Art: A Vision of Life

One of Mexico’s greatest modern painters, old (70) Francisco Goitia, sat beside deathbeds to catch the last gasp of unwilling models. Diego Rivera sketched during all-night vigils in the Tarascan graves near Tzintzuntzan. And David Siqueiros was perhaps at his best when quartering and Duco-painting a heroic Cuauhtemoc in his death throes. Last week the U.S. got a good look at the work of a new Mexican artist, Jose Luis Cuevas, who sometimes plays truant from the embalmer’s school of Mexican art.

Young (21) Painter Cuevas strayed only as far as the insane asylum, the charity hospital and the slums. With an economy of fuzzy line, scratched on paper with almost hairless brushes, he powerfully portrayed the hunched reticence of schizophrenia, the hauteur of megalomania, the stares of poverty and disease. His show of 43 ink drawings and watercolors at Washington’s Pan American Union caused one old lady to ask: “How can you be so young and so morbid?” To this often repeated question, Cuevas replies flatly: “My interest in the dying and the insane is my vision of modern life.”

Artist Cuevas professes to be untutored and uninfluenced—except for his admiration of Jose Clemente Orozco and Rufino Tamayo. He dismisses the other Mexican masters, Diego Rivera and David Siqueiros, with a shrug: “They died several years ago, and what is left are the politics and the public relations.”

The son of a Mexico City airline pilot, Cuevas discovered his genre at ten, when he found a dead rabbit, gutted it and sketched its entrails. He tried oils at 13 but soon abandoned them for ink and watercolors, roamed the streets in dungarees, sketching the poor and infirm. An elder brother, studying to be a psychiatrist, got him permission to visit insane asylums for his studies.

At the Pan American Union last week,

Cuevas’ show was a sellout at $20 to $50 a sketch. One Manhattan dealer sold several, sight unseen, by long-distance telephone. Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art took one look at the show’s catalogue and reserved two of the most impressive asylum studies.

Painter Cuevas, present at his show, was not as excited about Washington as Washington was about him. He found the city too orderly and antiseptic for inspiration. But Cuevas managed to escape, spent some time at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for the mentally ill, sketching.