Elena Poniatowska, Miguel Covarrubias: vida y mundos (Mexico, Ediciones Era, 2004).

Miguel Covarrubias (1904-1957) lived an unclassifiable life. As a painter, cartoonist, stage designer, ballet director, book illustrator, filmmaker, museologist, ethnographer, and ethnologist, his work blurred the lines between art and science, scholarship and passion, objectivity and commitment. He seemed to succeed in every thing he tried without much effort. Fame came first when he worked as a cartoonist for Vanity Fair during his years in New York, portraying celebrities like William Faulkner or Gloria Swason. The allure of the rich cultural scenes of Harlem in the 1920s drew him to publish his Negro Drawings, a series of cartoons that conveyed the spirit of that vibrant part of the city. After working closely with the Mexican revolutionary government during the next decade—he played a crucial role in the institutionalization of ballet and other fine arts in Mexico—and with artists of the time—Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Alfonso Caso—he spent a few years in Bali, where he wrote an ethnography (considered today a classic in Balinese studies, Island of Bali). Covarrubias died on February 5, 1957, in Mexico City. He violently refused to be transferred to a private institution and get better medical attention because he wanted to go as a defeated working man, a proletarian.

And an unclassifiable life requires, of course, unclassifiable biographies. In contrast with the traditional style of life-storytelling based on correspondence, archival work, and personal journals, Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska tried to tell his story seen through the best (but most unreliable) witnesses: his friends. In Miguel Covarrubias: vida y mundos, she weaves interviews, anecdotes, essays, fictionalized dialogues, and her own family’s relationships with Covarrubias to write a compelling, multi-faceted narrative of his life and work. Describing Covarrubias’ final moments, she writes:

Posada’s calacas [skeletons] surrounded his hospital bed like big cartoons, they began to dance a huapango [traditional dance] and he received them with open arms… Maybe he believed, like the inhabitants of Bali with whom he shared so much time, that the body is merely a shell, the recipient of the soul. His life on Earth, therefore, was nothing more than an incident in the evolution of the soul. That is why Miguel left.

The combination of Mexican imagery, personal history, and some literary speculation, makes the book a necessary source to approach the life and works of Covarrubias. Each one of his friends serves like a window to the intricate life of one of the most important Mexican artists—in the strict sense of the term—of the twentieth century.