Miami Art Museum

Tamayo: A Modern Icon Reinterpreted
From Jun 24th through Sep 23rd, 2007

Miami Art Museum continues to bring the works of contemporary and modern art masters to its premises in downtown Miami. This time it is a traveling retrospective exhibition on the work of one of the most acclaimed Mexican modern painters: Rufino Tamayo. Organized by the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in collaboration with the Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes in Mexico, Tamayo: A Modern Icon Reinterpreted, is the first exhibition in nearly thirty years gathering approximately a hundred among the best works made by the artist over a long and productive lifetime career. The show profiles the artist’s remarkable works from the 1940s and 1950s period in which he developed a unique form of figurative abstraction.

Born in 1899, in Oaxaca, Mexico, Rufino Tamayo studied in Mexico City’s National School of Fine Arts. Soon moved to New York having his first solo show at the Weyhe Gallery obtaining critical acclaim that praised him for both, his “authentic” status as a Mexican of indigenous heritage and for his internationally appealing modernist aesthetic. “Tamayo openly and freely melded modernist concepts and practices from Mexico, Europe, and the United States:” said Diana C. du Pont, the exhibition’s project director. “His fusion modernism forged links between the Mexican School, the New York School, and European figure painting of the 1940s and 1950s. He was committed to the human experience as the primary subject of art, while remaining dedicated to the modernist ethos of formal experimentation.

Unlike other major Mexican artists active in the first half of the twentieth century, Tamayo did not engage with the politically charged social realist approach to painting that became widely identified with modern Mexican art, take for instance the works by Siqueiros or Diego Rivera. Instead, he focused on what he called the “pure qualities of painting.” He referred to his art as a “non-descriptive realism” but remained convinced however - as many of his contemporaries - that to create completely unrecognizable art would be bourgeois and decadent. His international projection finds echoes in the work of many young Mexican artists working today. His influences on current and future generations are what this exhibition is seeking to understand. Tamayo: A Modern Icon Reinterpreted is part of a series of major monographic exhibitions launched by Diana C. du Pont with the objective of individually exploring Latin American artists and their legacies. Diana C. du Pont serves since 1992 as Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.

Miami Art Museum
101 West Flagler Street.
Miami, FL 33130
305.375.1706
www.miamiartmuseum.org