Neglected Treasures

After resettling in his native Mexico, Covarrubias followed a similar path, becoming an expert on the ancient Olmec civilization. He helped raise money to excavate some of the country's most important archaeological sites. The couple's home in Tizapan on the outskirts of Mexico City became (along with that of close friends Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo) a magnet for intellectuals and international notables.

The couple kept a multidisciplinary list of friends, from Amelia Earhart and Georgia O'Keeffe to Dolores del Rio and John Huston. Legend has it that it was at their kitchen table (Cowan was a gourmet cook) that Nelson Rockefeller, a frequent visitor, agreed to finance a major excavation of Palenque in the Yucatán. As Williams notes in her book, the couple's salon "was what Virginia Woolf's home was for the London crowd [and] what Gertrude Stein's was for Paris, except the food was inarguably better."

Guadalupe Rivera Marín, daughter of Diego Rivera, recalls being at the house with her father as a child, when the guest list included D.H. Lawrence and Orson Welles. "Covarrubias took great pride in his magnificent [archaeological] collection," she says. "He would say to my father, 'Diego, I have just bought some Olmec pieces better than yours,' to which my father would laugh and reply, 'You practically discovered the Olmecs. You deserve them.'"

Covarrubias' lifelong fascination with anthropology was more than an avocation. For instance, his study of iconography led him to determine that the Olmecs preceded the so-called Classic Era in Mexico (200-900 A.D.), long before archaeologists arrived at the same conclusion. In turn, admirers say, Covarrubias' interest in other cultures (he wrote about African Americans, the Balinese, and pre-Hispanic peoples of Mexico) play out vividly in his modernist murals, easel paintings, sketches, and illustrations.

María Elena Rico Covarrubias, who was a teenager when her uncle moved from Tizapan after the breakup of his marriage to her family's Mexico City compound, says he rarely slept and "left the light on in his apartment until daybreak, working day and night" near the end of his life. "He always smiled despite the ulcer that was killing him," she recalls. "Seeing and hearing him left me feeling calm."

Despite being a repository of stories from Cowan about her life with Covarrubias (including her bitterness over his leaving her for another woman), Williams says she had no intention of writing a biography until after she moved to the Bay Area in the mid-'80s and married for a second time (to San Francisco attorney Tom Williams), when friends prevailed upon her to do so.

By then, Covarrubias' work had begun to enjoy a resurgence of popularity, not only in Mexico and the United States, but also in Asia, where his evocative depictions of the Balinese were snatched up by collectors in Singapore and elsewhere.

Yet, in San Francisco, there remained the "appreciation gap," Williams says. And with the murals' status as curatorial orphans looming once again, she says, "that certainly hasn't changed."

The recent fuss in Mexico over the murals makes their history of neglect in San Francisco all the more extraordinary. "People here clearly haven't appreciated what they had," says art collector Bob Marcus, a retired aluminum company executive, who has admired the paintings since moving to the city in the early 1970s.

From the time they were installed at the Ferry Building in 1959 until their removal in 2001, the murals received little if any maintenance, observers say. "They were gray and dirty with years of grime, and splattered with God knows what," says San Francisco caricaturist Zach Trenholm, a huge Covarrubias fan who has the artist's self-portrait tattooed on his left arm. "It was really kind of pathetic."

Williams says she was just as appalled by the institutional apathy she encountered in the mid-'90s upon starting a campaign to rescue the paintings. Talk of renovating the Ferry Building had surfaced, and the time seemed right to push for finding the murals a new home.

Her appeals to then-Mayor Willie Brown and the Arts Commission, the agency charged with championing public art in the city, went nowhere, she says. Through her and Rivera Marín's efforts, a team of Mexican government art restorers wrote to the commission, offering to come to San Francisco at their own expense to consult on how best to restore the paintings. The letter went unanswered, Williams says.

But a bigger indignity occurred in 2001, after the work of renovating the Ferry Building had already begun, with the murals — uncovered and unprotected — still on the walls.