Cuban art is an exceptionally diverse cultural blend of North American, South American, European, and African elements, reflecting the diverse demographic makeup of the island. Cuban artists embraced European modernism, and the early part of the 20th century saw a growth in Cuban avant-garde movements, which were characterized by the mixing of modern artistic genres. Some of the more celebrated 20th-century Cuban artists include Amelia Peláez (1896–1968), best known for a series of mural projects, and painter Wifredo Lam (December 8, 1902 – September 11, 1982), who created a highly personal version of modern primitivism. The Cuban-born painter Federico Beltran Masses (1885–1949), was renowned as a colorist whose seductive portrayals of women sometimes made overt references to the tropical settings of his childhood.
Better known internationally is the work of photographer Alberto Korda, whose photographs following the early days of the Cuban Revolution included a picture of Che Guevara which was to become one of the most recognizable images of the 20th century.
There is a flourishing street art movement influenced by Latin American artists José Guadalupe Posada and the muralist Diego Rivera.
After the Cuban Revolution of 1959, some artists felt it was in their best interests to leave Cuba and produce their art, while others stayed behind, either happy or merely content to be creating art in Cuba, which was sponsored by the government. Because it was state-sponsored, implied censorship occurred, since artists wouldn't want to make art that was against the revolutionary movement as that was the source of their funding. It was during the 1980s in which art began to reflect true uninfluenced expression. The "rebirth" of expression in Cuban art was greatly affected by the emergence of a new generation of Cubans, which did not remember the revolution directly.Padura Fuentes, Leonardo. "Living and Creating in Cuba: Risks and Challenges". Reinventing the Revolution: A Contemporary Cuba Reader. Ed. Philip Brenner et al. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2008. 348–354. Print.
In 1981 Cubans saw the introduction of "Volumen Uno", a series of one-man exhibitions featuring contemporary Cuban artists. Three years later, the introduction of the "Havana Bienal" assisted in the further progression of the liberation of art and free speech therein.Tonel, Antonio Eligio. "A Tree From Many Shores: Cuban Art in Movement". Art Journal. 57.4 (1998) 62–74. Print.
Colonial Era Throughout most of its 400 years under Spanish rule, Cuba and specifically Havana functioned as the primary entrepôt of Spain's empire in the Americas, with a population of merchants, administrators, and professionals who were interested in supporting the arts. In the 16th century, painters and sculptors began arriving from Europe to decorate Cuban churches and public buildings. By the mid-1700s, native-born artists working in the European tradition were active in Cuba.
The first of these to leave a substantial, identifiable body of work was José Nicolás de la Escalera (1734 – 1804). Though mostly absent of originality, his religious scenes - particularly those decorating the cupola and altar of the Church of Santa María del Rosario near Havana - are spectacular, and include the first fine art depictions of Black Cuban slaves.Cernuda Arte: José Nicolás de la Escalera; http://www.cernudaarte.com/artists/jose-nicolas-de-la-escalera/ retvd 2 6 16
Vicente Escobar (1762 - 1834) was a mestizo whose skill as a portraitist made him popular among Cuba's elite.Art Experts; Vicente Escobar y de Flores (1762-1834); http://www.artexpertswebsite.com/pages/artists/escobarydeflores.php; retvd 1 31 16 Though having no formal art education himself, he opened what was possibly Cuba's first painting workshop/studio, and later graduated with honors from the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid. His portraiture was firmly in the European Classical style but had a distinctive freshness and energy.Cernuda Arte: Vicente Escobar; http://www.cernudaarte.com/artists/vicente-escobar/; retvd 1 31 16
A slave revolt culminating in neighboring Haiti's declaration of independence in 1804 proved something of a windfall for Cuba, as refugee plantation owners and their slaves relocated to the underdeveloped, underpopulated eastern portion of the island. However, the success of Toussaint and Dessalines' slave uprising spread intense anxiety throughout the Caribbean, and one response to it was the growth of costumbrismo - realist yet romanticized views of day-to-day life - in Cuban art.
A leading early artist in this genre was Spanish-born Víctor Patricio de Landaluze (1830 - 1889), whose paintings depicted plantation life as rough but essentially natural and harmonious. His political cartoons for the magazine El Almendares took a more satirical view of the urbanized "Creole aristocracy". Opposed to Cuban independence, Landaluze eventually fell out of favor with the public, but his work remains valued for capturing the atmosphere and attitudes of his time.Cernuda Arte: Víctor Patricio Landaluze http://www.cernudaarte.com/artists/victor-patricio-landaluze/; retvd 1 31 16
On January 11, 1818, the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes San Alejandro (known as the "Academy San Alejandro", in honor of an important founder/benefactor) was established in Havana, under the direction of Frenchman Jean Baptiste Vermay. The oldest art academy in Latin America, it is the second-oldest institution of higher education in Cuba, after the University of Havana. Continuing to the present day, it has produced many of Cuba's most important artists.
By the later 19th-century landscape painting had become popular, with artists such as Miguel Arias Bardou, Guillermo Collazo, José Abreu Morell, and José Joaquín Tejada creating scenes featuring Cuba's lush natural environment. Despite the benign content of their work, many artists (perhaps most prominently, Collazo) were strong supporters of Cuban independence, and some were forced into exile.
In 1898 Spain's four centuries of rule over Cuba came to an end when U.S. troops intervened on the side of rebel fighters. Independence, however, proved illusory, with the United States controlling Cuba's foreign policy and much of its economy,the U.S. Dep't of State-Office of the Historian; The United States, Cuba, and the Platt Amendment, 1901; https://history.state.gov/milestones/1899-1913/platt retvd 2 6 16 while strong-man presidents did little to foster freedom and democracy. Artists of the early Republican era continued much as before, painting landscapes and scenes of Cuban life in the traditional European style, some of them showing light touches of Impressionism. Many, such as Antonio Sanchez Araujo, Armando Menocal, Antonio Rodriguez Morey, Domingo Ramos Enriquez, and Leopoldo Romañach, went on to become instructors or administrators at the Academy San Alejandro and other arts institutions. The Modernist movements which convulsed European art early in the 20th century initially had little impact on the closed, academic world of contemporary Cuban art.
Vanguardia artists In the late 19th century, landscapes dominated Cuban art and classicism was still the preferred genre.Cuban Culture . The radical artistic movements that transformed European art in the first decades of the century arrived in Latin America in the 1920s to form part of a vigorous current of artistic, cultural, and social innovation.
By the late 1920s, the Vanguardia artists had rejected the conventions of Cuba's national art academy, the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes “San Alejandro”, in Havana, which most of them had attended. In their formative years, many had lived in Paris, where they studied and absorbed the tenets of Surrealism, Cubism, and modernist Primitivism. Modernism burst on the Cuban scene as part of the critical movement of national regeneration that arose in opposition to the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado, American neo-colonial control, and the consequent economic crisis.Ades, Dawn. Art in Latin America: The Modern Era, 1820–1980. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989: 7. They returned to Cuba committed to new artistic innovation and keen to embrace the heritage of their island. These artists became increasingly political in their ideology, viewing the rural poor as symbols of national identity in contrast to the ruling elite of post-independence Cuba. Vanguard leader Eduardo Abela, a painter who studied in Paris, was typical of the movement. He discovered his homeland Cuba from abroad, apparently motivated by a combination of distance and nostalgia. On his return, Abela entered a highly productive period of work. His murals of Cuban life were complemented by cartoons which became social critiques of Cuban life under the authoritarian Machado regime.Eduardo Abela Cubanet
Pioneers of the movement included Abela, Antonio Gattorno, Victor Manuel, Fidelio Ponce de León, and Carlos Enríquez Gómez. Born around the turn of the century, these artists grew up amidst the turmoil of constructing a new nation and reached maturity when Cubans were engaged in discovering and inventing a national identity. They fully shared in the sense of confidence, renovation, and nationalism that characterized Cuban progressive intellectuals in the second quarter of the twentieth century.
Antonio Gattorno (1904 - 1980) and Eduardo Abela (1889 - 1965) were the earliest painters of their generation to adapt modern European and Mexican art to the interpretation of their Cuban subjects. They also found in the directness and idealization of early Renaissance painting an effective model for their expression of Cuban themes. These painters' criollo images, for all their differences, shared a modern primitivist view of Cuba as an exotic, timeless, rural land inhabited by simple and sensual, if also sad and melancholic people. Although rooted in Cuba's natural and cultural environment, the vision of lo Cubano (the Cuban) was far removed from contemporary historical reality. Instead, it was based on an ideal conception of Patria that had been a component of Cuban nationalism and art since the nineteenth century.
This idealized vision featured strongly in the portraits and landscapes of Victor Manuel (1897 - 1969), who was particularly impressed by the works of Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin during his two relatively brief stays in Paris. A San Alejandro graduate highly skilled in drawing and composition, Manuel chose to apply primitivist simplicity to his Cuban subjects - a favorite being the female face - and brought out qualities of melancholy and strength, as captured in La Gitana Tropical (The Tropical Gipsy, 1929), which is considered by critics to be one of the defining pieces of Cuban Avant-garde art.Cernuda Art: Victor Manuel Garcia; http://www.cernudaarte.com/artists/victor-manuel-garcia/ retvd 12 9 15
The emphasis which Carlos Enríquez (1900 - 1957) and Fidelio Ponce (1895 - 1949) placed on the themes of change, transformation, and death have had an enduring impact on Cuban art.Cruz-Taura, Graciella; Fuentes-Perez, Ileana; Pau-Llosa, Ricardo. ‘’Outside Cuba’’. New Jersey: Office of Hispanic Arts Mason Gross School of the Arts, 1988: 44. Enríquez and Ponce represent two approaches to death: the first marked by exuberant flight and emotion; the second by moody contemplation. If Enríquez painted the delirium after the triumphed siege, Ponce painted the anteroom of grief. Enríquez was a self-taught painter from a wealthy family, while Ponce, though he had attended the San Alejandro Academy, spent his life in poverty. What these two most original and distinctive of the Vanguardia painters had in common - aside from severe problems with alcoholism - was that neither had studied in Europe.Martinez, Juan A.;’’ Cuban Art & National Identity: The Vanguardia Painters, 1927-1950’’; University Press of Florida, 1994;