El Doctor Rudolph van Crefel y su paciente No. 1

“My interest in the dying and the insane is my vision of modern life,” Cuevas declared to Time magazine in 1954, on the occasion of his starry debut in the United States at Washington’s Pan American Union.1 As an adolescent, he found affinities with the indigent and the mentally ill of Mexico City, sketching delirium and deformity with exquisite, expressionist sensitivity. Working within the macabre tradition of Goya and Picasso, Cuevas embraced these psychiatric subjects with morbid curiosity and compassion, drawn in part from first-hand observation of patients at La Castañeda, an insane asylum. A double portrait, "El Doctor Rudolph van Crefel y su paciente No. 1" pairs the existential face of madness—mutilated in its own delusions—with the gnarled countenance of the doctor, both of them ashen white. Cuevas renders their crude physiognomy with deft, finely-hatched black lines, inscribing the pain and paranoia of modern psychosis with raw, graphic intensity.

1 José Luis Cuevas, quoted in “Art: A Vision of Life,” Time, August 16, 1954.

This text was created in collaboration with the University of Maryland Department of Art History & Archaeology and written by Patricia Ortega-Miranda.