拍品专文
We are grateful to art historian Juan Carlos Pereda for his assistance cataloguing this work.
By the early 1940s, Rufino Tamayo had garnered widespread attention in his newly adopted home of New York. Drawn to the city, like so many artists from Europe and Latin America at the time, for its burgeoning cultural community away from the epicenter of World War II, Tamayo quickly found the enthusiastic support of museums, galleries, critics and collectors. Julien Levy and Valentine galleries held solo shows of his work while the Museum of Modern Art included Tamayo in the momentous exhibition of 1940 Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art. Tamayo's work stood out within MOMA's epic presentation, as the New York Sun declared in its review of the exhibition, "Among these living Mexicans it is Tamayo who carries aesthetics furthest." (1) The following year MOMA acquired Tamayo's powerful Animales (fig. 1) for its permanent collection. In 1947, the renowned art historian Robert Goldwater published the first monograph on Tamayo in the United States, opening the door to further scholarly studies on the artist that have continued to the present day. In short, New York in the 1940s was a turning point for Tamayo; there he was transformed from an artist barely known outside of Mexico to one accepted and lauded by the world's cultural capital.
Recognized early on as a major work by a promising artist, Women Reaching for the Moon entered the Cleveland Museum of Art's collection in 1947, the year after its completion. A particularly compelling rendering of two ebullient women striving for the stars and moon, the painting marks a shift in Tamayo's oeuvre. While Tamayo's work from the early 1940s appears dark and even menacing, as exemplified by Animales, his paintings from the latter half of the decade are distinguished by a joie de vivre. This dramatic change in temper is explained partly by world events. If Animales expresses the pervasive fear of the war years, Women Reaching for the Moon evokes the optimism palpable in New York in the post-World War II era.
The end of the war also meant the beginning of Tamayo's exploration of a new subject, as he explained, "Immediately after World War II and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I started thinking about the implications of a new space age and did the first paintings of constellations shooting through space." (2) From astronomers and stargazers to vast night skies, the cosmos became an enduring theme for Tamayo, so much so that NASA invited him to discuss the relationship between science and art.(3)
Tamayo's celestial musings have a resonance with contemporaneous paintings of the New York School. Artists such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning were fascinated by outer space and the heavens which both literally and metaphorically appear in many of their works from the 1940s and 1950s. Pollock's paintings from the early 1940s in particular share an affinity with Tamayo's art from this same period. During this time, Pollock executed a series of works that associated women with the moon (fig. 2). While certainly aware of these paintings by the New York School, Tamayo first developed his cosmological curiosity as a young man in Mexico while serving as chief draftsman for the Department of Ethnographic Drawing in the Museo Nacional de Arqueología, Historia y Etnografía where he was responsible for disseminating pre-Hispanic designs to Mexican artisans so that they could be copied and enjoyed. The cosmos was of paramount importance to ancient Mesoamerican societies and indeed their art and architecture is replete with images of skywatchers, the sun, moon and stars. This intimate experience with pre-Hispanic art profoundly impacted Tamayo as an artist, as he asserted, "[The museum] opened a world to me: it put me in contact with pre-Hispanic art and with popular art. Immediately, I discovered the source for my work."(4) Years later, that pre-Hispanic wellspring of inspiration took the form of monumentalized geometric figures who lung and leap for the stars or quietly stand in contemplation of the night sky.
In Women Reaching for the Moon, two impossibly stretched figures stand on a rocky precipice attempting to catch hold of the unattainable. In a play of perspective, Tamayo creates an absurd disparity in size between the two figures by shrinking the woman in the background to a dramatically diminutive stature in order to monumentalize her companion in the foreground. Silhouetted against an expansive gray-blue sky punctuated by twinkling stars, the women, like the majority of figures in Tamayo's oeuvre, are not individuals but anonymous types, that here represent hope and human potential. The central figure is distinguished only by her red dress and yellow-soled shoes that enliven the otherwise somber palette. A constant color in Tamayo's work, the striking red is repeated in the sky, subtly encircling the shooting stars and their delineated pathways. A hint of red also appears in the form of the extra "O" that Tamayo added to his signature, a practice he began in the early 1940s in deference to his wife Olga.
Years later, still exploring the theme of the cosmos and man's place within it, Tamayo painted the mural El hombre (fig. 3) for the Dallas Museum of Art. Women Reaching for the Moon was clearly Tamayo's point of departure for El hombre as the works share markedly similar compositions. El hombre depicts a central figure with mammoth legs and a minute head grasping at a star-streaked night sky. Less jubilant than Women Reaching for the Moon, El hombre exudes a heaviness as its strangely abstract figure seems rooted to the earth by massive webbed feet. These distorted figures, present in many of his works, lend themselves to comparisons with the art of Picasso, which Tamayo would have had ample opportunity to see at exhibitions in New York in the late 1930s. Particularly relevant to Women Reaching for the Moon is a series of seaside scenes that Picasso executed in the late 1920s, featuring radically foreshortened female forms (fig. 4). In these images, Picasso rendered the figure's feet and legs, those areas of the body closest to the viewer, monstrously large while the head, receding into the distance, appears absurdly small. Aware of the comparisons made between his work and Picasso's, Tamayo asserted, "In New York I came to know all the schools of painting, even though there was no shortage of critics who said I was influenced by Picasso. Perhaps, but I believe that the major influence on me is the spirit of all contemporary painting; that is to say, that in my work all the problems of contemporary painting are present. There are those who speak of the influence I received from the School of Paris. I don't accept that. In the first place, the School of Paris does not exist as such. A group of painters from all over the world united in Paris. The importance of the School of Paris radiates, then, from its universality."(5) Drawing from a rich repository of influences, found in Mexico, New York and Paris, Tamayo's oeuvre radiates that same universality. Women Reaching for the Moon, flecked with Picasso, informed by New York and rooted in Tamayo's Mexican heritage, evinces this truth.
(1) Quoted in I. Suckaer, 'Chronology,' in exhibition catalogue Tamayo: Modern Icon Reinterpreted, (Santa Barbara: Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 2007) 420.
(2) Rufino Tamayo, quoted in E. Genauer, Rufino Tamayo, (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 1973) 58.
(3) Ibid., 27.
(4) Rufino Tamayo, quoted in D.C. du Pont, "'Realistic, Never Descriptive: Tamayo and the Art of Abstract Figuration," Tamayo: Modern Icon Reinterpreted, 48.
(5) Ibid., 45.
By the early 1940s, Rufino Tamayo had garnered widespread attention in his newly adopted home of New York. Drawn to the city, like so many artists from Europe and Latin America at the time, for its burgeoning cultural community away from the epicenter of World War II, Tamayo quickly found the enthusiastic support of museums, galleries, critics and collectors. Julien Levy and Valentine galleries held solo shows of his work while the Museum of Modern Art included Tamayo in the momentous exhibition of 1940 Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art. Tamayo's work stood out within MOMA's epic presentation, as the New York Sun declared in its review of the exhibition, "Among these living Mexicans it is Tamayo who carries aesthetics furthest." (1) The following year MOMA acquired Tamayo's powerful Animales (fig. 1) for its permanent collection. In 1947, the renowned art historian Robert Goldwater published the first monograph on Tamayo in the United States, opening the door to further scholarly studies on the artist that have continued to the present day. In short, New York in the 1940s was a turning point for Tamayo; there he was transformed from an artist barely known outside of Mexico to one accepted and lauded by the world's cultural capital.
Recognized early on as a major work by a promising artist, Women Reaching for the Moon entered the Cleveland Museum of Art's collection in 1947, the year after its completion. A particularly compelling rendering of two ebullient women striving for the stars and moon, the painting marks a shift in Tamayo's oeuvre. While Tamayo's work from the early 1940s appears dark and even menacing, as exemplified by Animales, his paintings from the latter half of the decade are distinguished by a joie de vivre. This dramatic change in temper is explained partly by world events. If Animales expresses the pervasive fear of the war years, Women Reaching for the Moon evokes the optimism palpable in New York in the post-World War II era.
The end of the war also meant the beginning of Tamayo's exploration of a new subject, as he explained, "Immediately after World War II and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I started thinking about the implications of a new space age and did the first paintings of constellations shooting through space." (2) From astronomers and stargazers to vast night skies, the cosmos became an enduring theme for Tamayo, so much so that NASA invited him to discuss the relationship between science and art.(3)
Tamayo's celestial musings have a resonance with contemporaneous paintings of the New York School. Artists such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning were fascinated by outer space and the heavens which both literally and metaphorically appear in many of their works from the 1940s and 1950s. Pollock's paintings from the early 1940s in particular share an affinity with Tamayo's art from this same period. During this time, Pollock executed a series of works that associated women with the moon (fig. 2). While certainly aware of these paintings by the New York School, Tamayo first developed his cosmological curiosity as a young man in Mexico while serving as chief draftsman for the Department of Ethnographic Drawing in the Museo Nacional de Arqueología, Historia y Etnografía where he was responsible for disseminating pre-Hispanic designs to Mexican artisans so that they could be copied and enjoyed. The cosmos was of paramount importance to ancient Mesoamerican societies and indeed their art and architecture is replete with images of skywatchers, the sun, moon and stars. This intimate experience with pre-Hispanic art profoundly impacted Tamayo as an artist, as he asserted, "[The museum] opened a world to me: it put me in contact with pre-Hispanic art and with popular art. Immediately, I discovered the source for my work."(4) Years later, that pre-Hispanic wellspring of inspiration took the form of monumentalized geometric figures who lung and leap for the stars or quietly stand in contemplation of the night sky.
In Women Reaching for the Moon, two impossibly stretched figures stand on a rocky precipice attempting to catch hold of the unattainable. In a play of perspective, Tamayo creates an absurd disparity in size between the two figures by shrinking the woman in the background to a dramatically diminutive stature in order to monumentalize her companion in the foreground. Silhouetted against an expansive gray-blue sky punctuated by twinkling stars, the women, like the majority of figures in Tamayo's oeuvre, are not individuals but anonymous types, that here represent hope and human potential. The central figure is distinguished only by her red dress and yellow-soled shoes that enliven the otherwise somber palette. A constant color in Tamayo's work, the striking red is repeated in the sky, subtly encircling the shooting stars and their delineated pathways. A hint of red also appears in the form of the extra "O" that Tamayo added to his signature, a practice he began in the early 1940s in deference to his wife Olga.
Years later, still exploring the theme of the cosmos and man's place within it, Tamayo painted the mural El hombre (fig. 3) for the Dallas Museum of Art. Women Reaching for the Moon was clearly Tamayo's point of departure for El hombre as the works share markedly similar compositions. El hombre depicts a central figure with mammoth legs and a minute head grasping at a star-streaked night sky. Less jubilant than Women Reaching for the Moon, El hombre exudes a heaviness as its strangely abstract figure seems rooted to the earth by massive webbed feet. These distorted figures, present in many of his works, lend themselves to comparisons with the art of Picasso, which Tamayo would have had ample opportunity to see at exhibitions in New York in the late 1930s. Particularly relevant to Women Reaching for the Moon is a series of seaside scenes that Picasso executed in the late 1920s, featuring radically foreshortened female forms (fig. 4). In these images, Picasso rendered the figure's feet and legs, those areas of the body closest to the viewer, monstrously large while the head, receding into the distance, appears absurdly small. Aware of the comparisons made between his work and Picasso's, Tamayo asserted, "In New York I came to know all the schools of painting, even though there was no shortage of critics who said I was influenced by Picasso. Perhaps, but I believe that the major influence on me is the spirit of all contemporary painting; that is to say, that in my work all the problems of contemporary painting are present. There are those who speak of the influence I received from the School of Paris. I don't accept that. In the first place, the School of Paris does not exist as such. A group of painters from all over the world united in Paris. The importance of the School of Paris radiates, then, from its universality."(5) Drawing from a rich repository of influences, found in Mexico, New York and Paris, Tamayo's oeuvre radiates that same universality. Women Reaching for the Moon, flecked with Picasso, informed by New York and rooted in Tamayo's Mexican heritage, evinces this truth.
(1) Quoted in I. Suckaer, 'Chronology,' in exhibition catalogue Tamayo: Modern Icon Reinterpreted, (Santa Barbara: Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 2007) 420.
(2) Rufino Tamayo, quoted in E. Genauer, Rufino Tamayo, (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 1973) 58.
(3) Ibid., 27.
(4) Rufino Tamayo, quoted in D.C. du Pont, "'Realistic, Never Descriptive: Tamayo and the Art of Abstract Figuration," Tamayo: Modern Icon Reinterpreted, 48.
(5) Ibid., 45.