La Jornada: Exhibition reviews the residences of Tamayo, Nieto and Toledo in Paris

Three Oaxacan artists, Rufino Tamayo (1899-1991), Rodolfo Nieto (1936-1985) and Francisco Toledo (1940-2019), had stays in Paris at different times, and even lived together in the French capital on many occasions. The Tamayo Museum will review these residences and experiences through the exhibition Tamayo, Nieto, Toledo: The years in Pariscurated by Juan Carlos Pereda, which will open to the public on August 20. The almost hundred works, including painting, graphics, drawing and collagecome from public and private collections.

The first time Tamayo traveled to Europe was in 1949; He settled in Paris. He had already spent time in New York since 1936. In 1987/1988, on the occasion of the great exhibition Rufino Tamayo: 70 years of creationart critic Raquel Tibol wrote: “In both black and color, lithography was a very appropriate procedure for Tamayo’s sensitivity. The chromolithographs made with the Guilde de la Gravure in Paris during 1950, 1952 or later, are notable in finesse and elegance. The very delicate effects have great coherence.

“Seven of the lithographs worked in France were seen in Mexico for the first time in Tamayo’s individual exhibition for the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana in June 1951. They were: Bird hunter, Man contemplating the moon, Coyote at night, Still life, Woman with watermelon, Man y two women.”

Two other art critics, Margarita Nelken and Jorge Juan Crespo de la Serna, were able to value the importance of what was achieved in color, composition and finesse. Crespo wrote: “How wonderful that one in which just three slices of watermelon establish the rhythm and harmony of a divine musical ‘fugue’! What is the sidereal and what is the earthly in these three moist slices?”

For her part, Nelken described her colors as sonorous because, according to her, only by going through the musical diatonic succession could one define the violets, the yellows in their range from almost white to almost ocher, the nocturnal blues, the fiery reds, the scant depth of the blacks. In that sound, the writer also discovered a resurrection of the illuminated codices.

“The experts were able to appreciate Tamayo’s very high performance as a lithographer. His works in that technique began to be sold in the limited editions section of the Louvre Museum, and in 1952 he received two commissions to illustrate the books with original lithographs. Aztlán, Mexican dreamsby Man’Ha Garreau-Dombasle, and Mexican airby Benjamín Peret, published, respectively, by La Porte Etroite and Librarie Arcanes. His highly refined use of inks and lithographic effects was widely recognized.

“In 1959 the opportunity arose for Tamayo to carry out an exceptional work: the illustration with 15 lithographs in three and four inks of the Apocalypse of Saint John for the Collection of Books by Contemporary Painters of the Association Internationale de Bibliophilie. The exquisite edition was made by Jaspard, Polus et Cie. This series demonstrates an enormous imaginative display and a very subtle mastery of technique. In lithography Tamayo found a field for technical splendor of unusual delicacy and surprising originality.”

Postwar Human Condition

Rodolfo Nieto moved to Paris in 1960 with the idea of ​​expanding his plastic horizon. During his stay of almost a decade he proposed an unprecedented graphic fusion between human beings and animals, which plastically showed feelings and emotions of vulnerability such as fear, loneliness and existential anguish. In his series of drawings, illustrations and collages mental zoology He placed imagination as intuitive knowledge and hybridization as an unprecedented structural principle. Like Tamayo, Nieto explored the condition of post-war human beings.

In Paris he worked on lithography in different workshops, that of Mourlot, for example, and metal engraving in that of Stanley William Hayter, which allowed him to deepen the study of his techniques. He also frequented the Bramsen workshop. In 1963 he entered the prestigious Galerie de France where he held his first exhibition in 1964, then in 1967. He participated in the Paris Biennale with the oil painting man in the subway and won first prize. In the City of Light he established a relationship with Julio Cortázar, Octavio Paz and Rufino Tamayo, among others.

He illustrated for Maurice Nadeau’s publishing house the French edition of Manual of fantastic zoologyby Jorge Luis Borges. Two years later he made a series of lithographs in Michel Casse’s atelier. That same year he created the scenery for a ballet by Graciela Martínez presented at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris. In 1968 he worked for the German publisher Manus press on a series of woodcuts based on the text Bestiaryby Juan José Arreola.

In 1969, upon returning to Mexico, he exhibited his series of collages Laboratory on papermade in Paris. In 1984 he returned to Europe: in Paris and Barcelona he produced pictorial, lithographic and plastic work.

Francisco Toledo traveled to Paris for the first time also in 1960 and his stay spanned five years.

In the four-volume book published by Fomento Cultural Banamex on the artist’s work, Gonzalo Vélez writes that the gallery owner Antonio Souza had given him references of people he should see, among them Rufino and Olga Tamayo, who lived in the Latin neighborhood: “he went to visit them and they received him warmly, especially knowing that he was from Oaxaca. Toledo has always expressed himself with ample gratitude and generosity about Tamayo, in the way he supported him. Tamayo told him He proposed, from the outset, that when he sold his own paintings he could also sell paintings from Toledo. Indeed he did so, in a sustained manner, and this allowed the young man from Juchitán to have a relatively continuous flow of money to stay in Paris.

The French writer and art critic André Pieyre de Mandiargues, “who in that decade had a high reputation and enjoyed a lot of influence in the Parisian artistic milieu, very early noticed the work of Toledo, in whose fantastic iconography and exotic origins he tried to see perhaps the last emergence of a late pancultural surrealism, linked to a Freudian reading of uninhibited eroticism. The refusal to join the trends in vogue and, instead, The affirmation of his unique style referring to his origins was what finally earned Toledo his foray into European galleries. He, in reality, was basically drawing on his idealized childhood memories, his tropical nostalgia for familiar places,” Vélez notes.

Over time, “important gallery owners actively promoted his work in Europe and, later, in the United States. Suddenly the young Oaxacan artist had the opportunity to work on a metal plate in Paris with Stanley William Hayter, one of the best graphic printers in the world. Quite a dream. From that moment on, Toledo began to display his exemplary mastery in engraving. The drawing effervescence of his childhood and youth began to bear fruit.”

According to Vélez, in 1965, returning to his roots “became an increasingly obsessive thought for Toledo. He felt an irrepressible desire to stop being a foreigner, to return to Oaxaca, to settle in Juchitán, to speak Zapotec, to have a wife and a family in that language. Meanwhile, abroad, Toledo’s work was moving better and better.”

The years that followed ’68 were also ones of many moves, especially to Paris and New York, where he had a relevant exhibition in 1970, as well as several in Mexico City. “Toledo’s formative years in Paris were crucial to building the person of this great artist,” Vélez concludes.

Tamayo, Nieto, Toledo: The years in Pariswill be exhibited from August 20 to February 15, 2027 at the Tamayo Museum (Paseo de la Reforma 51, Bosque de Chapultepec).