Tamayo, Rufino (1899–1991)

Mexican painter and printmaker. His work, nurtured by both European modernism and pre-Columbian indigenous art, demonstrates a clear break with the rhetoric and pictoralism of the preceding generation of Mexican muralists. His mainly easel-sized paintings, with their vibrant colours and cryptic, semi-abstract figures, display strong cubist, expressionist, and surrealist elements, as in Women Reaching for the Moon (1946; Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio).

Tamayo painted many important murals 1933–77 as well as smaller-scale works. His choice of subject matter – Mexican folklore, people, fauna, and flora – reveals his passion for his native country, for example Watermelons 1968 (Rufino Tamayo Museum, Mexico City). Among important commissions was his mural, Prometheus Bringing Fire to Man 1958, for the UNESCO Building, Paris.