Miguel Covarrubias was a painter, writer, illustrator, and documentarist of Indigenous cultures with sharp humour and a satirical eye, whose ethnographic research would greatly impact Mexico’s national identity after the Mexican Revolution. Covarrubias’s painting El Hueso (1940) depicts an Indigenous man with an umbrella sitting calmly, dressed in a suit and hat – a choice of clothes befitting a “modern man” – with a bone next to him. Waiting in what seems to be a porch somewhere in rural Mexico, the man has a glimpse of sadness in his eyes. Also known as Maestro Rural, this canvas shows a teacher waiting for un hueso, which is slang for getting a job through the favour of the politician in power. In this case, the pin on the lapel of the jacket indicates that the man is waiting for someone at the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which was founded in 1929 and held uninterrupted control in the country for seventy-one years. While depicting daily life in the countryside, Covarrubias painted a subtle critique of the political and social state of Mexico’s modernisation.
This is the first time the work of Miguel Covarrubias is presented at Biennale Arte.
—Eva Posas
