- Title
- Dark Man (Hombre obscuro)
- Date Made
- 1976
- Medium
- Lithograph
- Dimensions
- 25 1/2 × 19 1/2 in. (64.77 × 49.53 cm)
- Accession Number
- AC1997.LWN.3375
- Collecting Area
- Latin American Art
- Curatorial Notes
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.
Dark Man (Hombre obscuro) was published by Transworld Art in New York and printed by Atelier Mourlot in Paris.
- Provenance
Bernard and Edith Lewin, Rancho Mirage, California; LACMA, 1997.
- Selected Bibliography
- Kaplan, Rachel. Rufino Tamayo: The Essential Figure. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2019.
- Selected Exhibition History
- Rufino Tamayo: Innovation and Experimentation. December 21, 2019 - July 11, 2020
- Rufino Tamayo: Innovation and Experimentation. December 21, 2019 - July 11, 2020
- Rufino Tamayo: Innovation and Experimentation. May 3, 2024 - May 27, 2024
- Rufino Tamayo: Innovation and Experimentation. May 3, 2024 - May 27, 2024
- Rufino Tamayo: Innovation and Experimentation. November 15, 2024–April 24, 2025
- Rufino Tamayo: Innovation and Experimentation. November 15, 2024–April 24, 2025
