Artist Dossier: Rufino Tamayo

When an artist emerges in a country whose art scene is already ruled by an internationally renowned triumvirate of painters, the best he can hope for is to be called the fourth. And yet, that was precisely the laurel that Rufino Tamayo handed back in 1953, when he told a journalist for the Mexican daily Excelsior, “I am neither the fourth, nor am I great. . . . I am the first in a new modality of Mexican painting that attempts a universal voice.”

This declaration of independence from the trio of muralists known as “the three great ones”—David Alfaro Siqueiros, Jose Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera—came on the heels of the completion of Tamayo’s second and final mural for Mexico City’s Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico de hoy, a dark Cubist scene indicative of the politically troubled era its creator was born into, in 1899. Tamayo continued to execute mural commissions, including one in 1955 for the Bank of the Southwest in Houston that resulted in America, whose bright color scheme and dynamic visual effects, reminiscent of work by Umberto Boccioni, compelled a buyer to pay $2.6 million at Christie’s in 1993, establishing Tamayo’s auction record. However, the artist is best known for the advances he introduced in easel painting at a time when his contemporaries had turned to the wall.

By focusing on his “new modality” of painting, characterized by Fauve-inspired color schemes, primitive figures and richly textured surfaces, Tamayo pushed back the boundaries for the next generation of Latin American artists. As William Sheehy, the director of Latin American Masters gallery, in Los Angeles, points out, “Tamayo is as central to what’s gone on in Latin America as Matisse or Picasso is for Europe.”

Now his commercial appeal is catching up with his artistic innovations. Last November, Virgilio Garza, the head of the Latin American department at Christie’s, was concerned that he had too many Tamayos in one sale—nine, including works on paper. He needn’t have worried: Eight of them sold, most above their high estimates. “That,” Garza says, “is when I noticed, ‘Wow, the market is turning around for Tamayo.’ ”

Dealers from coast to coast are predicting that the thirst for Tamayo’s semiabstract, lushly colored canvases will only intensify as “Tamayo: A Modern Icon Reinterpreted,” the artist’s first retrospective in the United States in almost 30 years, travels around North America. Having opened its tour at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in February, the show moved to the Miami Art Museum in June before coming to rest, until January 21, 2008, in Mexico City’s Museo Tamayo, a contemporary-art museum that the painter founded in 1981. The more than 100 works in the exhibition offer a broad overview of the artist’s prolific career, from his early Impressionist paintings of the 1920s to his rosy portrait of Picasso in the nude, painted in 1989, just two years before Tamayo’s death.

Mary-Anne Martin, who founded the first Latin American department at Sotheby’s in the 1970s and now runs her namesake gallery on the Upper East Side, notes that the exhibition is already affecting Tamayo’s market. “I’m starting to get calls from movie people, CEOs—people who had not even thought of Tamayo before as something they would want in a modern-picture collection,” she says. Reflecting on a “very visible” collector who inquired after a work she had already sold, she adds, “He’s walked by my stand at art fairs but has never walked in—certainly never looked at a Tamayo before—and suddenly this person’s ringing me up and wants to come to the gallery because he saw that show.”

Tamayo’s present popularity with American art aficionados, who account for at least half of his collecting base, is evidence of a renaissance more than a discovery. After growing up and going to art school in Mexico City, the artist first became acquainted with Manhattan in the 1920s, when he developed, as he recounted to a reporter in 1989, “this dream that I wanted to be recognized in New York.” By 1940, he had officially arrived. That year he moved to the city and celebrated his first show at Valentine Gallery. Tamayo enjoyed blue-chip representation for the rest of his life—going from Valentine to Knoedler and then Marlborough—a factor that gave his work credibility with American collectors.