In December 2005 I was lucky
enough to visit Cuba, for the Latin American film festival. While in
Havana, I visited some of its many museums and galleries and I was
particularly impressed with the Museo Nacional Palacio de Bellas Artes,
which is the Cuban national museum of fine arts. The gallery has an
international and Cuban section, and it was in the Cuban section that I
found myself spending a happy few hours, learning a lot about the country
and its history as well as becoming familiar with several artists that I
had not had the pleasure of seeing before.
The museum underwent extensive
renovations in 1999, and so it was a very pleasant and well-designed
gallery to stroll through, abundant in natural light and ample space for
paintings, sculptures and installations.
I first visited a special
exhibition, a retrospective of the painter and ceramicist Alfredo
Sosabravo. Sosabravo’s paintings are large, brightly coloured and
chaotic, each canvas filled with the recurring motifs of animals, fish and
birds. He frequently seemed to infuse his many-creatured canvases with a
sense of almost mechanical operation, thus creating a surreal effect. His
ceramics on display showed the same distinctive style of bright colourings
– but reflected human body shapes, or body-part shapes.
Another painter, sculptor and
ceramicist who worked also very much in the Surrealist tradition was the
Cuban painter Wifredo Lam. Lam is quite well known both in Cuba and
internationally, and so I had high expectations of seeing his work in the
Museo Nacional Palacio de Bellas Artes. Unfortunately I only saw a few
token items of his work there, as there is a much larger collection in the
Centro de Arte Contemporaneo Wifredo Lam, which I did not get a chance to
see.
Lam had mixed Cuban heritage:
African Spanish and Creole on his mother’s side and Chinese on his
father’s. Lam travelled a lot internationally to learn his art: he was
close friends with Pablo Picasso and also Andre Breton, the French writer,
poet and theorist who introduced Lam to
surrealism. It was Breton who defined surrealism as ‘pure psychic
automaton’, which in terms of Lam’s art meant
spontaneous drawing without conscious aesthetic or moral self-censorship.
Female artists always seem to be
under-represented in great collections so I was interested to see some of
the work of Amelia Pelaez del Casal,
a Havana-born artist who was part of the Cuban Vanguardia. The vanguardia
was an artistic movement in Cuba in the 1920s and 30s which saw Cuban
artists move towards European modernism in an attempt to define Cuban
nationalism in the contemporary language of Western cultural centres like
Paris (where Pelaez lived and studied for some time). She produced some
beautiful landscapes and seascapes in the early part of her career with a
real attention to detail.
In her later career, she developed
a distinctive style which I think is beautifully described in the
following paragraph from a catalogue:
“Her highly personal and
original interpretation or architectural and decorative elements
associated with the colonial period grounds her work in a Cuban cultural
context. A thick black line outlining areas of intense colour produces an
effect that recalls the stained glass of a fanlight or the baroque design
of decorative ironwork in colonial houses; a free flowing arabesque line
evokes the intricate weave of wicker furniture. Her use of a heavy black
line also serves to give the tones of her compositions a distinctive
brilliance. Light appears to penetrate from behind the picture through
the filter of coloured glass.”
Another local Cuban artist that
greatly impressed me was Rene Portocarrero. Portocarerro was born
in Havana and self-taught in the arts. This is said to be because his
fiery temperament was not compatible with an academic or apprenticeship
training in fine arts. Primarily a painter, he also worked as a book
illustrator, theater designer and ceramist. His first exhibition was in
the Museo Nacional Palacio de Bellas Artes but now he is exhibited in
major galleries throughout the world.
A large part of his work deals
with Spanish Colonial subjects (including religious themes) and
Spanish-Cuban interiors. With thick brushstrokes texturing his busy
canvasses, the paintings are complex and some time is needed to take in
the range of themes and ideas present in his work. As with the other
artists discussed here, his work depicts an emerging Cuban national
identity with a focus on the daily life and social activities that
transcend the myriad of pressures and influences on Cuban culture over the
last century that have come from Latin America, the United States,
corporatisation and finally the communist revolution.
In the 19th Century
section of the Museo Nacional Palacio de Bellas Artes, I really liked the
work of Armando Menocal. He was a prominent Cuban painters
of the period, best known for his portraits, landscapes and history
subjects. He was highly influential and mentored generations of Cuban
artists. His own influences came from the Impressionists and by the
Spanish masters, whose work he saw on a trip to Madrid. On his return to
Cuba he worked mainly in portraiture and landscape as well as designing
the Comedy, Music and Orgy allegorical murals for the lobby ceilings of
the Grand Theatre of Havana. He joined the liberation army in 1895 and
started a series of works depicting Cuban martial scenes. He was the first
painter to depict the topic of the Cuban War of Independence. The
establishment of the Republican government marked the beginning of a new
stage in Menocal’s life, when he became an official painter and is
assigned to decorate the houses of the political power. His works then
divide according to its historical or allegorical topics. He was a
prolific and critically acclaimed artist during his lifetime, when his
work was highly praised by critics for its emotional resonance, its bold
coloration and impressive brushwork.
Menocal is credited with
contributing to the renewal of Cuban cultural life at the turn of the 20th
century by introducing specifically Cuban themes into art. While Cuban
artists had been painting traditional subjects from Western art, such as
Greek myths, in a neo-classical style, he was notable for portraying
incidents from Cuban history.
In the short time that I was in
Havana, I was only able to obtain a small insight into what is obviously a
long history of Cuban painting with a rich nationalist tradition.
I look forward to one day
returning to Havana, and will most certainly also be looking out for these
and other Cuban painters when I visit art galleries.
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