(b Oaxaca, Aug 29, 1899; d Jun 24, 1991).
Mexican painter, printmaker, sculptor, and collector. He is one of a select group of Mexican painters who attained international reputations in the 20th century. Opposed to the ideological current represented by Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco, Tamayo was involved with an aesthetic search detached from nationalism and more interested in addressing pictorial and aesthetic questions. He was born in Oaxaca, a region noted for its traditions and indigenous groups, its Pre-Columbian art and highly colored popular art, all of which, together with Tamayo’s travels to New York and Paris where he experienced the impact of artists such as Picasso and Jean Dubuffet, produced a highly original appropriation of the popular, the “primitive,” and the modern. Tamayo, with his painting and declarations of the need for artistic independence, became a model for a new generation of painters in the 1950s and 1960s who broke away from the Mexican school of painting....
