Existing comment:
The Pretty Girl
1937
oil on canvas
Private collection
With its expressionless young girl standing amid incongruous objects, The Pretty Girl is an enigmatic image. The painting was inspired by a childhood photograph of Olga Tamayo and her sister. By the time it was shown in Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art (1940), a blockbuster exhibition organized by New York's Museum of Modern Art, critics had already begun to distinguish Tamayo from his peers Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Henry McBride, a prominent art critic, argued that "[among] these living Mexicans it is Tamayo who carries aesthetics the furthest. He may be as political as the rest of them for that I know, but when he paints he is not a politician but an artist. His 'Pretty Girl' is a delightful picture." |