Miguel Covarrubias

Modern Mexican art has also been nourished by the cosmopolitan activity of asrtists who worked mainly abroad, as has been said of Angel Zárraga and Miguel Covarrubias. Son of a wealthy Porfirian family which prospered even more after the Revolution, the latter lived in New York in the twenties, as attaché to the Mexican Consulate, thanks to connections and reccomendations. His skill as a draftsman made him a renown cartoonist for Vanity Fair and Fortune. His relationship with the artistic and intellectual community of Mexico was constant, and his entrance into painting was always affected by the qualities of formal syntheisis, characteristic of cartoons. Nevertheless, his small watercolors on Mexican subjects are full of grace and dignity, as well as a soft expressiveness and color. Covarrubias' vision of Mexico was always somewhere between a romantic native Indian world and the plausible calm of stability suppossedly reached by the Revolution.