Vatican Museums

In contrast with the direction taken by Siqueiros, Orozco and Rivera, supporters of socially and politically committed art, Rufino Tamayo represents a truly singular case in the context of twentieth-century Mexican art, declaring himself from the very beginning the spokesperson for a form of painting that evolved in relation to the European avant-gardes and then with the informal experience in American and France. Cubism, the chromatism of Gauguin, his encounter in New York with abstract expressionism and in Paris with the work of Dubuffet and Fautrier are the roots from which the artist drew the vital lymph for his own personal reinterpretations. The man and the Cross, one of Tamayo's mature works, is a painting that reveals the link, never entirely broken, with the pre-Columbian tradition, from which there descends a formal simplification transforming the narrative element into a symbol. The posture and fixed gaze of Christ, drawn from pre-Columbian statuettes, are revisited by the artist with a dreamlike sensibility, giving a corporeal presence to Christ in the moment of his supreme sacrifice which becomes an emblem of suffering humanity.