A native of Mexico, Rufino Tamayo is best known for his modernist paintings, murals and graphic works. He studied briefly at the San Carlos Academy of Fine Arts and was largely self-taught. In the early 1920s, he served as the head designer of the department of ethnographic drawings at the National Museum of Archaeology in Mexico City. Following the Mexican Revolution, he left Mexico for New York City where his work was well received in an exhibit at the Weyhe Gallery. In 1929, he returned to Mexico for health reasons and took several teaching positions. In 1933, he worked on a series of wall murals at the Escuela Nacional de Musica, his first mural commission. It was at the school where he met Olga Flores Rivas, the couple married in 1934 and returned to New York in 1937. In New York, Tamayo's abstract figuration works were exhibited internationally. He received numerous commissions to paint murals for museums, universities, hotels, an ocean liner along with corporate and civic clients. Tamayo also earned a name for himself as a graphic artist, working in several mediums including a technique known as Mixographia, a process developed for Tamayo by Luis Remba. Tamayo and his wife moved to Paris in 1949 before returning to Mexico in 1959 where they settled permanently in his home town of Oaxaca.