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Carmen Herrera in the context of modern painting in Cuba

by Alejandro Anreus

Modernist painting arrived in Cuba in February of 1927 when Victor Manuel García (1897-1969) exhibited his canvases at the Asociación de Pintores y Escultures in Havana.1 He had been in Paris since 1925. García’s canvases, which shocked his Cuban audience in 1927, today seem tame, traditional pictures of girls and landscapes, bearing the influence of Gauguin and Modigliani. Between 1927 and 1938, all of the leading painters and sculptors associated with modernism returned to Cuba (Fidelio Ponce being the exception-he never left the island), and exhibited their work.2 This group included the painters Eduardo Abela (1889-1965), Amelia Peláez (1896-1968), Fidelio Ponce (1895-1949), Carlos Enríquez (1900-1957), and Marcelo Pogolotti (1902-1988). Abela’s work of the late1920’s and 1930’s dealt with typical Cuban genre subjects: the life of the guajiro (peasant) in the countryside, and various aspects of Afro-Cuban culture. Stylistically he moved from a poetic expressionism that owed much to Pascin, to a flat and linear visual vocabulary straight out of the Italian Primitives. Abela’s content was always idyllic; he reserved his critique of Cuban reality for his political cartoon EL Bobo. Fidelio Ponce, the one artist of this generation that never went overseas, was homegrown expressionist. An admirer of El Greco (whose work he knew through reproductions), He painted images with tonal, impastoed compositions in which the figures, be these tuberculosis victims, saints, or children, seem trapped in an environment of melancholy and desolation. Carlos Enriquez brought to Cuban painting the formal influences of both the Italian Futurists and French Surrealism, although filtered through a personal temperament obsessed with what the artist termed a “romancero criollo” (Creole ballads). In his “romancero” the Cuban countryside, its inhabitants, and its folklore come together or apart in a violent, erotic embrace.3

Without a doubt, Amelia Peláez received the most thorough and varied artistic training among the early modern painters in Cuba. Peláez finished the traditional course of study at the Academic San Alejandro.4 At the Academy Peláez became a protégée of the painter Leopoldo Romañach (1862-1951). Romañach painted in a style reminiscent of impressionism, particularly its Italian version as found in the Macchiaioli painters. What was important about Romañach’s pedagogy was his open mind and his encouragement of his students to investigate new art forms, even when these were incomprehensible to him.5

After graduating from San Alejandro, Peláez attended the Art Students League of New York for six months, and in 1927 she departed for Paris, where she stayed until 1934 when returned to Cuba. In Paris, Peláez not only encountered modern painting firsthand-fromCezanne to Piccaso-but she also studied privately with the Russian Constructivist painter and stage designer, Alexandra Exter.6

After Peláez returned to Cuba, she developed a unique painting style that adapted the Synthetic Cubist reconstruction of space to a more fluid organization of forms within the canvas. Peláez absorbed both the coloristic lessons of Matisse and the use of impastoed textures from expressionists such as Chaim Soutine. Her re-encounter with the environment of her childhood and youth: neo-colonial architecture, with its stained glass fanlights and iron grill-work, her mother’s kitchen with its tropical fruits and vegetables, the family garden with its exotic flowers, all of this concrete, material experience helped crystallize her art. Peláez’s still-lifes are abstractions where color and shapes are engaged in a formal dance charged with symbolic overtones.
Marcelo Pogolotti was active as a painter until 1938, when he became blind. His limited output was produced from 1928 to 1937. Like Peláez, Pogolotti studied at the Art Students League of New York, and lived and worked in both Italy and France. As early as 1928 he was experimenting with geometric abstraction, followed by Surrealist Experiments. By the early 1930’s he had encountered Marxism and was reflecting social concerns in his drawings and paintings. Although he was involved with the Italian Futurists until 1934, that year he joined the left-wing Association des Ecrivains et Artistes Revolutionaires in Paris. Pogolotti’s mature paintings (1934-1937) adapted the aesthetic of Fernand Leger, with its emphasis on the machine. Marxism continued to be the foundation of his work. Pogolotti’s concept of abstraction has much in common with trotsky’s as expressed in Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art of 1938-that revolutionary of forms: namely, abstraction.7

A figure of importance in the general discussion of modern painting in Cuba is Wifredo Lam (1902-1982). Although this artist never practiced abstraction in the most radical of forms, he was a member of the Surrealist movement, providing an international context for his art, as well as cosmopolitan beyond the island.

A peripheral figure who fits between the first and second generations of modern painters in Cuba was Enrique Riverón (b. 1902). Riverón was known in Latin America from the 1920s through 1950 as a caricaturist and illustrator. However, as early as 1921 he started to exhibit his efforts in painting. Starting in the late 1930s, Riverón was the first painter in Cuba to take up non-objective art. For the next two decades he produced small scale paintings, collages, and drawings that explored the relationship of color and forms without any reference to reality. Although his pictorial vision was not consistent, he was the first recognized abstract painter within the context of Cuban modern painting.

Carmen Herrera belongs to what is generally defined as the second generation of modern artists in Cuba; these are artists born in the decade of the 1910s.

Some of them have been classified as the Escuela de la Habana by critics such as Jose Gómez Sicre and Guy Perez Cisneros. Members of this generation included artists Rene Portocarrero (1912-1986), Mariano Rodríguez (1912-1988), Alfredo Lozano (1913-1997), and Daniel Serra Badue (1914-1996). From this generation only three are alive at the writing of this essay: Cundo Bermudez (b. 1914), Mario Carreño (b. 1914), and Carmen Herrera (b. 1915).

The majority of these artists’ works stayed within figurative parameters. Carreño painted in a geometric style during the 1950s, and Lozano’s sculpture became abstract around 1954, remaining so until his death. This places Herrera in a unique position within Cuban art; she was the first artist to develop and sustain a pure, abstract style.

Most important for an artist like Carmen Herrera was the example of Amelia Peláez gave up marriage and children at a time when these defined the identity of a woman, particularly in Latin American country, devoting herself entirely to her art. The centrality of color within Peláez’s painting was also important in Herrera’s own use of color in her work. She was a powerful example for charting one’s own course.

In 1939 Carmen Herrera settled in New York. Through her husband, Herrera became a good friend of the Abstract Expressionist painter Barnett Newman. In the 1940s Newman was going through a dry period in his own work, yet conversing with him was always stimulating: “We spoke about the nature of abstraction, its very essence. Barney felt strongly that abstraction needed a mythological a religious basis; I, on the other hand, wanted something clearer, less romantic and dark.” 8 It was also in New York that she befriended the painter Leon Polk Smith: “We did similar work, and had embarked on a similar exploration regarding the structure and color of painting, and we always had a lot to talk about.” 9 Even though she continued to travel to Cuba, maintaining friendships with artists like Cundo Bermudez, Alfredo Lozano, and Jose Mijáres, the development of Herrera’s art after 1939 would be closely tied to the city of New York.

By the early 1940s Herrera abandoned sculpture-she done a lot of wood carving in Cuba-and focused entirely on painting. After world war II Herrera lived in Paris again, and was there at the time of the Salon des Realites Nouvelles exhibition. This exhibition was a revelation for the artist:

The exhibition was a response to the Nazi’s anti-modern stance, and here you had the many voices that the Third Reich tired to silence; it was powerful. Everything that was in the exhibition was abstract, geometric, even pre-minimal. Albers’ paintings touched me. I was able to see more work by the Bauhaus. I felt that this was the kind of painting that I wanted to do . I had found my path as a painter.10

By 1954 Herrera had cemented her visual vocabulary: a rigorous synthesis of geometric and coloristic concerns, one that is too sensual to be minimal, and a color that, for all its intensity, is never allowed to overtake the classical structure of her pictures:

Color is the essence of my painting. What starts to happen to it as you reduce its numbers and come down to two colors, them there is a subtlety, an intensity in the way two colors relate to each other. Yet I am not interested in optical effects as these are simplistic to my mind. For a number of years I have also been interested in the form of the painting, working not just with square and rectangular canvases, but also oblong and other shapes.11

Since the 1950s Herrera has produced a series of painting only with black and white: “For me, black and white are colors. I do not see them as anything but colors. These paintings are about rigor, about setting up a challenge for myself as a painter.” 12

Is Herrera a minimalist painter. An abstractionist born in Cuba, Herrera sees herself as a Cuban who is a painter, but regarding the nature of her painting, the issue is more complicated: “My paintings sometimes are very bold and filled with risk; Other times they are subtle. I see my paintings at a crossroads, they have much in common with geometry, with minimalism, yet they are neither. To me they are good paintings that do not fit into easy categories.” 13

Carmen Herrera’s work cannot be easily placed within a category. Her paintings are too minimal to be simply geometric, and her intense use of color is not minimal. Since the early 1950s Carmen Herrera has been producing a body of paintings that, in its purity of color and rigor of construction, has few equals in the art of Cuba and Latin America.

ALEJANDRO ANREUS, PH.D.
Curator
Jersey City Museum

NOTES

1. Navarrete, Jose Antonio and Ramón Vásquez Díaz, La Vanguardia. Surgimiento del arte moderno en Cuba (La Habana: Museo Nacional, 1988), n.pg. This and all other translations from the Spanish are by the author.
2. Ibid.
3. Martinez, Juan A., Cuban Art & National Identity (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994), p. 153.
4. Founded in 1818 by Jean-Baptiste Vermay, a former student of Jacques-Louis David, the academy was until the 1930s the only structured art school in the island Its Program of study was very traditional, based both on the French (Ecole des Beaux Arts) and Spanish (Academia de San Fernando) models. Women were admitted to the Academy at the end of the nineteenth century, and by 1920 they were allowed to draw from nude models.
5. Blanc, Giulio V., Amelia Peláez 1896-1968. A Retrospective (Miami: Cuban Museum of Art and Culture, 1988), p. 20.
6. Ibid. pp. 24-26.
7. Martínez, p. 161.
8.Telephone interview with Carmen Herrera by the author, January 27, 1998.
9. Fuentes-Perez, Ileana, Outside Cuba ( New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989), pp. 104-109. Telephone interview with Carmen Herrera by author, January 27, 1998
10. Telephone interview with Carmen Herrera by the author, January 27, 1998.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.