Rufino Tamayo Masterpiece: From Trash Bin To Auction Block

When I first moved to New York in 1987, one of my first jobs while working at a gallery was to help create a postcard announcing the theft of the painting ‘Tres Personajes,’ by Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo (1899-1991). So, I had never really seen the painting until May of this year when the painting was recovered. It is a work of art that is held in high regard by the scholarly community.

‘Tres Personajes’ is one of Rufino Tamayo’s masterpieces from his mature period. It is a culmination of the artist’s lifelong search and his exploration of color abstraction and surface build up of his canvases.

The way an appraiser comes up with a value is by studying recent previous sales and coming up with comparable examples of works that have sold. Interestingly, nothing quite comparable to this has sold in recent years. A suggestion of the painting’s importance is the fact that it was featured on the cover of a book on Tamayo written by Emily Genauer, who was one of the pre-eminent art historians.

We’re very excited to be having a painting of this caliber on the auction block next month. We have the privilege of offering this picture for sale and hopefully our audience is going to respond as positively as we have been.

The muralists were artists who were preoccupied with promoting the goals of the 1910 Mexican revolution. Tamayo was unlike the three principal muralists in Mexico, which are Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Tamayo was also a member of the muralist movement, but he divorced himself officially from that movement in 1926 because he believed that art should be painted for art’s sake, not political propaganda’s sake.