Cuban Avant-Garde at Pan American Art Projects

Mariano Rodríguez. En el parque, 1938. Oil/Canvas. 14” x 10”. Courtesy Pan American Art Projects.

By Raisa Clavijo

One of the outstanding exhibitions in Miami this season is the show “Leopoldo Romañach & La Vanguardia Cubana,” presented at Pan American Art Projects. The period known as “las vanguardias” in Cuban art spans approximately from 1926 to 1949. During this period a movement, involving mainly art and literature, emerged among the Cuban intelligentsia based on rapprochement with European modernity principles. Most of the artists, who would make up the Cuban avant-garde, traveled to Europe, above all to Paris, melding with the new aesthetic and philosophical ideas being generated on the Old Continent. Many of these creators, upon returning to Cuba, opposed the rigid stylistic canons of the Academia de San Alejandro in Havana (founded in 1818) and promoted new art and new forms of expression. Many of them came together in cultural publications spearheaded by José Lezama Lima, such as Verbum (1937), Espuela de Plata (1939-1941), Nadie Parecía (1942-1944), and Orígenes (1944-1956). These publications assembled prominent intellectuals, who blazed new philosophical and ideo-aesthetic trails in insular thinking.

Cuban avant-garde represented a national art of renewal and anti-academic solutions that would shake up the artistic inertia afflicting the Island. The contribution of these artists consisted in their capacity to learn from European modernity and Mexican muralism from a personal perspective, capturing elements of national culture and idiosyncrasy. Cuban avant-garde implied a discerning search for national expression within Western artistic modernity.

The collection exhibited at Pan American Art Projects was compiled over decades by its owner, Robert Borlenghi, a notable collector of Latin American art. It includes works by Víctor Manuel García (1897-1969), Eduardo Abela (1889-1965), Carlos Enríquez (1900-1957), Mariano Rodríguez (1912-1990), Roberto Diago (1920-1955), Amelia Peláez (1896-1968), Mario Carreño (1913-2000), Cundo Bermúdez (1914-2008), Wifredo Lam (1902-1982), René Portocarrero (1912-1985) and Luis Martínez Pedro (1910-1989). In an adjacent room, the gallery has also included a selection of pieces by Leopoldo Romañach (1862-1951), one of the great figures of Cuban colonial painting and a professor at the Academia de San Alejandro in Havana in the early twentieth century. Although he himself embraced an academic style, as professor at San Alejandro, Romañach allowed his students to freely express themselves. Many of his disciples, after inhaling the airs of renewal in the European “isms,” would come to form part of the Cuban avant-garde.

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In its Project Room, the gallery is simultaneously presenting a show by Héctor Molné (1937), who is not a part of the Cuban avant-garde because he belongs to a subsequent generation, but who nevertheless exhibits stylistic ties to the artists of the period, as a result of his connection to Víctor Manuel and Mariano Rodríguez. His work is highly regarded in Miami’s Cuban community.

With these exhibitions Pan American Art Projects continues its tradition of providing high-quality fare to the South Florida art scene.

“Leopoldo Romañach & La Vanguardia Cubana” will be on view until August 16, 2009

Pan American Art Projects. 2450 NW 2^nd Avenue. Miami, FL, 33127.