Rufino Tamayo Painting Found in the Trash
This is a really mysterious story about a painting being found in the garbage. How did it get there in the first place? And how was it authenticated and finally sent back to its rightful owner? Read on, let’s find out.
Rufino Tamayo
First, let’s talk about the artist. Rufino Tamayo was born in Oaxaca, Mexico in 1899. After his mother’s death in 1911, he moved to Mexico City to live with his aunt and work with her in the fruit markets. In 1917 his aunt enrolled him at Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas in San Carlos to study art. At school, he experimented and was inspired by many different art movements such as Cubism, Impressionism, and Fauvism but always with a distinctly Mexican feel. His paintings became more and more political and in 1926 he determined that he couldn’t freely create his art in Mexico and decided to move to New York City.
Tamayo and his wife Olga lived in New York for the next 15 years. They moved to Paris in 1948 because they were becoming uncomfortable with the increasing controversy around the political views that Tamayo portrayed in his paintings and they lived there for the next 10 years. In 1959 Tamayo and Olga returned to Mexico permanently and built an art museum in Tamayo’s hometown of Oaxaca, the Museo Rufino Tamayo. Tamayo died in 1991, at age 91, as the result of a heart attack, but he was productive and still creating art well into his later years.
The Mystery
Now that we all know a little bit about this iconic artist (whose work hangs in museums all over the world) let’s talk about what the heck happened.
The painting in question is called Tres Personajes (or Three People in English). Tamayo created this work in 1970 and it’s considered an important example of the artist’s mature style.
In 1977 the painting was purchased by a Houston collector at a Sotheby’s auction for $55,000 as a gift for his wife. Ten years later, in 1987, the couple moved to a new home and the painting disappeared from their storage locker. It’s hard to find any information about this robbery, there’s nothing known about it and no one knows who perpetrated it.
Then the painting was just gone. As if it had disappeared into thin air.
In 2003 a writer who lived in New York City named Elizabeth Gibson was out for a morning walk in Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Suddenly she spotted a large colourful canvas in the garbage and she felt compelled to pick it up. She said, “I wouldn't say it was beautiful. It was just so powerful. It had like an other-worldly power. It was just like a mystery, what was it doing in the trash?” (VOA, 2009). When Gibson got the painting home she hung it on her wall but she was still bothered by a nagging desire to find out more.
She spent the next four years trying to uncover more information about this mysterious painting. She called friends in the art world, studied at the library, and even traveled four hours to watch a TV show on lost and stolen artwork. Strangely enough, she didn’t uncover anything about the painting during any of this research. About having the painting in her apartment she said, “never did I take it and say, 'Oh, maybe it's valuable.' That wasn't it. But it was just like this radiating energy in my apartment saying, 'You're just going to leave me here? I don't belong here. Find out about me'” (VOA, 2009).
Finally, her research brought her to the Antique Roadshow website where she discovered that the painting hanging in her living room had been featured on a segment of the show where they described it as a missing masterpiece.
Of course, the next step for Gibson was actually authenticating the painting and ensuring that it wasn’t a reproduction. So, she made an appointment with art appraiser August Uribe using a fake name (though I’m not sure why she did this because I don’t think Uribe knew her). Regardless, he visited her home and was able to confirm the painting’s authenticity. He said, “there's just this wonderful saturation of texture and colors pretty unique to Tamayo's painting. It would be extraordinarily difficult to fake that” (VOA, 2009).
As soon as the painting was authenticated it was returned to the original owner, the husband of the couple had died and the widow decided to sell it. She gave Gibson a $15,000 finders fee for returning the painting to her. The painting was put up for auction by Sotheby’s in 2007 and ended up selling for $1,049,000 to an American collector.
The question still remains how it ended up in the trash and who is responsible. I think we can just be happy that Gibson was able to save it. When asked about her reward she said she is “happy just to have rescued the piece from its demise” (VOA, 2009).
Works Cited
“Latin Masterpiece a Real Find for New York Writer”. VOA News. 2009. https://www.voanews.com/a/a-13-2007-12-04-voa43-66702237/559291.html
“Masterpiece Found in Trash Sells for $1 Million”. The Houston Chronicle. 2007. https://www.chron.com/entertainment/article/Masterpiece-found-in-trash-sells-for-1-million-1801412.php