Existing comment:
Carnival
1941
oil on canvas
The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, Acquired 1942
Much like the Museum of Modern Art's 1940 exhibition Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art, Tamayo's Carnival brings together multiple eras of Mexican visual culture. Although the scene clearly depicts a couple donning colorful masks for a festival, this reading is complicated by Tamayo's rendering of the woman's body, which is nude and divided into geometric components through color and line -- stylized elements reminiscent of the pre-Hispanic ceramics of western Mexico. Popular and ancient Mexican art had fascinated Tamayo since the early 1920s, but it was likely his encounters with Picasso's work that encouraged him to mine these traditions further in his own painting. |