From the Files

+ In 1926, Tamayo had his first solo show in New York, at the Weyhe Gallery- three years before his first one-man show at the Palacio de Bellas Artes, his native Mexico's most prestigious art showcase.

+ Mujer arreglandose el pelo, 1944, which sold for $209,600 in November 2003 at Sotheby's, holds Tamayo's auction record for a work on paper. Privately, such works sell in the range of $60,000 to $70,000.

+ Tamayo completed only about 11 sculptures, and they maintain a consistent price range between $200,000 and $300,000.

+ In 1981, Tamayo unveiled his Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporaneo, in Mexico City. He fashioned it to be a contemporary art museum on a broad scale—beginning with artists like Mark Rothko— instead of just an exhibition space for his own work.

+ Monterrey, Mexico, is the place to see the artist at his grandest: The city is home to two cosmic Tamayo murals, Eclipse total, 1977, and El universo, 1982, as well as an 89-foot-tall metal sculpture, Homenaje al sol, 1980.

Pablo Picasso Jean Dubuffet Alberto Giacometti Mark Rothko Henri Matisse Philip Guston Claude Monet Rufino Tamayo

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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.

While his pictures can be found in such esteemed collections of Latin American art as Bernard Lewin’s—the largest private assemblage of Mexican painting in the world, now at LACMA—his work was also acquired by connoisseurs of modern art like Ruth and Harvey Kaplan. Garza visited the Kaplan estate before Christie’s auctioned many of the Chicago-based collectors’ holdings, in May 2005, and was bowled over by Tamayo’s La silla amarilla, 1929, an early still life that sold for $744,000. Demonstrating that the artist belongs among 20th-century innovators of any nationality, the painting was presented as “the centerpiece of this modern collection,” says Garza, mingling with a Giacometti, a Claude Monet and a Philip Guston.

Tamayo can hang with the other modern masters because his work echoes the most important movements of the 20th century, thanks to his exposure to them in New York. Carmen Melian, the head of the Latin American department at Sotheby’s, notes that Tamayo’s synthesis of ancient and indigenous themes with international styles—which the writer Octavio Paz famously called his “transfiguration”—really began in the 1940s, after the artist left Mexico City for New York and, later, Paris. She notes that the 1941 MoMA show “Masterpieces of Picasso,” in particular, “led to his blending of pre-Colombian and pre-Hispanic motifs with Cubism.”

But it wasn’t until the 1950s that, as Melian puts it, “the wonderful color comes through.” Tamayo’s rich hues—ebullient blues, burnt reds and bright yellows—evoke the sun-drenched climate of his semitropical homeland and led Paz to comment, “If it were possible to say in just one word what it is that distinguishes Tamayo from the other painters of our time, I would say without hesitating: sun.” But his palette also absorbed the experiments of color-field painters abroad. This is evident in Tamayo’s signature watermelon paintings, one of which Martin describes as looking “like a Mark Rothko—it was just red upon red upon red.” Back in 1997, Sandias, 1951, almost broke Tamayo’s auction record, going for $2.4 million. Another, Sandias (Fette d’anguria), 1958, sold in 2000 at Sotheby’s for $1.2 million, representing a substantial profit for the consignor, who had acquired it at the first sale of Mexican Art at Sotheby’s, in 1978, for just $37,500.

While the market has historically favored Tamayo’s works from the 1940s and ’50s, like his watermelon paintings, art adviser Alberto Barral points out that the artist’s technique, which developed over seven decades, was good to the last drop of cerulean. “What is amazing with Tamayo is that pretty much till the end you still find some very wonderful paintings,” he says. In fact, Martin claims that it is the pictures of the late ’50s and the 1960s, when the artist began experimenting with the texture of his canvases by incorporating sand into the paint, that “many people in the art world actually consider . . . to be his masterpieces.”

These mature paintings—with their alluring, complex surfaces—are now beginning to hit their stride at auction. Last May, La rana, a small picture depicting a frog from 1968, leapt past its high estimate to fetch $622,000 at Christie’s, while Retrato matrimoniale, a sand painting from 1967, sold for $552,000 at Sotheby’s. Works from the ’60s and ’70s are still bargains compared with midcentury works, which often go for upwards of$700,000 at auction and much more privately.

Last March at the Art Show, for instance, Martin sold Hombre feliz, 1947, to a private collector for more than $1.5 million, and Barral confirms that Tamayo’s auction record has been surpassed privately. Indeed, even as the artist’s works on paper earn significant sums on the block—last June a gouache from 1937, Mother and Child, brought $90,000 at Christie’s—it is in private sales that the artist’s most valuable paintings change hands.

“There are truly important Tamayos that have not been available for decades,” says Garza. “And if they were to come up at auction, they would break all records.” This theory will be put to the test at the Latin American sales in New York this month with two early Tamayos. Christie’s is offering Banistas, 1930, depicting voluptuous female figures starkly different from the ragged, Dubuffet-like forms of his later paintings. The work, estimated at $700,000 to $900,000, has never been auctioned. The portrait Bodegon con mujer, 1928, will be on the block at Sotheby’s, estimated at $250,000 to $300,000.

Sheehy, who experienced the potency of Tamayo’s market firsthand when he held a successful gallery show of the artist’s work last spring, predicts that his prices will continue to rise. “When you see artists in the contemporary art world that have a very thin body of work selling for millions,” he says, “and you see an artist like Tamayo—whose work, whether you like it or not, is going to be around a hundred years from now—selling for much less, you realize that he’s a bargain.”

"Market File: Rufino Tamayo" originally appeared in the November 2007 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's November 2007 Table of Contents