Covarrubias’ China: Art, Propaganda, and Radical Cultural Diplomacy

This essay traces Miguel Covarrubias’ intellectual and artistic itineraries between China and Mexico. From providing illustrations for Vanity Fair and books such as 水浒传 (translated by Pearl S. Buck as All Men Are Brothers) to founding the Mexican Society of Friendship with China in 1953, Covarrubias’ intervened in the visual making of Chinese history and culture for American and Mexican audiences. It explores how literary and visual exchanges between Mexico, the US, and China—how subaltern cosmopolitans experienced and depicted places and ideas—contributed to the rise of global modernisms in art, music, and new racial assemblages. Covarrubias’ visits to Shanghai in the 1930s triggered a “Covarrubiasmania” among Chinese artists who copied his drawings, style, and methods. Chinese artists including the Zhang brothers and Liao Bingxiong saw his work in smuggled issues of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, and in local magazines like Shanghai Manhua (上海漫畫) and Modern Sketch (时代漫画). In Mexico, Covarrubias translated Mao and published articles on Chinese art, architecture, and politics. He founded the Mexican Society of Friendship with Popular China, Mexico’s only diplomatic liaison with the People’s Republic of China, and painted the serious portrait of Mao that hung on its walls. His illustrations for the classic novel All Men Are Brothers (1948) were groundbreaking: a Chinese reviewer found it hard to believe that a Mexican artist could do such culturally and linguistically accurate work—the artist had become an anthropologist. I chart Covarrubias’ turn to Maoism and his visualization of China as part of a global project of deploying art and anthropology as anti-propaganda: as images to combat stereotypes, ignorance, and racism.