MIGUEL COVARRUBIAS (1904-1957) Food Stand in Bali 14 15/16 x 19 in (37.9 x 48.2 cm) (Executed circa 1934) ,1934
Herkunft : The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by Anahí Luna.
Rachel Warrington Pease Collection, Sharpsburg, Maryland.Thence by descent to the present owners.
Exhibited
Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Fifteenth International Exhibition Water Colors, Pastels, Drawings and Monotypes, March 12 – May 10, 1936, no. 101.
'He understood everything there was to know about Bali. I have never forgotten the brother from far-away Mexico: dark-skinned Miguel with the laughing brown eyes, who looked every bit as Balinese as the next man dressed in a 'kamben' with a flower behind his ear. To us he seemed to have a Balinese soul' (I. Gust Alit Oka Degut quoted in A. Williams, Covarubbias, Austin, 1994, p. 69).
Miguel Covarrubias, the Mexican painter, caricaturist, illustrator, ethnologist, and art historian, visited Bali for the first time in 1930 on his honeymoon with his wife, the photographer Rosa Rolando. Drawn to the Indonesian island after reading a 1926 book of photographs by Gregor Krause, they were initially accompanied by a Dutch guide and stayed in a Dutch-run Balinese hotel in Denpasar with other tourists. However, the pair grew disillusioned with the singular image of Bali they were being fed, electing to extend their three-month stay to gain a truer picture of the island. Covarrubias recalled, 'As we became more and more familiar with our new life, and our ears grew accustomed to Malay, we made friends among the Balinese...We were already weary of the stolid prudishness of Dutch hotel life, and since we could not afford the high rates much longer, we looked for another place to live' (A. Williams, ibid., p. 62).
At the start of his career, Covarrubias drafted maps for the Mexican government's geographical office, often sketching caricatures of colleagues when bored. As an usher at the Lyric Theater, he advanced his caricature skills, drawing audience members during intermissions (A. Williams, ibid, p. 7). His first published caricatures appeared in Policromías, the student magazine of the National University of Mexico in Mexico City, in October of 1920. He then moved to New York in the summer of 1923, where his drawings of prominent society figures appeared on the covers of The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and other notable publications. His illustrations for Vanity Fair's 'Impossible Interviews' launched a thirteen-year working relationship between Covarrubias and the publication, embedding himself prominently in the New York scene of artists and celebrity culture and solidifying himself as one of the leading caricaturists of his generation.
This time in New York attracted Covarrubias to Bali every further as it represented the antithesis to his New York cosmopolitan lifestyle. In Bali, life was 'simple, natural, highly spiritual, creative, and aesthetic' (A. Williams, ibid, p. 62). Finding comfort in the similar temperament and humor of the Balinese people to his own, Covarrubias submerged himself in the customs, culture, and communities of Bali, a vast difference from the role occupied by the traditional tourist abroad. Island of Bali, an ethnographic account of his time there, was published in 1937 and included 90 of his sketches and 120 of his wife's photographs of their travels. In a review published the same year, the book was lauded as 'A finely executed masterpiece, a scholarly study magnificently illustrated by an artist who showed true genius as a writer, a draftsman, and a painter. It demonstrated his painstaking research, his accurate marshalling of fact, and the ordered results of key first-hand observation. The result was worthy of a trained ethnologist, but with the feeling and sympathetic understanding that might only be expected from someone of Balinese birth' (quoted in 'Biography of an Island Set in the ...
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