Rufino Tamayo
Perro aullando a la luna (Dog Howling at the Moon)
Against a cobalt sky, a lone dog raises its head and howls. The distended veins and contracted muscles of its blood-red body emphasize its desperate, anguished cry.
Created in 1942, Perro aullando a la luna typifies a stage in Tamayo’s production related to the strife of World War II. During this time, the serenity of the artist’s previous paintings was supplanted by a chromatic intensity and formal tension.
The artist studied Picasso’s monumental anti-war painting Guernica (1937), and the anxiety of Tamayo’s dog recalls Picasso’s screaming horse. However, Tamayo merges modern European influences with Indigenous inspiration; his tormented dog’s form also relates to the funerary canine statuettes of pre-Columbian Colima.
Perro aullando a la luna not only expresses a sense of social consciousness during a time of war, it also declares the artist’s investment in applying the tenets of European modernism to an exploration of Mexico’s visual heritage.
Rufino Tamayo
44 1/4 × 33 3/4 in. (112.4 × 85.7 cm) Framed: 55 1/2 in. × 45 in. × 2 in.
Art Bridges
1942
Oil on canvas
AB.2018.9
l.l.: Tamayo 42
(Valentine Gallery, New York, NY); Inés Amor [1912-1980], Mexico City, Mexico; John Huston [1906-1987], Beverly Hills, CA; to Evelyn Keyes [1916-2008] (his wife), Beverly Hills, CA; (Frank Perls Gallery, Los Angeles, CA); purchased by Peter G. Wray, Scottsdale, AZ, 1977; Otto Atencio, New York, NY; to Private Collection, Mexico, 1993; to (Sotheby’s, New York, NY), May 14, 2018, sale N09860, lot 25; purchased by Art Bridges, TX, 2018
The Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art (JSMA) at the University of Oregon created three innovative programs for their Art Bridges-funded project, which focused on two loans from the Art Bridges collection, Diego Rivera’s La ofrenda (1931) and Rufino Tamayo’s Perro allando al la luna (1942). These Mexican masterworks were on display from September 2018 through September 2019.
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