National painting in the 19th century
National painting began to take shape from the mid
19th century onward. Taste and the appreciation of painting developed
in Cuba at the same pace as the intellectual environment of the island
was infused with new activities. In the political field the voices of
Félix Varela, Tomás Gener, José Antonio Saco and
Betancourt Cisneros were to be heard with predictions of freedom. At
the same time other intellectuals sowed the seeds of native culture,
amongst them Don José de la Luz y Caballero, Domingo del Monte
y José María Heredia should be mentioned. Romanticism
made its appearance in the paintings of this era with landscape paintings,
influenced by the French schools of Barbizon and Fontainebleau, or by
the North American school of Hudson River. Esteban Chartrand and Valentin
Sanz Carta are examples of two opposing points of view, the former,
a Cuban of French descent, created nostalgic and idealized landscapes
bathed in twilight, in which the Cuban element of bohíos (farmhouses),
ingenios (sugar factories) and palms can be recognized, and the latter,
a Cuban from the Canaries, offered a more direct and realistic landscape
flooded with tropical light.
Amongst the landscape painters, the Belgian Henry Clennewerck and the
Cuban Federico Fernández Cavada should be mentioned. At this
time the genre painting of Juana Borrero, José Joaquín
Tejada and Victor Patricio Landaluze emerged. The latter is mainly known
for the large plastic and documentary value of his works. He worked
in watercolors and oils, lending the pictures the transparency and luminosity
of watercolor paintings. He also cultivated political caricatures, expressing
in his pictures, as no other artist did, the Creole element with a fitting
sense of observation, quality and fine humor. In the era of official
academicism, which extended into the first decade of the 20th century,
Juan Jorge Peoli, José Arburu y Morell, and Miguel Angel Melero
deserve mention, as well as Guillermo Collazo Tejada; a controversial
figure because of his separatist ideas in the field of politics and
his dedication to conservative French painting in the field of art.
The name of the incredible portrait painter, Federico Martínez
Matos from Santiago, has to be included, whose entry to the Academy
was doubted and whose unique work combines Spanish realism and Italian
idealism. After their return from Europe, Armando García Menocal
and Leopoldo Romañach Guillén contributed to the cultural
renewal which found its positive aspect, favored by the new era, the
new rulers, and the reorganization of education started under the North
American occupation. They were appointed to teaching posts at the Academy,
where they taught generations of Cuban artists. Menocal, who made sketches
for an epic Cuban painting during his participation in the wars of independence,
influenced the orientation of the first new artists of the Republic:
Manuel Vega, Esteban Valderrama y de la Peña, Pastor Argudai
… Romañach, on the other hand, is recognized as one of the
most able professors in the development of Cuban art, after Juan Bautiste
Vermay and Miguel Melero; a master of avant-gardism, which replaced
decadent romanticism with naturalism, he worked with live models, taking
as a pretext the portrait, in which the psychological representation
of the model is of no interest. Both are recognized as artists who ended
the 19th century with the highest repute, and who led Cuba into the
20th century and the transition to modern painting. Valderrama, Domingo
Ramos and Romañach completed the mural paintings of the Aula
Magna, [University of Havana], adhering to academicism, whilst the modernists
took their first steps.
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History
