through … the country.”3 Tamayo responded in an article that November: “We are witnessing in our pictorial life the tyranny of gangsterism ready to shoot its gun.”4 This debate, which would continue throughout 1951, is known as the “Tamayo controversy.”
Paz's “Tamayo en la pintura mexicana” became the canonical essay accompanying both Tamayo's ascent and the subsequent disputes involving the painter and artistic freedom. The essay should be seen as part of a coordinated campaign, along with a poem from ¿Aguila o sol? revealingly called “Ser natural” (Natural Being). The latter alluded to Tamayo's images as erecting a “bridge of blood between the living and the dead,” a territory where “everything is endless birth” (1990, p. 189–190). The essay was written for Tamayo's first solo exhibition in Paris at the Galerie Beaux‐Arts in November 1950. The catalog also included an essay written by André Breton, which denounced the decadence of Mexican social painting, while praising Tamayo's desire to portray the “eternal Mexico” (1982, p. 303).
Tamayo insisted that the reason Breton wrote that essay for him was because Octavio Paz asked him to (Suckaer 2000, p. 209). Indeed, if this is true, then today we would say that Paz took a curatorial role in the exhibition. The essay, therefore, was part of a larger campaign. We must take Paz seriously when he confessed in the 1970s and 1980s that his relationship with Tamayo had been more one of identification than of wonder:
He had asked himself the same questions I had and he had answered them with those paintings that were simultaneously elegant and savage. What did they say? I translated his primordial forms and his exalted colors into this formula: the conquest of modernity is resolved in the exploration of Mexico's substratum. Not the historical or anecdotal substratum of the muralists and the realist writers, but rather the psychic substratum. Myth and reality; modernity was the most ancient antiquity (1986, p. 29).
According to Paz, Mexican painting was “a child of the Mexican Revolution” because, beyond the rhetoric and ideologies, it was an “immersion of Mexico in its own self.” Yet this self‐gnosis was never transparent. To begin with, Paz argued, the profound meaning of the Mexican Revolution had more to do with critique than proposal; it consisted in showing how colonial Catholicism and Mexican liberalism, the two battling ideological models of the nineteenth century, were “merely historical overlappings” destined to fail. Things being what they were, reasoned Paz, painters had to face the fact that the Mexican Revolution had lacked a world vision. He suggested as much in El laberinto de la soledad:
The Revolution was first a discovery of ourselves and a return to our origins, then a search and a tentative synthesis aborted several times. Unable to assimilate our tradition and offer us a new project of salvation, in the end it was a concession. The Revolution has not been able to articulate its entire salvational explosion into a world vision; nor has the Mexican intelligentsia resolved the conflict between the insufficiency of our tradition and our need for universality (1950, p. 164).
This lack was, according to Paz, the reason for the Marxism of the muralists, “a shell” that “had no other purpose than to replace the absence of philosophy in the Mexican Revolution with a philosophy of international revolution” (1951, p. 1).
Rather than criticizing mere aesthetic motifs, Paz reproaches muralism for its political and argumentative inconsistencies. In a peculiar “self‐interview” on muralism and expressionism in 1978, Paz notes that the relationship between muralism and the Mexican state had been “a game of masks” (1986, p. 265). What he condemns above all, however, is the fact that muralism lost itself in the fruitless search for a messianic project. Disparaging their ideological affiliations, Paz states that Rivera is a “materialist” of the constant creation and recreation of material; Siqueiros, a painter of incessant change, movement and contrast;5 and Orozco solitary, critical and tragic. Paz then makes an explicit effort to situate these painters as representatives of the initial phases of the 1910 revolution. By historicizing them, he simultaneously validates them and declares them obsolete.
Diego Rivera, argues Paz, represented “the rupture with lies and dictatorship, and a return to origins,” whereas Orozco represented “sarcasm, denunciation and quest” (1951, p. 6). It was apparently in this context that Paz first used the term “rupture,” which would later be adopted by Mexican art history to designate both the opposition to muralism, and Paz's theory of modern art. According to Paz, artists such as Carlos Mérida, Julio Castellanos, Frida Kahlo, and Agustín Lazo were motivated by a desire to find a “new kind of artistic universality.” But Paz's expectations for this concept did not stop at a lesser or greater interaction with metropolitan Western art. What he had in mind was to formulate artistically an alternative to the crisis of civilization. And it is at this point that we can detect his very bold endeavor: to transform what until then had been a secondary urban ideology – the belief in the contemporaneity of the Aztecs – into cosmopolitan dogma.
What separated Tamayo from this group, and inspired Paz to see him as a milestone, was nothing less than the “authenticity” of his “Mexicanness.” For Paz, Tamayo's task was to reestablish cultural communality with pre‐Columbian civilizations. And the determining factor here was that, unlike ordinary European primitivism, Tamayo returned to his magical, non‐European origins through instinct. “The naturalness with which Tamayo reinstates the lost contact with old pre‐Cortesian civilizations,” wrote Paz, “distinguishes him from most of the great painters of our time, Mexican or European.” With the exception of Picasso and Miró, stated Paz, for all modern painters the “discovery of innocence is the result of an effort and a conquest.” Tamayo was unique for this reason: he did not require anthropology, history or archaeology, or a tour through museums in search of the effect of antiquity. He was capable of unearthing the primitive in himself because “he does not need to conquer innocence; he only needs to delve into the depths of himself to find the ancient sun, supplier of images” (1951, pp. 6, 7).
This primitivism, however, was rooted in a contemporary aim validated by reenchantment: Paz wished to acquire for Tamayo worldwide political status so that he could be enrolled in the competition to define new painting. There was an ongoing search in the late 1940s involving several scenarios and actors on both sides of the Atlantic who sought to recover the attention that the School of Paris had lost. In this context, Paz offered Tamayo as a herald. If “Tamayo [had] discovered the old formula of consecration,” then he could speak directly and unreservedly about the contemporary world's atmosphere of terror. “This modern man is also very ancient.” In this seemingly innocuous statement, Paz hinted that the Mexican painter was fully prepared to describe the twentieth century's potential apocalypse, because his civilization had already experienced the brutality of historical collapse:
The painter opens the doors to the Old sacred universe of myths and images that reveal the two‐fold condition of man, his atrocious reality and, simultaneously, his no less atrocious unreality. Twentieth‐century man suddenly discovers what through other means others who had lived through a crisis already knew: an end to the world (1951, pp. 6, 7).
Paz's essay on Tamayo should thus be seen as a digression from the El laberinto de la soledad, in which Tamayo represents the new sensibility of the modern Mexican in the face of the historic “desolation” of the postwar. Written for consumption by the modernist urban elite to which Paz belonged, El laberinto de la soledad sought to uncover the mythical “masks” of the Mexican, before inviting him to remove them and join the rest of humanity in the “nakedness and vulnerability” of “truly thinking and living.” According to Paz, the Mexican elite had exhausted both its local myths and its adopted ones, to find itself in a state of total alienation from modern man:
And now, suddenly, we have reached the limit. In only a few years we have depleted all the historical forms that
