Like a Mother

Mexico's aging "Big Three"--Orozco, Siqueiros and Rivera--have plastered miles of Mexican walls with bayonets, clenched fists, streaming banners and broken chains. That kind of thing is no longer up-to-date. Last week Rufino Tamayo, 47, the most important of Mexico's "younger" painters, opened a one-man show in Manhattan. Revolutionary violence is not his game; he paints the classless society of his own imagination.

Tamayo's paintings hang in over a dozen U.S. museums, sell like hot tamales at prices ranging up to $5,000. His new show impressed critics and tickled Tamayo collectors as usual. And, as usual, it sent conscientious gallerygoers swearing into the street, wishing they knew what moderns like Tamayo were driving at.

At first glance the colors looked muddy or sometimes acidly off-register. Tamayo's figures lifted swollen hands and feet, like anthropomorphic cactus plants, and stared from flat, featureless heads. Behind them the fuzzy skies were scratched with schoolboy diagrams of the constellations. But for fans of Rufino Tamayo the distorted figures seemed perfectly adjusted to their painted world, and the star-spangled night skies (a new element in Tamayo's work) seemed to suggest the era of science.

A Zapotecan Indian born in the tropical state of Oaxaca, Tamayo was orphaned at ten, brought up in Mexico City's fruit markets by an aunt. "My feeling is Mexican," he grins, "my color is Mexican, my shapes are Mexican, but my thinking is a mixture."

Eight years ago he forsook Mexico, moved with his wife into an apartment on Manhattan's East 93rd Street, where he reads up on astronomy and physics for inspiration and paints in a bare back room. Painting is no fun, he says; "it has to be done with our insides, our heart, even our intestines. The painter is like a mother bearing a child. It has to hurt a lot--and the more it hurts the more healthy it is." Mystified onlookers were relieved to hear that it hurt Tamayo too.

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