Frutero y dominó, painted in 1928, is an iconic still-life from Tamayo's New York period, a t.mes of great artistic freedom and experimentation. A quintessential image, Frutero y dominó is one of the earliest compositions from the artist’s celebrated series of watermelons where he first synthesized modernist European aesthetics and local subject matter. From the beginning of his career in the early 1920s and throughout the 1980s, Tamayo's adherence to still-life set him apart from the Mexican muralists. As noted by art historian Indych-López: with this genre—historically associated with interior or domestic spaces, and the space of the artist's studio, Tamayo consciously countered the monumentality and heroic virility of public muralism that became the so-called "official" art of Mexico. By delving into the more private realms of the studio, Tamayo rejected the political focus of muralism and what he perceived as its concomitant didacticism.

Far from didactic or picturesque, qualities Tamayo openly denounced as the folkloric narratives of the Mexican School of painting, Frutero y dominó reveals the artist’s early affiliation with European vanguardism. Among the many artists he admired from this period: Picasso, Matisse, Braque…it was the young Giorgio de Chirico that interested him the most. In fact, it is very likely that Tamayo had the opportunity to study de Chirico’s work in depth at the Valentine Gallery in New York (where Tamayo was also represented) during his first solo exhibition in 1928. From de Chirico, Tamayo internalized the incongruous juxtaposition of objects placed in mysterious spaces suggestive of dreams or melancholic states. Above all, de Chirico’s talent for integrating the classical past with contemporary subject matter is evident in Tamayo’s own personal approach to modernism where Mexico’s pre-Hispanic, colonial, and modern history are presented as a collects ive whole.

Tamayo’s association with the Mexican vanguard group Contemporáneos, a group of artists and poets in the late 1920s and early 1930s, also proved enduring as he would commit to a life-long search for “essential formal values” in painting. While the artist’s depiction of watermelons is undoubtedly connected to his biography, Tamayo grew up visiting local fruit markets in his native Oaxaca and later in Mexico City, he purposely inserts his work with a luscious palette of opulent Oaxacan colors. Known as a master colorist, Tamayo impregnates the composition with saturated pinks, magentas, crimson and plums that when viewed together create a dramatic contrast against the restrained deep grays in the background. While conveying an intimate setting, Frutero y dominó excels in its treatment of schematic shapes and the use of color to express emotion. The radiance attained by Tamayo’s accomplished manipulation of the medium, places his formalist philosophy at the forefront of modernity. Ultimately, Tamayo’s commitment to the plastic elements of painting, his constant thirst for technical experimentation and contemporaneity with both the European and North American avant-garde converge here in a classic and enduring example of Mexican modernism.