Fugitive from a Mayan Lintel belongs to a body of work inspired by Rodolfo Abularach’s study of Mayan architecture and artifacts at the Museo Nacional de Arqueología y Etnología in Guatemala. With the encouragement of Carlos Mérida, Abularach looked to the forms of pre-Columbian art in the late 1950s as a vehicle for modernist experimentation. By the late 1950s, Mayan art had already inspired Art Deco ornament in numerous countries, as well as having a profound influence on architect Frank Lloyd Wright and an impact on modern artists such as Henry Moore and Adolph Gottlieb. José Gómez Sicre, intrigued by the possibilities of Abularach’s new work, offered him a solo exhibition in 1959 at the Visual Arts Section and purchased Fugitive from a Mayan Lintel from the show. Abularach created a tension in the drawing between the precision of his draftsmanship, especially in the dense cross-hatching of the background, and the biomorphic forms, derived not only from Mayan iconography but also the vagaries of surrealist automatism. While the artist’s wry title suggests that his forms escaped from Mayan reliefs, implying direct inspiration, the drawing owes a debt to automatic drawing and Abularach ostensibly tapped the whims of the unconscious mind to invent his composition. He looked to the Guatemalan past for archetypal forms that spoke to the collective unconscious, following a path already developed by Surrealists such as Max Ernst, Andre Masson, and Roberto Matta. Born in Guatemala, Rodolfo Abularach initially pursued a career in architecture, graduating from the Universidad de San Carlos in Guatemala City in 1954. He turned to the visual arts after his employment with the Museo Nacional de Arqueología y Etnología between 1955 and 1957 where he sketched pre-Columbian materials. Abularach began looking to Mayan forms as inspiration for modernist compositions, an idea encouraged by Carlos Mérida, the influential Guatemalan abstract artist. After teaching drawing and painting briefly at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plástica in Guatemala City, Abularach moved to New York in 1958 to study at the Art Students League with financial support from the Dirección General de Bellas Artes. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1959 and 1960 and exhibited at both the Fifth Bienal de São Paulo and the Art Institute of Chicago. Abularach became interested in printmaking in the 1960s and, with the support of the OAS, he attended the Pratt Institute from 1962 to 1964 to study printmaking techniques. He also attended the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles in 1966. The OAS later sponsored Abularach in 1976 to teach a course in graphics at the Centro Regional de Artes Gráficas at the University Rodrigo Facio, San Jose, Costa Rica. During the 1960s, Abularach developed an ongoing series on the human eye. His enigmatic and delicately crafted images owed a debt to Odilon Redon and René Magritte and he explored the motif in a variety of media. Later in his career, he turned to landscape, favoring volcanic motifs.