Tamayo: A Modern Icon Reinterpreted
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The number and quality of the reproductions in the book alone make it a worthwhile purchase for someone who is interested in Rufino Tamayo or Mexican art generally. So far, I have only read the first 3 of the 7 essays in the book. I was quite disappointed by the first, the introductory essay by the editor Ms. Du Pont. This essay makes only passing reference to Tamayo's paintings themselves; rather it is devoted principally to using various extraneous texts, some of which Tamayo certainly had nothing to do with writing and probably never even read (e.g. the U.N Charter - yes, I'm not kidding) and others which he may have had no part in writing or even read (e.g. the promotional materials in English produced by the gallery in N.Y. which put on his first U.S. show in 1926), to attack Tamayo from a left-wing political perspective and generally condemn him as a hypocrite. The next two essays were much better, combining a close examination of his paintings with useful information about the cultural and political background of his work. The difference can be illustrated by Ms Du Pont's discussion of Tamayo's 2 paintings, titled respectively homages to Madero and Zapata, and the discussion of these same paintings in the second essay whose subject is Tamayo's early work. To Ms. Du Pont , the existence of these paintings is evidence of Tamayo's hypocrisy: he claimed to be apolitical, but here he was making political paintings! In discussing these same paintings, the author of the second essay, points out that there is significant element of irony in Tamayo's depictions of the glorification of Mexico's revolutionary heroes, a subtlety which had entirely escaped Ms. Du Pont.