Miguel Covarrubias

Biography

Of the six maps of the Pacific that Miguel Covarrubias painted for the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco, five hung in the Ferry Building until 2001. The sixth, “Art and Culture”, went missing, and where it is remains unknown to this day.

These maps were not quite maps. In “The Fauna and Flora of the Pacific”, now at the de Young Museum, four continents ring the ocean, and animals, plants and sea creatures are scattered over land and water.

José Miguel Covarrubias Duclaud was born on 22 November 1904 in Mexico City. At fourteen he finished the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria and began drawing caricatures and illustrations for the teaching materials of the Ministry of Public Education, with some work for the Ministry of Communications on the side. He had no formal art training. In 1923, with a grant from the Mexican government, a great deal of talent and very little English, he left for New York. The poet José Juan Tablada and the critic Carl Van Vechten introduced him to the city’s literary circle, and soon he was drawing for the major magazines; at Vanity Fair he became one of the leading caricaturists, and The New Yorker printed his work too. His first book, “The Prince of Wales and Other Famous Americans” (1925), sold well, though not all its subjects enjoyed being its subjects. He fell in love with the jazz of Harlem, went there with Eugene O’Neill and the photographer Nickolas Muray, befriended Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes and W. C. Handy and illustrated their books. His drawings of the Harlem clubs were the first of their kind in Vanity Fair, and he himself regarded them not as caricatures but as serious drawings of people, of music and of a culture he loved; from them came the book “Negro Drawings” (1927). The clean line of his drawing influenced, among others, Al Hirschfeld.

For the theatre he designed sets and costumes: “La Revue nègre” with Josephine Baker, which made her famous in Paris, “Androcles and the Lion” after Shaw (1925), and the “Rancho Mexicano” number in the Garrick Gaieties for the dancer Rosa Rolando, born Rosemonde Cowan. In the second half of the 1920s the two of them travelled through Mexico, Europe, Africa and the Caribbean; on one of the Mexican trips they were joined by Tina Modotti and Edward Weston, who taught Rosa photography, and in Mexico Covarrubias introduced her to his friends, Diego Rivera among them; with Frida Kahlo Rosa remained friends for the rest of her life. In 1929 he received the National Art Directors’ Medal for painting in colour for a Steinway piano advertisement. On the prize money he and Rosa, married in 1930, went to Bali and lived there, absorbing the language and the customs; in 1933 he returned to Southeast Asia as a Guggenheim Fellow and travelled through Java, Bali, India and Vietnam. The book “Island of Bali” (1937), with Rosa’s photographs, which he wrote and illustrated himself, fed the Bali craze in New York. There was China too, where his drawings were noticed by the artists of Shanghai.

He illustrated a great deal: for George Macy’s Limited Editions Club he did “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (1938), “Green Mansions”, Melville’s “Typee” and “All Men Are Brothers” in Pearl Buck’s translation; for the Bonis, “Frankie and Johnny” (1930) by the young John Huston, the future film director. In 1942–1944 he contributed to Wolfgang Paalen’s journal Dyn.

The maps for San Francisco he painted with his assistant Antonio Ruiz in 1939–1940 for Pacific House, the exposition’s centre devoted to the countries of the Pacific: fauna and flora, peoples, art and culture, economy, dwellings and means of transport. After the fair they were shown at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and then five of them returned to San Francisco.

Back in Mexico City with Rosa, he lived in a house in Tizapán that drew Muray, Dolores del Río and Nelson Rockefeller. He taught ethnology at the National School of Anthropology and History and headed a new dance department at the Palace of Fine Arts: Rosa, with her background in choreography, was indispensable there, and his friend José Limón brought his company from New York for the first season in 1950. That was when Mexican traditional dance began to be recorded and studied. His second book, “Mexico South” (1946), he again wrote and illustrated himself; it was followed by “The Eagle, the Jaguar, and the Serpent” (1954), on the Indian art of North America, and “Mezcala: Ancient Mexican Sculpture” (1956). From the iconography he argued that the Olmecs were older than the Classic cultures of Mesoamerica, years before excavation confirmed it, and together with Matthew Stirling he is called a discoverer of the Olmec civilisation. The argument about a clash between Olmecs and Maya he pursued with Paalen in the pages of Dyn; Paalen even saw in it a struggle between an ancient matriarchy and the patriarchal culture of the Maya. To my mind he was more artist than scholar here: what mattered to him was the pattern of the idea.

Miguel Covarrubias died in Mexico City on 4 February 1957. “Indian Art of Mexico and Central America” came out the same year, without him.