The Internet Travel Guide "Getting to Know Cuba"

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At the beginning of the 20th century

The commercialization of art did not begin until after 1916, with the Salon de Bellas Artes. Prior to that, the portrait represented a two-sided relationship, history was linked more to the state, and the allegorical was attributable to education. There were no real exhibition rooms available to graduates, only the Academy itself and exhibitions which were organized in the Pabellon de Educación in the Quinta de Molinos existed as channels of distribution. The regional Spanish centers: Asturian, Canarian and Galician, were exhibition venues for Spanish artists and it was not until the 20th century, with the formation of the Republic and the participation of the Catalonians, that these institutions developed into symbols of power.

Autor: Víctor Manuel Titel: "Gitana Tropical" 46.5 x 38 cm 1929

As a result cultural institutions such as the Atheneum and the Academy for Art and Literature (1910) developed with private support. The Asociación de Pintores y Escultores cubanos was founded to defend the work of Cuban artists against foreign ones, and to organize the annual Salón de Bellas Artes. Whilst the peninsular sector enjoyed Spanish painting, the ruling oligarchy mainly invested in foreign models, in that production which was dedicated to their cultural style of life. The nouveau riche, indebted to the sugar boom after the first world war, were attracted to the works of representation, led by the proportions of the picture and its frame, but not by its craftsmanship. It was justly the intellectuals and the educated class who preferred Cuban production. At the beginning of the twenties a new generation of intellectuals surfaced in the conflict-ridden political and social panorama. The magazine Avances (1927) was the fundamental place to accommodate new ideas and artistic debate. Later it was to be the publications Verbum (1930), Espuela de Plata (1940) and Orígenes (in the fifties). In 1937 forward-thinking artists founded the Estudio Libre de Pintura y Escultura, promoting such fields of art as wood carving and mural painting which had been neglected by the Academy, and the "First Salon of Modern Art" was inaugurated. As in any avant-garde movement, the artists tried to transform society through culture. The revolution in sculptural art, introduced in Europe by Cezanne, Gauguin, van Gogh …, with the modern - ism , appeared in Cuba with a delay of two decades. Those of this period who were to become masters of modern Cuban art drew inspiration from these sources and from Mexican mural painting, until a personal and deeply Cuban work was created.
This was a national art of renewal and anti-academic solutions. Portrait and landscape subjects demanded a return to significance in their own right and were created using other artistic techniques, with the exception of oil on canvas. In his watercolors and sketches ("painted caricatures" which were not regarded as paintings), Rafael Blanco presented himself as a pioneer in the search for new forms of expression and as a forerunner in the Cuban artistic avant-garde. The developments, parallel to the academic but not dominating, are those in which modernity could most easily be introduced: in the press, in caricatures (Torriente and Massaguer the main representatives) and in graphic designs on the title pages of journals (in the twenties the Revista Social was prominent). It must also be pointed out that serigraphy had been employed from time to time in Cuba since the beginning of the century. This contemporary printing technique was originally used mainly for graphic - publishing and industrial - applications, and its introduction to Cuba (about 1910) was one of the first in the world. Amongst the forerunners of the Cuban avant-garde Victor Manuel deserves particular mention, testing new forms from the basis of the figurative and bequeathing a symbol in the history of Cuban art with his picture "La Gitana Tropical". In the third decade, modern art in Cuba finally became consolidated. This is the first moment of the turning point in Cuban painting, uniting the intimism of Antonio Gattornos; the Guajiros [farmers] of Eduardo Abelas; the sensuality of Carlos Enriquez, the sociopolitical criticisms of Marcelo, the drama of an artistic world, the despair and agony of Fidelio Ponce; the African roots of our culture emphasized by Wifredo Lam and the still life, combined with elements of Cuban architecture of Amelia Pelaez. Also belonging to this group are Arístides Fernández, further removed from the general trends but with similar stimulus; Jorge Arche with his personalization of the subject of the portrait, and also Mariano Rodríguez, whose works are distinguished by their chromatic depiction; René Portocarrero and the interiors from the colonial period, and other names such as Mirta Cerra, Roberto Diago and José Mijares.





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