The pursuit of his roots

The Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach is currently a study in the abstract and the concrete.

Inside, a retrospective exhibition looks at Rufino Tamayo, one of Mexico’s greatest 20th century painters, who employed abstracted forms in an attempt to break down the barriers of the imagination. Outside, workers are constructing two new gallery spaces, a sculpture garden and an educational area that will allow the museum to expand its offerings by summer.

For now, the focus is on “Tamayo: A Search for the Essence,” a collection of 34 paintings, prints, drawings and sculptures as well as 41 prints done via Mixografia, the process which Tamayo helped develop in the early 1970s.

With the exception of several Mixografia prints, all of the works come from private institutions and collections in the U.S. and Mexico, says the museum’s associate curator, Idurre Alonso-Penate.

Born a full-blooded Zapotec Indian in Oaxaca in 1899, Tamayo resisted the pressure to join fellow artists Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and the other Mexican Muralists, whose work presented revolutionary and nationalistic themes and an aesthetic of Social Realism. Instead, Tamayo worked abstractly and fiercely pursued what he called “the Mexican Tradition.” Tamayo recognized its roots in pre-Columbian sculpture and art, and extended its essence through his highly personal and contemporary visual language.

“He was also a great colorist,” Alonso-Penate says of the artist, who died in 1991. “We can trace the use of vibrant color and texture in his art to when he was an 11-year-old boy working at his aunt’s fruit stand in the Mexico City marketplace.”

“Tamayo sought a different definition of what it was to be Mexican,” museum director Gregorio Luke says. “He responded to Siqueiros’ charge that he was apolitical by saying that the political theme of the Mexican Muralists wasn’t specific to Mexico, but could also refer to similar struggles of oppressed people in many other places.”

Spiritually, Tamayo focused almost exclusively on the human search for meaning in a seemingly impersonal cosmos. He countered the existentialist’s pessimistic inclinations with a paradoxical blend of vulnerability and courage. As Alonso-Penate says, “Tamayo’s work is full of hope.”

Take, for instance, his 1974 Mixografia print “Nino Bailando” (Boy Dancing), which depicts a silhouetted image of a child abstracted into barely nothing more than a fleshed-out stick figure. Yet the boy exudes personality as he leaps with joy. In a 1972 oil painting titled “Personaje en la Ventana” (Character in the Window), an otherworldly looking pink character, with a face flattened into symmetrical halves, peers into the void with a calm transcendence.

The exhibition’s Mixografia prints mark an almost 30-year professional relationship between Tamayo and the printmaking workshop of Luis Remba and his wife, Lea. Though founded in Mexico City, Mixografia opened a workshop and showroom in Los Angeles in 1984. Today, the couple’s son, Shaye Remba, directs the workshop located on East Adams Boulevard. He recalls, “Tamayo wasn’t initially interested in making prints unless he could produce editions with the volume, textures and depth of his paintings.

“Bulto, meaning ‘mass,’ was what he wanted, and my father met the challenge by developing his now-patented printing method on handmade paper, which he and Tamayo agreed to call ‘Mixografia.’ ”

Remba goes on to explain how Tamayo (and eventually many other artists, including Helen Frankenthaler, Kiki Smith, Manolo Valdes and Mimmo Paladino) would begin by making a collage or maquette that might include pieces of wood, cloth, wire or rope. The workshop would then cast this maquette into a copper plate for printing the Mixografias.

The real magic unfolds in the act of printing: In one simultaneous pass, the absorbent handmade paper both forms directly on the printing and receives the impressions made by the maquette’s variously composed objects. The Mixografia prints replicate the original objects’ textures and dimensions so faithfully as to be almost indistinguishable from them, and this pleased Tamayo.

“Mixografia is the most significant revolution in graphic arts in the last 50 years,” museum director Luke says, “because it changes the very nature of a print by giving it the third dimension of depth. It also makes it economically feasible for many more people to own an original Tamayo work of art.”

Luke’s passion for art heats up even more when he describes his museum’s expansion. L.A.-based architect Manuel Rosen designed the new exterior, which reflects contemporary Latin American architecture and style in the manner of prominent Mexican architects Luis Barragan and Ricardo Legoretta.

A 15,000-square-foot sculpture garden will open this summer, with the entire project scheduled for completion by next summer. The project’s additional 25,000 square feet of interior space will nearly double the museum’s size.

“The sculpture garden will be the first in the United States dedicated to Latin American sculpture,” Luke says, “and our new research library will be the definitive resource on Latin American art, culture and heritage in the Western United States. In addition to two new galleries, we’re also building a second educational art studio, which will allow us to serve three times more students each year.”

*

‘Tamayo’

A Search for the Essence

Where: Museum of Latin American Art, 628 Alamitos Ave., Long Beach

When: 11:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Saturdays, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sundays

Ends: March 20

Price: $5; $3, seniors and students; free on Fridays and for children younger than 12

Contact: (562) 437-1689; www.molaa.org