Behind the lines of Jose Luis Cuevas.

• Author: Casciero, Annick Sanjurjo
• Position: Interview

JOSE LUIS CUEVAS, born in Mexico City in 1933, works in lithography and woodcuts, paints with oil, acrylic and water colors, creates sculpture, is a Sunday writer and occasionally even acts. Through it all, however, he remains obsessively devoted to drawing. And an unusually fruitful obsession it has been. Nothing seems to pass through his hands without taking on the highly personal stamp of an unmistakable "Cuevas" drawing: the floor tiles of his childhood home, the papers he filched from his father's paper factory, the letters, the envelopes ... He uses line, sometimes infused with wry humor, to create a hallucinatory, haunting world of the anguished and the odd, of phantoms and impenetrable loneliness. It is a world full of people, but the people are veiled and elusive.

Since his first exhibition, at the early age of 14, Cuevas has travelled a long road, exhibiting virtually everywhere. International renown has come to him in the form of numerous honors and prizes. These include the First International Prize in Drawing at the Sao Paulo Biennial, Brazil, 1959; First Prize, International Black and White Exhibit, Lugano, Switzerland, 1962; First International Prize in Printmaking, Graphic Arts Triennial, New Delhi, India, 1968; and the coveted National Prize in Fine Arts of Mexico, 1982, which until then had been awarded only to Diego Rivera, Rufino Tamayo and David Alfaro Siqueiros.

Americas: It was at the headquarters of the Organization of American States that you had your first show outside Mexico, wasn't it?

Jose Luis Cuevas: Yes, I came to Washington for the first time in 1954 to show my work at the invitation of Jose Gomez-Sicre, who was then director of the Visual Arts Division of the Pan American Union, now the OAS. Gomez-Sicre was enormously important for Latin American art. For many artists, Washington was a springboard to New York and even European galleries, as in my case. My first exhibition here enjoyed a terrific reception from the local critics and, thanks to that, shows in New York and Paris followed.

A correspondent from Time magazine did two interviews with me. One was published in Time and the other in Americas, the cover of which showed my work entitled The Butcher. I then collaborated occasionally with Americas, illustrating Jorge Luis Borges's El Aleph and a short story by Julio Cortazar. Eventually I also did illustrations for magazines like Life - that was many years ago - and more recently I illustrated a short story by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a Nobel Prize winner.

What are the most important books you have illustrated?

I illustrated Franz Kafka in 1959, here in the United States. The book, The Worlds of Kafka and Cuevas, was a great success and enjoyed good reviews. Then I illustrated for other authors, almost always with U.S. publishers: the Marquis de Sade, Francisco de Quevedo and many others. Some were my own texts, for instance an autobiography entitled Cuevas by Cuevas (1962), whose lithographs were also exhibited in Washington, Violence and Crime (1966), Crime by Cuevas (1968), Cuevas' Comedies (1968) . . .

Do you consider these endeavors part of your work as an artist?

You might say it runs parallel to my work as an artist...