Born in 1904, the artist died of diabetes in a Mexico City hospital in 1957. At the age of fourteen he began working as a map drawer in the Ministry of Communications. The most important places for his apprenticeship were the streets of Mexico City and the Café de los Monotes owned by the brothers of José Clemente Orozco, which was frequently visited by artists and critics such as Rivera, Rodríguez Lozano, Abraham Angel, Manuel Maples Arce, José Juan Tabalada and others. Covarrubias, who was known as "chamaco" (kid), began his career as a caricaturist and left for New York in 1923, and so most of his work was done abroad. His book The Prince of Wales and Other Famous Americans published by Knopf in 1925, was one of his many successes as a caricaturist as well as his work for such magazines as Vanity Fair, Fortune and Harper´s Bazaar. He traveled to Bali as a member of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He painted six murals entitled Pacific Basin for the Treasure Island World Fair of San Francisco in 1938. He contributed to the fileds of caricature, book illustration, painting, museography, collecting, set design and writing.
