Rufino Tamayo was an avid collector of art from the ancient Americas. By the early 1970s he had amassed more than 1,300 objects, which he decided to donate to his native state of Oaxaca. Tamayo’s interests extended beyond his collection into his own artistic practice. In particular, he absorbed the treatment of the human figure by Mesoamerican artists into his own understandings of the human form. For example, the broad shoulders and exaggerated rectangular shape of the torso in Dark Man—visible beneath the dense splatters of black ink—recall ceramic figurines found in western Mexico. Tamayoʼs color palette of rusty orange and pale peach evokes pottery slips, while the speckled black overlay mimics the mottled appearance that many of these ceramics have assumed.

For more information see the catalogue entry by Rachel Kaplan in Rufino Tamayo: The Essential Figure, 2019, pp. 50–51.