Music is a Higher Revelation than Philosophy Beethoven

Like the United States, Latin America was caught up with abstraction in the 1950s and 1960s. But José Luis Cuevas resisted the trend. Instead he is drawn to the more expressive subject of the figure. He is an incessant sketcher—habits learned early growing up above his grandfather's paper mill in Mexico City—and he often imbues his figures with nightmarish qualities, such as the multiple heads imbedded here. One series of works was devoted to inmates at an insane asylum, another to corpses. Cuevas was famous in Mexico as the enfant terrible who, rather than using his art for reform as the muralists did, chose the more personal path of exploring alienation through his observations of Mexico's beggars, prostitutes, fortune tellers, and homeless.