摘要：Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo inaugurated his transnational career between Mexico and the United States with two works that shared the same title and subject matter. The painting Man and Woman, featured in Tamayo’s first solo show in Mexico City in April of 1926, powerfully reverberates in the homonymous print that Tamayo included in his first individual exhibition in New York City in October of that year. In both works, Tamayo depicted a couple of peasants of seemingly indigenous origins in an evocative rural landscape - a subject that carried different aesthetic and political implications in Mexico and the United States. This paper analyzes the dialectical variations in the shared subject matter of these works to discuss Tamayo’s subtle critique to the cultural politics of Mexico and its North American neighbor. Virtually travelling across the Mexico-U.S. border, Tamayo's image of the Mexican couple reveals the politicized vein through which the artist addressed the power imbalances that he directly experienced in both cultural contexts.
