Rufino Tamayo - Early Life

Early Life

Tamayo's Zapotec heritage is often cited as an early influence.

After the death of his parents, he was orphaned and moved to Mexico City to live with his aunt. Tamayo had no choice but to move and live with relatives in México City, México. While living with them, Tamayo was very devoted to helping his family out with a small business they owned. However, after a while Tamayo’s aunt enrolled him into an art school which was when his career as an artist began. He enrolled at Escuela Nacional de Artes Plasticas at San Carlos in 1917 to study art. While studying, Tamayo experimented with and was influenced by Cubism, Impressionism, and Fauvism, among other popular art movements of the time, but with a distinctly Mexican feel. Although he studied drawing at Academy of Art at San Carlos as a young adult, Tamayo was very dissatisfied and eventually went to study art on his own. That was when he began working for José Vasconcelos at the Department of Ethnographic Drawings (1921), and was later appointed head of the department by Vasconcelos.

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