Rufino Tamayo was not a painter of anecdotes. On the contrary, over the course of his eighty-year career, Tamayo’s painting claimed an ancestral synthesis rooted in the ancient sculpture of Mexico. However symbolic, his most successful canvases also subtly convey personal experiences – though they are rarely confessional or autobiographical. The idyllic scene presented in The Lovers (Los Amantes) of 1950—a rarely seen work by Tamayo from a distinguished collects ion of Latin American Art—could be interpreted as a celebration of the artist's long union with Olga Flores Rivas, whom he married in 1934. Given its intrinsic and ethereal beauty, the work can be associated with Tamayo’s great regard for universal and humanistic values shared by people across temporal geographies.

Tamayo’s decisive departure from the mimetic, already evident in his painting of the 1920s, achieved with the passage of t.mes a deeply personal iconography. The Lovers (Los Amantes) seems to descend from Tamayo’s conception of ancestral beauty; a notion he reinforces by the intimacy of two faceted sculptural bodies that lovingly inhabit a sublime and otherworldly landscape. Although motionless, the couple is also passionately alive: a gentle tenderness is expressed in the delicate gesture with which the male figure affectionately embraces his companion, who in turn adoringly rests her elbow on his hand.

The pair gaze intently upwards at a cerulean sky, now turned into a celestial garden; where galaxies and comets flourish and where the human presence appears to fragment a harmonious universe. The composition can also be interpreted within the framework of global reconciliation in the years following World War II, a period marked by growing optimism in New York, where Tamayo worked from the late 1920s through 1949, and returned often throughout his life. The onset of a Post-War era also meant the beginning of Tamayo's exploration of a new subject, as he explained, "immediately after World War II and the bombings s of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I started thinking about the implications of a new space age and did the first paintings of constellations shooting through space” (Rufino Tamayo, quoted in Emily Genauer, Rufino Tamayo, New York, 1973, p.58). From astronomers and stargazers to vast night skies, the cosmos became an enduring theme for Tamayo, so much so that NASA invited him to discuss the relationship between science and art. (ibid.,p. 27.)

As a result of his residence in New York, Tamayo's celestial musings have a clear resonance with contemporaneous paintings of the Abstract Expressionist School. Like Tamayo, young artists such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning were attracted to the mysteries of the cosmos; a subject matter which was ardently pursued both literally and metaphorically in works executed during the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s as a pathway to the true nature of humanity. Among this group, it was Pollock who during a particularly fervent period of stylistic evolution, most notably shared a conceptual affinity for the celestial themes with Tamayo. Pollock executed a series of works that associated the feminine with the moon (fig. 1) and in fact, all source of life. Another artist with whom Tamayo shared a similar kinship with was the Spaniard Joan Miro whose Constellations series he knew well as they had both exhibited at Pierre Matisse during the 1940s. (fig. 2)

While Tamayo was certainly aware of these paintings, his knowledge of the cosmos derived from his early experience as chief draftsman for the Department of Ethnographic Drawing in the Museo Nacional de Arqueología, Historia y Etnografía in Mexico City, where his main responsibilities included the dissemination of pre-Hispanic designs to Mexican artisans. This first contact between Tamayo and the ancient cultures of Mesoamerica not only facilitated a profound appreciation for the cosmos and its pivotal importance for their art and architecture, but was also paramount for his stylistic development years later. This intimate experience with pre-Hispanic art profoundly impacted Tamayo as an artist, as he asserted, "[The museum] opened a world to me: it put.mes in contact with pre-Hispanic art and with popular art. Immediately, I discovered the source for my work." (Rufino Tamayo, quoted in Diana du Pont, "'Realistic, Never Descriptive: Tamayo and the Art of Abstract Figuration," in Tamayo: Modern Icon Reinterpreted, (exhibition catalogue), Santa Barbara, 2007, p. 48.) Years later, that pre-Hispanic wellspring of inspiration took the form of monumentalized geometric figures who lung and leap for the stars or quietly stand in contemplation of the night sky.

The Lovers (Amantes) [NE2] was painted in 1950, a seminal year in which Tamayo and Olga settled in Paris for a period characterized by increasing commercial and curatorial success. While the Tamayos relocated to Europe, the canvas remained in the Knoedler Gallery in New York, where it was lent to a select but significant number of exhibitions. A rarely published work, the painting has been reproduced in only two books for which Olga Tamayo contributed the photographic material: one published by the National Autonomous University of Mexico with a text by Octavio Paz and as part of an important essay written by Paul Westheim about the painter, both in the 1950s. Vastly unknown and virtually unexhibited until now, The Lovers (Amantes) has remained in the same private collects ion for over three decades making this the first opportunity to appreciate its celestial beauty.