AN APPRECIATION : The Modern Ancient : Art: The work of Mexican modernist Rufino Tamayo bears witness to his generation’s complexities. He wove a provocative thread into the internationalism of 20th-Century art.

In 1921, Rufino Tamayo got a job as head of the ethnographic department at the National Museum of Archaeology in Mexico City. Dissatisfied with his rigidly traditional, European-style training in drawing and painting at what was then known as the Academia de Arte de San Carlos, he had left school in search of the kind of aesthetic authenticity he had always felt as a kid, growing up in the shadow of Monte Alban in the southern city of Oaxaca. At the National Museum he found what he was looking for.

Among Tamayo’s responsibilities was the teaching of drawing, based on various Indian art traditions, in an effort to sustain and celebrate indigenous culture in the face of Mexico’s tumultuous modern history. This intimate and early association (the young artist was barely 22) with the visual expression of Aztec, Maya and Toltec cultures was to prove fateful for Tamayo’s own later work.

At his death Monday after contracting pneumonia at the age of 91, Tamayo was the most famous living Mexican artist. If his work cannot finally claim a spot in the first rank produced by his generation--a position reserved by Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros among his Mexican compatriots--it nonetheless bears telling witness to the complex currents of his era. Tamayo was a Modernist painter through and through, but he sought for modern art a universalism that would spring from the particularities of his own Mexican experience.

In the same year Tamayo assumed his position at the National Museum, Rivera, Siqueiros, Jose Clemente Orozco and several other artists established the Mexican Workers, Technicians, Painters and Sculptors Union. Among their first acts was the repudiation of easel painting, claimed to be a bourgeois distraction, in favor of a politically activist art that, quite logically in their minds, would take the form of mural decorations in public buildings.

This was not a repudiation Tamayo was willing to make. Indeed, although he did paint murals during his long career, including those at the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City and at UNESCO headquarters in Paris, easel painting was the site of his best and most consistent work.

The essential conservatism of Tamayo’s art put him at odds with the politically trenchant, sometimes bombastic work of the Mexican muralists. By the 1930s the phenomenon of indigenismo --or indigenous culture--had become a central argument in artistic circles, revolving around the three poles of Indian culture, Mexican history and Marxism. Tamayo’s commitment to Indian subject matter far surpassed any interest in topical history (although he did paint social themes, such as his famous 1932 portrait of Juarez), and the aesthetics of Modernism replaced the politics of Marxism in his affections.

Needless to say, this did not endear Tamayo to his more radical colleagues. Friction at home, coupled with a desire to connect with the European avant-garde in painting, led to his departure from Mexico in 1936. Tamayo spent more than a dozen years working in New York. He taught at the private Dalton School (which didn’t help his reputation among followers of Marxism) and later at the Brooklyn Museum, and in 1943 he painted murals for Smith College in Northampton, Mass. Six years later, Tamayo settled in Paris.

His timing was less than fortuitous. Like many artists working in New York in the years before World War II, Tamayo had benefitted from the example provided by the influx of European expatriates to Manhattan. Yet, just as New York was coalescing as the new cultural center, Tamayo left. The fading School of Paris soon became his new milieu.

Tamayo’s art had long been enamored of various currents of European Modernism, especially the precedents of Matisse and Picasso. In Paris, the later work of Georges Braque became a principal guide, especially the Frenchman’s decorative permutation of Cubism and his affinity for the traditions of symbolic expression. Throughout the 1950s, Tamayo garnered prizes and prestigious commissions--showing at the Venice Biennale, winning the grand prize at the Sao Paolo Bienniale, doing the UNESCO mural--as his international reputation was secured.

In Tamayo’s art, the ancient traditions of Indian cultures were spoken in a visual language derived from the modern styles of the School of Paris. Melding the ancient with the modern, he meant to create an art of timeless mystery and archetypal purity. If the result was sometimes at cross purposes with itself, Tamayo nonetheless wove a provocative thread into the internationalism of 20th-Century art.