Painted during WWII, Tamayo’s howling dog leaves the viewer with a deep sense of dread.
Rufino Tamayo, Perro aullando a la luna (Dog Howling at the Moon), 1942, oil on canvas, 112.4 x 85.7 cm (Art Bridges, Bentonville) © estate of the artist. Speakers: Dr. Javier Rivero Ramos, Assistant Curator, Art Bridges Foundation, and Dr. Beth Harris
[music]
0:00:05.2 Dr. Javier Rivero Ramos: We are standing in front of a 1942 painting by Mexican painter Rufino Tamayo called Perro aullando a la luna, Dog Howling at the Moon.
0:00:15.8 Dr. Beth Harris: So we’re right smack in the middle of World War II.
0:00:19.7 Dr. Javier Rivero Ramos: Tamayo was living most of the time in New York. He would travel back to Mexico during the summer break.
0:00:26.3 Dr. Beth Harris: This dog takes up most of the composition. His body forms this broad pyramid. We see this attenuated neck and the underside of his snout. His mouth is open. We see his teeth, his ears, just a little bit of his eyes, and we can almost hear the howling.
0:00:47.0 Dr. Javier Rivero Ramos: The dog reveals the broad network of influences that informed the work of Tamayo. In 1921, when he was a mere 22 years old, Tamayo had been hired to be the Head of the Department of Ethnographic Drawing at the National Museum of Archaeology in Mexico. So his job for a number of years was drawing a whole range of pre-Columbian artifacts from all over Mesoamerica. And in this case, we know from his work and from sketches that he kept that he was very focused on the Tarascan and dog pottery figurines. He was copying them. But what’s interesting is that these figures are prized by the graciousness of their curves. They are also usually depicting a dog sitting down and forward. We have something very different here, and perhaps the red alludes to the red clay.
0:0 1:43.1 Dr. Beth Harris: And dogs had very special significance in so many Mesoamerican cultures.
0:01:48.4 Dr. Javier Rivero Ramos: The dog was, in Mesoamerican cosmology, this liminal figure. It was both quotidian but also very spiritual. So the Mesoamerican people regarded the dog as an entity that was able to traverse the world of the living and come back into the world of the dead. And I think that there’s something of that here. We’re talking about World War II, a moment of global upheaval, of violence, of death, of destruction.
0:02:16.7 Dr. Beth Harris: And life permeated on a daily basis by images of death.
0:02:21.9 Dr. Javier Rivero Ramos: This is something that’s very much in the mind of Tamayo as he is depicting this dog, and he depicts it howling. We can see the muscles in the neck tensing as the entire energy of this broad chest shoots upward into these bared teeth. He was obviously very influenced by pottery, the whole cosmological understanding of the dog, but he was also a very cosmopolitan artist who was very much invested in not allowing his Mexican identity to lapse into what he considered vapid folklorism. He wanted to take the pictorial and the plastic understanding of the pre-Columbian cultures of Mexico and amalgamate them with a more cosmopolitan and modern understanding of painting. And this is why he was in New York. And then in 1939, he goes to the Museum of Modern Art and experiences this very important exhibition around the work of Pablo Picasso. And one of the culminating paintings of this was Guernica, a painting where Picasso depicts the destruction of a Basque town by the Luftwaffe.
0:03:28.9 Dr. Beth Harris: The town is destroyed by aerial bombardment. And in that painting of Guernica that expresses really a kind of universal horror of violence and war, there are prominently placed animals.
0:03:41.5 Dr. Javier Rivero Ramos: One of the more memorable passages of Guernica depicts a horse crying in anguish. And like that horse in Guernica, the dog in Tamayo’s Dog Howling at the Moon is looking upwards, howling. However, as some people have pointed out, there’s more anguish in the horse depicted by Picasso, whereas there’s a certain defiance to this dog.
0:04:03.8 Dr. Beth Harris: In Guernica, buildings are burning, bombs are falling, people are fleeing buildings. And here we don’t have that wartime activity. We just have this lone figure of a dog, and so there is a sense of defiance, of protest.
0:04:20.2 Dr. Javier Rivero Ramos: Tamayo depicts World War II here more allegorically. It is much more foreboding. We have this crescent moon that would signal the passing of time. You have this mountain in the background. We have this object to the right that very much reads like the frame of a door or the corner of a building. So we have an animal that is being depicted outside.
0:04:43.4 Dr. Beth Harris: And in front of the dog, these meatless bones, this sense of being bereft, of emptiness, of hunger. It seems to me that using the dog, Tamayo is able to express a depth of anguish that is primal, is animalistic. So these flat areas of color, this beautiful blue, the olive green of the doorway that seems to lead nowhere and is not connected to any building, the way that we look up at the dog across at this moon, it’s a very simplified composition, and we feel the hand of the artist. The contours of the dog are not clear and linear, the paint between the blue and the red moves back and forth, so the edges are unstable.
0:05:34.2 Dr. Javier Rivero Ramos: This dog is in this otherworldly, foreboding environment that leaves in the viewer a deep sense of dread, which is what Tamayo would have been experiencing around 1942.
[music]
