Light, Color, Vision

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Without an important pictorial legacy from its first settlers, such as the continental legacies of the Maya, Nahuatl or Quechua, the presence in Cuba of the art of color began with maps that included the island at the American geographical crossings, such as Sebastian Münster's precious Novae Insulae (1540). As it is often the case for other cultural aspects, Cuba's strategic geographical location determined its earliest (and at times imagined) historical manifestation in paintings.

That interest also motivated the creation of engravings, whose main subjects were Cuba's bays and systems of defenses, by artists who visited the island or imagined it, artists at the service of European countries (Holland, France or England) that needed military intelligence. These engravings developed in ever-greater-realism and detail from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. An eighteenth-century collection of illustrations by Dominique Serres, a Frenchman nationalized in England, detailed in color many scenes of the capture of Havana by the English in 1762. The increasing wealth of a Creole slave-owning aristocracy, interested in decorating its residences, gave rise to a little-studied presence of masterful painters and primitive artists, who were even able to establish schools. Samples of their work are found in the Casa de la Obrapía owned by the Calvo de la Puerta family (seventeenth and eighteenth century pieces and at the residences of the Count de Lagunillas, the Count of Peñalver and the Marques de Jústiz (nineteenth-century pieces). They provide ample evidence of the existence of a flourishing school of interior decoration in Havana as well as in Trinidad. The work of these artists also appeared on exterior spaces as can be observed in Havana's Plaza Vieja and in Trinidad.

The first Cuban painters whose names we know are Nicolás de la Escalera (1734-1804) and Vicente Escobar (1757-1854). Escalera was a painter, apparently self-taught, of religious altarpieces and paintings such as La Santísima Trinidad coronando a la Virgen, La Virgen del Rosario and San José and formal portraits such as the one of Captain Don Luis de Velazco. He was the painter of the altar and the pendentives around the dome of the Santa María del Rosario Church, called hyperbolically "The Baroque Cathedral of the Cuban Countryside." In one of the pendentives, Escalera painted the first Count of Casa Bayona surrounded by his family and his servants, including a black slave who found in the count's domain the medicinal waters that helped his master recover from an illness. Escobar, who probably studied in New Spain, is of great interest for he primarily devoted himself to painting portraits of Cuban high society. He fashioned portraits of the Capitanes Generales of the Island of Cuba, a complete gallery of paintings currently stored at the Archivos de Indias in Sevilla. Outstanding mainly as a physiognomist, Escobar became a fashionable painter, the first such recognized painter in Cuba.

Other foreign painters whose works have survived are Juan del Río and, most abundantly, Giuseppe Perovani, whose paintings are preserved in several Havana churches and who is best known for the excellent portrait of the Bishop of Havana Juan José Díaz de Espada y Fernández de Landa.

Related to the Diocesan authority of the learned and liberal Bishop Espada and the equally learned intendente (quartermaster general) Alejandro Ramirez, is the founding in 1818 of the San Alejandro Academy of Drawing and Painting (later also of sculpture), one of the few institutions of colonial Cuba that has survived to the present day. At San Alejandro's classrooms and workshops, many generations of Cuban artists, including women starting in 1878, were educated. To head San Alejandro, the Bishop recommended French artist Juan Baptist Vermay (1786-1833), educated in Paris at the school of David.
 

With Vermay, and subsequent directors at San Alejandro, academicism became the norm in Cuban pictorial production, prevailing, although with new techniques (e.g., impressionism), into the first two decades of the twentieth century. Espada, a progressive man in many aspects, did not enjoy the gilded and abrupt breaks of the baroque and thus he emptied the baroque temples of Havana, replacing their baroque altars and altarpieces with pieces more compatible with his neoclassic taste. Santa María del Rosario, in the outskirts of the capital, managed to survive such iconoclastic onslaught. Engraving attained excellent results in the nineteenth century. Many costumbrista artists, mainly foreign, who visited or settled in Cuba, produced pieces rich in detail and masterful composition. Examples of these engravings are the aquatints of Hypolite Garneray that depict animated scenes of colonial daily life in various places of Havana towards 1830, like the Plaza Vieja and the Plaza de Armas or the Paseo del Prado in the outskirts of the city. Other worthy examples of this production are: Federico Mialhe's remarkable litho-v graphs (1838) included in his album La Isla de Cuba pintoresca and Eduardo Laplante's Los ingenios de Cuba, a detailed depiction of Cuban sugar mills from the area of Trinidad (c. 1857) right after the introduction of the steam engine, portraying slaves and other employees. These illustrations, with their great realism, are considered among the best examples of American lithographic art. In turn, Augusto Ferrán and José Baturone took full advantage of colorful California gold prospectors, who were passing through Havana, to create another valuable graphic document: Album californiano. In the second half of the century, another excellent painter, engraver and caricaturist, Víctor Patricio de Landaluze, a Spaniard residing in Havana, made another exquisite collection of lithographs collected in the volume Tipos y costumbres de Cuba. Landaluze presented a vast gallery of popular types, both masculine and feminine, and a graceful pageant of people in everyday pursuits. Landaluze also painted oils with distinct nineteenth-century Cuban traits, although politically he was inclined to favor Spain during these years of armed conflict between the metropolis and its Antillean colony.

The development of the production of habanos in highly specialized factories facilitated another expression in Cuban plastic arts: the cigar labels and bands that served to identify the company and to guarantee the authenticity and high quality of its products. Cuban cigars and cigar boxes were also produced in the United States when the industry migrated. This lithographic cigar box art (with allegorical, historical and folkloric modes) was enriched by subjects and motifs from the United States. This occurred mainly at Key West and Tampa, the main cigar-producing enclaves that, of course, used raw material from Cuba.
 

Many of Vermay's works, religious themes and numerous portraits, have been preserved. Among the portraits there is another rendition of Bishop Espada and portraits of the Montalvo and Manrique de Lara families. Vermay's most outstanding work covers three walls with the commemorative building known as El Templete, erected in 1820 in front of the historic Plaza de Armas, in the heart of Habana Vieja. El Templete marks the place where, according to tradition, the first mass was celebrated at the beginning of the sixteenth century. One of the murals of the building represents that event and another one is of the first Havana town hall (or city council). The largest and most significant mural, on the back wall, captures the very inauguration of El Templete itself with a composition where the Capitán General Dionisio Vives and other civil functionaries, such as the intendente Alejandro Ramírez and Bishop Espada, appear surrounded by the ecclesiastical curia and numerous Cuban men and women from the most distinguished families of Havana society. Near an edge of the mural, Vermay included his self-portrait.

The benefits derived from the establishment of San Alejandro did not take long in leading to excellent results with a large number of Cuban painters. During the second half of the nineteenth century many of them went on to study in New York or Paris, where sometimes they established residence. Thus, nineteenth-century Cuban painting was of the quality and merit to be comparable to music or poetry. The main figures were: Esteban Chartrand (1840-1884), Federico Martínez (1835-1912), Guillermo Collazo (1850-1896), Leopoldo Romañach (1862-1951) and Armando Menocal (1863-1942). Menocal made large murals in public buildings in Havana at the beginning of the twentieth century. Romanach became the patriarch of Cuban painting, as a distinguished elder and mentor at San Alejandro. Other names can be added to this list: the precocious and expressive Juana Borrero, who died in her youth, and the landscape painter Valentín Sanz Carta, originally from the Canary Islands, who managed to catch, much better than many Cuban painters, the presence and function of color and light in the tropical nature of the island.
 

Chartrand, who emigrated in 1863 to the United States where he resided until the end of his life, shows the romantic influence of Corot in the atmosphere of his Cuban landscapes (Salto de Hanabanilla, Paisaje con riachuelo, Visita del ingenio Tinguaro) and in his non-Cuban subjects, for example, the Chapel of Lourdes at the Havana Iglesia de la Merced. The excellent Santiago painter Federico Martinez produced portraits, elegant and rich in color, like the one of Landaluze, the Portrait of a Girl and Portrait of a Lady. Collazo, also from Santiago but who lived for many years in Paris where he served the cause of Cuban independence, is according to some critics the best Cuban painter of the nineteenth century. He was masterful in creating a counterpoint that integrates French modes with Cuban landscapes and remarkable performances in paintings such as La siesta, Retrato de la Señora Malpica and the totally European Dama sentada a la orilla del mar. Menocal was, like Romañach, under the impressionist influence. He fought against Spain and made some drawings in the battlefield that served to collect funds for the support of Cuban forces. During the Republic he painted large works such as the famous Muerte de Maceo, the murals in the Presidential Palace about the historic Victoria de Las Tunas and the allegorical paintings at the Magna Aula of the University of Havana. Romañach, who studied in Cuba, Spain and Italy and received numerous international prizes, was for more than 50 years a teacher of exceptional importance during his tenure at San Alejandro. He gave us such masterpieces of Cuban painting, as La convaleciente and La niña de las cañas.
 

Other "academics" appear in the twentieth century. Antonio Rodríguez Morey, winner of prizes in Europe and United States and a member of the Academy of San Fernando in Spain, also painted murals in the Presidential Palace. Esteban Valderrama, a landscape and portrait painter of great technical skill, made portraits of Franklin D. Roosevelt and José Martí and landscapes with valleys and Cuban forests. Domingo Branches and the Spanish painter Miguel Arias also distinguished themselves as "academic" painters. Arias painted the backdrops of the famous Alhambra Theater. With the coming of the Republic in 1902, artistic education was considered a component of the national culture. As part of a wider project, institutions like the Academia Nacional de Artes y Letras and the Museo Nacional de Arte were founded. But the artists continued suffering for lack of official support, until in 1916 the Círculo de Bellas Artes was inaugurated. The Círculo contributed in part to the promotion of culture with concert series and other activities that included the individual and collective exhibition of Cuban painters. Through the years other institutions joined in the work of the Círculo, among them Lyceum, a women's social organization, and the Departmento de Cultura del Ministerio de Educación. Lyceum carried out admirable cultural work in Havana until the 1950s. With bounteous diligence, the Department of Culture of the Ministry of Education, beginning in 1935, organized national exhibitions of (and prizes for) the paintings and sculptures of artists of all tendencies. It also acquired works that are now part of the cultural heritage preserved at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes.
 

An outstanding role for the recognition of culture in general and painting in particular was played by publications that featured the art of painting: La Habana Elegante and El Fígaro, in the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, and later publications such as Revista Cubana, Revista de Avance, Verbum, Selecta, Grafos and Orígenes. The Revista de Avance brought to light in 1927 the group of artists known as La Vanguardia in the history of the Cuban art. They were in non-hostile opposition to the academics, whose works they tried to surpass with the introduction of novel stylistic patterns gained from a greater individual freedom in artistic expression.
 

In general, the painters of La Vanguardia had completed their artistic education in Paris, where they appreciated conceptual and formal elements taken from the expressionists, the cubists, the surrealists, naive and other artistic currents of the time, including Mexican muralists. In 1927 they initiated their pictorial revolution and in 1938 Eduardo Abela established the Estudio Libre de Pintura. Also in 1938 they held their first exhibition, with the participation of Víctor Manuel García (1897-1968), Eduardo Abela (1889-1965), Carlos Enríquez (1901-1957), Jorge Arche (b. 1905), Arístides Fernandez (1904-

1934), Amelia Peláez (1896-1968), Fidelio Ponce of León (1895-1949), Antonio Gattorno and Marcelo Pogolotti. With their very personal style, these painters of the vanguard included in their themes the humblest sectors of the population, their ethnic origins and a dynamic symbol-ism that integrated Cuban culture and land-scape: Abela with a fantastic expressionism or small childlike and charming works; Enriquez, with ardent and sweeping movements, color transparencies according to the light and paintings of varied subjects including eroticism; Amelia Peláez, with cubist planes, synthetic biodimensionals of pure luminous colors separated by heavy lines in black, with elements of the Cuban flora and fauna or baroque decorations from old Havana houses; Víctor Manuel, with simplified forms and a rich palette offering a summary vision that fortified his indigenous tone; Fidelio Ponce of León with elongated figures in an atmosphere of distressing solitude, facilitated by his heavy priming and almost monochromatic preference and by the use of whites and ocher colors; and Marcelo Pogolotti, with the introduction of the proletariat and labor in compositions where drawing and composition achieved by volumes predominate.

Toward the end of the 1930s other excellent artists joined the avant-garde group, such as painters born primarily in the 1910s: Wifredo Lam, Mario Carreño, René Portocarrero, Mariano Rodríguez, Mirta Cerra, Cundo Bermúdez and Roberto Diago. They, similar to those of the previous vanguardia and those who followed, had been trained at San Alejandro and, like the moderns that preceded them, used the unconscious as a source for personal creations and a foundation for their intimate aesthetics. Much has been written about Lam, who is generally recognized as the foremost Cuban painter of the twentieth century. Critics refer to the fluid sense of his line and fantasy, to his use of dramatized natural elements at the service of primitivist magical function, without ignoring the totemic and the apparently absurd nature of tribal art. His best known pieces are La jungla, El tercer mundo and Zambezia, Zambezia; in all of which the imagination of the artist recreated a surprising rhythmic universe by means of formal resources of diverse origins: Africa, Oceania, the symbolic mine of Afro-Antillean cults. Cundo Bermúdez, an enigmatic painter skilled at counterpoint, is an exponent of hidden fantasies translated into oneiric signs. Carreño uses concrete geometry, for a subjective reductionist, with magnificent drawing skills. Portocarrero, together with Lam perhaps the most critically acclaimed Cuban painters, was a muralist and ceramist, an exponent of diverse currents such as cubism, expressionism and primitivism. His thematics are rich and varied, with still-life works, Afro-Cuban motifs, motley cities (Havana), delicately conceived Floras, figures with distinct Caribbean baroque hairstyles, vibrant colonial baroque interiors: color and light, a folkloric feast for the senses. Mariano Rodríguez, a prolific self-taught artist as diverse as Portocarrero, was the maker of stained-glass works, a multiplicity of oils and wash drawings that used colors infused in brilliant light; a light so decisive that, as in his collection of roosters, it almost leads away from reality and nearly makes him an abstract painter.
 

Little was known in the United States about Cuban painting in spite of its increasing international recognition, with prizes and critical acclaim in several countries of Europe and Latin America, in spite of its promotion within Cuba thanks to the above-mentioned institutions and specialists and academics, in spite of lectures and conferences on various topics going back to the 1920s at the Asociación del Club Cubano de Bellas Artes, and in spite of Jorge Mañach and Esteban Valderrama's scholarly and professorial pursuits on the history of art and art education in Cuba as well as the journalistic support of the Revista de Avance and exhibitions, courses and other projects organized by unforgettable professor Luis de Soto at the University of Havana. This situation did not begin to change until 1939 with the creation of the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, the organizer of many contemporary and retrospective exhibitions of Cuban artistic production. The situation improved further after World War II when artistic promotion and funding (from, for example, the Comisión Cubana de Cooperación Interior) increased in Havana at the University, and other institutions such as the distinguished Lyceum.
 

In 1942, paintings by Picasso, Dufy and Miró were exhibited for the first time in Cuba. In the years 1943 and 1944 the millionaire promoter of art Maria Luisa Gómez Mena facilitated the opening of the Galería del Prado, the first private gallery in the country, specializing in modern art. The efforts of art critic José Gómez Sicre led to a 1944 exhibition of Cuban painters at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the publication that same year of his book Pintura cubana de hoy.
 

The decade of the 1950s began with the establishment in Havana of another eminent institution for the history of the Cuban culture: La Sociedad Cultural Nuestro Tiempo. It contributed, along with the previously mentioned organizations, to the diffusion and promotion of the plastic arts in the country. San Alejandro continued to be the only official center for practical art training. During this decade other galleries opened, but without continued success due to the small number of people interested in buying art, in addition to poor purchasing power and the political violence the country was subjected to throughout these years after due coup d'état by General Fulgencio Batista Zaldivar. The Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes continued to be the center for national art exhibitions and the Círculo de Bellas Artes was the seat for academic art as well as a place for art exhibitions. This decade also witnessed the arrival in Cuban painting and sculpture of a new generation of artists that is usually split into two groups: the Abstract Eleven and the Concrete Ten. The Eleven get their name from the original number of their members, which stuck even though their number varied throughout the years. At the beginning it included seven painters and four sculptors. The original painters were: Guido Llinás, Hugo Consuegra, Fayad Jamís, Raúl Martínez, Antonio Vidal, René Avila and José Ignacio Bermúdez. The original sculptors were: Agustin Cárdenas, Francisco (Pancho) Antigua, Tomás Oliva and José Antonio (Díaz) Peláez. Their first exhibition took place at the Rampa in April of 1953, followed by many other shows until the last one entitled Expresionismo Abstracto 1963, even though the group officially disbanded in 1958. The Abstract Eleven included through the years at least 21 artists, including such non-abstract painters as Antonia Eiriz, Servando Cabrera and Angel Acosta León.

Dictator Batista resolved to celebrate the centennial of the birth of José Martí in Havana in 1953 and, in conspiracy with Francisco Franco and ample financial resources, a Bienal Hispano-americana de Arte at the hall of Bellas Artes. This clear political move was rejected and repudiated by those who organized an Anti-Bienal de La Habana entitled Plástica Cubana Contemporánea: Homenaje a José Martí at the Lyceum on January 28, 1954, the one hundred and first anniversary of Marti's birth. This exhibit was later transferred to the University of Havana by agreement with the Federación Estudiantil Universitaria. According to professor and art critic Graciela Pogolotti, the Anti-Bienal became "an expression of revolt and rejection of all attempts to use culture as a legitimating instrument of the regime." Members of the Abstract Eleven, among them Raúl Martinez, Hugo Consuegra and Guido Llinás were at the forefront of this condemnation of the Franco and Batista dictatorships.
 

For the Eleven and their abstract expressionism, painting was the direct expression of feelings through color and form. Consuegra called himself a "painter of feelings and not of objects" who searches by symbolic means to give the viewer a "whole" received as a "direct psychological experience." Thus we can infer the titles of his paintings: Un entendimiento ciego (A Blind Understanding), La rehabilitación de Galileo Galilei and Rumor de Guerra (A War Rumor).
 

Llinás also attempted to free his feelings on the canvas, but by means of an automatic action with dynamic and energetic brush strokes, compositions made from feelings, subjective situations, emotions and moods. Llinás along with Jamis and Martinez, preferred New York action painting, that in the case of Martinez evolved into non-abstract expressions, impregnated during his last years by strong nationalistic and revolutionary content: pop art and collages.
 

The group of the Concrete Ten included distinguished painters such as José Miyares, Lolo Soldevilla and Luis Martinez Pedro, the latter represented by his marinas, the simplification of the sea as an entity, an object to itself, all surplus removed, a sea of blue gradations in lines or waves that are transformed into optical essences. In spite of the energetic and novel abstractionism, the Cuban pictorial universe included academic, even avant-garde, modern and expressionist painters. There were others of strong unique personality and style, such as Antonia Eiriz, Servando Cabrera Moreno, Raul Milián, Angel Acosta León and Orlando Yanes. At such a moment of multiplicity and creative presence came the Cuban Revolution on January 1, 1959. Many artists, among them Mariano Rodriguez, Jamís, Cabrera, Yanes and Martínez, produced some of their best works, with the variety of styles that characterized them, within the frame of Fidel Castro's words to the intellectuals in 1961: "Dentro de la Revolución, todo; contra la Revolución, nada" ("Within the Revolution, everything; against the Revolution, nothing"). Other artists decided to go into exile or simply not to return to Cuba, settling down in Europe, the United States and other countries.

From its beginning, the Cuban Revolution paid careful attention to cultural promotion, in all its aspects and throughout the land, a task entrusted to the Ministry of Education until 1976 and afterwards to the newly-created Ministry of Culture. The Constitution of 1976 ratified and codified the cultural policy of 1961. The Constitution declared "freedom of artistic creation as long as its content is not in opposition to the Revolution," allowing formal free-dom, until the present, a freedom promoted and supported by other national institutions such as the Unión de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba (UNEAC) and the internationally recognized work of Casa de Las Américas, institutions that were founded at the very beginning of the Revolution. From the First Congress of Writers and Artists (1961) until the present time, freedom of artistic expression has been respected by the Revolutionary Government and has been very evident at national and international events such as the Salón de Mayo (1968) with participation of more than 500 intellectuals and artists, an event that led to the celebrated Salón Nacional (1970) and the II Bienal de La Habana (1986). Numerous meetings of artists, with very different motivations, contents and styles, reaffirm Martis judgment by demonstrating that "a Revolution of forms is a Revolution of essences," as well as that fertile artistic fields were created by the effective Cuban cultural policy of 1961.
 

Throughout these decades, Havana has remained the center par excellence for the production and promotion of art, but unlike what prevailed prior to 1961, most of the other cities of the country now join in these endeavors. Training centers and exhibition halls, plus an increase in pictorial production at the national level, has attained surprising quality and popular expansion since the 1980s. The main place for these creative pursuits is provided by the National Education System, with its new thematic spaces and an extensive list of recognized figures in the contemporary universe of art. The venerable Academia de San Alejandro has been preserved but the national system has also integrated the study and the appreciation of art, in its diverse expressions, starting with primary education. The system created for the study of the plastic arts culminates at the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA) under the direction of the Ministry of Culture and with the support of other institutions such as the UNEAC (Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba), the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Higher Education. The University of Havana, for example, offers a doctorate in the History, Theory and Criticism of Artistic Culture and the ISA offers a degree in the History, Theory and Criticism of the Plastic Arts.

We should not fail to add that, as it happens with literature and music, Cubans or children of Cubans who have chosen to live and work abroad, enrich artistic production in Cuba. Without trying to be exhaustive, we should men-tion, at least, painters like Ever Fonseca, who is said to nourish his spaces with symbols extracted from nature and mythology turning them into pictorial literature; Roberto Fabelo, a synthetic sketcher with fabulous representations, riddled with subjective presences that can be metaphors of power, hallucinations or simply critical night-mares; Tomás Sánchez, with junkyards and landscapes that arrive at the spectator like something remembered or as premonitions whose realism is all appearance; and Cosme Proenza, creator of places and characters of dream or fantasy, with surrealist subtleties transmuted into historical, medieval or Renaissance surroundings. We must also mention the paintings of hallucinated enchantments by Zaida of Río, and Flora Fong and Manuel Mendive's works, an examination of the thematic wealth and legacy that Cuban culture claims from its African roots.

There are more and more painters of prestige, some with a permanent presence at Havana's rich Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes: the abstract Juan Roberto Diago, the mannerist Juan Grillo, the introspective Agustín Bejerano, Juan Carlos' persistent studies of types and mockery, Armando Mariño's ironic reconstructions of messages from the past, Pedro Pablo Oliva's talented strokes of national humor and family drama. And then we arrive at those self-taught painters, legitimated by their vocation and persistence, like Mirito from Matanzas and Jesús Díaz Morán from Pinar del Río and now residing in Havana. The diverse and impressive repertoire of the most recent artistic creation in Cuba is based in the past and perpetuates it. It is a historical repertoire, a generational product, not static but inquisitive and original. It is a gallery committed to the now and present, which guarantees its legacy and its coherent, intimate and substantial utility.