Cuban art

Some of the more celebrated 20th-century Cuban artists include Amelia Peláez (1896–1968), best known for a series of mural projects, and painter Wifredo Lam (December 8, 1902 – September 11, 1982), who created a highly personal version of modern primitivism.

The Cuban-born painter Federico Beltran Masses (1885–1949), was renowned as a colorist whose seductive portrayals of women sometimes made overt references to the tropical settings of his childhood.

[2] Throughout most of its 400 years under Spanish rule, Cuba and specifically Havana functioned as the primary entrepôt of Spain's empire in the Americas, with a population of merchants, administrators, and professionals who were interested in supporting the arts.

Though mostly absent of originality, his religious scenes - particularly those decorating the cupola and altar of the Church of Santa María del Rosario near Havana - are spectacular, and include the first fine art depictions of Black Cuban slaves.

However, the success of Toussaint and Dessalines' slave uprising spread intense anxiety throughout the Caribbean, and one response to it was the growth of costumbrismo - realist yet romanticized views of day-to-day life - in Cuban art.

[4] A leading early artist in this genre was Spanish-born Víctor Patricio de Landaluze (1830 - 1889), whose paintings depicted plantation life as rough but essentially natural and harmonious.

Artists of the early Republican era continued much as before, painting landscapes and scenes of Cuban life in the traditional European style, some of them showing light touches of Impressionism.

Modernism burst on the Cuban scene as part of the critical movement of national regeneration that arose in opposition to the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado, American neo-colonial control, and the consequent economic crisis.

[12] Pioneers of the movement included Abela, Antonio Gattorno, Victor Manuel, Fidelio Ponce de León, and Carlos Enríquez Gómez.

These painters' criollo images, for all their differences, shared a modern primitivist view of Cuba as an exotic, timeless, rural land inhabited by simple and sensual, if also sad and melancholic people.

[3] Early in 1927, solo exhibitions were held for Victor Manuel and Antonio Gattorno at Havana's Association of Painters and Sculptors, followed in May by the First Exposition of New Art, a group show featuring mostly Cuban modernists.

[14] Wifredo Lam (1902 - 1982), a Cuban of Chinese, Spanish, and African ancestry, had little direct involvement with the Havana Vanguardia, but was of the same generation and had similar motivations and experiences with his art.

A San Alejandro graduate, she studied and worked for several years in Paris, where, before her return to Havana in 1934, she absorbed the influence of Henri Matisse and, especially, the Cubism of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque.

During her long career, she worked in a variety of media, including painting, pottery, and mosaic, and explored a variety of subjects and themes, but whether creating her abstracted still life paintings or her famed large scale public murals, her work consistently employed vivid color and elaborate composition, as well as representations of Cuba's tropical flora and Havana's ubiquitous Spanish Colonial architectural motifs.

Occasional purchase awards were doled out, as at the First National Salon of Painting and Sculpture in 1935, but there was no consistent system of patronage, and commissions for Cuba's avant-gardists were rare.

Most subsisted on low-paying teaching jobs and commercial work; a few, such as Enriquez and Pelaez, had means of support via their families, and some, such as Ponce and Manuel, lived in poverty.

[15] Other notable artists of the original vanguardia were Jorge Arche, Marcelo Pogolotti, Aristides Fernandez, Rafael Blanco, Domingo Ravenet, Alberto Peña, and Lorenzo Romero Arciaga.

[17] Modern Cuban artists continue to do significant work in this tradition, including Juan Ramón Valdés Gómez (called Yiki) and José Toirac.

These artists were discovered during a 1996 trip to Cuba by Levinson, Olga Hirshhorn, and others, who crisscrossed the island searching for examples of this style of art, of which so little had previously been seen in the United States[19] The unofficial head of Grupo Bayate is Luis Rodríguez Arias (born 1950), a baker by profession.

In June 2002 his work was described as "riotously colorful and stacked like a rush-hour train" in a New York Times article entitled "Ebullient Cubans Make a Lot Out of a Little",[27] which also speaks of the art-market success of his naïve style.

The primitive-outsider art of Corso de Palenzuela (b. Havana, ca.1960), a self-taught painter of Sephardic ancestry, taps a rich lode of memory for its source material, depicted in a very personal Cuban landscape.

[32] Although government policies - driven by limited resources - did narrow artistic expression, they expanded, through education and subsidies, the number of people who could practice art, breaking down barriers through democratization and socialization.

[32] In the 1960s government agencies such as the Commission of Revolutionary Orientation (the publishing division of the Cuban Communist Party, later renamed Editora Politica (EP)) and OSPAAAL began churning out posters for propaganda purposes.

Though still essentially producing propaganda, artists such as Rene Mederos, Raul Martinez, Alfredo Rostgaard, and Félix Beltran were creating vivid, powerful, and highly distinctive works which had a global influence on graphic design.

The candid shot of a moody exhausted Guevara, taken in March 1960 at a memorial service for victims of an ammunition ship explosion in Havana Harbor, became one of the world's most iconic images.

Nelson Dominguez and Roberto Fabelo went from Abstraction and Neoexpressionism of the 1950s, to immortalizing the proletariat, farmers, workers, and soldiers, while continuing to utilize many of the techniques they learned under the tutelage of Antonia Eiriz Vázquez.

Organized by Carlos Franqui, it presented works by more than a hundred artists and represented rival schools of twentieth-century art: early modernists (Picasso, Miro, Magritte); the next generation (Lam, Calder, Jacques Hérold, Stanley Hayter); and postwar (Asger Jorn, Antonio Saura, Jorge Soto.

The group, Volumen Uno - made up of Jose Bedia, Lucy Lippard, Ana Mendieta, Ricardo Brey, Leandro Soto, Juan Francisco Elso, Flavio Garciandia, Gustavo Perez Monzon, Rubin Torres Lloret, Gory (Rogelio Lopez Marin), and Tomas Sanchez - presented a "fresh eclectic mix filtered through informalism, pop, minimalism, conceptualism, performance, graffiti and Arte Povera reconfigured and reactivated … to be critically, ethically, and organically Cuban".

[41] Laughter became the antidote of anarchistic energy for and from the revolution; "one moment an aggressive undertow, then a jester's provocation, pressuring the tensions", wrote Rachel Weiss in To and from Utopia in the New Cuban Art.

"[45] In addition to the Christian, predominately Catholic, four African Religions are continuing to influence culture being practiced in Cuba: Santeria (Yoruba), Palo Monte (Kongo), Regla Arara (Ewe Fon), and the secret, male-only, Abakua (Calabar).