Art: Numero Uno

For four weeks, a show of 18 handsome paintings in Mexico City’s tiny Galeria Souza has been the talk of the town and a source of interested buzzing in art centers far above and beyond the border. Critics greeted the show with salvos of praise that made it the biggest Mexican art event since the 1949 retrospective of another painter, Diego Rivera. Paris’ Museum of Modern Art Director Jean Cassou fired off an urgent telegram, then flew to Mexico City to see for himself. One Californian sent in his $4,000 check for one painting, a leader of Ft. Worth’s oiligarchy reserved another four paintings, and U.S. museums hurried to get in bids. Focus of all the excitement: Mexican Muralist and Painter Rufino Tamayo, 56, today hailed in his own land as Mexico’s modernist número uno.

Down with the Phalanx. For Tamayo, a proud Mexican and fullblood Zapotec Indian, such success is sweet balm for long years of struggle in Manhattan and of official ostracism in his own city. Outside Mexico Tamayo has in recent years won a hatful of international awards, including a $5,000 first prize at Sāo Paulo’s 1953 biennial, a second in last year’s Carnegie International (but not the Barcelona Biennial grand prize, which Tamayo turned down, later explaining: “I am not on good terms with Mr. Franco”). At home Tamayo, outspokenly antiCommunist, has been up against an iron phalanx of pro-Marxist critics. Only four years ago die the government finally relent, award him his first official mural commission (TIME, April 13, 1953).

What pleases Tamayo most about his latest success is that he has won it with a new technique. Not long ago he made a disturbing discovery. Said he: “Salons in New York and Paris was featuring Tamayo Pink.’ Why, my wife even got presents-aprons, pillow cases and napkins with watermelons on them. Naturally, I was displeased.”

Tamayo’s answer was to scrape his palette clean, begin using grey and white. He used color sparingly in small splashes of gold, red, lavender and cerulean blue; he switched from his usually thin paint surfaces, often done in Vinylite, to full-bodied oils thickly applied to gain surface richness. What remains the same is Tamayo’s distinctive approach, which can assault the senses with all the fury of a maddened cat, shift to grotesque satire, or acquire the quality of jagged hallucination as in his Phantasma (see cut’) which depicts a phosphorescent feminine specter who seems perched uninvited on the window ledge. Closed in Mexico City last week. Tamayo’s triumphant show will be seen next month at Manhattan’s Knoedler Galleries.

Up with Freedom. In the politics-ridden art world of Mexico, Tamayo’s latest success inevitably brought a renewed plea that he lead a new Mexican art movement against the prevailing Communist and leftist painters—Siqueiros, Rivera, et al. But Rufino Tamayo does not want to create a new kind of orthodoxy. He is convinced that the leftists, by pretending “that Mexican painting must follow one specific, rigid line, have put Mexican art back many years.” Of the eager young artists who want to follow him, he says: “They are not dogmatic. That’s the reason I love them. They don’t follow my painting, but my idea of freedom.”