Born in 1899 into a family of mixed Zapotec and Spanish ancestry, Tamayo grew up in the city of Oaxaca but moved to Mexico City at the age of 12 after his mother died. Though he initially studied accounting in order to work in the family fruit business, he ended up at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes (The National Academy of Fine Arts). His work as a young man reflected the prevailing social realist style, drawing praise from Diego Rivera, but he ultimately rejected the idea that Mexican art had to be solely political. In contrast to Rivera and other contemporaries such as José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siquieros, he sought a more poetic approach to painting. He started to paint subjects inspired by indigenous art that predated the Spanish conquest of Mexico and by Mexican folklore, searching for ways to express “the true essence of Mexicanness,” as he put it, rather than the “Mexicanness of anecdote.” His goal was to create a truly Mexican modern art.
Rufino met a sympathetic soul in the artist and fellow Escuela Nacional student María Izquierdo.
Rufino Tamayo, 1945
Carl Van Vechten
María Izquierdo, n.d.
Photographer unknown
Also of Indigenous and Spanish ancestry, she was born in San Juan de los Lagos in 1902, a city famous for an image of the Virgin Mary that still draws millions of pilgrims a year. Married and with three children by the age of 17, she and her family moved to Mexico City in 1923. Five years later, she divorced her husband and enrolled at the Escuela Nacional, where her talent was also praised by Rivera. Soon, in addition to sharing a new vision of what Mexican art should be, she and Rufino were sharing both a bed and a studio and even painting the same subjects side by side.
Both Izquierdo and Tamayo belonged to a group of artists known as the Contemporáneos, who believed that Mexican art should be open to many influences, including international styles like Cubism. By 1932, Izquierdo was painting more allegorical and surreal works, drawing themes from Indigenous art and Mexican folklore. That same year, Tamayo painted this portrait of Izquierdo, depicting her with eyes closed, as if emphasizing the importance of her inner world.
She appears the way the poet Octavio Paz described her, like “a prehispanic goddess. A face of sun-baked clay, cured in copal incense. Heavily made-up, but her make-up ancient and ritual rather than contemporary….” The palette and the contrasting white blouse and gloves highlight her Indigenous features. Almost as if in a dream, the figure of a fish passes through her body, while the smoke from a cigarette appears to reveal rather than hide what passes behind it. This portrait, compelling and enigmatic, perhaps could only have been painted by an artist who shared and admired her sensibility.
Art is a means of expression that must be understood by everybody, everywhere. It grows out of the earth, the textures of our lives, and our experience.
—Rufino Tamayo
In 1933, the two artists went their separate personal ways. Tamayo married and moved to New York, where he found inspiration in works by Picasso. He combined motifs drawn from ancient indigenous art with Cubism—as seen in Women with a Bird Cage—helping to define his holistic vision of what Mexican art could be.
Izquierdo, whose work shares certain themes with that by Frida Kahlo, continued to celebrate the presence and power of women in all aspects of Mexican culture and went on to become the first Mexican woman artist to have a solo exhibition in the United States.
In the years they shared an intensely creative and personal relationship, they pulled away from social realism to create what could be called their own brand of realism, one that primarily looked within. Perhaps their shared Indigenous heritage encouraged both of them to reach beyond the dominant trend practiced by mostly male artists, helping them find an art that embraced both the deep historic past and the equally deep promptings of the subconscious.
See more works by Rufino Tamayo in our collection.
