Existing comment:
Man Searching the Heavens
1949
oil on canvas
Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Harold Gershinowitz
Tamayo partially attributed his interest in the night sky to the advent of nuclear warfare: "Immediately after . . . the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki [in 1945], I started thinking about the implications of a new space age and did the first paintings of constellations." While the title Man Searching the Heavens seems to address man's existential quest for meaning in the universe, this painting also veers toward science fiction, visualizing a link between a person and a circular object in the sky. Tamayo continued mining the cosmos and humankind's place in it in his work until the end of his life, in 1991 |