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 1943, 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.