Throckmorton Fine Art is pleased to announce a special retrospective exhibition of signature paintings, caricatures and drawings by the Mexican illustrator, writer and anthropologist Miguel Covarrubias (1904-1957).
In Covarrubias’s hands caricature became a cosmopolitan artform and appeared worldwide in prestigious publications ranging from Vanity Fair, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and The New Yorker to Fortune magazine. During the 1920s and 1930s more than 300 Covarrubias caricatures of influential artists and politicians were featured on the covers of influential publications including The New Yorker and Vanity Fair.
Caricature was not just one expression of Covarrubias’s genius. He achieved acclaim in popular arts, fine art, photography, ethnography, archeology, anthropology and dance. His contributions to the cultural oeuvre range from a fascination with the Harlem renaissance and the history of Latino artists living in the United States, to an immersion in the cultural life of Bali. While his career started in Mexico, where as a teenager his work first appeared in El Heraldo, Ed Mundo and the Universal Ilustrado, he later chose to spend time in New York, Paris, Germany, Japan, Indochina and Bali. He was witness to Mexico’s effervescent cultural rebirth after the Revolution and friend of leading arts talents among them Diego Rivera and the poet Jose Juan Tablada. Later, he and his wife, the dancer Rosa Rolanda, a close friend of Frida Kahlo, would entertain international figures including Georgia O’Keefe, Orson Wells, Merce Cunningham, Luis Bunuel, John Huston, Amelia Earhart, Nelson Rockefeller and Henri Cartier-Bresson at their Mexico City residence. Rosa and Miguel also traveled with Tina Modotti and Edward Weston, who taught Rosa photography.
Covarrubias was born in Mexico City to an upper middle-class family. His father was a civil engineer who held various prominent positions in the government and his mother was from a family that included Spanish aristocracy. When his caricatures were first published in 1920 they drew attention from an artistic circle that led to a meeting with New York Times critic Carl Van Vechten who introduced Covarrubias to Vanity Fair which published his work in 1924. His first book The Prince of Wales and Other Famous Americans was published in 1925. Covarrubias also illustrated Langston Hughes book, The Weary Blues and An Anthology of the Blues by W. C. Handy in the 1920s. Later his illustrations appeared in books by John Huston, Zora Neale Hurston and in Herman Melville’s Typee, as well as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Adriana Williams, author and Covarrubias biographer and titled book, Covarrubias, published in 1994, helped bring new recognition to the artist. As quoted “In his case drawing is an essential weapon of the intellect that allows for the assimilation of the complexities of current events, and also the paradoxes of history. Thus, we often find in some of Miguel Covarrubias drawings not only very thorough field research, but also humor and irony.” Many of the artworks in this exhibition come from the Adriana and Tom Williams Collection of Miguel Covarrubias.
Pablo Goebel mounted a Covarrubias exhibition last year in his Mexico City gallery, Pablo Goebel Fine Art. The show titled Recorriendo el mundo del Chamaco Covarrubias / Touring the World with the Kid Covarrubias, was the start of our collaboration with bringing the works by Covarrubias to the United States. The artist possessed an assurance, a sensuous even melancholy desire to depict with character what he is viewing, seeing, recording. The direct synthesis of his characters, and their environment is exceptional and delightful. He knew himself to be downright genial, direct, transparent, and to the point.
His linear control is absolute, his works make up a theatre of characters, some familiar and some not so. He did for anthropology and archeology what they could not do for themselves in that he was able to draw a registrar of that which was being un-earthed. When he was only twenty-four Covarrubias published his book Negro Drawings that helped spark recognition of black culture among the highest intellectual circles of the United States. Chronicling the world of jazz, the Charleston dance and blues singers as well as the nightclubs and people of the black Harlem district of New York, Covarrubias used his drawings to illustrate the sinuous movement and cadences of the people he met, calling up the influences of cubism and primitive African art.
In the 1930s, Covarrubias became interested in indigenous cultures, in Mexico in particular, and he began writing a book for Knopf Mexico South: Isthmus of Tehuantepec, as well as creating pictorial maps for the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition. He also undertook six murals, Pageant of the Pacific, mapping the countries of the Pacific Rim. Covarrubias focused on the peoples, fauna and flora, art forms, economy, native dwelling and native means of transportation. These were later exhibited at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and until 2001 five of the murals were on view at San Francisco’s Ferry Building. Covarrubias works have been featured in numerous museums and galleries including the National Portrait Gallery (1985) in Washington and the Centro Cultural Arte Contemporaneo (1987) in Mexico City.
In the 1940s, he branched out to include museum work and dance production and he received the first museology teaching appointment in Mexico and taught anthropology and art history courses at the Museo Nacional de Antropologia. He also mounted 34 ballets for the Instituto Nacional de Bellas and was director of the dance academy there.
Rosa and Miguel Covarrubias visited Bali on their honeymoon in 1930 using the money from a National Art Directors Medal he had won. They returned there in 1933 when Miguel was a Guggenheim Fellow. His Island of Bali book included photographs taken by Rosa and contributed to the 1930s Bali craze in New York.
The exhibition includes a wide range of Covarrubias work that not only shows his power of synthesis, -- his ability to evoke the feeling, character and the movement of such a broad mix of subjects -- but also reflects the far-flung interests and intellectual curiosity Covarrubias brought to his work. Among the illustrations on view is a series of female nudes dating to the 1930s, portraits of women from Bali, A Mexican Pueblo Scene, a Kneeling Figure with Chickens, a Caregiver, a caricature of Rosa and Miguel, Apache Dancers, a portrait of a Filipino woman, Filipino Figures in front of a Cabin, a Filipino Figure with Machete, numerous faces, a Man with Cigar, a study of a woman with glasses, another of a Harlem Renaissance face, smiling men and women, reclining nudes, a Portrait of a Woman, Musicians and Dancers, a Typee Girl with a Kava Bowl and a Flower Vendor.
Miguel Covarrubias, illustrator, writer, humanist, anthropologist he was witness to one of the most exciting periods of the 20th century, and he remains an unmatched talent and we are pleased to share it the public. If you want to hear more then please join us for a talk on Saturday, November 17th, at the gallery with Adriana Williams, Covarrubias biographer and MaríaElena Rico, niece of Miguel Covarrubias.
