EUGENE, ORE.- Two master paintings are on view at the University of Oregon’s Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art: Diego Rivera’s La ofrenda (The Offering) and Rufino Tamayo’s Perro aullando a la luna (Dog Howling at the Moon). These works are on loan to the JSMA for one year from the collection of Art Bridges, a recently established nonprofit foundation dedicated to providing institutions across the U.S. access to outstanding works of American art.

“From the 1920s to the 1940s, Mexican artists Diego Rivera and Rufino Tamayo were key participants in the international avant-garde,” says Cheryl Hartup, JSMA Associate Curator of Academic Programs and Latin American Art. “Through their cross-cultural exchanges in Mexico and the United States, they shaped the visual vocabulary of modern art during a period of social and economic upheaval.”

Hartup explains that the title she chose for the exhibition, Flor y canto, or “flower and song,” is inspired by a semantic couplet--two metaphors that when presented together symbolically convey one thought. In Náhuatl, the language of the peoples native to southern Mexico and Central America, xochitl (flower), cuicatl (song) means “poetry,” “art,” and “symbolism,” according to Miguel León-Portilla in his book Fifteen Poets of the Aztec World. The marigold flower in Rivera’s La ofrenda symbolizes the impermanence and fragility of life, and song reverberates in the cry of the dog howling to the moon in Tamayo’s painting. Exhibited together for the first time, these two works—flower and song—convey poetry, art, and symbolism.

Both paintings were made during periods when the artists were enjoying great professional and critical success in the U.S. While Rivera tended to depict scenes of indigenous culture and political subjects bound to time and place, Tamayo concerned himself with allegory, timeless universal themes, and formal investigations of color, line and shape. Although Rivera and Tamayo differed strongly in their artistic intentions, fundamental and ever-present inspirations for their work were Mexico’s ancient indigenous art and culture and popular (folk) art, which they studied and collected avidly.

Diego Rivera (1886-1957) was the most internationally acclaimed Mexican artist of his time because of his prominent role in one of the first revolutionary art movements of the twentieth-century—Mexican muralism—which flourished from the early 1920s to the late 1940s. Born in Guanajuato, Mexico, Rivera enrolled in Mexico City’s Academy of San Carlos at age eleven. He received a scholarship to study art in Europe in 1907, and for the next fourteen years, he lived mainly in Paris where he was a member of the European avant-garde. At the end of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), he returned to his homeland and became a leading participant in Mexico’s government-sponsored mural movement, which sought to redefine national identity and promote socialist ideals.

As interest in Mexican arts and culture, especially muralism, spread north of the border, influential art patrons invited Rivera to the United States for several mural commissions, exhibitions, and art projects from 1930 to 1934. As a prolific muralist, painter, master draftsman and printmaker, Rivera made art to address public values during times of great social and economic disparity. His practice directly influenced the largest state-sponsored U.S. public art program, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (1935-1943).

Born in Oaxaca, Mexico, Rufino Tamayo (1899-1991) attended the Academy of San Carlos from 1917 to 1921. Dissatisfied with the art school’s traditional teaching methods, Tamayo stopped his formal education and accepted the position of first draftsman in the ethnographic drawing department of the Museo Nacional de Arqueología, Historia y Etnografía (National Museum of Archaeology, History, and Ethnography). For the next five years, he learned directly from Mexico’s pre-Columbian artifacts and popular art. In 1926, Tamayo moved to New York City and over the next twenty-five years, he lived there for extended periods of time, teaching painting intermittently and frequently exhibiting his work in museums and galleries. As a painter, printmaker, and sculptor, he received critical acclaim for synthesizing Mexican and European artistic influences and for his original use of bold color. His tense figures often communicate with celestial bodies as they question their place in the universe and express an existential crisis unleashed by war. In the 1950s, Tamayo settled in Paris, returning to Mexico City in 1964to make it his permanent home.