El veinticinco de agosto/August 25th

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Rufin Tamayo's Trovador (1945), which broke
previous records for Latin American art
when it sold at Christie's for $7.2 million
in 2008. Click HERE. 

¡Feliz cumpleaños a ... Rufino Tamayo! (1899-1991)

A renowned Mexican painter of Zapotec heritage, Tamayo, who was born in Oaxaca, moved to Mexico City to live with his aunt after his parents died when he was a child. There, he worked alongside her in the city's fruit markets. In 1917, she enrolled him in the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas at San Carlos. He later worked for José Vasconcelos at the Department of Ethnographic Drawings. Unlike Orozco, Rivera, and Siqueiros, Tamayo eschewed political art and actually thought that the Revolution would hurt Mexico. In 1926 he left Mexico to live in New York City, and in 1939, he and his wife Olga, whom he had married in 1934, moved to Paris for a decade. Tamayo ultimately received high praise for his work in Mexico, and today you can visit the Museo Rufino Tamayo in Mexico City. As an interesting sidenote, a New York woman found a painting put out with the trash in New York City in 2003 and took it home because she found it interesting. It turns out the painting was Rufino Tamayo's 1970 painting Tres personajes, worth some one million dollars. Read the full story HERE.

For resources for teaching Spanish, Level 1 through AP, CLICK HERE.

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