Miguel Covarrubias
1904–1957
The artist, writer, and anthropologist Miguel Covarrubias was an important figure in New York’s cultural landscape during the Jazz Age. Arriving in 1923 from his native Mexico City, he quickly developed a reputation as a brilliant caricaturist and took up with the city’s intellectual and artistic elite. By 1924 he had rented studio space with another young artist, Al Hirschfeld, and began frequenting Harlem nightclubs and associating with key figures of the renaissance under way among the city’s African American writers and artists. In March of that year, the Whitney Studio Club presented a show of his drawings, and he began what would become a long association with Vanity Fair, which published a number of his illustrations. At the end of the year his work appeared there again, in a spread titled “Enter, The New Negro,” in which the young artist interpreted the lively nightclub scene in Harlem.
This drawing was reproduced in that spread, along with seven others by the artist, accompanied by captions from the Afro-Carribean writer Eric Walrond. Covarrubias typically made hundreds of sketches while directly observing Harlem’s nightlife, but he clearly labored over this piece carefully in his studio, creating subtle gradations of black and gray washes. Beyond his concise and legible presentation of a Harlem couple out on the town, Covarrubius proves himself a deft master of modernist form. His streamlined figures suggest a nod to the burgeoning Art Deco aesthetic, while the fragmented glass and upturned plane of the table echo elements of Cubism. Covarrubias published a slightly different version of this sheet in his book Negro Drawings (1927), a landmark publication capturing the Harlem Renaissance.
Introduction
Miguel Covarrubias, also known as José Miguel Covarrubias Duclaud (22 November 1904 — 4 February 1957) was a Mexican painter, caricaturist, illustrator, ethnologist and art historian. Along with his American colleague Matthew W. Stirling, he was the co-discoverer of the Olmec civilization.
Wikidata identifier
Q1709505
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License . Accessed April 30, 2025.
Country of birth
Mexico
Roles
Artist, caricaturist, designer, graphic artist, illustrator, muralist, painter, writer
ULAN identifier
500122721
Names
Miguel Covarrubias, Miguel Covarrubias Duclaud, Miguel Duclaud Covarrubias
Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed April 30, 2025.
