José Luis Cuevas and the Art of Performance 

Caroline D. Shields
University of Maryland 

Mexican artist José Luis Cuevas has crafted a legend around his life and artistic career. This paper locates the artist’s ambitions within the web of complex international agendas that critic and curator José Gómez Sicre superimposed upon Cuevas, his protégé. It does so by looking to Cuevas’s early self-portraiture, a genre through which the artist visibly constructed a persona beyond the reach of his ever-prying mentor.

As the Chief of the Pan American Union’s Visual Arts Unit between 1949 and 1981, Gómez Sicre effectively promoted a democratic, pro-capitalist ideology through artistic exchange and exhibition projects. Gómez Sicre attempted to “recast” young, Mexican artists as individual agents in a commercial market, rather than as anonymous promoters of the nation. Cuevas proved the perfect actor to take this fraught stage: young, attractive, and articulate, he had already asserted a position against Mexican muralism. As early as 1954, Gómez Sicre began a feverish campaign to shape Cuevas into the poster child of a supposedly apolitical, universalist art.^[1]

Due in part to the narratives that Gómez Sicre wove around Cuevas, the artist repeatedly proves difficult to classify. He is alternatively described as deeply truthful, egotistical, a celebrity, a man of the street, Mexican, North American, analytical, expressionistic, political, and apolitical.  In his self-portraits, Cuevas appears almost interchangeably as a tormented intellectual, a lover, a spectator, and a mutilated body. Considering the number of contradictory labels that others have imposed upon Cuevas, his self-portraits show remarkable expressive consistency in spite of their multiple personas. By employing the cognitive theory of symbolic self-completion, this paper offers a framework by which one may understand the artist’s work in its own right. No longer Mexican or North American, political or apolitical, in these self-portraits Cuevas defines himself simply as an observer, a thinker, an artist.