Miguel Covarrubias, was a Mexican born artist and early pioneer of the study of pre-Columbian art. He spent much of his life in New York City in the 1920’s, and 30’s, and achieved a level of fame and success as an illustrator and caricaturist whose work appeared in Vanity Fair and the New Yorker. At the same time he was a painter and did some public commissions. When he and his wife returned to Mexico City he continued to work and develop his ideas on pre-Columbian art, whose study was in its infancy. He was multidisciplinary in his approach, and willing and able to draw comparisons between different cultures, unconstrained by the siloed approach scholars take today. In his time, there was not much known about the Mayans, and the Olmecs had only just been identified/discovered, and the timeline was conjectural and has been changed by new discoveries. The most important development since his time is our ability to read Mayan hieroglyphs and finally understand what was written on the buildings and stelas with inscriptions. But he had an eye, and his pioneering work is still valuable to us today.
In his book, “The Eagle, the Jaguar, and the Serpent”, he related the art of China to that of the Mayans, and made comparisons around the Pacific rim cultures with the art of various places of the Americas. It is quite amazing the comparisons he came up with, and attempted to systematize by types. His explanation for these similarities was a theory of diffusion, which is the transmission of motifs and ideas through contact with other cultures, either directly by a person from one culture finding their way to the other culture, or by transmission, with no direct contact but people being influenced by other cultures via intermediate cultures. Diffusion is difficult to accept in this case, as the time and space differentials are so great. Archaic Chinese art dates to between 1500 to 200 B.C., while the height of the Mayan cultures isn’t until 300 to 1000 A.D., roughly speaking. But the visual similarities he highlights are uncanny and undeniable. And then there is the problem of a lack of evidence of direct contact or explanation as to how these motifs spread over such a distance and long time period.
Illustration by Covarrubias in his book, “The Eagle, the Jaguar, and the Serpent”.
Covarrubias describes the problem thusly;
“….the scientific world is now sharply divided into “diffusionist”(those who believe in an early diffusion of Asiatic and Pacific cultural traits through America) and “isolationists”(those who claim that all Indian culture was a local development)…..”
I would say it is the isolationists who are predominant today, you don’t hear about diffusionist theories. However, the isolationists also don’t address the similarities evident in the visual artistic record or suggest any alternative explanation.
While much of the scholarship of Covarrubias has been superseded by new discoveries, he does present intriguing ideas that are not addressed by modern scholars. They simply ignore the issue as unsolvable and unexplainable and therefor don’t look at it. I do have some ideas for explaining the similarity, but those I will discuss later.
In this exhibition, I am presenting the early Chinese jades from my collection in relation to the art of the Mayans from the surviving architecture here in the Yucatan. This exhibition is a visual exercise and meant to be thought provoking. It is a subject that I would like to see explored further and I am convinced that in time we will understand these similarities, as there is so much we are still discovering about the Mayans and ancient American civilizations.
