The books were stacked one atop the other from one end of a long row of tables to the other at the auction house. I groaned because I knew I had to go through all of them to find anything worth bidding on.
That happens a lot. Tons of books are usually dumped on tables for the picking. So I got to picking. In the first stack, I saw a book inside a slipcase with only its spine showing. It was titled “Green Mansions,” and I was about to bypass it when I saw the words “Illustrated by Covarrubias.”
Now that was a name I recognized. Miguel Covarrubias was a Mexican artist, a major illustrator, and friend to Diego Rivera and his artist-wife Frida Kahlo. I’ve known his name for years, and have a black and white Covarrubias lithograph hanging in my house that I bought at another auction. I was never sure how to pronounce his name, though.
Some years before, I had come across Life magazine illustrations of four brightly colored scenes that Covarrubias had created in 1944 of the Broadway play “Carmen Jones” featuring an African American cast.
The slipcase on the novel at auction was split at most of the seams, but the book itself was in good condition. It had the look and feel of a textbook (“staunch washable linen,” as described by the publisher), but Covarrubias’ illustrations elevated it to a higher status.
The novel was subtitled “A Romance of the Tropical Forest” by W.H. Hudson. It was first published in 1917, but this copy was republished for members of the Heritage Club of New York. Inside was a newsletter titled “The Heritage Sandglass (Number 1A),” which noted that this book was the first publication of the club.
Calling the novel a born classic, the newsletter raved about the book, which recounted the adventures of Hudson, an Englishman who spent some time in northern South America. The novel “is a rich tapestry full of the vivid color of the South American forest which Hudson called Green Mansions.”
Covarrubias, it further noted, was just as familiar with the area, having traveled from Bali to the Virgin Islands. Both a caricaturist and a magazine illustrator, he was “known to be one of the greatest living painters in oils. Because his paintings are always rich with tropical color, because we knew that he had wandered through the Green Mansions of Hudson’s book, we asked him to illustrate the Heritage edition of ‘Green Mansions.'”
Covarrubias created 25 drawings in pen and ink, eight watercolors, along with a tropical forest that was used across the entire cover of the book – front, back and spine – and the front and back end pages inside.
Born in Mexico City, Covarrubias at age 14 began drawing maps for a government agency. In 1923 at age 19, he moved to New York City armed with a grant from the Mexican government and was introduced to the city’s cultural elite by photographer Carl Van Vechten. He shared a studio with the caricaturist Al Hirschfeld, who was influenced by Covarrubias.
Covarrubias became an illustrator with some major newspapers and magazines, including Vogue, the New Yorker and Vanity Fair, where most of his work was published.
The heyday for Covarrubias was the 1920s and 1930s. He also designed sets and costumes for the theater, and that’s how he met Rosa Roland, a choreographer and dancer on Broadway whom he married in 1930. Covarrubias completed his first book of caricatures titled “The Prince of Wales and Other Famous Americans” in 1925. Most of the drawings had appeared in Vanity Fair. The book catapulted him into a major illustrator/caricaturist.
In that series for Vanity Fair, he juxtaposed very different public figures in his usual form. In a separate drawing, he poked fun at Emily Post. His caricatures, however, did not sit well with their subjects, and Rivera came to his defense.
“In Covarrubias’ art there is no vicious cruelty, it is all irony untainted with malice; a humor that is young and clean; a precise and well defined plasticity,” Rivera noted.
Through friends, Covarrubias and his wife found Harlem and its jazz, and they fell in love with it. He put his impressions of the Harlem people and their lives in a book of caricatures titled “Negro Drawings (1927).” His illustrations of Harlem were said to be the the first of their kind in Vanity Fair.
He became friends with many famous figures of the Harlem Renaissance. He illustrated Zora Neale Hurston‘s “Of Mules and Men,” 1935; W.C. Handy’s “Blues: An Anthology,” 1926, and Langston Hughes’ “The Weary Blues,” 1926.
He also created illustrations for books by the Limited Editions Club (LEC), which published limited editions of the classics. The Heritage Club was a subsidiary that sold books by subscription for those who could not afford to join the LEC. In 1939, Covarrubias completed a set of six murals/maps for the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco titled “Pageant of the Pacific,” showing the cultures of the Pacific area. Five of the murals are still in San Francisco, but the whereabouts of the sixth is unknown.
While he was best known as a caricaturist and illustrator, Covarrubias was also a painter, but seemingly did not create a large body of work in that genre. His name and reputation are not recognized as being on par with Rivera and other Mexican artists whose works pricked the conscience. He could better be described as a versatile artist who spread his talents around, as noted by a professor of art history during a show of his works in Santa Fe, NM, a year ago.
Some of his original paintings sell in the hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars, though, such as this oil on canvas titled “Sitting Woman with Flowers” that sold at Christie’s in 2010 for $146,500 (plus buyer’s premium) and “In Preparation of a Balinese Ceremony” that sold at Sotheby’s last year for $8.4 million.
Covarrubias and his wife were avid travelers, fueling his interest in cultural anthropology (especially early Mexican history), stopping in Cuba, China, Bali (he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to study there and wrote a book), Europe and North Africa. The couple eventually returned to Mexico to live in the town of Tizapan near Mexico City where he delved into the history of the country and they opened their home to far-flung artist-friends. Covarrubias died in 1957.
