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Lot Essay
This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity signed by Adriana Williams, dated 16 April 2018.
Miguel Covarrubias’s fascination with Bali originated with his first trip to the Indonesian island in 1930. He traveled there from New York with his wife, the artist Rosa Rolando, on their honeymoon. Spending six months on the island, the Mexican artist took extensive notes and made numerous sketches while Rolando took hundreds of documentary photographs of Bali life and customs. During the long voyage home on an ocean liner, Covarrubias produced gouaches and oil paintings based on his sketches and his recollections.[1]
Covarrubias exhibited thirty-two of these gouaches and oil paintings on Balinese themes at the Valentine Gallery in New York in an exhibition that opened on January 18, 1932. This series and exhibition represent a significant turning point in the artist’s career. Celebrated as a highly-regarded caricaturist during the 1920s in New York City—where he had moved in 1923 at the young age of nineteen—Covarrubias was known for his humorous and biting satires of the city’s social and political elite as well as for his so-called “negro drawings” and observations of Harlem social life. With the support of leading New Yorkers, Frank Crowninshield and Carl Van Vechten, Covarrubias had become a contributor to magazines for the social set such as Vanity Fair, Vogue, and the New Yorker. In addition to its shift in thematic focus, the 1932 Valentine exhibition represents a turn away from illustration and a move toward painting, on which he would increasingly focus his energies. His interest in Bali would also serve as the starting point for the production of ethnographic, pictorial travelogues.
A Guggenheim Fellowship provided him with some of the funds to return to Bali in 1933 in order to continue his investigations, specifically for a book manuscript, which Alfred A. Knopf would eventually publish as Island of Bali in 1937. Covarrubias stayed on the island for a year. During his voyage home to New York, where he arrived in December 1934, he again completed several more paintings on Balinese themes. He also made significant progress on the book manuscript, which he had been planning since the first trip.[2] Life magazine and Vanity Fair reported on Covarrubias’s work on Bali, and he circulated Balinese imagery in various magazines: Vanity Fair (January 1935, and February 1936), Theatre Arts Monthly (August 1936), and Asia (April and June, 1937).[3] The April 1937 issue of Asia featured Girl Wearing a Sarong by the Ocean on its cover. These contributions inspired a “Balinese vogue” among fashionable New Yorkers as epitomized by the window displays at the Fifth Avenue department store, Franklin Simon, which included fabric designs with Bali prints by the artist. Even before Island of Bali’s appearance in mid-November 1937, Knopf ordered a second printing to satisfy demand.
Girl Wearing a Sarong by the Ocean depicts themes at the heart of Island of Bali—bathing and the romanticized depiction of Bali’s inhabitants and its landscape. In his exegesis on the customs of everyday life, Covarrubias expounds on the centrality of bathing in Balinese culture, yet his paintings are divorced from the pseudo-anthropological observations he put forth in his chronicles.[4] Here Covarrubias focuses on creating cultural, racial, and sexualized types. Two dark-skinned Balinese women populate a desolate seashore against a deep blue sky. In the background, a figure with protruding and perky breasts crosses the sand carrying a large bundle on her head while maintaining a graceful pose. Yet, Covarrubias concentrates on the bare-chested figure in the foreground whose head is in profile view, emphasizing her racialized attributes. The artist takes particular delight in depicting her accoutrements: an abstracted ear plug, her decorative pink head wrap, the beige and green twisted belt at her waist, and the visually-enticing and graphic sarong, a print that may have started the whole Balinese fashion craze in New York. The colorful yet muted stippling effect used for the shore is set against the pattern of the sarong and a variety of minute brushstrokes provide textured contrasts to an otherwise flat and simple composition.
The artist idealized Bali as a pristine and enchanted land that embodied a vision of social harmony and beauty. The gouache encapsulates the ways in which Covarrubias was drawn to the exoticism of the “South Sea Island paradise.” As such, like the European traveler artists who came to Latin America in the nineteenth-century, Covarrubias reinvented his own form of a pictorial costumbrismo for the modern age.[5]
Dr. Anna Indych-López, Associate Professor of Art History, The City College of New York and The Graduate Center, The City University of New York
1 Adriana Williams, Covarrubias (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), 69. See also: Adriana Williams and Y-C. Chong, Covarrubias in Bali (Singapore: Didier Millet, 2005).
2 Williams, Covarrubias, 80 and 82.
3 Selva Hernández, “A Marco Polo in New York,” in Covarrubias: Cuatro Miradas/Four Visions (Mexico, Editorial RM, 2005), 75.
4 Miguel Covarrubias, Island of Bali (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973; originally published in 1937), 116-118.
5 Terence Grieder, “The Divided World of Miguel Covarrubias,” Americas (Washington D.C.) vol. 23, no. 5, (May 1971): 24, cited in Williams, 84.
Miguel Covarrubias’s fascination with Bali originated with his first trip to the Indonesian island in 1930. He traveled there from New York with his wife, the artist Rosa Rolando, on their honeymoon. Spending six months on the island, the Mexican artist took extensive notes and made numerous sketches while Rolando took hundreds of documentary photographs of Bali life and customs. During the long voyage home on an ocean liner, Covarrubias produced gouaches and oil paintings based on his sketches and his recollections.[1]
Covarrubias exhibited thirty-two of these gouaches and oil paintings on Balinese themes at the Valentine Gallery in New York in an exhibition that opened on January 18, 1932. This series and exhibition represent a significant turning point in the artist’s career. Celebrated as a highly-regarded caricaturist during the 1920s in New York City—where he had moved in 1923 at the young age of nineteen—Covarrubias was known for his humorous and biting satires of the city’s social and political elite as well as for his so-called “negro drawings” and observations of Harlem social life. With the support of leading New Yorkers, Frank Crowninshield and Carl Van Vechten, Covarrubias had become a contributor to magazines for the social set such as Vanity Fair, Vogue, and the New Yorker. In addition to its shift in thematic focus, the 1932 Valentine exhibition represents a turn away from illustration and a move toward painting, on which he would increasingly focus his energies. His interest in Bali would also serve as the starting point for the production of ethnographic, pictorial travelogues.
A Guggenheim Fellowship provided him with some of the funds to return to Bali in 1933 in order to continue his investigations, specifically for a book manuscript, which Alfred A. Knopf would eventually publish as Island of Bali in 1937. Covarrubias stayed on the island for a year. During his voyage home to New York, where he arrived in December 1934, he again completed several more paintings on Balinese themes. He also made significant progress on the book manuscript, which he had been planning since the first trip.[2] Life magazine and Vanity Fair reported on Covarrubias’s work on Bali, and he circulated Balinese imagery in various magazines: Vanity Fair (January 1935, and February 1936), Theatre Arts Monthly (August 1936), and Asia (April and June, 1937).[3] The April 1937 issue of Asia featured Girl Wearing a Sarong by the Ocean on its cover. These contributions inspired a “Balinese vogue” among fashionable New Yorkers as epitomized by the window displays at the Fifth Avenue department store, Franklin Simon, which included fabric designs with Bali prints by the artist. Even before Island of Bali’s appearance in mid-November 1937, Knopf ordered a second printing to satisfy demand.
Girl Wearing a Sarong by the Ocean depicts themes at the heart of Island of Bali—bathing and the romanticized depiction of Bali’s inhabitants and its landscape. In his exegesis on the customs of everyday life, Covarrubias expounds on the centrality of bathing in Balinese culture, yet his paintings are divorced from the pseudo-anthropological observations he put forth in his chronicles.[4] Here Covarrubias focuses on creating cultural, racial, and sexualized types. Two dark-skinned Balinese women populate a desolate seashore against a deep blue sky. In the background, a figure with protruding and perky breasts crosses the sand carrying a large bundle on her head while maintaining a graceful pose. Yet, Covarrubias concentrates on the bare-chested figure in the foreground whose head is in profile view, emphasizing her racialized attributes. The artist takes particular delight in depicting her accoutrements: an abstracted ear plug, her decorative pink head wrap, the beige and green twisted belt at her waist, and the visually-enticing and graphic sarong, a print that may have started the whole Balinese fashion craze in New York. The colorful yet muted stippling effect used for the shore is set against the pattern of the sarong and a variety of minute brushstrokes provide textured contrasts to an otherwise flat and simple composition.
The artist idealized Bali as a pristine and enchanted land that embodied a vision of social harmony and beauty. The gouache encapsulates the ways in which Covarrubias was drawn to the exoticism of the “South Sea Island paradise.” As such, like the European traveler artists who came to Latin America in the nineteenth-century, Covarrubias reinvented his own form of a pictorial costumbrismo for the modern age.[5]
Dr. Anna Indych-López, Associate Professor of Art History, The City College of New York and The Graduate Center, The City University of New York
1 Adriana Williams, Covarrubias (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), 69. See also: Adriana Williams and Y-C. Chong, Covarrubias in Bali (Singapore: Didier Millet, 2005).
2 Williams, Covarrubias, 80 and 82.
3 Selva Hernández, “A Marco Polo in New York,” in Covarrubias: Cuatro Miradas/Four Visions (Mexico, Editorial RM, 2005), 75.
4 Miguel Covarrubias, Island of Bali (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973; originally published in 1937), 116-118.
5 Terence Grieder, “The Divided World of Miguel Covarrubias,” Americas (Washington D.C.) vol. 23, no. 5, (May 1971): 24, cited in Williams, 84.