Tamayo Recovering From Triple-Bypass Surgery

The 90-year-old Mexican painter Rufino Tamayo is recovering at home from triple-bypass heart surgery.

“He is recuperating very well,” said his wife of 55 years, Olga. The four-hour surgery was performed Nov. 21 by Dr. Denton A. Cooley in St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital in Houston.

“I hope to be back to work as soon as possible,” Mrs. Tamayo quoted her husband as saying.

Until his surgery, Tamayo had been working eight hours a day. In addition to his daily course of painting, he had recently embarked on a commitment to do 30 color lithographs.

They are being printed in editions of 110 by the Mexican lithographer Andrew Vlady at his Kyron press in Mexico City. Tamayo is doing all the drawing on the stones himself. He has finished 10, of which three have been printed. The lithographs will be sold for $6,000 in Mexico, $7,500 in the United States and $15,000 in Japan.

Tamayo flew with his wife for a celebration of his 90th birthday in Paris on Aug. 26, then on to Moscow for the Aug. 29 opening of his first exhibition in the Soviet Union. The show presented 81 paintings (from 1925 to 1989) and 44 graphics (1959 to 1989).

Tamayo felt chest pains after his return to Mexico Oct. 27, said his close friend Jaime Benavente, and went to Houston for an angiogram.

Benavente said that Tamayo’s doctors there and in Mexico City told him he could try to exist on medicine to control his symptoms, but they, and he, concluded such a course was not suitable to a man, even though a nonagenarian, as active as he was. So they proceeded with the surgery. A hospital spokeswoman said he was the third-oldest person given a triple bypass at the hospital since 1980.

Tamayo habitually rises at 8 in the morning, breakfasts and starts painting at 9. He paints until 2:30 or 3, has lunch, naps, and resumes work.

He had been walking on a treadmill 40 minutes a day before his surgery. Before he left the hospital last Wednesday for home he was up to 8 minutes a day on his hospital treadmill.

On Friday afternoons, the Tamayos leave their house in the suburbs of San Angel for weekends at their house across the mountain in Cuernavaca, where he swims daily.