Covarrubias [Hardcover]

Adriana Williams (Author), Doris Ober (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: 1994

Like the Algonquin Hotel in New York, Virginia Woolf's home in London, and Gertrude Stein's salon in Paris, the home of Rosa and Miguel Covarrubias in Mexico City drew dozens of the world's intellectuals, artists, and celebrities during Mexico's artistic golden age of the 1930s and 1940s. As fascinating themselves as any of their renowned guests, the Covarrubiases together fostered a renaissance of interest in the history and traditional arts of Mexico's indigenous peoples, while amassing an extraordinary collection of art that ranged from pre-Hispanic Olmec and Aztec sculptures to the work of Diego Rivera. Written by a long-time friend of Rosa, this book presents a sparkling, anecdote-rich account of the life and times of Rosa and Miguel. Adriana Williams begins with Miguel's birth in 1904 and follows the brilliant early flowering of his artistic career as a renowned caricaturist for Vanity Fair and the New Yorker magazines, his meeting and marriage with Rosa at the height of her New York dancing career, and their many years of professional collaboration on projects ranging from dance to anthropology to painting and art collecting to the development of museums to preserve Mexico's pre-Columbian heritage.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Miguel Covarrubias (1904-1956), the precociously gifted Mexican caricaturist and artist later turned anthropologist, author and ballet director, remains comparatively unfamiliar in the U.S. But he was a darling of the New York smart set during the 1920s and '30s, when his caricatures were featured in Vanity Fair and the New Yorker and he became a protege of Carl van Vechten and Alfred Knopf, who published his books. Williams's biography is thus important as the first full-scale portrait. In the course of painstakingly tracing Covarrubias's life and his association with such luminaries as Diego Rivera, Nelson Rockefeller and Carlos Chavez, Williams reveals the long-term cultural and social links between Mexican and North American elites, at a time when such links are being renewed. As granddaughter of former Mexican president Plutarco Calles and a friend of Covarrubias's American wife, Rosa Cowen, the author is well qualified to cover this material, though the book suffers from some lack of focus. Moving forward chronologically, with little interpretation, analysis or shaping, Williams depends heavily on the reminiscences of eyewitnesses to events in the lives of the Covarrubiases; and only when such events are interesting is the book interesting-as for instance, in the account of the scandalous dissolution of the couple's marriage. The illustrations would be more effective if they corresponded more closely with the text.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Miguel Covarrubias (1904-57), cari-caturist for Vanity Fair and The New Yorker and one of the most multifaceted 20th-century Mexican artists, and wife Rosa Rolanda Covarrubias (d. 1970), an acclaimed New York dancer, are the subjects of this long-overdue biography. The Covarrubiases collaborated on projects that included dance, ethnology, painting, art collecting, and the development of museums to preserve Mexico's pre-Columbian heritage. In the 1930s and 1940s, their home near Mexico City became a well-known address to native and foreign artists of all disciplines. This highly readable and scrupulously researched narrative captures the brilliance of both artists and their cultural milieu. Besides a 1984 exhibition at the Smithsonian, English-language research on the Covarrubiases has been scarce. (Readers may also be interested in the Centro Cultural Arte Contemporaneo Museum of Mexico's comprehensive and beautiful Spanish-language catalog on the Covarrubiases, published in 1987.) Recommended for most collections.
Russell T. Clement, Brigham Young Univ. Lib., Provo, Ut.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 344 pages
• Publisher: University of Texas Press; 1st edition (1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0292790880
• ISBN-13: 978-0292790889
• Product Dimensions: 10.3 x 7.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #784,330 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great reading, July 18, 2001

By 

AK "ak6" (Orlando, FL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Covarrubias (Hardcover)

This book was so much fun to read! Covarrubias (and his wife Rosa) led the most fascinating lives. They were both great artists who also spent a great deal of time with other great artists, writers, musicians, actors and philanthropists of the early-mid 20th century in Mexico and the US including Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Jose Clemente Orozco, Rufino Tamayo, Georgia O'Keeffe, Zora Neal Hurston, Nelson Rockerfeller,Delores del Rio, just to name a few. Today unfortunately Miguel Covarrubias is one the great overlooked Mexican artists (writer and anthropologist) of the 20th century. He was involved with many different cultural and artistic studies including the visual arts, theater, dance, music and later ethnology and anthropology. As a student of the ancient Americas I was familiar with his work as an anthropologist but that was only a very small part of the many things he did in his short lifetime. He has made significant contributions to the world of art through his famous caricatures for Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, numerous books and drawings as cultural studies especially of the Island of Bali and ancient Mexican cultures, incredible murals, and stunning portraits of many of the artistic celebrities of his time.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars a genius of life and art, August 31, 2001

By 

Dita "ditasays2" (NY United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Covarrubias (Hardcover)

Though less well known than Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, Miguel and Rosa Covarrubias were much more interesting as people and as artists. Miguel Covarrubias had the good fortune to emerge in a golden age when art and adventure met at the fabulous intersection that was the 1920s. It is unimaginable now that a serious anthropolgist could have been regularly published as a caricaturist for Vanity Fair, and simultaneously take part in the Harlem Renaissance (his drawings celebrating modern urban black life remain an extraordinary and vivid document of this movement). Add to that his year-long sojourn in Bali that produced a seminal work on the culture, complete with brilliant drawings, and his innovative research on Mexico's pre-Columbian history -- and throw in the exquisiste presence of Rosa, dancer, painter and fellow-explorer...an enviable life, an inspiration to any and all who have more than one interest or talent. The book is filled with fascinating photographs and reproductions of the work created by this mesmerizing, orignal pair.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars How this book reveals Mexico's cultural sophistication, January 18, 2011

By 

John H. Mcfadden (San Francisco) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Covarrubias (Hardcover)

In her book, Covarrubias, Adriana Williams does much to dispel the engrained prejudice North Americans have against Mexico. As she mentions in this book, too many Americans knew Mexico and Mexicans through the gross, degrading characterizations in Hollywood manufactured Westerns. Even educated people tended and still tend to view Mexico as a largely strife torn country with little economic, political, and artistic sophistication.

Although this book is billed as a biography of a Mexican artist/anthropologist and his artist wife, Rosa Cowan, the Mexican history presented makes the case that, coincident with the prodigious intellectual/artistic creativity in the U.S. and Europe during the first half of the 20th Century, Mexico was teeming with equally creative developments. Covarrubias was uniquely gifted as an artist and anthropologist and as a singularly charming person capable of being the most engaging person in a group of the world's most interesting artists, philanthropists, and intellectuals. But he was just one of many impressive Mexicans who helped Mexico gradually pull itself out of the demoralization inflicted on it by the Spaniards. Not the least of their accomplishments was to reestablish a conception of pre-Hispanic Mexican culture equal to and sometimes surpassing other regions throughout the world in its politics, art, and other realms of achievement.

While this book celebrates Covarrubias' genius throughout, it is no less a proof of Mexican sophistication and value and therefore a locus of pride for all Mexicans and Mexican Americans.