Miguel Covarrubias (born José Miguel Covarrubias Duclaud)

Through his work as an artist, book illustrator, curator, anthropologist, and collector, Miguel Covarrubias made significant contributions to the Harlem Renaissance, Mexican modernism, and the dissemination of Balinese and Chinese culture after the 1949 Revolution. His participation in global intellectual and artistic networks further helped to shape the fields of caricature, anthropology, archeology, and museology in Mexico and the United States.

Born into an upper-middle-class family in Mexico City, Covarrubias grew up amid the armed conflict of the Mexican Revolution. Drawn to art from an early age, he left school to immerse himself in Mexico City’s vibrant artistic circles. With other artists, such as Dr. Atl, Frida Kahlo, Adolfo Best Maugard, Roberto Montenegro, Tina Modotti, José Clemente Orozco, María Izquierdo, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, he participated in the complex endeavor of visualizing modern post-revolutionary Mexico through murals, paintings, drawings, books, and costumes and background designs for the Mexican Ballet. In the 1940s he taught at the Escuela Nacional de Antropología.

Covarrubias moved to New York City in the summer of 1923 with the support of Genaro Estrada, the Mexican minister of foreign affairs, and José Juan Tablada, the owner of La Latinabookstore on Fifth Avenue and an active promoter of Mexican arts and culture. Covarrubias arrived bearing the title of “cultural attaché” that Tablada had secured for him as part of a larger, informal cultural exchange policy. In New York he met the photographer Carl Van Vechten, who would guide the young artist’s career and introduce him to his circle of illustrious friends, from writers William Faulkner and Eugene O’Neill to bandleader Paul Whiteman and actors Gloria Swanson and Charles Chaplin. A prolific sketch artist, Covarrubias assembled caricatures of many of these figures into his first book, The Prince of Wales and Other Famous Americans (1925).

Covarrubias’s rise as an illustrator was immediate and meteoric in the United States and Mexico, and his caricatures soon appeared in the pages of Vanity Fair, Current Opinion, The Nation, the New York Herald Tribune, the Evening Post, and the Los Angeles Times. At the height of the Harlem Renaissance, he began sketching African American figures from New York City’s rich poetry, jazz, blues, and dance cultures. In 1927 he published Negro Drawings, a series of visual depictions on paper that conveyed the vibrant spirit of Harlem through the exoticizing gaze of its generally white visitors. He designed the backdrop for La Revue Nègre, a musical staged in Parisfeaturing Josephine Baker; was featured on the cover of Langston Hughes’s The Weary Blues; and illustrated Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men, W. C. Handy’s Blues: An Anthology, and Taylor Gordon’s Born to Be. He was also commissioned to illustrate classic works of African American and global Black literature: René Maran’s Batouala, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Théodore Canot’s Adventures of an African Slaver. Two of his drawings appeared in Alain Locke’s The New Negro: An Anthology, arguably the defining text of the Harlem Renaissance.

In 1930, Covarrubias married the American dancer, painter, and photographer Rosa Rolanda (née Rosemonde Cowan). The couple decided to spend their honeymoon in Bali, Indonesia; in 1933 Miguel Covarrubias earned a Guggenheim Fellowship for painting that funded a trip back to Bali. That year, the German painter Walter Spies hosted the Covarrubiases, alongside other artists and celebrities who visited the island, and guided them through the island’s geography, art, and history. These trips became the source for Miguel’s first venture into amateur anthropology, Island of Bali (1937), which wove texts, drawings, paintings, and Rosa’s photographs into an ethnographic account of Balinese life in the 1930s and became a classic reference for Balinese studies. The book’s success steered him further into anthropology and archeology, defining the rest of his career. An exhibition of his gouaches and oil paintings of Bali at the Valentine Gallery in New York in 1932 contributed to a period of “Balimania” in New York.

Beginning in the late 1930s, Covarrubias parlayed his archaeological knowledge and interest in ethnography into a series of painted map murals that collapsed the divisions between drawing, geography, ethnography, and architecture. He produced maps of the Pacific for The Golden Gate International Exposition in 1939, the United States for the Associated American Artists in 1943, and Mexican popular arts for the Museo de Arte Popular in Mexico in 1951. He contributed color illustrations for the catalogue accompanying a comprehensive exhibition of artwork from the Oceanic world, Arts of the South Seas,at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, in 1946.

Covarrubias’s visibility extended to China and Latin America. Chinese artists, including the Zhang brothers and Liao Bingxiong, saw his work in smuggled issues of Vanity Fair, Vogue, and The New Yorker, and in local magazines like Shanghai Manhua (上海漫畫) and Modern Sketch (时代漫画). On their way to Bali in 1930 and 1933, the Covarrubiases made short visits to Shanghai that triggered a “Covarrubiasmania” among Chinese artists who copied his drawings, style, and methods. Back in Mexico and New York, Covarrubias engaged in various informal diplomatic efforts to promote Balinese and Chinese arts and culture. He translated and published articles on China, founded the Mexican Society of Friendship with Popular China (SMACHP) with other Latin American intellectuals in 1953, and painted the portrait of Mao that hung on the wall at the Sociedad’s headquarters in Mexico City. His illustrations for the classic Chinese novel 水浒传 or All Men Are Brothers (1948), translated by Pearl Buck, were groundbreaking: one Chinese reviewer found it hard to believe that a Mexican artist could be so culturally and linguistically sensitive.

Upon his return to Mexico in 1940, Covarrubias’s interests shifted again toward Mexican art and culture, pre-Columbian studies, and the idea of Mexico. He worked closely with the Mexican post-revolutionary government and hosted parties and comidas (meals) at theirTizapán home for editors, artists, writers, and photographers from Europe and North America. In 1947, he published Mexico South, an ethnographic study on the Indigenous peoples of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec (Oaxaca, Mexico).As Director of the Dance Department at the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes (INBA), a post he was appointed to by his friend and INBA director Carlos Chávez because of his deep knowledge of dance traditions in Mexico, Covarrubias prompted Mexican ballet’s “golden years” by organizing more than twenty performances and contributing to costume and stage designs. He curated the modern art section of Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art at MoMA (1940) as well as the first two exhibitions at the now-defunct Museo de Artes e Industrias Populares, Obras Maestras del Arte Popular Mexicano and La Laca Mexicana in 1951.

Besides an extensive collection of pre-Columbian objects and artworks, the Covarrubiases also collected modern art, including paintings, prints, and engravings by their contemporaries and themselves, some of which they lent to MoMA for Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art. The collection included works by Emilio Amero, Abraham Ángel, Leopoldo Méndez, Joan Miró, Tina Modotti, Diego Rivera, Edward Steichen, Paul Strand, and Edward Weston.

Covarrubiasmade his last trip to the United States in 1950 to sit on a four-member board of advisors to the United Nations charged with selecting art for its new headquarters in New York. Despite his contributions during World War II—providing propagandistic drawings to the Office of Strategic Services, now the CIA—officials during the McCarthy era denied him future entry, and he never returned to the United States. During his final years in Mexico, he organized major exhibitions of Mexican art, led archeological excavations funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, and articulated the main archeological and historical theories that would dominate twentieth-century Mexican anthropology.