Rufino Tamayo

Rufino Tamayo was born in Oaxaca on 25 August 1899, of Zapotec descent. Orphaned young, he moved to Mexico City in 1911 to live with an aunt who sold fruit at the market, a world of colour and form he would paint all his life. He studied at the Academia de San Carlos and in 1921 became head of ethnographic drawing at the National Museum of Archaeology, where pre-Hispanic art shaped his sense of form.

Standing apart from the political muralism of Rivera, Orozco and Siqueiros, Tamayo sought a painting that was Mexican in colour and spirit but modern in language, drawing on Cubism, Picasso and Braque.

He lived in New York in 1926 and again from 1936 to 1949, then in Paris until 1959, painting murals for the Palacio de Bellas Artes (1952–53) and UNESCO (1958). His mature work of the 1950s sets stylised figures, dogs, moons and above all watermelons against textured grounds of resonant reds and earths, often with sand mixed into the paint.

Tamayo gave his collection of pre-Hispanic art to Oaxaca (1974) and founded the Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City (1981). He died in Mexico City on 24 June 1991.