Miami, FL - The first major U.S. exhibition in nearly 30 years of the work of acclaimed Mexican artist Rufino TamayoTamayo: A Modern Icon Reinterpreted (1899-1991), will be on view at Miami Art Museum June 24 – September 23, 2007. The internationally traveling exhibition features paintings from private and institutional collections all over the world, including works that have not been on public view for decades. In conjunction with the first public viewing of the exhibition on June 24, from 2 to 4pm MAM and the Mexico Tourism Board will present A Festival of Mexico: Oaxaca!, on the Cultural Center Plaza at 101 West Flagler Street in downtown Miami. 

Tamayo: A Modern Icon Reinterpreted brings together approximately 100 of the best canvases, gouaches, and watercolors made by Tamayo over a long and productive career that spanned seven decades. The largest section of the show profiles Tamayo’s remarkable work of the 1940s and 1950s, in which he developed a unique form of figurative abstraction. The exhibition seeks not only to present a careful selection of Tamayo’s finest works, but also to offer a contemporary reinterpretation of this world-renowned artist.

“Tamayo openly and freely melded modernist concepts and practices from Mexico, Europe, and the United States: his fusion modernism forged links between the Mexican School, the New York School, and European figure painting of the 1940s and 1950s,” said Diana C. du Pont, Santa Barbara Museum of Art Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art and the exhibition’s Project Director. “Tamayo was committed to the human experience as the primary subject of art, while remaining dedicated to the modernist ethos of formal experimentation.”

“He called his approach to art ‘nondescriptive realism’ and remained convinced, like Orozco, Rivera, and Siqueiros, and Picasso, that to create completely unrecognizable art would be bourgeois and decadent,” du Pont added. “Tamayo’s international perspective and aesthetic approach serve as an example for the contemporary Mexican artist working globally. Thus, in many ways, Tamayo had and continues to have a significant influence, which this exhibition seeks to understand.”

Unlike other major Mexican artists active in the first half of the twentieth century, Tamayo did not espouse the politically charged social realist approach to painting that became widely identified with modern Mexican art. Instead, he focused on what he called the “pure qualities of painting.” His attention to line, form and vibrant colors, resulted in works that he described as “universal while retaining a specifically Mexican accent.”

In one of his many essays on Tamayo’s work, Nobel Prize-winning poet Octavio Paz, a long-time friend of the artist, observed: "If I could express with a single word what it is that distinguishes Tamayo from other painters, I would say, without a moment’s hesitation: sun. For the sun is in all his pictures, whether we see it or not."

The exhibition, which has been organized chronologically while emphasizing the themes that run through the artist’s work, provides viewers with a complete overview of Tamayo’s creative career. The exhibition begins with a small group of his early impressionist-inspired landscapes and cubist-related works; it continues with a broad selection of his signature mature works and closes with a group of his best late paintings.

Tamayo: A Modern Icon Reinterpreted is organized by the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in collaboration with the Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, through the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes and the Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico, and the Fundación Olga y Rufino Tamayo, AC. It is curated by Diana C. du Pont, Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, with Juan Carlos Pereda, Curator of the Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo.

In Miami, the exhibition is coordinated by Assistant Curator René Morales and was planned during the tenure of MAM Founding Director Suzanne Delehanty. The Miami presentation is supported in part by the Consulate General of Mexico, Mexico Tourism Board, Neoris and MAM’s Annual Exhibition Fund.

The Miami Art Museum is dedicated to engaging the public with art from the twentieth century through the present. Since its founding in 1996, the Museum has built a collection of contemporary art with the goal of providing Miami with a legacy for future generations. MAM's collection has grown exponentially since Art in America called it "the quintessential Miami collection" in 1999. The MAM collection is dedicated to international art of the 20th and 21st centuries, taking a hemispheric perspective of the Americas.

About the Artist

Rufino del Carmen Arellanes Tamayo was born August 25, 1899, in Oaxaca, Mexico. He studied in Mexico City’s Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes (National School of Fine Arts). He worked at the Museo Nacional de Arqueología, Historia y Etnografía (National Museum of Archaeology, History, and Ethnography), where, beginning in 1921, he was head of the Department of Ethnographic Drawing and taught art classes in Mexico City’s public schools using the Adolfo Best-Maugard Drawing Method. In April 1926, Tamayo mounted his own one-person show in Mexico City, the first solo exhibition of his career. In June 1926, Tamayo moved to New York with his friend, the composer Carlos Chávez. His first solo show there, at the Weyhe Gallery, earned him critical acclaim that praised him for both his “authentic” status as a Mexican of indigenous heritage and for his internationally appealing modernist aesthetic.

Tamayo was honored with his first major retrospective at the Palacio de Bellas Artes (Palace of Fine Arts) in Mexico City in 1948. In 1950 Tamayo was among the first Mexican artists to be included in the Venice Biennale. On the occasion of his 80th birthday, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York inaugurated Rufino Tamayo: Myth and Magic. On June 24, 1991, two months before his 92nd birthday, Rufino Tamayo died in Mexico City.

About the Curator

Diana C. du Pont, Project Director for Tamayo: A Modern Icon Reinterpreted, has served since 1992 as Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Tamayo is part of a series of major monographic exhibitions launched by Ms. du Pont with the objective of individually exploring Latin American artists and their contributions. Initiated at the SBMA in 2000, this exhibition series realized its first major one-person first exhibition of a Latin American artist in 2003 with its successful Risking the Abstract: Mexican Modernism and the Art of Gunther Gerzso.

During her fifteen-year tenure, SBMA has emerged as a leader in the field, moving to re-categorize Latin American art into a more expansive sphere—the art of the Americas—and to challenge narrow, regional readings of this work by shifting the emphasis to hemispheric as well as global concerns. Ms. du Pont earned her M.A. in the History of Art from the University of California, Berkeley, and began her curatorial career at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where she contributed to the museum’s collection catalogue of painting and sculpture before serving as a curator of photography.

Publication: A fully illustrated catalogue, published by SBMA in association with Turner Libros, Mexico City, includes essays by leading scholars and curators from both the United States and Mexico. The 460 page publication will be sold through the MAM store for $49.95 (paperback) and $75 hardback.

Accredited by the American Association of Art Museums, Miami Art Museum is sponsored in part by the State of Florida, Department of State, Division of Cultural Affairs and the Florida Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts; with the support of the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs, the Cultural Affairs Council, the Mayor and the Board of County Commissioners. The Miami Art Museum is an accessible facility. 101 West Flagler Street - Miami, FL 33130 - 305.375.3000 - Visit : www.miamiartmuseum.org