Woman with a Bird Cage combines Rufino Tamayo’s deep appreciation of ancient Mesoamerican art with his interest in Cubism, the 20th-century abstract art movement created by artists Pablo Picasso and George Braque. The influence of Cubism is apparent in the woman’s body, which Tamayo fractured into planes of color. Yet her distinctive elongated ear, large nose, open mouth, and the other aspects of her form reflect the Indigenous artist’s study of West Mexican ceramic sculptures (similar examples of which are on view in Gallery 136), which he collected enthusiastically. The synthesis of the two styles suggests his desire to introduce personal aspects of his Zapotec identity into modernist painting.
Date
Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.
Signed and inscribed recto, bottom-right, in black paint: "Tamayo / 41". Titled and signed verso, top-middle, on stretcher, in graphite: "WOMAN with A BIRD CAGE / TAMAYO".
Dorothy Odenheimer, “Woman with Bird Cage by Tamayo,” Bulletin of the Art Institute of Chicago 37, no. 3 (Mar. 1943): 33–35 (ill.), https://www.jstor.org/stable/4116273.
Robert Goldwater, Rufino Tamayo (Quadrangle Press, 1947), 81, pl. 37 (ill.).
Drawings by Tamayo (Ediciones Mexicanas, 1950), 25 (related drawing).
Léon Degand, “La peinture mexicaine du XVIIe s. a nos jours,” L’Art d’aujourdhui 3, no. 6 (Aug. 1952): 9, fig. 8 (ill.).
Exposition universelle et internationale, Les Arts (Establissements Généreaux d’Impr., 1960), n.p. (ill.).
Damián Bayón, Hacia Tamayo (Fundación Olga y Rufina Tamayo; Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1995), 43 (ill.).
Lucia Garcia-Noriega y Nieto, ed., Rufino Tamayo: del reflejo al sueño, 1920–1950, exh. cat. (Fundación Cultural Televisa; Centro Cultural Arte Contemporáneo, 1995), 38–39, 75, cat. 70 (ill.), as Mujer con jaula de pájaros,https://archive.org/details/rufinotamayodelr0000tama.
James N. Wood and Teri J. Edelstein, The Art Institute of Chicago: Twentieth–Century Painting and Sculpture (Art Institute of Chicago, 1996), 82 (ill.).
Barbara Braun, “West Mexican Art and Modernist Artists,” in Ancient West Mexico: Art and Archaeology of the Unknown Past, ed. Richard Townsend (Art Institute of Chicago, 1998), 278–79, fig. 20 (ill.).
Judith A. Barter, et al., American Modernism at the Art Institute of Chicago, From World War I to 1955 (Art Institute of Chicago, 2009), 211–13, cat. 95 (ill.).
Sarah Kelly Oehler, They Seek a City: Chicago and the Art of Migration, exh. cat. (Art Institute of Chicago, 2013), 55–56, cat. 43 (ill.).
Sofia Ortega-Guerrero, “Americas in the Making,” in “In the Galleries,” ed. Elizabeth McGoey and Sara Picard, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 12, no. 1 (Spring 2026), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.21042.
New York, Pierre Matisse Gallery, Figure Pieces in Modern Painting, Jan. 20–Feb. 14, 1942, cat. 12.
Chicago, Arts Club of Chicago, Tamayo, May 4–31, 1945, cat. 27.
Council for Inter–American Cooperation (organizer), Six Latin American Painters, Kansas City, William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art, Apr. 1946; San Francisco, Museum of Art, May 10–June 9, 1946; Bloomfield Hills, MI, Cranbrook Museum of the Academy of Art, June 23–July 30, 1946; and Dallas, Museum of Fine Arts, Aug. 1946; no cat.
Art Institute of Chicago, The Winterbotham Collection, May 23–June 22, 1947, 41–41, ill.
Mexico City, Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, Museo Nacional de Artes Plásticas, Tamayo: 20 años de su labor pictórica, 1948, cat. 25.
Mexican government (organizer), Paris, Musée national d’art moderne, under Art Mexicain du précolumbien a nos jours, May–July 1952, cat. 1063, as Femme a la cage; Stockholm, Sweden, Liljevalchs Konsthall, under Mexikansk Konst från forntid till nutid, Oct. 1952, cat. 1048, as Kvinna med bur.; London, Tate Gallery, under Exhibition of Mexican Art from Pre–Columbian Times to the Present Day, Mar. 4 to Apr. 26, 1953, cat. 1041.
Exposition de Bruxelles, Mexican Pavilion, 1958.
New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Rufino Tamayo: Myth and Magic, May 18–Aug. 12, 1979, cat. 20.
Madrid, Spain, Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Rufino Tamayo: Pinturas, June 29–Oct. 3, 1988, cat. 19.
Mexico City, Centro Cultural Arte Contemporáneo, Rufino Tamayo: del reflejo al sueño, 1920–1950, Oct. 1995–Jan. 1996, cat. 70, as Mujer con jaula de pájaros, (organized by Fundación Cultural Televisa).
Art Institute of Chicago, Ancient West Mexico: Art of the Unknown Past, Sept. 5–Nov. 22, 1998; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Dec. 20, 1998–Mar. 29, 1999, cat. 224.
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