| Brief History: |
(born August 26, 1899, Oaxaca, Mexico—died June 24, 1991, Mexico City) 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.
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. During this period the various styles of his paintings ranged from the stolid figures in Women of Tehuantepec (1939) to the expressive violence of the barking mongrels in Animals (1941). He often used vibrant colours and textured surfaces to depict his subjects in symbolic, stylized, or semiabstract modes.
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