MEXICO CITY.-Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo presents Tamayo: A Modern Icon Reinterpreted, on view through January 20, 2008. The internationally traveling exhibition features spectacular paintings from private and institutional collections all over the world, including canvases that have not been on public view for decades.

The extraordinary exhibition of more than 100 paintings—created during a prolific seven decade career in Mexico City, New York, and Paris—seeks not only to present a careful selection of Tamayo’s finest works, but also to offer a contemporary reinterpretation of this world-renowned artist. An icon of modern Mexican art, Tamayo was called the “The Fourth Great One” and was inducted into Mexico’s “national pantheon” alongside Los Tres Grandes (The Three Great Ones) of Mexican Muralism, José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Far and wide, his extraordinary paintings conjure familiar images of Mexico, its colors, textures, and centuries of indigenous and hybrid culture, perhaps most picturesquely, and stereotypically, epitomized by the country’s traditional marketplaces brimming with exotic flowers, tropical fruit, and native folk art. The lushness and materiality of Tamayo’s signature canvases readily encourage such an imagining and, as a result, has indelibly marked the artist as a formalist, a painter primarily interested in pure line, form, and color. While he has been contextualized among them, he has been most often considered a discordant counterpoint to Los Tres Grandes, whose ambition was Social Realism, in which aesthetics was wrought by politics. The persistent view of Tamayo as an ardent advocate of formalism, or arte puro (pure art), has impeded a fuller appreciation of the artist as well as his painting. Tamayo aims to offer new readings of this widely recognized and respected, but also controversial painter.

The exhibition provides viewers with a window onto the painter’s many geographic and creative trajectories. It traces Tamayo’s artistic evolution from his earliest paintings—impressionistic landscapes and Picasso-esque portraits—to his last works, meditations on his own mortality. As a retrospective, Tamayo presents the artist’s contributions to Mexican and international modernism by exploring the various paths he traveled to shape the ways in which he successfully negotiated both an aesthetic dialogue and a career between Mexico, the United States, and Europe. Beyond a retrospective, Tamayo revisits the story of Mexican modernism through the artist’s paintings, portraying a much richer panorama of visual expressions and debates than customarily understood.

The carefully selected paintings are organized in a loose chronological sequence in order to emphasize thematic interpretation. The early period (1920-the late 1930s) addresses Tamayo’s adoption of the various “isms” of European modern art and proceeds to demonstrate how he transformed these vanguard sources by way of still lifes, images of women, nudes, portraits of children and family, and genre scenes of indigenous subjects. These striking works show how Tamayo appropriated imagery, incorporated modernist strategies of collage and advertising, and, contrary to conventional wisdom, ventured to make political observations.

By 1940, Tamayo had established the definitive form of abstract figuration that made him one of the most celebrated painters of the twentieth century. His fully mature period (1940-to the mid 1960s) is represented by a dramatic range of figurative works, from telling self-portraits to eerie phantoms. This section, the largest of the show, examines Tamayo’s fusion modernism through a series of themes that confirm the breadth and depth of his visual thinking. The subjects of man; woman; nature; man and woman representing the universal; animal; and human hybrids were all treated in this manner to address a full range of emotion. Love and hate, joy and despair, aggression and reconciliation, all found pictorial expression in the artist’s mature work that is on view.

The exhibition culminates with a selection of Tamayo’s best late paintings. In his work from roughly 1968 on, Tamayo left behind his searing and searching pictures of the 1940s and 1950s. Besides their message of universal humanism and their tour-de-force ability to show that modern painting is still capable of arresting the eye, this sampling demonstrates how Tamayo addressed a reality that cannot be sentimentalized: death. These pictures do not treat its actuality but rather the process of reflecting on a life lived and anticipating what is to come. They poignantly speak to the artist’s own sense of mortality, showing an increasing physical weakness but also a defiant resistance to that inevitability.

“Tamayo’s painting as well as his personal and professional story have the hallmarks of aspiration and struggle, triumph and failure that defined Mexico as a modern nation,” says Diana C. du Pont, SBMA Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art and the exhibition’s Project Director. “At the heart of the controversies that Tamayo and his painting fueled in his day were the clashes created by the different views of modernism and modernity that he and his art represented. Today, Tamayo’s international perspective and aesthetic approach serve as an example for the contemporary Mexican artist working globally. Thus, in many ways, Tamayo had and continues to have a significant influence, which this exhibition seeks to understand.”