The Covarrubias Circle: Nickolas Muray's Collection of Twentieth-Century Mexican Art (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center Imprint Series)
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About this book
New York in the 1920s and 1930s was a modernist mecca that drew artists writers and other creators of culture from around the globe. Two such expatriates were Mexican artist and Renaissance man Miguel Covarrubias and Hungarian photographer Nickolas Muray. Their lifelong friendship gave Muray an entre into Covarrubiass circle of fellow Mexican artistsFrida Kahlo Rufino Tamayo Juan Soriano Fernando Castillo Guillermo Meza Roberto Montenegro and Rafael Navarrowhose works Muray collected. This outstanding body of Mexican modernist art now owned by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center (HRC) at the University of Texas at Austin forms the subject of this beautifully illustrated volume. Produced in conjunction with the Ransom Centers exhibition "Miguel Covarrubias: A Certain Clairvoyance " this volume contains color plates of virtually all the items in Nickolas Murays collection of twentieth-century Mexican art. The majority of the works are by Covarrubias while the excellent works by the other artists reflect the range of aesthetic shifts and modernist influences of the period in Mexico. Accompanying the plates are five original essays that establish Covarrubiass importance as a modernist impresario as influential in his sphere as Ezra Pound T. S. Eliot and Jean Cocteau were in theirs. Likewise the essays reestablish the significance of Nickolas Muray whose success as a master of color photography portraiture advertising imagery and commercial illustration has made him difficult to place within the history of photography as a fine art. As a whole this publication of the Nickolas Muray Collection vividly illustrates the transgression of generic boundaries and the cross-fertilization among artists working in different media from painting and photography to dance and ethnography that gave modernism its freshness and energy. It also demonstrates that American modernism was thoroughly infused with a fervor for all things Mexican of which Covarrubias was a principal proponent and that Mexican modernists no less than their American and European counterparts answered Pounds call to "make it new."
