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Look, I love Philip Guston's work as much as the next person, but why is it that no one seems to have discussed that Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo's 1930s-era art is almost a template for Guston's signature '70s visual idiom? Here's a 1928 Tamayo & a 1971 Guston
Part of the connection is iconographic: the light bulbs, the smokers, the canvases on studio easels, the enlarged heads standing in for the overall human figure (Tamayo: The Smokers & Still Life with Dominoes, both 1931)
But there are also strong formal & coloristic affiliations between the two: the massing of objects, the distinctive paint application, the inclination to certain hues (pinks & reds especially)
In all fairness, this may be because much of Tamayo's strongest work is in Mexican collections & not widely reproduced, like his 1932 Las Musas de la Pintura (The Muses of Painting) @MUNALmx. But still a significant oversight given massive attention to Guston this past year
