Alice Rahon - Surrealism

 

Alice Rahon ( 1904 –1987) was a French/Mexican poet and artist whose work contributed to the beginning of abstract expression in Mexico. She began as a surrealist poet in Europe but began painting in Mexico."Alice Rahon was an integral member of the Surrealist group that lived and worked in Mexico City in the late 1930s. Displaced by World War II, Rahon and her husband, painter Wolfgang Paalen, fled France in 1939, joining André Breton, Leonora Carrington, and Remedios Varo as well as local Mexican artists Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Manuel Álvarez Bravo. Rahon and her peers found community in exile, and their artwork was informed by the landscape, Indigenous history, and artistic legacies of Mexico. Rahon took a Surrealist approach to all of her work, marrying poetry and myth in an array of media. In Thunderbird (1946), she invokes the aesthetics of prehistoric cave painting, with gestural brushstrokes and contour lines that connect a web of symbolic figures on floating backgrounds. In 1946, a year after the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, she created a ballet inspired by the ancient Mayans’ expertise in astronomy. In the ballet, five characters – first imagined through gouache paintings, and then configured as three-dimensional marionettes made of wire – including The Juggler (a magician) and Androgyne (a non-binary gender being), ponder the beginning of life following the destruction of the planet. Rahon was able to channel the spiritual energy of ancestral cultures and did so through a plethora of artistic expressions."(Isabella Achenbach) 

 

 

Manuel Felguérez Barra

 

 Manuel Felguérez Barra (1928 – 2020) was a Mexican abstract artist, part of the Generación de la Ruptura that broke with the muralist movement of Diego Rivera and others in the mid 20th century.
"Painter and sculptor. In the late forties, he studied at the San Carlos Academy in Mexico City. At the beginning of the fifties, thanks to a scholarship from the French government he traveled to Paris where he studied at the Academy de la Grande Chaumier and at the Colarossi Academy. There he perfected his sculptural work with the master Ossip Zadkine, whose work will influence the young Felguérez. In the mid-fifties he became one of the pioneers of the Abstract trend, provoking a true renewal of the Mexican visual arts landscape in the second half of the XX century. Between 1965 and 1990 he developed an intense teaching and research work that took him to Cornell University and Harvard University in the United States. He tought Composition Classes in the National School of Plastic Arts and 1977 he became a researcher at the Institute of Aesthetic Research at UNAM. The work of Felguérez poses a dialectic between abstraction and expression. His paintings articulate geometric figures as squares, triangles, circles or rectangles, that collides with the imprint of an expressive Informalism charged with gestural spontaneity."(durbansegnini.com)

Rufino Tamayo

 

 Rufino Tamayo was a Mexican painter and printmaker known for his large-scale murals and vivid use of color. Like Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco, Tamayo attracted international attention for Mexican art. Influenced by Modern movements such as Cubism, Surrealism, and Expressionism, Tamayo wove his country’s native motifs into his painting with a signature figurative style. Born on August 26, 1899 in Oaxaca, Mexico, Tamayo left the San Carlos Academy of Fine Arts after a year and began to teach himself. He moved to New York in the 1930s after a falling out with the politically activist artists he knew at home. Tamayo’s work has been exhibited worldwide in museums including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Naples Museum of Art in Naples, The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, and the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. The artist would eventually return to his home country in 1959, where he died on June 24, 1991 in Mexico City, Mexico at the age of 91. In 1981, he founded the Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, which houses his Modern Art collection, and the Museo Rufino Tamayo in his birthplace of Oaxaca for his extensive pre-Columbian collection.(.artnet)
Tamayo's method situates his composition as the focal point instead of emphasizing the subject alone. By doing so, looks at the painting as a whole. He explained his approach to Paul Westheim as follows: “As the number of colors we use decreases, the wealth of possibilities increases". Tamayo favored using few colors rather than many; he asserted that fewer colors in a painting gave the art greater force and meaning. Tamayo’s unique color choices are evident in the painting Tres personajes cantando (Three singers), 1981. In this painting, Tamayo employs pure colors such as red and purple; his restraint in the choice of color here confirms his belief that fewer colors, far from limiting the painting, actually enlarge the composition's possibilities. With that being said, Octavio Paz, author of the book Rufino Tamayo, argues that, “Time and again we have been told that Tamayo is a great colourist; but it should be added that this richness of colour is the result of sobriety". By being pure or, as Paz explained, sober with his color choice, Tamayo's paintings were enriched, not impoverished.
“     "If I could express with a single word what it is that distinguishes Tamayo from other painters, I would say without a moment's hesitation: Sun. For the sun is in all his pictures, whether we see it or not." - Nobel Prize-winning poet Octavio Paz. (Wikipedia)