Miguel Covarrubias’s 1925 watercolor-collage caricature of his friend the photographer Carl Van Vechten. Creditvia Throckmorton Fine Art/Estate of Maria Elena Rico Covarrubias.

Born in Mexico City in 1904, Covarrubias was a member of Kahlo’s inner circle — a highly sociable workaholic, painter, anthropologist, teacher, writer and sometime curator — who had a chameleonic talent for drawing. He would illustrate his own books on the ethnography of Mesoamerican Mexico, but arriving in New York, at age 19, he established himself with influential celebrity caricatures for magazines like The New Yorker, Vogue and Vanity Fair… Covarrubias died in 1957 at age 53, ending a career worthy of a much longer life.

(Roberta Smith, from “What to See in New York Art Galleries This Week,” NYTimes, 2-7-19)

(c) 2019 JMN.