Cuban Colonial Prints

The collector and independent scholar Emilio Cueto provides a historical inventory of seventeen graphic art images depicting Cuba, printed during the late Spanish colonial period (1762–1898). These images—primarily authored by Dutch, English, French, and German, not Spanish or Cuban artists—became the most widely circulated visual representations of the island, particularly the capital of Havana. Despite their fanciful and often inaccurate character, these prints depicted the landscape, architecture, people, and customs of the island. They became part of a well-known visual repertoire that fixed Cuba as an exotic tropical location in the global imagination. As Cueto underlines, “It was through engravings and lithographs that Cuba first became known both inside the island and abroad. Colonial Cuba was defined by its prints.”

The Cuban-American Exile Vanguardia

Art historian Lynette M. F. Bosch concentrates on the first generation of postrevolutionary exile artists, which she calls the “Cuban-American Exile Vanguardia,” who arrived in the United States between 1959 and 1980. Bosch emphasizes that many members of this diasporic generation explore “identity, hybridity, transnationalism, and the emotional and experiential territory of exile.” She also argues that these artists recast traditional notions of lo cubano (Cubanness) as lo cubanoamericano (Cuban-Americanness) through visual representations of “life on the hyphen,” that is, the blending of Cuban and American cultural practices. Examples of these hybrid exile artists include Humberto Calzada, Jake Fernandez, and Arturo Rodríguez.

The Cuban Avant-Garde and the International Art Community

Art collector Ramón Cernuda discusses how Cuban art was consolidated during the first half of the twentieth century, especially after the emergence of two generations of modern artists that are now considered the core of the vanguardia (also known as the Havana School). Cernuda notes that the international art market increasingly valued the work of Cuban artists such as Amelia Peláez, Víctor Manuel García, René Portocarrero, and Wifredo Lam. These artists appeared in numerous individual and collective exhibitions in major museums and private galleries, as well as in specialized art magazines and books. As Cernuda underlines, Cuban vanguardia painters reached a broad audience with Alfred Barr Jr.’s 1944 exhibition, Modern Cuban Painters, at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City. Ironically, the wide success of Cuban artists abroad led Cuban collectors to pay attention to them.

Cuban Painting at the Turn of the Century (1902–1930)

Art historian Anelys Alvarez reviews the tumultuous first three decades of the Cuban Republic (1902–30) and their impact on painting and other visual arts such as sculpture. First, she questions the conventional dichotomy between traditional (or academic) and avant-garde (or modernist) art in Cuba during this period. She then recovers several forgotten artists, such as Antonio Rodríguez Morey, María Capdevila, and Manuel Mesa, who were active on the island before the rise of modernism in the 1930s. Alvarez reappraises a whole generation of painters who served as an artistic bridge between the late nineteenth century and the first generation of avant-garde (vanguardista) painters in 1927.

Introduction

Volume editor Jorge Duany briefly reviews the intellectual history of Cuban thought on national identity since the late eighteenth century. Several generations of Cuban writers and artists on the island and abroad have drawn the contours of their “moveable nation,” according to different historical junctures, geographic locations, and ideological perspectives. Duany notes that the search for and affirmation of Cuba’s national identity strongly shaped the history of the visual arts, as well as literature, music, and other cultural expressions. The author then explains the origins of the current volume in an interdisciplinary 2017 conference on Cuban and Cuban-American art held at the Frost Art Museum of Florida International University in Miami. The second part of the introduction summarizes the contents of the volume, highlighting the significance of Cuban and Cuban-American art for the construction of national and diasporic identities.

Colonial Art and Its Afterlife

Art historian Alison Fraunhar examines how graphic and fine arts helped trace the contours of national identity in colonial Cuba well before the island’s independence. Fraunhar dwells on maps and other visual representations of rural and urban landscapes, people, and historical events that were critical to imagine Cuba as a separate nation with its own culture. The author argues persuasively that late nineteenth-century images of the island’s geography, history, and culture continue to be significant visual markers for contemporary Cuban artists.

From Burning Paintings to Domestic Anxieties

Jorge Duany examines the shifting cultural ties between Cuba and the United States since 1959, and how they have reframed relations between Cubans on and off the island. Duany argues that the cultural politics of Miami’s Cuban community have changed substantially because of demographic and generational transitions over the last three decades. Until the 1980s, Cuban artists and other intellectuals in the United States had limited contact with their island counterparts. However, it is now customary for U.S. museums and galleries to collect and exhibit artworks produced in post-1959 Cuba without much protest or opposition from Cuban Americans. Although some exile artists and critics still believe that U.S. cultural institutions should not display such artworks, the fault lines between Cubans residing on the island and abroad seem more porous than in the past. The author concludes that the visual arts may serve as cultural bridges across the Florida Straits.

Theatricality in the Art of the Cuban Diaspora

Art critic and collector Ricardo Pau-Llosa proposes that certain “tropes of identity”—common metaphors inherited from previous generations of modern Cuban artists—continue to shape the work of contemporary Cuban-American artists. Pau-Llosa underlines the trope of theatricality as a form of representing “the poetics of shelter (from time, history, persecution, and other forces).” The early work in exile of Mario Carreño and Cundo Bermúdez launched a diasporic sensibility in Cuban art that still resonates in the more recent work of Emilio Sánchez, María Brito, and José Bedia. From this perspective, theatricality ties together several generations of Cuban modern artists and those who left the island after 1959.

Cuban Photography after 1959

Art historian and curator Iliana Cepero analyzes how some photographers deviated from the official discourse of the 1959 Revolution as an epic and messianic process of liberation from imperialism and class oppression. Instead, as Cepero highlights, several artists (such as the 1960s artists María Eugenia Haya, aka Marucha, and José Alberto Figueroa) used photography both as a medium of self-expression and as a way to explore alternative narratives of daily life in Cuba. More recently, a new generation of photographers—among them, Eduardo García—has documented the material scarcity, poverty, marginalization, racial discrimination, and other intractable problems of contemporary Cuban society. Cepero concludes: “Cuban photography today, both in its documentary and conceptual approaches, aspires to dismantle the epic paradigm with which the Revolution came to be known as a visual phenomenon.”

Concrete Cuba

Art historian Abigail McEwen focuses on the so-called concretos, a generation of abstract Cuban painters that emerged during the 1950s and included Luis Martínez Pedro, Mario Carreño, José M. Mijares, and the Romanian-born Sandú Darié. According to McEwen, the concretos saw themselves as the last generation of the island’s artistic avant-garde, which contradicted their predecessors’ quest for a vernacular expression of national identity in the visual arts while striving for modernization and cosmopolitanism. She shows that the abstract turn in Cuba was both an aesthetic revolt against figurative art and a political protest against the Batista regime. The abstract art movement gradually waned after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, with its preference for narrative and representational art.