The Internet Travel Guide "Getting to Know Cuba"

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The 40s and 50s

The 40s and 50s mark the second moment in Cuban sculpture. In this process of the continued modernization of art, a new avant-garde developed; this time coinciding with trends in international art which was no longer focused on Europe but on North America. Abstractionism arrived in the country and provoked the Contrabienale of 1953. The aforementioned artists adapted their work to these new influences. Raúl Martínez founded the group Los 11 (Group of Eleven), the abstract Informalists, and then the Concrete artists, independent creative artists who engaged in geometric abstraction: Sandú Darié, Salvador Corratgé, Luis Martínez Pedró, Loló Soldevilla and Pedro de Oraá. The masters Antonia Eiriz and Servando Cabrera Moreno turned their attention gradually to Expressionism, along with Orlando Llanes.

Autor: Servando Cabrera Moreno Titel: "Milicias campesinas" 140 x 200 cm 1962

Despite his early death, Angel Acosta León plays an important role in the development of Surrealism. In the forties Cuban serigraphy, in connection with political posters, enjoyed the widest and most comprehensive distribution of all times. The merging of serigraphy and the poster form created a poster art with its own characteristics, which became obvious from 1943 through film posters in particular (due to the boom in Mexican and Argentinean films); a serigraphic link which continues without interruption to the present. Parallel to this, serigraphic uses continue on a wide variety of mediums: card, paper, material, wood.... for publication and industrial purposes. This method underwent a notable development at the end of the forties, reaching its pinnacle in the fifties, a period in which spontaneous excursions of qualitative relevance occur in art serigraphy.

Cuban art of the previous four decades represents the revolutionary period, its continuity and the completion of a process of maturing. The sixties encouraged heterogeneity, plurality and freedom of expression, optimism and trust in order to emphasize the changes taking place in the country. The serigraphic heritage was adopted by the revolution in the first few months of 1959, adding new content, values and projections in the ideological and cultural fields. The graphic arts experienced an extraordinary boom through the poster art of the ICAIC (Instituto Cubano de Arte e Industria Cinematográfica = Cuban Institute for Cinematic Art and Industry),. Despite a substantial lack of material means, it achieved results of special significance with regard to expressive, esthetic, iconographic, formal, chromatic and technological aspects. Humorous drawings, based on everyday realities, developed along broad lines. The Cuban life style formed the actual basis of humorism, harking back to the previous century, the anti-colonial period and the time after the founding of the Republic in 1902. Adigio Benítez and Carmelo Sobrino place peasants and workers at the center of their pictures; Raúl Martínez the heroes and the other artists deal with themes from their own specific realities. The masters of that remarkable generation, such as Servando Cabrera, Mariano Rodríguez, René Protocarrero, Amelia Pelaez, Wifredo Lam …. continue their work, reinforcing particular nuances in their themes and styles. In doing so they always occupy a prominent place in Cuban art, which, like the international movement too, is concerned with figuration. Antonia Eiriz left a permanent impression on many of the early graduates of the Escuela Nacional de Arte (National School of Art). Most of the graduates were of peasant stock and they were the ones who, in the following years, were to stimulate artistic developments.

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