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Lot Essay
A teenage prodigy, Miguel Covarrubias arrived in New York in 1923 with sketchbook in tow, immersing himself in the cosmopolitan ambience of the city and the fashionable goings-on of its literary and social elites. Covarrubias was made famous by his deft caricatures of personalities from John D. Rockefeller and Calvin Coolidge to Charlie Chaplin and Pablo Picasso, which he published regularly in Vanity Fair and The New Yorker through the end of his career. Yet as curator Wendy Wick Reaves has noted, "In addition to the caricatures for which he was best known, Covarrubias's contributions to theater design, mural painting, book illustration, museum exhibition, and anthropology helped spur that cultural phenomenon of the 1920s and 1930s which The New York Times called 'the enormous vogue of things Mexican.'"(1) Indeed, Covarrubias was from the beginning warmly received by the established Mexican contingent in New York, headlined by Diego Rivera, Rufino Tamayo and José Clemente Orozco, who collectively dubbed him El Chamaco ("The Kid") and whose social and national interests he shared.
Covarrubias followed a peripatetic path through the 1920s and '30s that led him as far from New York as northern Africa and southeast Asia as he explored new interests in ethnography, travel that culminated in his return to Mexico and attention to the indigenous arts of its southern regions. He would later distinguish himself through his anthropological research, particularly the important volumes Mexico South: The Isthmus of Tehuantepec (1946) and The Eagle, the Jaguar, and the Serpent: Indian Art of the Americas (1954). "The most important contribution of Covarrubias to the study of Mexican popular art was the interrelationship he established between local traditions and their pre-Columbian ancestral origins," Juan Rafael Coronel Rivera has remarked, "and then its contemporary links with the rest of the continent's indigenous population."(2)
Covarrubias began to paint seriously after 1930, and his painting reflected both the new, nativist turn of his scholarship and the visual codes of the modern Mexican masters. Sitting Woman with Flowers likely dates from the 1930s, the period when Covarrubias was most invested in painting and its allegorical meanings, as seen on a large scale in his mural, A Sunday Afternoon in Xochimilco (1937), at the Hotel Ritz in Mexico City. Drawing on the characteristic and timeless motif of a flower seller, Covarrubias here instills his subject with an expressive gravitas, her squatting figure spanning the full length of the canvas. The architectural backdrop features warm rose and golden tones built up through patterns of stippled dots, or petatillos, that nod to the modern Drawing Method championed by his friend and colleague, Alfredo Best Maugard, during the 1920s. Yet the painterly inflections may also have a source in the surface treatment of pre-Columbian carvings; and the bold graphic patterning of the woman's skirt and tunic likely derives from ancient or native cultures. An archetypal portrait, Sitting Woman with Flowers is a powerful image of Mexico's rich artistic patrimony: the brilliant jewel tones of the sitter's garments and tonal, all-over patterning evoke a reawakened indigenous tradition at a moment of surging nationalism and attention to the social role of art.
1) W. Wick Reaves, "Miguel Covarrubias and the Vogue for Things Mexican," in The Covarrubias Circle: Nickolas Muray's Collection of Twentieth-Century Mexican Art, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004, 64.
2) J. R. Coronel Rivera, "Covarrubias: Yólotl Bali, Yólotl Tehuantepec," Miguel Covarrubias: 4 Miradas, 4 Visions, Mexico City: Editorial RM, 2005, 125.
Covarrubias followed a peripatetic path through the 1920s and '30s that led him as far from New York as northern Africa and southeast Asia as he explored new interests in ethnography, travel that culminated in his return to Mexico and attention to the indigenous arts of its southern regions. He would later distinguish himself through his anthropological research, particularly the important volumes Mexico South: The Isthmus of Tehuantepec (1946) and The Eagle, the Jaguar, and the Serpent: Indian Art of the Americas (1954). "The most important contribution of Covarrubias to the study of Mexican popular art was the interrelationship he established between local traditions and their pre-Columbian ancestral origins," Juan Rafael Coronel Rivera has remarked, "and then its contemporary links with the rest of the continent's indigenous population."(2)
Covarrubias began to paint seriously after 1930, and his painting reflected both the new, nativist turn of his scholarship and the visual codes of the modern Mexican masters. Sitting Woman with Flowers likely dates from the 1930s, the period when Covarrubias was most invested in painting and its allegorical meanings, as seen on a large scale in his mural, A Sunday Afternoon in Xochimilco (1937), at the Hotel Ritz in Mexico City. Drawing on the characteristic and timeless motif of a flower seller, Covarrubias here instills his subject with an expressive gravitas, her squatting figure spanning the full length of the canvas. The architectural backdrop features warm rose and golden tones built up through patterns of stippled dots, or petatillos, that nod to the modern Drawing Method championed by his friend and colleague, Alfredo Best Maugard, during the 1920s. Yet the painterly inflections may also have a source in the surface treatment of pre-Columbian carvings; and the bold graphic patterning of the woman's skirt and tunic likely derives from ancient or native cultures. An archetypal portrait, Sitting Woman with Flowers is a powerful image of Mexico's rich artistic patrimony: the brilliant jewel tones of the sitter's garments and tonal, all-over patterning evoke a reawakened indigenous tradition at a moment of surging nationalism and attention to the social role of art.
1) W. Wick Reaves, "Miguel Covarrubias and the Vogue for Things Mexican," in The Covarrubias Circle: Nickolas Muray's Collection of Twentieth-Century Mexican Art, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004, 64.
2) J. R. Coronel Rivera, "Covarrubias: Yólotl Bali, Yólotl Tehuantepec," Miguel Covarrubias: 4 Miradas, 4 Visions, Mexico City: Editorial RM, 2005, 125.