Covarrubias

Rating:
Summary: Great reading
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: a genius of life and art
Review: 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.