A man for all seasons: Miguel Covarrubias, modernist and antiquities scholar

This ability to perceive a person, place, or thing’s essential quality would become a hallmark of his art. While Drawing a Cosmopolitan Line firmly establishes Covarrubias as a man of his time, a man connected to the modernist painters and writers of his day, it takes a critical look at the artist as well. This is something recent exhibits, more celebratory than critical, have not pursued. “That he first made his name in New York as a caricaturist was something by which he was typecast,” said Villela. “I’ve heard people say that his work is less interesting because he didn’t set out to grapple with these big modernist questions like Diego Rivera did.” Villela, a contributing scholar to the exhibition catalog, gives a talk at the Santa Fe Community Convention Center on Saturday, Sept. 27, titled “Miguel Covarrubias: Modernism From Mexico City to New York and Back.” “He was known in his time more as an illustrator, archaeologist, and writer than an artist who produced large numbers of oil paintings,” said Villela. “It goes back to that old hierarchy of the arts, where illustration art is considered much less important than oil painting. On the one hand, you have Diego Rivera’s work: it’s impossible to have a Mexican modernist show and not have a Rivera piece in it, but it is possible to have one without Covarrubias in it.” The kinds of ethnographic work Covarrubias produced are represented in the show by his drawings of Hernando Cortez and Montezuma Xocoyotzin for Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico (1942). These pieces, while simple and slightly cartoonish, bear the influence of his studies into the formal qualities of Mesoamerican art.

Covarrubias contributed illustrations to many other books — The Weary Blues (1926), by Langston Hughes, and a 1935 edition of Herman Melville’s Typee among them. But he also wrote several himself. Among them are Island of Bali, where he spent some time as a Guggenheim Fellow in 1933 observing the traditions of local peoples. His writings on Bali included numerous drawings as well as photographs taken by Rosa. The first of a monumental survey of the arts of the Americas, The Eagle, the Jaguar, and the Serpent, a tome dealing with the Native arts of North America, was published in 1954. Covarrubias collected Native American art, and his holdings included examples of Southwestern pottery. In 1929, before they had married, he and Rosa spent time in New Mexico at the Taos compound of Mabel Dodge Luhan during a summer when notable guests included Ansel Adams and Georgia O’Keeffe.

Indian Art of Mexico and Central America, the second volume of Covarrubias’ survey, was published in 1957, soon after his death at age 53. A third volume — a survey of the arts of South America — had been planned, but the manuscript was never completed. The existing work on it left behind by Covarrubias was lost until recently, when Villela and Janet C. Berlo, a fellow contributor to the exhibit and catalog and a professor of visual and cultural studies at the University of Rochester, discovered it in the Alfred A. Knopf collection at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas-Austin. “What exists are outlines, bibliographies, a little bit of text, and a couple hundred drawings and tracings,” said Villela. “After he died, his family had control of his papers. Rosa Covarrubias was able to get the manuscript from his family, because they split up in 1955, two years before he died. He moved with all his books and papers into a family apartment in Mexico City. She was able to get herself listed as the proper heir to the estate. She sent the manuscript to New York, where editors shopped it around to see if any archaeologists could finish it. Everyone said it was so incomplete that it could not be done. There was little chance of publication. I plan on publishing at least half or a third of the illustrations. We have many illustrations of ancient South American art, and there are a couple of survey books on South American antiquities, but these are unknown drawings. Like the rest of his output, they are excellent.”

Although no images from the unpublished work are on view at the exhibit, some are presented in the catalog: faithful depictions of Raimondi Stela and other iconography from Chavín de Huantar, a pre-Inca archaeological site in Peru, for example. What are included are preliminary drawings for Mexico South: The Isthmus of Tehuantepec (1946), a chronicle of daily life in the region of Mexico that includes Oaxaca and Chiapas. The works show his interest in the traditional dress and customs of the people in the region. “This is the same time period that Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo are exploiting Mexican stereotypes to celebrate them: the Tehuana image, Kahlo dressing in these crazy outfits. Rosa Covarrubias dressed like that as well.” Edward Weston’s gelatin silver print of Rosa in formal Tehuana dress is among the exhibit’s many photographs. “It’s a consistent theme in Rivera’s paintings, that aspect of folkloric nationalism. Covarrubias, in his own way, is also promoting that. Mexico South is all about that, promoting it as something authentic or uniquely Mexican.”

What Covarrubias saw as authentic expressions of culture motivated his explorations into the arts and cultures of other regions as well. To give some idea of his global interests, the catalog essay by Alicia Inez Guzmán, also from the University of Rochester, focuses on the murals Covarrubias painted for San Francisco’s 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition, also known as Pageant of the Pacific. One mural, Art Forms of the Pacific Area, is a world map showing the Pacific Rim with icons depicting the art forms common to particular regions. Covarrubias was a proponent of diffusionism, the idea that some of the cultural legacy of the New World was derived from contact with peoples from the East before European contact. “Diffusionism was a bona fide intellectual approach in the late 19th and early 20th centuries,” said Villela. “People were trying to figure out how global cultures were related to each other and answer questions about the origin of forms — was there any kind of culture contact? I tell my students that it’s perfectly possible that the Chinese did come to America in the 1400s, but there’s no direct evidence. Also, with any kind of culture contact, you have to ask the question whether it’s sustained and significant.”

Mapmaking was another of Covarrubias’ artistic preoccupations. His approach was usually to illustrate — like a caricaturist does for a portrait — essential aspects of various cultures, using an oversimplified but dynamic approach with icons for summing up some character or aspect of place. “That’s a strategy for almost every kind of publication he did. It’s a specific kind of hybrid cartographic exercise. Some of my favorites were published in McCall’s and magazines like that in the 1950s, and they’re images of foods of the Americas. He also did a map of the U.S. that had little icons, so there’s a little Pueblo pot here or, for New Mexico, there’s a plate of enchiladas. For Southern California, there’s a starlet in a bathing suit on the beach. To me that’s an interesting approach, figuring out how to essentialize or distill features, whether it’s the animals, the food, the culture. In Pageant of the Pacific, there’s one mural for each of these broad themes.” Route of the Spaniards, a map made for The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico is among the works in Drawing a Cosmopolitan Line.

While Covarrubias amassed a prodigious body of work, there are few paintings in his oeuvre. For most of the past century, he was not regarded as the equal of modernist contemporaries like Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros — painters and muralists all. “The argument of the exhibition is that we can view Covarrubias in the same light as Rivera and Orozco and Siqueiros, but it requires looking at the work more broadly. Mostly, he’s still known as a caricaturist. He’s typecast as not being a serious artist because he’s involved in so many different arenas. You can say they dilute his impact, but you can also say that he was a polymath. There’s no doubt that he didn’t conduct himself like Diego Rivera or Orozco or other figures who were engaged with questions of modernism and questions of identity in Mexico. He’s more like somebody like Pablo Picasso, who’s involved in a very large number of different creative arenas. It’s difficult to pin Covarrubias down because he was so good at so many creative endeavors. I think he was a kind of genius.” ◀