The missing "Tres Personajes, second version" by Rufino TamayoRufino Tamayo Painting
August Uribe of Sotheby's is on the lookout for a stolen Rufino Tamayo painting. A large-scale investigation with the help of the Houston police, the FBI, Interpol, and a $15,000 reward has turned up no solid leads toward the recovery of the painting. August explains that Tamayo, who started out as a figurative painter, is considered the father of modern art in Mexico. During Tamayo's time, he was set apart from well-known muralists such as Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siquieros who were popular for including their political aims in their art. Tamayo instead embraced art for art's sake, keeping his national identity but depicting his imagery in a more "non-confrontational manner." Later on in his career, Tamayo became more interested in color, adding ground-up marble and sand to his compositions. He was influenced by pre-Columbian art, making reference to the ancient walls and ghostlike figures of West Mexico. August gives us an idea of the worth of Tamayo's art — the most valuable, an easel painting, sold for a record price of $2.3 million and his watercolors sold for over $100,000 each. The missing painting, "Tres Personajes, second version," was sold in 1977 at a sale of modern pictures in Sotheby's. In the fall of 1987, after its owners had placed the painting for safekeeping in an art storage warehouse, it was discovered that "Tres Personajes, second version," along with several other pieces, was missing. After the FBI and Interpol exhausted all leads, the painting is still at large. August estimates the painting's worth at auction today would be between $750,000 and $1 million.
Update: "Tres Personajes" was found among trash on a Manhattan street in 2003, having vanished from a warehouse in 1987. Elizabeth Gibson, the woman who found the canvas, credited an ANTIQUES ROADSHOW FYI "Missing Masterpieces" segment about the painting for providing confirmation of her amazing find. On Nov. 20, 2007, "Tres Personajes" was sold to an undisclosed collector for $1.049 million in a Sotheby's auction of Latin American art. Watch the original AR FYI segment that clinched the discovery.
