Customer Reviews

Covarrubias

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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.

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.

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.

There is no better documentation of Covarrubias, his charmed and richly productive life, and the complicity of his partnership with Rosa, until it all fell apart. An invaluable resource, revealing a singular chapter in 20th century art, society, and the rediscovery of the ancient Mexican legacy.