Portrait of Mexican Master Painter : Visiting Artist Brings Colorful Views to College

Mexican artist Jose Luis Cuevas is at work in a studio at Pasadena City College as about 50 students, a couple of photographers and a television crew watch and record. Straight-backed, intense, his dancing blue eyes seeing nothing but the picture taking shape, Cuevas draws a pair of large male heads.

Like most of Cuevas’ work, there is only a passing resemblance to observable reality. The heads seem to take on the qualities of masks, heavy browed and snout-nosed. One displays a long seam with cross-hatching, like a sutured scar, the other seems to sprout another face from his ear.

Distinctive Signature

Cuevas, surpassed only by 89-year-old Rufino Tamayo as Mexico’s most widely acclaimed living artist, dabs with ink-soaked cotton, slashes with brush and grease pencil, then applies the distinctive Cuevas signature. He turns to his audience, glassy-eyed and disoriented, like a man who has just awakened from a dream.

“ Fantastico ,” says Bertha, his wife of 28 years, who is sitting to the side. “In 33 years, this is the first time I’ve watched him at work. I’ve seen those little pencils and brushes, but I never knew what he did with them.”

Cuevas, 54, who is putting in a one-week stint as the college’s artist-in-residence, later dismisses his display in the studio as “theatrics.”

“The creative act is a private act, like making love,” said the artist, a slight man with a Napoleonic ego who sometimes talks of himself in the third person. “Drawing in front of television cameras becomes a theatrical representation, like Cuevas playing the role of Jose Luis Cuevas drawing.”

Linda Malm, chairwoman of the college’s art department, said Cuevas was the first choice of the department’s artists- in-residence committee. “They said, ‘He’s the world’s best draftsman, and we’d like to get him,’ ” Malm said . Often compared to British artist Francis Bacon and American Willem De Kooning for their dark visions, Cuevas was the recipient of the 1983 World Print Award. His works hang in the permanent collections of, among others, the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Musee d’Art Moderne in Paris and the San Diego Museum of Art.

The artist can be observed at work today, in a studio on the fifth floor of the R Building at the college. On Friday, he will lead a seminar for invited guests and present the college with one of the works he has produced there.

Despite the artist’s dismissal of public creation, his audience of art students is awed, admiringly hovering about him during a series of Cuevas-related activities at the school Monday. They study the collection of recent Cuevas prints on display in the school’s gallery, bloated, nightmarish figures with incongruously animalistic features. They listen reverently to the artist’s flippant attacks on some of his Mexican colleagues. They push programs and posters into his hands to be autographed, and they ask questions.

“What do you think of Chicano art?” a young woman asks.

“Something extraordinary is happening with the Chicanos,” says Cuevas breezily, basking in the attention of the students. “They’ve created a nostalgic art that refers back to something expressed by their parents or their grandparents.” So powerful is this nostalgia, with its references to Pancho Villa and the Virgin of Guadalupe, that it is sending tendrils across the border toward its source, Cuevas said.

“We have these artists in Mexico now who are returning to nationalism,” he said. “They have a tremendous influence from Chicanos working in the United States.”

Literary Influences

A young man presses the artist on his well-known literary influences (“Those of us who draw are close to the art of calligraphy, close to the act of writing,” Cuevas says). The student wants to know which artists best encompass both art and literature.

“Besides myself?” snaps Cuevas, who has written six books.

A provocative presence on the Mexican art scene since the early 1950s, the opinionated Cuevas has crossed swords with the mighty of the Mexican art world, suffered physical attacks and death threats, touched off brawls and carried on a passionate love-hate relationship with his native land. But he persists.

“We all live the middle of an earthquake,” says Cuevas, talking in a deliberate, professorial Spanish, almost as if he were dictating a letter. “I’d say that in each Mexican artist, there is the heart and mind of a revolutionary. We all carry Pancho Villa around inside.”

Born in a poor section of Mexico City, Cuevas spent his early years living above a paper factory. “My first recollection is of paper trimmings, scattered over the floor like fallen streamers and confetti from the paper punches,” he once wrote. “It was always carnival time at my house.”

The ready supply of something to draw on, an endless stream of bizarre characters outside his window and his own ill health (at age 10, he spent a year in bed with a heart ailment) drove him to art, he says.

Drawing and printmaking became his medium. “Even when I observe a painting that I love, such as a work by Rembrandt,” says Cuevas, who has studios in Mexico City, Paris and New York. “I carry out a very strange operation. In my mind, I denude the painting of paint, leaving only the skeleton of the drawing underneath.”

From the beginning, Cuevas was attracted to the grotesque. He sketched lunatics, criminals and stricken, deformed people on the streets of Mexico City. And he drew himself, a brooding, shadowy-eyed, tormented figure, who even now forms a central part of his work.

“Every morning I begin work by drawing a self-portrait,” he says. “Why? Because I’m the closest model I have. I draw precisely in front of the mirror, before I have showered and shaved or in any way improved my appearance, while I still feel the effects of dreams. Sometimes the dreams are nightmares.”

Daily Photographs

For the last 30 years, his wife has taken a daily photograph of him, he added. Photographs and self-portraits, filed chronologically, all go into the “Cuevas archives.”

“In spirit, I’m really an accountant,” the artist confesses with a self-deprecating grin. He seeks to register precisely, he explains, everything that occurs to him (including the fact that this is the 928th interview he has engaged in).

In the 1950s and 1960s, Mexican art was dominated by the nation’s great triumvirate of muralists: Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and Jose Clemente Orozco. Cuevas contends that the muralists, with their emphasis on epic historic scenes and on quaintly “folkloric” views of the Mexican marketplace, had put a virtual lock on Mexican art, forcing young artists like himself to seek recognition outside of the country.

“They were a type of sacred icon,” says Cuevas, who was acclaimed in New York and Paris long before he was accepted in Mexico City. “While Diego Rivera was denying me any possible future in Mexico, Pablo Picasso was buying my works at the Loeb Gallery in Paris.”

Attacked by some of his compatriots as negative and reactionary, Cuevas proclaimed that his grotesque depictions were part of a long tradition, going back to pre-Colombian artisans and medieval Spanish mystics, reflecting “the dark aspects of man.”

“I’m more of a Mexican nationalist than Rivera and Siqueiros put together,” Cuevas says with asperity of his erstwhile rivals, both long dead.

Antagonized Establishment

It may have been his outspokenness, including widely publicized assertions that the muralists existed behind a “cactus curtain,” more than his art that antagonized Mexico’s art establishment, Cuevas says. “I was the first effective opposition to them,” he says.

The nadir in his relationship with his own country came 11 years ago. In 1975, he had proclaimed to the press his intention of leaving Mexico forever. But barely a year later, he was haunted by the need to return to his homeland, the source of his inspiration.

After returning to Mexico City from Paris with his wife and three daughters, the family was awakened late one night by a loud explosion at the front of the building. “It sounded like dynamite going off, and the house shook as during an earthquake,” Cuevas says.

Someone had sprayed the front of the house with machine-gun fire, smashing doors and windows, destroying a Mercedes-Benz in his garage and stitching a pattern of bullet holes around some invaluable works of art on a hallway wall--”showing a blind respect for art,” says Cuevas wryly. The perpetrator was never found, Cuevas says, but he interpreted the attack as an official warning about his outspokenness.

The Cuevas family fled to Europe, but the artist returned later that year with a new show at the Museum of Modern Art of Mexico. “It was the return of the prodigal son,” he says. “I was very well received.”

Acknowledged Master

Suddenly, all of the sniping attacks began to fade, and Cuevas began to be acknowledged as a Mexican master. The acclaim has been building ever since.

“By now, I have the popularity of a movie star or a popular singer,” he said.

In the ultimate tribute, the national government has given Cuevas a building in Mexico City’s downtown historical district, a converted 17th-Century convent, to house the Jose Luis Cuevas Museum, the future repository of much of the artist’s work (as well as the Cuevas archives). The museum opens next summer.

Cuevas seems to miss those days of antagonism between the art establishment and the angry young man. He persists with his pictorial vision of the damned, turning out as many as 1,000 drawings and prints a year. (“I could illustrate Dante’s ‘Inferno,’ but never his ascent to paradise,” he says.)

But he is losing his ability to provoke, Cuevas confesses with a shake of the head. “In place of the public’s irritation,” says the artist, “there is social acceptance. In response to the artist’s aggressions, they buy his works.”

Cuevas turns the palms of his hands upward in amused frustration.