Still Life with Foot

Tamayo is one of the Mexican artists who did not assimilate the avant-garde in Europe, but from the paintings he admired in New York, a city he visited for the first time in 1926 when he had an individual exhibition in the Weyhe Gallery. He took up residence in the metropolis in 1934, and there he matured as an artist, and little by little gained a prestigious international renown. Far from running from the Mexican artistic evironment, as some studies have suggested, many of the artistic propositions that Mexican critics wrote about in magazines on the work of his restless contemporaries were confirmed by Tamayo in this city of skyscrapers. Before going abroad, it is worth mentioning that Tamayo was mostly a product of the Mexican artistic panorama, and thus, his work suffered, in its subject matter, from a certain provincialism, similar to that promoted by the Open Air Schools of Painting, and for this he always sought to try out other, more cosmopolitan artistic expressions. This explains the metaphysical feel that prevails in Naturaleza muerta con pie, which around 1928 became one of the first works with a full international style in the artistic trajectory of Rufino Tamayo.