José Luis Cuevas

Biography

Nobody came to José Luis Cuevas’s first exhibition. He was fourteen, the venue was called the Seminario Axiológico, the drawings fell off the walls and were walked on.

Five years later, in 1953, the Galería Prisse in Mexico City showed him again, and this time people came.

He was born on 26 February 1934 in Mexico City, on the upper floor of the paper and pencil factory that belonged to his grandfather Adalberto Cuevas; his father, Alberto Cuevas Gómez, was a pilot, his mother was María Regla Novelo. At ten he entered the school of painting, sculpture and printmaking “La Esmeralda” and was already illustrating newspapers and books. In 1946 illness put him to bed for two years; in that time Lola Cueto of Mexico City College taught him engraving. At fourteen he did not go back to school but rented premises on Donceles Street as a studio: not knowing how long he had, he decided it was better to get on with his own work. He earned money weaving baskets, drew for the newspaper The News, taught art history at the Coronet Hall Institute without any diploma, and went to draw the patients at the La Castañeda psychiatric hospital, where his brother worked. He was, in essence, self-taught.

In 1954 the critic José Gómez Sicre invited him to the Pan American Union in Washington; the works sold out on the opening night, and The Washington Post called him a golden boy. In 1955, at the first Salón de Arte Libre of the Galería Proteo, he met Siqueiros, and until the end of the 1950s he exhibited in Havana, Caracas, Lima and Buenos Aires, where he met Borges. In those same years he began writing on culture for Novedades and called the muralists led by Rivera the “nopal cactus curtain”: the article, rejected by Excélsior, he published as “Letter to Siqueiros” in the magazine Perfumes y Modas and delivered a copy to Siqueiros’s house himself. He demanded freedom from state-commissioned murals and from the government propaganda which, in his view, the muralists served; with Carlos Fuentes, Fernando Benítez, José Emilio Pacheco and Carlos Monsiváis he was lumped together as “La Mafia”, and in the histories he remains one of the main figures of the Generación de la Ruptura. Siqueiros, for his part, invited him to join the muralists and found something of Orozco in his drawings.

In 1959 he received the International First Prize for Drawing at the São Paulo Biennial for forty sheets of the series “Funeral of a Dictator”. In 1960 he exhibited at the David Herbert Gallery in New York, and The New York Times compared him to Picasso. In 1961 two works at the Galleria dell’Obelisco in Rome, “Funeral of a Dictator” and “The Fall of Franco”, drew a diplomatic protest from Spain demanding their removal. In 1962 he showed a series after a sculpture by Tilman Riemenschneider he had seen in Munich and won first prize at the International Black and White Exhibition in Lugano. In the 1960s he went to Morocco to study Islamic art and met Francis Bacon in Tangier. The lithographs “Cuevas-Charenton” (1966), after the Marquis de Sade, he printed at the Tamarind workshop in Los Angeles; homages to Quevedo, Dostoevsky, Kafka and Sade returned in his series more than once. In 1976–1979 he “exiled” himself to France, worked on books, serigraphs and lithographs, the “Cuaderno de París” and “La Renaudière”, and on his return called his exhibition “The Return of Another Prodigal Son”.

He drew in pen and ink, gouache and watercolour on very large sheets. His people are distorted, turn into animals or take on animal features; the themes are prostitution, despotism, the solitude of contemporary man and his inability to speak to others. He disliked skulls, finding them empty, and preferred bodies soon after death, while something personal still remains in them; in this he called himself a Spaniard, like Goya, and far from Posada. From 1955 he had himself photographed every day. It was he who once gave the Zona Rosa in the Juárez district its name: too naive to be red, too frivolous to be white, and so pink.

In the 1970s he showed 72 self-portraits at the UNAM University Cultural Centre and exhibited at museums in San Francisco, Caracas, Phoenix, Paris and Mexico City. In 1982 fourteen galleries in Mexico City, Barcelona, Paris and other cities opened “March: The Month of José Luis Cuevas” all at once; in 1984–1988 fifty large drawings, “Intolerance”, which grew out of a book on witch trials given to him, toured universities and museums in the Americas and Europe. In 1991 France awarded him the Order of Arts and Letters; in 1997 Queen Sofía presented him with the Tomás Francisco Prieto medal. In 1992 the José Luis Cuevas Museum opened in the former convent of Santa Inés in the historic centre of Mexico City, with a collection of more than 1,860 works, mostly Latin American, and a library of 11,500 press cuttings; in the courtyard stands his “La Giganta” (1991), after a poem by Baudelaire. The museum’s first director was his wife Bertha Riestra; from 2005 it was run by his second wife, Beatriz del Carmen Bazán. In 1995 he made a Talavera-tile mural for the Zona Rosa. The sculpture “Figura obscena”, given to the city of Colima in 2001, became the centre of a scandal in 2006; the same year, in the Nezahualcóyotl sculpture park, he installed the sculpture “Carmen” in honour of his wife. There followed the Jerusalem Prize (2007), a retrospective at the Palace of Fine Arts (2008), the Lorenzo il Magnifico Prize at the Florence Biennale (2012) and four honorary doctorates.

José Luis Cuevas died on 3 July 2017 in Mexico City, at eighty-three; he never stopped exhibiting to the end.