dieser beitrag wurde verfasst in: englisch (eng/en)
künstler: Rufino Tamayo
titel: Conquest of Mexico
jahr: 1930, 1936
adresse: Archaeological Museum, Mexico City, Mexico
+: Sketch, not completed as a mural
«The proposed mural for the Archaeölogical Museum which has already been mentioned was never completed because of a disagreement with the authorities over the sketches which the artist submitted. The subject was the Conquest of Mexico, a theme treated fifteen years earlier by Rivera and Chorlot, among others. lnstead of their narrative stories, complete with historical details, Tamayo renders his theme as a magical event of Indian legend, and the conquest is not so much by brute force as by some superior power carrying all before it without real physical effort. The Spaniards are not shown as Conquistadores, but as the strange centaur-like animal they appeared to the terrified Indians when Cortes first landed on the Mexican coast. In the battle near Tabasco the Indians, who had never seen horses, imagined animal and rider to be a single creature. Even here the artist is more interested in symbolic meaning which can be generalized beyond the immediate subject than in the accurate depiction of nationalist fact, and in this werk one can see the evidence for Nicolas Dorantes' estimate of Tamayo: "lf the purity of his work gives him a claim to universality, his imagination ... makes him decidely Mexican." (Goldwater 1947, p. 30–31)