The pictorial expression does not need a shimmering palette. Tamayo reduces his painting to a few pure, dark colors, in a unique balance that could have led him durably to abstraction.
Picasso's Guernica had been sheltered away from political censorship at the MoMA since 1939. Tamayo is in New York since 1937. The war in Europe cannot leave him indifferent. Guernica inspires his own cry of anguish, in his signature style of colors.
On May 14 in New York, Sotheby's sells Perro aullando a la Luna, oil on canvas 112 x 86 cm painted in 1942, lot 25 estimated $ 5M.
The dark red dog is sitting larger than life in the blue night. He screams like the horse in Guernica although no threat is apparent. The stretched throat reveals the veins swollen by the howl. The beautiful bones placed before him as offerings do not calm him.
However Tamayo's dog is not a Guernica dog. There were representations of screaming dogs in pre-Columbian America that Tamayo knew well : he had begun his career in Mexico City in 1921 in the ethnographic drawing department of the archeology museum.
Please watch the video shared by Sotheby's.
SOLD for $ 5.9M including premium
Rare Rufino Tamayo Emerges in Sotheby’s Imp-Mod Sale https://t.co/gUjilTwt9I pic.twitter.com/rp4J35IWJi
— Art Market Monitor (@artmarket) April 27, 2018