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拍品专文
We are grateful to art historian Juan Carlos Pereda for his assistance cataloguing this work.
"I'm the first of a new modality of Mexican painting that tries to have a universal voice," Tamayo proclaimed in 1953, supplanting what he felt was the provincial chauvinism of his Mexican contemporaries with a cosmopolitan, universalizing pictorial language.(1) Tamayo developed his mature style in the early 1940s while in New York, producing paintings at the beginning of his great creative period that, as in Child Playing, beautifully bridge the modernist language of form with the universal humanism then sweeping the war-torn West. "Tamayo's technical development, which swiftly accelerated, was coupled to a new expressiveness" during these years, James B. Lynch has observed. "Often violent and cruel, occasionally tender, it was the result of several causes. First, Tamayo began to disclose what one suspected all along: a rich vein of Expressionism beneath the surface of his art. Exacerbated by sorrows of an intimate private kind, it grew in intensity during the forties."(2)
Celebrated for his color, Tamayo shows here his refinement and intuition as a colorist. "As the number of colors we use decreases," he once explained, "the wealth of possibilities increases. From the pictorial point of view, it is more worthwhile to exhaust the possibilities of a single color than to use an unlimited variety of pigments."(3) Gray is an ideal metaphor for Tamayo's existential concerns, and in the present work the gossamer pigments complement the charmed innocence and inexperience of the child at play. "Though reflecting insecurity," José Corredor-Matheos has observed, gray "also gives a work a more lively, dynamic character. Gray in this sense may have connotations of flight, and also--or especially--a flight forward. . . . Gray introduces doubt, sincerity, naturalness. . . . perhaps what he wants above all is an imprecision that gives life to the work itself."(4)
Tamayo explores multiple tonalities of gray in Child Playing, incorporating diaphanous veils of blue and the palest rose into the gritty, sand-flecked surface of the painting. Drawing on a Cubist language of form, Tamayo constructs the child's body out of tempered geometric shapes that, in their composite arrangement, depict the child in the active motions of play. The formal distortions of the body, its unnatural coloration and anatomy, suggest the artist's technical sophistication and fluency in the spatial complexities of late Cubism, seen in the work of Georges Braque and Juan Gris. The faceted planes of the body, partitioned in shallow spaces and rendered through layered transparencies, show a mature command of modern form and its plastic potential.
From late 1942 through the end of the following year, Tamayo and his wife, Olga, suffered the emotional trauma of a series of miscarriages, coming to the eventual realization that they would not have children. The impossibility of becoming parents profoundly affected the couple, and Tamayo's subjects from this period reflect personal preoccupations as much as wartime anxieties. The artist's private sorrows impart a special poignancy to Child Playing: the frolicking child, a blithe vision of youthful innocence and wonder, is in one sense a surrogate for the children Tamayo would never have. Yet in a larger sense, the child also embodies the purity and hopes of a world then suffering the depredations of war. A beacon of future promise and renewal, the child exemplifies a redeeming humanity and the potential for recovery and new life.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
1) R. Tamayo, quoted in Diana C. du Pont, "Tamayo: Between Spaces, Within Controversies," Tamayo: A Modern Icon Reinterpreted, Santa Barbara: Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 2007, 34.
2) J. B. Lynch, Jr., "Tamayo Revisited" in Rufino Tamayo: Fifty Years of His Painting, Washington, D.C., Phillips Collection, 1978, 17.
3) Tamayo, quoted in O. Paz, "Geometry and transfiguration," Rufino Tamayo: Myth and Magic, New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1979, 10.
4) J. Corredor-Matheos, Tamayo, New York: Rizzoli, 1987, 12.
"I'm the first of a new modality of Mexican painting that tries to have a universal voice," Tamayo proclaimed in 1953, supplanting what he felt was the provincial chauvinism of his Mexican contemporaries with a cosmopolitan, universalizing pictorial language.(1) Tamayo developed his mature style in the early 1940s while in New York, producing paintings at the beginning of his great creative period that, as in Child Playing, beautifully bridge the modernist language of form with the universal humanism then sweeping the war-torn West. "Tamayo's technical development, which swiftly accelerated, was coupled to a new expressiveness" during these years, James B. Lynch has observed. "Often violent and cruel, occasionally tender, it was the result of several causes. First, Tamayo began to disclose what one suspected all along: a rich vein of Expressionism beneath the surface of his art. Exacerbated by sorrows of an intimate private kind, it grew in intensity during the forties."(2)
Celebrated for his color, Tamayo shows here his refinement and intuition as a colorist. "As the number of colors we use decreases," he once explained, "the wealth of possibilities increases. From the pictorial point of view, it is more worthwhile to exhaust the possibilities of a single color than to use an unlimited variety of pigments."(3) Gray is an ideal metaphor for Tamayo's existential concerns, and in the present work the gossamer pigments complement the charmed innocence and inexperience of the child at play. "Though reflecting insecurity," José Corredor-Matheos has observed, gray "also gives a work a more lively, dynamic character. Gray in this sense may have connotations of flight, and also--or especially--a flight forward. . . . Gray introduces doubt, sincerity, naturalness. . . . perhaps what he wants above all is an imprecision that gives life to the work itself."(4)
Tamayo explores multiple tonalities of gray in Child Playing, incorporating diaphanous veils of blue and the palest rose into the gritty, sand-flecked surface of the painting. Drawing on a Cubist language of form, Tamayo constructs the child's body out of tempered geometric shapes that, in their composite arrangement, depict the child in the active motions of play. The formal distortions of the body, its unnatural coloration and anatomy, suggest the artist's technical sophistication and fluency in the spatial complexities of late Cubism, seen in the work of Georges Braque and Juan Gris. The faceted planes of the body, partitioned in shallow spaces and rendered through layered transparencies, show a mature command of modern form and its plastic potential.
From late 1942 through the end of the following year, Tamayo and his wife, Olga, suffered the emotional trauma of a series of miscarriages, coming to the eventual realization that they would not have children. The impossibility of becoming parents profoundly affected the couple, and Tamayo's subjects from this period reflect personal preoccupations as much as wartime anxieties. The artist's private sorrows impart a special poignancy to Child Playing: the frolicking child, a blithe vision of youthful innocence and wonder, is in one sense a surrogate for the children Tamayo would never have. Yet in a larger sense, the child also embodies the purity and hopes of a world then suffering the depredations of war. A beacon of future promise and renewal, the child exemplifies a redeeming humanity and the potential for recovery and new life.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
1) R. Tamayo, quoted in Diana C. du Pont, "Tamayo: Between Spaces, Within Controversies," Tamayo: A Modern Icon Reinterpreted, Santa Barbara: Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 2007, 34.
2) J. B. Lynch, Jr., "Tamayo Revisited" in Rufino Tamayo: Fifty Years of His Painting, Washington, D.C., Phillips Collection, 1978, 17.
3) Tamayo, quoted in O. Paz, "Geometry and transfiguration," Rufino Tamayo: Myth and Magic, New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1979, 10.
4) J. Corredor-Matheos, Tamayo, New York: Rizzoli, 1987, 12.