grateful to art historian Juan Carlos Pereda for his assistance in cataloguing this work.
After living in New York on and off since the 1920s, Rufino Tamayo had arrived at his mature style by the early 1940s producing remarkable works that catapulted him to the heights of international acclaim. Painted in 1988, Sonriente en rosa (Smiling Woman in Pink) is a late work by the renowned master who was praised throughout his long artistic production for his refinement and intuition as a colorist. Experimentation with color provided endless possibilities for Tamayo who is said to have invented numerous reds. In fact, in his paintings of the period from 1980 to 1990 which saw his reds look more like pink or rose as in the present painting, Tamayo still preferred calling the color "red" as Raquel Tibol noted.[1] Red was the color of his many vibrant still lifes of watermelons. But red also could be sensuous and fierce as in his painting La luna de miel (The Honeymoon) of 1943 wherein the female figure who embraces her lover is almost wholly rendered in red.
In Sonriente en rosa, the entire composition is defined by the color red in various tones and hues. The background, which is rendered beautifully in rich pomegranate red, does not merely provide a setting for the figure of a modern woman but sets the mood for the work. The artist's sophisticated colors underscore the subtle geometric composition. His figure provides only part of a narrative--his palette creates the psychological state in which it unfolds. We as viewers become participants in the joyous occasion before our eyes although oblivious to the narrative. Sheer joyous emotion is not merely alluded to in the way that the artist has depicted this figure with her arms extended in the air in celebration and in the painted moons or spheres that float behind her. She seems to have broken through a wall of bricks or muralla and taken center stage at last. Tamayo has depicted the female form in contemporary dress and style and in medium tones of greyish pink, thus describing her as centered and balanced.
Tamayo above all was a humanist and the human figure became a signature motif for him. Through the human form the artist expressed his modern aesthetic and mankind's place in the world. The female form was often the subject matter for his paintings from his early trajectory onwards. He celebrated and found inspiration in women including his wife Olga. Olga was a powerful force for the artist from the moment he met her in the 1930s when she was a music student. She would become Tamayo's lifelong muse. Never a follower, Tamayo was a passionate artist committed to his craft and ideas about art, first and foremost.
Margarita Aguilar
1 Raquel Tibol, Rufino Tamayo: Recent Paintings, 1980-1990 (New York: Marlborough Gallery, Inc., 1990), 5.
After living in New York on and off since the 1920s, Rufino Tamayo had arrived at his mature style by the early 1940s producing remarkable works that catapulted him to the heights of international acclaim. Painted in 1988, Sonriente en rosa (Smiling Woman in Pink) is a late work by the renowned master who was praised throughout his long artistic production for his refinement and intuition as a colorist. Experimentation with color provided endless possibilities for Tamayo who is said to have invented numerous reds. In fact, in his paintings of the period from 1980 to 1990 which saw his reds look more like pink or rose as in the present painting, Tamayo still preferred calling the color "red" as Raquel Tibol noted.[1] Red was the color of his many vibrant still lifes of watermelons. But red also could be sensuous and fierce as in his painting La luna de miel (The Honeymoon) of 1943 wherein the female figure who embraces her lover is almost wholly rendered in red.
In Sonriente en rosa, the entire composition is defined by the color red in various tones and hues. The background, which is rendered beautifully in rich pomegranate red, does not merely provide a setting for the figure of a modern woman but sets the mood for the work. The artist's sophisticated colors underscore the subtle geometric composition. His figure provides only part of a narrative--his palette creates the psychological state in which it unfolds. We as viewers become participants in the joyous occasion before our eyes although oblivious to the narrative. Sheer joyous emotion is not merely alluded to in the way that the artist has depicted this figure with her arms extended in the air in celebration and in the painted moons or spheres that float behind her. She seems to have broken through a wall of bricks or muralla and taken center stage at last. Tamayo has depicted the female form in contemporary dress and style and in medium tones of greyish pink, thus describing her as centered and balanced.
Tamayo above all was a humanist and the human figure became a signature motif for him. Through the human form the artist expressed his modern aesthetic and mankind's place in the world. The female form was often the subject matter for his paintings from his early trajectory onwards. He celebrated and found inspiration in women including his wife Olga. Olga was a powerful force for the artist from the moment he met her in the 1930s when she was a music student. She would become Tamayo's lifelong muse. Never a follower, Tamayo was a passionate artist committed to his craft and ideas about art, first and foremost.
Margarita Aguilar
1 Raquel Tibol, Rufino Tamayo: Recent Paintings, 1980-1990 (New York: Marlborough Gallery, Inc., 1990), 5.