The Mad Dog

Gallery 286, Modern and Contemporary Art, second floor

Main Building

The Mad Dog

1943

Rufino Tamayo (Mexican, 1899–1991)

Oaxacan-born artist Rufino Tamayo began a series of paintings of animals in the early 1940s that focused on the human states of anxiety and desperation, as exemplified in The Mad Dog. Living in New York City at the time, Tamayo was probably influenced by the animal imagery found in Picasso's masterpiece Guernica (1937), which was on view in 1939 and 1940 at the Valentine Gallery and the Museum of Modern Art, respectively. Although a self-declared apolitical artist, Tamayo commented in later years that the animal paintings addressed, in general terms, the "mounting world pressures" of the time.

Gallery 286, Modern and Contemporary Art, second floor

Object Details

Title:

The Mad Dog

Date:

1943

Artist:

Rufino Tamayo (Mexican, 1899–1991)

Medium:

Oil on canvas

Dimensions:

32 x 43 inches (81.3 x 109.2cm) Framed: 33 1/4 × 44 5/8 × 2 inches (84.5 × 113.3 × 5.1 cm)

Classification:

Paintings

Credit Line:

Gift of Mrs. Herbert Cameron Morris, 1945

Accession Number:

1945-2-1

Geography:

Made in United States, North and Central America

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Gallery 286, Modern and Contemporary Art, second floor

Main Building

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