Cuba
December 2008
©2008 James Teitelbaum, all rights reserved.

Persistent prologue: I write these travelogues for myself, so that twenty years from now, I will be able to remember as much about these trips as possible. I include as much detail as possible so as to get it all fixed in writing before the memories fade. I share these with friends, family, and any complete strangers who find them, because people express interest. I know that these writings do ramble on a bit, but I do not require an editor; these writings are here as aids to my own memory not as attempts at serious travel writing -- although anecdotes from these journals have formed the core of my more formalized and proper travel writings, which have appeared in print and on the web elsewhere.

Part One Part Two Part Three Art Digression

As the previous few artists illustrate (with del Rio actually being the exception; I wish I had been able to sneak photos of the others), the Cubans remained interested in surrealism, cubism, and early forms of abstraction long after the rest of the world left it behind. It isn’t quite fair to compare this to the idea that their architecture stopped cold in 1959, but it might be more accurate to say that their range of outside influences became seriously limited at that point. Unlike their cars and architecture, Cuban art has developed in the past fifty years, but in a manner out of step with the rest of the Western world. They never got the bug for conceptual art, and have maintained the artistic perspectives of the early to mid 20th century, still working in styles that were contemporary and vital when Castro took over.
The Cubans, in their infinite and vital resourcefulness, have continued cultivating the same fertile patch of artistic ground, finding new ideas and new ways to keep things fresh without becoming totally derailed by the prevailing western insistence (over the past four or five decades) on rejecting representational or pictorial art.

Reuben Torres Lorrca. Esta es tu Obra (1989). Snuck a photo. A sculptural pyramid with figures and found objects all over it. Cuba Campeon (1991) by Jose Angel Toirac Batista and Tanya Agulo Aleman shows a Cuban trouncing an American in a boxing match. It isn’t a very good painting, but it is definitely interesting from a nationalistic perspective. Next to it is a sort of mixed-media thing by Glexis Novoa, De la Etapa Practica (1990) that looks like a heavy metal album cover sandwiched between two store displays. I don’t like it much, but it is kind of funny. 1980s and 1990s surrealism continues with Lazaro Garcia’s Virgen de las Visiones (1990), a small ten inch by eight inch portrait of a girl painted in a post-Renaissance style. A pretty red haired girl sitting under a tree... except she’s got four eyes. Lorrca is back Tellebo Bajo mi Tiel (1986), six masonite panels, each five or six feet tall and two feet wide. The panels are covered with expensive looking textiles, onto which are attached wood cut-outs of human figures doing routine things, but with selected parts of each person replaced by anatomical renderings of their insides. These figures are surrounded by many found objects glued to the work in intricate patterns: keys, buttons, pencils.

Turns out that yesterday was the seventieth birthday of Ever Fonseca. A temporary retrospective of his work was opened yesterday as well. The large room contains fifteen paintings and four wooden sculptures by Fonseca. None of the works here are quite as strong as the two I’d seen in the permanent collection. Whomever purchased the Fonsecas for the museum collection selected wisely. Looking at his later works, from the 1990s and 2000s, one can see the man aging. His work becomes repetitive, and far less intense. Going back to a 1973 painting, however, shows him at the peak of his powers with El Ultimo Cuardro Que Pinte en Matanzas (The Last Painting I did in Matanzas). Also, Las Padres del Agua (1968), Presencia Ancestral (Ancestral Presence, 1988), and the massive triptych Homenaje a Viet Nam Heroico (Tribute to Heroic Viet Nam, 1968).
A guide walked through the room with four people all speaking in English. They were geeking out over one of the sculptures, the very tribal Jigü e de Rio. The guide did not speak English very well, and he also did not seem to know much about art. His charges were asking him a lot of pointed questions, and he really only seemed able to give them very superficial answers. I did learn that a “Jigüe” is a sort of elf or gnome.

Next I went into the other half of the second floor, and this is all of the early to middle 20th century stuff. The gallery is called (translated) Other Perspective in Modern Art 1951-1963. This is a motherlode of coolness, a whole large gallery of unknown artists that recall of the greats from Europe or America. Any number of works from this gallery could hold their own alongside material by Picasso, Braque, Dali, Miro, Arp, Ernst, Tanguy, De Chirico, Mondrian, Klee, or Calder. And yet, even after a lifetime of studying art history, going right back to art camp when I was like eight years old, I have never heard of any of the twenty or thirty artists represented in this room.
None of them, not one.
Insanity.
I can understand why Cuban artists might not get the spotlight in America, but why are these people’s works not hanging in Spain, England, or France (three nations that I have been to many, many museums in)? They’re all absent from Chile and Japan as well, for that matter. Maybe the Cuban government doesn’t want art from Cuba to be exported... but the bulk of this art dates from before the 1958 revolution. It would have, must have, made its way abroad during the first six decades of the 20th century, during the very decades in which it was all created?

Lucky me, the only guard in this gallery was sitting in the corner with a little manicure kit out on her lap, and was absorbed in her fingernails. So I was able to discreetly grab a fair number of photos (no flash of course - mustn’t ruin the paintings... or draw attention to the forbidden photos). A fast camera and a steady hand ensured that the images came out acceptably. Now, in its way, this art has made it to America, finally.

Carmelo Gonzales, Ismos (1952). Seen immediately to the right of this sentence. This is like Paul Delvaux meets Picassso via Peter Blume. Delvaux-ish women performing their toilette in a ruined landscape, but with a figure playing a flute juxtaposed in the corner, rendered in a cubist style, as if lifted from a completely different painting. A less interesting work by Gozales is Maria Orando, a masculine-looking nun praying with a skull and a village in the background.

Sandu Darie has a bunch of works here, from 1948 to the late 1950s, very much Calder but also a direct descendant of Mondrian, and some showing a strong Bauhaus influence. Snuck of pic of Multivision Especial (1955), a yellow-red-black Bauhaus sort of thing (underneath the Gonzales to the right and below).

Works by Dolores Soldevilla, Salvador Corratge (reminds me more or less like the design work used by Saul Bass for his film titles), and Jose Mijares are lined up across a long gallery wall, providing a short history of early geometric abstraction, but with clean lines and bold colors on dark backgrounds in use by all three artists. That's two Mijares in the pic below the Darie, down the page a bit.

Servando Cabrera Moreno: Las Damas de Buena Vista (1957), El Licho (1955), Abstraction (1953).
Luis Martinez Pedro Aguas Territoriales #5 (July 29, 1962; black with a blue circle), Homenaje (1959; red stripe), El Ojo del la Agua (1962; black with green and red and grey shapes).
Couldn’t sneak pics of works by Mario Carreno: Untitled (1954; Mondrianesque with colored squares but also some diamonds and curved shapes), a completely different work more in a Cubist style called Saludo al Mar Caribe (1951), and my fave, En Cuentro En Inspirado (1952) in ochre, brown, tan and grey. A great bit of mid-century design influence.

And now some expressionist-influenced material, filling in the timeline gap between the first and the most recent rooms I explored.

Jorge Camacho, La Noche Que Oculta (1967).
Triptych by Antonia Eriez, Nimuertos (1962); similar to the work I saw at the hotel yesterday that I thought might be by the Depeche Mode cover artist guy. Here are a few more by this woman. These are all different from that first one. These are expressive, a little Bacon-ish. Broad strokes drippy paint, violent looking figures. One mixed-media piece, screaming faces, a hole in the canvas - El Bueno de los Caballitos (1965).
La Muerte en Pelota (1966). Here’s another creepy one, a winged animal skeleton, attacking an old woman who appears to be almost dead on her sewing bench. Maybe this animal is death coming for the woman.
La Annunciation(?) (1963-1964). Looking at seven of her works, the visual styles are inconsistent, but the themes of death are all quite consistent.

Having looked at the 20th century in reverse, it’s time to go deeper backwards... the floor above ground level is all of the 20th century, the older stuff is on what we'd think of as the third floor in the U.S. We begin with the late 19th century, and once again work backwards though a century...
Once again (again), all of my favorite styles and movements are present here, but with different names attached to the paintings, as if I were looking at an alternate-reality version of a museum. Symbolist, Orientalist, and even an equivalent to the Hudson River School await on the third floor, just as the surrealists, modernists, cubists, and abstract expressionist filled the second floor.

Leopoldo Romanach painted colonial-era pastoral scenes with big bold strokes, not Impressionistic, but pointing towards that direction, while Armando G. Menocal did scenes similar to Romanach, but in a more delicate and detailed style, more photorealistic. A single room on the third floor is dedicated to these two artists. One of the works, the centerpiece of the room, is a portrait of a little girl Retrato de Lilly Hildalgo (1893). It is nothing special, but it seems to be Menocal’s signature work (based on its prominent poistion in the gallery). Some of the others are in an almost Symbolist or Romantic style, which was so big in the late 19th century. And in a completely different style, Menocal did El Nacimenteo de Venus (1904), Venus coming out of the water. Her face reminds me, more than anything else, of something by the earl pin-up artist Rolf Armstrong (who worked a lot in the 1930s and 1940s). One wonders if Armstrong could have been exposed to Menocal.

The following room contains nothing but one large-format painting by Menocal, Embarque de Colon Pour Bobadilla (1893); Columbus is on the beach, getting ready to go somewhere. This is a dramatic and luminous work, clearly a masterpiece, but I also think it might be a reproduction. I can’t read the informative paragraphs about the work, but the gist of it is that the original could not be here. Nevertheless, this reproduction is great, the original must have been breathtaking. Next to is on a small easel is a tiny painting marked ‘draft’. Researching this one further, it also showed up reproduced on a two-piece puzzle telephone card in Europe. Elsewhere, another luminous history painting by Menocal, No Quiero Iral Cielo (1930), an Indian about to be burned at the stake by some Conquistadors and missionaries. The Indian looks defiant, the missionaries look concerned, and the conquistadors look arrogant.

Jose A. Bencomo Mena, La Fleur Blanca (1944); a teenage girl in a pastoral scene, sitting on a rock in a blue dress with a flower in her hand. Jesus is in the background, a hundred yards away, standing in the shrubbery. In the foreground, as if coming from the viewer, two hands enter the picture. One has a knife and is stabbing a cactus next to the girl’s rock, and the other is offering to take her by the hand, as if to offer aid.

Cuban art is, on the whole, seriously weird.
Coming from me, this is saying a lot.
A lot.

Armando Maribona, La Virgen de las Palomas (1930), a creepy looking woman staring off into space, with a red shawl on her hair and two doves on the window sill.
Rafael Lillo Guadano (1917), a woman sitting on a covered rowboat, wearing a white dress, a shawl, lace-up boots, holding a rose. More roses are scattered in the boat. A man is rowing, smiling at her. Notable (in this museum anyway) mostly for being not creepy at all.
Esteban Valderrama, Des Nudo (1937), a pastel sketch.
Federico Beltran Masses, Figura de Dama. Elegant 1920s-1930s woman shedding her shawl. This one was in the fashion and art exhibit I saw in the former Hilton yesterday. A few of the ones in this room were, actually.
Antonio Sanchez Araujo, Retrato de Dos Mujeres, very Nouveau looking.
Manuel Vega, Caravana de Ciegos (1919). Four blind men in robes on a very dark canvas, feeling their way around, hands on each others shoulders, with walking sticks. Very disturbing.

A balcony contains a gallery of illustration art:
Jaime Valls, magazine advertisements in black and white. Some of his original layouts are very cool. Some aren’t.
Illustrations by Enrique Garcia Cabrera are not to be confused with the amazing Mexican poster artist Ernesto Garcia Cabral, although their styles are not wholly dissimilar. Cabrera Pobre Gigolo, a dapper man surrounded by elegant women. Another illustration features a confused bellboy in the lobby of an elegant hotel. Very nice illustration, probably for a magazine.
Also, some great cigar labels, a specifically Cuban art form to be sure.

Another symbolist painting by Miguel Melero, El Rapto De Dejanara Por el Centauro Nesso (1978), or the Abduction of (Diana?) by the Centaur Nessus, I suppose. She doesn’t look particularly helpless as the centaur lifts her upon his back. More like a lovely afternoon centaur-back ride than an abduction.
A slightly haunting painting by Juan Jorge Peoli: La Dama del Lago, a forlorn woman with an intricately rendered shawl, painted in grey on a black background.
An Orientalist work by Miguel Angel Melero, Encuentro Entre Dos Tribus Arabes (1886). Two tribes of Arabs on horseback, having a gunfight. One is all you can score. Rushing each other, shooting each other. Not a great painting, a little rough.

More from Jorge Camacho, Siempre la Guerra (1959). Clear Miro influence here. There is a lot of that here, lots of these guys followed that path. But darker.
La Batalla Entre (1969).

Fayad Jamis Tierra; a lot of motion here, as if all the paint is rushing to a point beyond the canvas deeper into the wall. Greys and blacks and a bit of orange, a lot of depth. Did I also see this guy’s work in the hotel yesterday?
Fideilo Ponce de Leon’s Beatas (1934), three forlorn-looking women with shrouds over their heads. Another six or seven by Ponce, he paints with these big thick swaths of paint, stackin’ it up on the canvas, probably paints with a palette knife. Vague expressionistic figures, painted in a style that reminds me a little bit of Frank Auerbach. A lot of browns and tans and subtle greens.
Ernesto Navarro, Maternidad (1934), a very deco wooden sculpture of a woman kissing her baby.
Jorge Arche(sp?), mostly portraits, some very flat without a lot of detail, but others are luminous with a lot of depth. Looks like two different artists.

Marcelo Pogolotti’s, March Ascendente(sp?) is the first of at least seven works here, plus some more on the opposite wall, all showing these sort of vaguely painted working-class figures with no faces. Working in the factory, a woman in her bedroom staring at a harp and seeing mermaids in it, a bored looking guy sitting at a typewriter, a student falling asleep at his books, some people fighting a war, some people digging in a garden, a woman in a red dress walking down a deserted street towards a distant factory. The working class people of Cuba. Some of these are undated, but the ones that are dated are mostly from 1930 to 1937. Pogolotti was clearly an important artist, and of course his message must be beloved by the Communist party.

Even the landscape artists were alive and well in Cuba. No Hudson River all-stars here, no Coles, Church, or Beirstadt, but we do have Esteban Chartrand, who was quite prolific, there are several of his works here.
Also a bunch by Valentin Sanz Carta, vibrant detailed seascapes and forest scenes.
Henry Cleenewerck, a Belgian guy born in Watou (must have emigrated to Cuba if he is in this museum), Rincon del Valle al Atardecer (1865). A verdant green valley at sunrise, pink clouds, blue skies, a city off in the distance in a valley, and in the foreground there is one bird, just a bit right and below center, but the way it is painted it pops right out of the painting, more so than any other element. But below that, and hidden in the foliage, painted in a way that one would not notice it unless one were looking at the painting for a while, are two more vultures, feasting on a dead horse, picking its skeleton clean. Really subtle. There are a few more Cleenewercks too.
And then two dozen or so small genre scenes of mulato people going about their lives by Viktor Patricio Landaluze. White, black, Hispanic, all of the above. A man with a monkey, a man on a horse, a couple dancing, a woman taking a break from sweeping to admire herself in the mirror, a man courting a woman by a statue, a man taking a break from his work to kiss a beautiful statue. Pygmalion?
Robert Diago. Eleggua Regala las Caminos: more surrealist inanity from 1949. El Oraculo, another crazy bizarre one: bizarre lobster people standing in a tiny space with symbols carved into the floor by their feet.
Condo Bermudez, Mujeres con Pesces, mentioned yesterday at the fashion exhibit.
Mariano Rodriguez, further insanity from the 1950s. A bunch by him. Interesting to various degrees. Here’s something from ‘56, not so great, ‘61 not so great, not caring for the ‘63, but when we go backwards, this one from 1956 is kind of cool Gallo Amarillo, these insane ovoid Cubist things, Pescador (1950), Lectura de Origenes (1949), and to a lesser degree Naturaleza Muerta (1947). We can go back even further, but it looks like the late 1940s and early 1950s were his heyday. Before then he was doing rounded portraits of portly people. Pre-Botero or something. But when he hit his surreal phase he was completely nuts for a while, but then by the 1960s it was just more of the same, but dull, repetitious. Short window of coolness for this guy.

And then we get to Wifredo Lam. Clearly one of Cuba's mid-century art superstars. He has to be the big post-Picasso of Cuba, working from the late 1930s on.
Here is a whole gallery devoted to seventeen of his large canvases. Some great stuff by this guy. Some works on paper under glass, and some canvases.
Very tribal. Very modern. Here's your link, scoffers.
Retrato de H.H. (1944), this sort of tribal mask, and the rest of the figure wearing the mask is sort of fading into the blank paper. A hint of breasts and a woman’s knee under a dress. Crazed. Most of these are from 1939 to 1951, but there are two from 1955 and 1957.
Lam in the 1940s, that is where it is at.
Lam is represented in the Chicago museum, actually, making him the only person here that I was already familiar with. Time to find a book on him for my library...

Carlos Enriquez. Six works here, plus one that is missing at the moment (three of them seen below and to the right). Also dark and fairly interesting. This one is interesting, Primavera Bacterialogica(sp) (1932), but Virgin del Cobra (1933) is not nearly as much so. Moving down the line here, Des Nudos (1934) two nude women looking at each other and sort of melting into each other, and then another from the same year, untitled, similar to the previous one, maybe a study for it. The one they had in the hotel exhibit the other day was Retrato Maria Luisa Gomez Meno, the creepy deco woman in the black dress, very serious looking. Seven more by him on the next wall, even more serious and more intense.
Campesinos Felices (1938), a couple huddled on a hovel, the man shrouded in red and looking emaciated and sad, the woman green-faced with sagging boobs and missing teeth, holding an confused little baby. A naked little daughter stands nearby picking her nose while things burn in the background. The figures are sort of Edvard Munch-ish. This is not a happy painting. Combate (1941) two men in somberos on horseback fighting with swords, but all painted in red and green and white swirls. Totally different style from the 1930s works, but painting towards the man’s later style... Las Banistas de le Laguna (1936), two women bathing in a lagoon. Not nearly as violent as the last few paintings, almost tranquil in fact, but it points the way towards the later work in style, such as El Rapto des las Mulattes (1938), two guys again with sombreros, and bandoleers and horses, talking to two women, and painted in that swirly style, with big curved strokes distorting and twisting the image. Hard to see where the men and women and horses and landscape all begin and end. Eva en el Bano, just a woman, unfinished.

These Cubans painted some very serious art.
There is no whimsy or play in this nation's art, during Castro, during Batista, or before.

So here is a theory that explains two mysteries (the mystery of why there is so much great art packed into this ghetto museum, and the mystery of why I have never heard of most of these artists before):
France, Spain, the U.S. of A., the Netherlands, and many other nations have been producing great art for centuries. Greece, Egypt, and Italy have been producing art for millennia! All of this art has been on the free market for many years, and having been bought up by collectors and museums world-wide. So, the art works of these nations have been more or less evenly dispersed across the world over the centuries. Thus, any major (or even minor) museum in the western world is going to have a decent collection of western art from many nations, from many eras, and in many styles.
However, Cuba is a tiny nation, and it has only been producing art of note for about 150 years. For more than a third of that time, the government has tightly controlled how much art can leave the country. Therefore, given that this one single nationalized museum has first choice of all work created in Cuba, and that the artists can’t even sell their work abroad anyway, it is natural that the museum will have a sterling collection. Not to mention the fact that the average Cuban citizen isn’t really buying much art.
So, the Cuban government basically owns every single masterpiece of Cuban art created in the 20th century, and they have it all hermetically sealed in this building, far from where the winds of the capitalist world can disperse these seeds to the seven continents.
Even for a nation as small as Cuba, it is not hard for a nationalized museum to accrue an impressive collection when they have the total output of every Cuban artist in the nation within their easy reach.
Imagine if northern Europe were like Cuba: what if the ten best works by Brughel, the ten best by Bosch, the ten best by Vermeer, the ten best by Van Gough, and the ten best by Rembrandt were all in one museum in Brussels or Amsterdam?
Holy crap!
Or, what if this were Italy, and di Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Caravaggio, Modigliani, and de Chirico each had all ten of their most important works in one museum in Florence?
Yowza!
Well, the equivalent is happening in Cuba.
Fortunately, Cuba’s history is a whole hell of a lot more manageable than Italy’s; this museum is do-able in a single day, but how I would like to be able to go back over it again in the future...