Arte Prehispanico de Mexico: Coleccion Rufino Tamayo

Author: Tamayo, Rufino Arellanes (1899-1991)

Year: 1973

Publisher: Ediciones Galeria de Arte Misrachi

Place: Mexico City

Description:

159 pages with over 150 photographs (some in color) and index. Folio (13 1/2" x 10 1/2") bound in cream cloth with black lettering to spine and front cover. Introduction by Ramon Xirau. First edition limited to 2000 copies.

Rufino Tamayo was a Mexican painter who combined modern European painting styles with Mexican folk themes. Tamayo attended the School of Fine Arts in Mexico City from 1917 to 1921, but he was dissatisfied with the traditional art program and thereafter studied independently. He became head of the department of ethnographic drawing at the National Museum of Archaeology (1921–26) in Mexico City, where he developed an interest in pre-Columbian art. Tamayo spent many years of his career in New York City, first settling there from 1926 to 1928. He retained his ties to Mexico and returned there often, but the modern art he encountered in New York—especially the paintings of European artists Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Henri Matisse—profoundly influenced his work. Tamayo reacted against the epic proportions and political rhetoric of the paintings of the Mexican muralists, who had dominated the country’s art production since the Mexican Revolution. Instead, he chose to address formal and aesthetic issues in easel paintings, fusing European styles such as Cubism and Surrealism with subject matter that often involved Mexican culture. By the 1930s Tamayo had become a well-known figure in the Mexican art scene. He lived in New York again from 1936 to 1950. Tamayo exhibited his paintings at the Venice Biennale in 1950, and the success of his work there led to international recognition. After living in Paris from 1957 to 1964, Tamayo settled in Mexico. In 1974 he donated his large collection of pre-Columbian art to the city of Oaxaca, founding the Rufino Tamayo Museum of Pre-Hispanic Art. In 1981 Tamayo and his wife donated to the people of Mexico their collection of international art, which formed the basis for the Rufino Tamayo Museum of Contemporary Art in Mexico City.

Condition:

Corners gently bumped. Jacket with edge wear and small closed tears else a better than very good copy in a very good jacket.

SOLD 2024