During the 1920s and 1930s, a number of artists in Mexico depicted the technology of the city to emphasize its modernity. In Messengers in the Wind (Mensajeras en el viento), two native women dressed in white fly across an urban nocturnal sky; their speed is reinforced by the trajectory of the electric wires. Born in Oaxaca, Rufino Tamayo lived and worked in Mexico City, traveling frequently to New York. In the 1920s, he became increasingly interested in folk art and themes of everyday life. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Tamayo believed that art should have an aesthetic, rather than an ideological, function.

Ilona Katzew, 2008

In 1928, Tamayo assumed a teaching post at Mexico’s National School of Fine Arts, where he met painter María Izquierdo. As partners for the next four years, the two shared an interest in combining the dreamlike and the commonplace, and their corresponding works show their artistic affinities. Dated 1931, Messengers in the Wind embodies several of Tamayo’s concerns from this period, transforming two Indigenous women into allegorical figures that bridge Mexico’s rich past and present. The painting is full of movement and dynamic energy, as the women fly through the night sky and their billowing dresses merge into the windswept clouds. They are delivering a message, visible in the right hand of the woman closes to the viewer. This act of transmission is echoed by the telephone wires that traverse the painting, pointing to another form of communication and a visual cue of Mexico’s modernization.

For more information see the catalogue entry by Rachel Kaplan in Rufino Tamayo: The Essential Figure, 2019, pp. 22–23.

• Gifts on the Occasion of LACMA's 50th Anniversary. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2015.
• Kaplan, Rachel. Rufino Tamayo: The Essential Figure. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2019.
• Los Angeles County Museum of Art.  New York: Thames and Hudson, 2003.