The latest works by Cuban artist Eduardo Abela Torrás (born Havana 1963) are currently on view in Popular Mechanics, an exhibition at Villa Manuela, a nonprofit art gallery hosted by the Union of Cuban Artists and Writers. Abela Torrás is the grandson of Eduardo Abela, one of the most important Cuban avant-garde painters of the 1930s. Trained as an engraver, Abela Torrás has published graphic humor pieces in Cuban magazines, and his work irreverently appropriates many iconic images from art history.

The exhibition includes twelve works made in the manner of Joseph Cornell’s boxes, but without Cornell’s surrealist tone. The handmade wooden boxes—belonging to a pre-industrial culture—incorporate objects found or purchased on the street, which the artist has mixed with fragments of engravings, caricatures, and old photos. The result is a seris of flat-screen computers for surfing a peculiar Internet. The websites refer to customs, iconic characters, and ceremonies of everyday Cuban life: the peanut-seller, stores where basic commodities are distributed, school snacks, Spanish emigrants, and the sensual mixed-race woman.

Popular Mechanics showcases a typically Cuban “portable computer,” made from a wooden suitcase holding a gas cooker and a portrait of the artist—biographical reference points well known to Cubans of his generation. Humorously demystifying “cutting-edge technology,” Abela offers a satiric but close-up view of Cuba in the 21st century.

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In part one of this interview, which appears courtesy of CubaSí, distinguished curator Roberto Cobas reflected on his long and productive career at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana. Today, Cobas talks about his passion for film, his fascination with the work of Wifredo Lam, and what’s ahead for him and the MNBA.

Your work as a writer and critic—in both Cuban art and Cuban cinema—have appeared in some of the most prestigious publications across the island. Is there a personal or aesthetic motive for this remarkable output?

Films are my other passion. In particular, I’ve always been attracted to animation—to the point that I did a college thesis on the evolution of this artistic medium in Cuba. There is certainly a connection between art and animation, based on the plastic arts. To the point that it’s possible to distinguish, through their designs, the work of notable Cuban animators such as Juan Padron, Tulio Raggi, and Mario Rivas. In a previous era there were Jesus Armas, founder of the ICAIC Department of Animation, and Hernán Henríquez. In March, 1984, I was able to bring art and animation together at the MNBA in a show of drawings, designs, and posters on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of ICAIC. The exhibition, opened by the great documentary maker Santiago Álvarez, was my first project as a curator.

My affinity for films has always been very strong. Some years ago I faithfully attended those great film series presented by the Cuban Cinematheque. I remember one on German expressionist films, which was amazing, and also a program marking the centenary of Charles Chaplin in 1989, which made not a few people laugh and cry in the screening room that today carries his name. If I had not decided to be an MNBA curator, I would surely have been linked somehow to film, which continues to be an exciting artistic medium for me.

You’ve made countless contributions to Cuban culture, and in return have received the highest distinction awarded by the Ministry of Culture—a field to which you have devoted the better part of your life. How do you spend what little free time comes your way?

For a long time, I lived without taking any leisure time, which is a mistake. When I finished a day at the museum, I would take work home to continue it there—it was like a hobby. Nowadays, I consider it important to spend free time with friends and families. However, I have spent some of this so-called "free time" writing articles and essays for books, such as the essay “Mariano Rodriguez” for the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana; “Splendor and Shortcomings of a Great Collection” for Volume I of the catalogue raisonné of Mariano Rodriguez; another text entitled “Eduardo Abela: A Painter Both Cuban and Universal” for a book on this great Cuban painter, which will probably be presented in November of this year at the MNBA, in collaboration with Cuban Avant-Garde Editions, whose main organizers, Alejandro Rodríguez and José Ramón Vázquez Veiga, are doing an outstanding job in rescuing the leading figures of Cuban modernity from oblivion.”

I also want to mention the essay I was asked to write about Cuban animation for the Latin American Cinema Encyclopedia, which was recently published in Madrid. The fact of being asked to write an essay for such an important publication as an encyclopedia really surprised and satisfied me. I think I haven’t ever written anything as important as this essay. All this consumed some of my free time. I am thinking about writing a book on the Cuban avant-garde portrait, with the intent of showing the evolution of this topic as reflected in the appropriation of new artistic vocabularies by our modern artists. I’m also thinking of a book on the classic children's stories I’ve collected, with illustrations by Conrad Massaguer, under the title The Return of Tom Thumb.

What are some of the difficulties and challenges you face in your work, whether as a critic, essayist, curator, or researcher?

Basically, it’s a time-management problem. I know that the ability to draw up effective timelines and action plans is a great virtue, but in reality it’s one that I don’t possess. On occasion, I’ve started more than one project at a time, which is not the recommended approach for obtaining the best, most long-lasting results.

You’re considered one of the most knowledgeable experts on the work of Wifredo Lam, this most universal of Cuban painters. Tell us about your affinity for Lam’s work, and how it came about.

My initial encounter with Lam´s work was casual. It started when I began working with Jose Manuel Noceda [a leading Lam expert] on an exhibition that had been planned for Brazil in the late 1980s. The show never took place, but [this exposure to] Lam´s work encouraged me to understand the motifs presented in his work.”

So in 1991, Noceda and I joined our forces once more to organize the exhibition Unknown Lam, which shows the works the artist had not previously presented. To our surprise, we were able to collect a very strong set of works, including those painted on kraft paper. That show included paintings in the MNBA collection that had not been displayed previously, as well as others from La Acacia gallery and private collections. As part of the research, and thanks to the expertise of a group of restorers from the National Center for Conservation, Restoration and Museology, some completely unknown works, which had been painted on the back [of other works] and covered with cloth to supposedly protect them, were recovered.

This was one of the great revelations of the exhibition, which was showcased at Casa de las Americas on the occasion of the IV Havana Biennial. That exhibition caught the attention of the public, critics, and specialists from other countries. For instance, Robert Littman, the director of the prestigious Cultural Center of Contemporary Art in Mexico City, became fascinated with Lam´s works on paper and proposed to the MNBA that we jointly organize an exhibition that would travel to Mexico.

My friend and colleague Ramón Vázquez and I were responsible for that exhibition. This work was very important from the perspective of in-depth investigation into his work, defining key themes, and titles and dates of works that had not been signed by the artist. Research on his work continued, and the results allowed us to prepare a large exhibition that was presented in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1994, and later at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Santiago de Chile in 1995.

Among more recent Lam exhibitions, I’d have to mention a retrospective organized by the prestigious Museum of Contemporary Art of Monterrey (MARCO) and the Museo Nacional, curated by Jorge Contreras—an excellent guardian of that institution—and myself. It opened in August, 2008. The exhibition ranged from Lam´s early works, made during the 1920s, to a selection of engravings taken from the series The Last Voyage of the Ghost Ship, made in 1976 and based on the Gabriel García Márquez novel of the same name. I can tell you that Lam´s oeuvre is so rich that we often find ourselves surprised each time we approach it. And his influence on Cuban and Latin American art, and art in general.

You may be too modest to admit it, but the name of Roberto Cobas is now inextricably linked to the history of Cuban art and culture. What have you gained from this commitment to Cuban culture, and to the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes? Are there goals you haven’t yet achieved in your professional life?

After 27 years of working at the Museo Nacional, I can affirm that I owe everything I am—if I am something—to my dedication and loyalty to the institution that has hosted me since I was 24 years old. It has been my only job, and it’s undoubtedly my great love. Of course I have had ups and downs, but I prefer to remember the moments that bound me to this great family of workers at the Museo Nacional. In this span of time I have done all the tasks you can perform as a curator, from the most sublime—like investigating the authenticity of a certain painting—to the most unassuming, like moving paintings from one gallery to another or helping to install them for exhibition. I have had the great pleasure to have in my hands important works ranging from The Tropical Gypsy by Victor Manuel to The Third World by Wifredo Lam. In that sense I am an extremely happy man.

And projects in the near future?

For 2011, we are planning an exhibition on Amelia Peláez, which re-examines the most significant moments of her prolific career, including her appearance in the public arena as an academic painter and eminent disciple of Leopoldo Romañach, her consecration as one of the great figures of Cuban visual arts in the 1940s and 1950s, and the crowning achievements of her works of the 1960s. We're also very excited to be organizing a show to celebrate Felipe Orlando’s hundredth birthday. This Cuban painter is little known, as his artistic life took place in several different countries, including Cuba, the United States, Mexico, and Spain. There’s not much information about him, and his work is scattered in these different countries. It's a challenge, and a real pleasure, to work on an exhibition like this.

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Recently, the Cuban Art Building of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana hosted, to great critical acclaim, the exhibition Vanguardia y Tradición, Dibujos y grabados 1934 – 1969 (Vanguard and Tradition, Drawings and Engravings 1934 – 1969), a retrospective of master artist Jorge Rigol Lomba. The curator was Roberto Cobas Amate, a renowned figure across the island in this field and a noted art critic and essayist on Cuban films.

Through this exhibition, the public was able to explore both primary and less well-known aspects of Rigol´s art. For the most part, Rigol is remembered for an extraordinary series of engravings and drawings depicting the Vietnamese people’s daily life and struggle for independence, and for the relationship of his work to Cuban avant-garde artists. Seeing the exhibition encouraged us to talk with its curator, one of the Museo Nacional’s most experienced specialists.

Vanguardia y Tradición is essential for a better understanding of Rigol´s work. About preparation for the show, Cobas noted: “In its exhibition schedule, the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes is well aware of the anniversaries, including birthdays, of Cuba’s most important visual artists in any historical period."

“So far this year, for instance, we have had several big celebrations. We held a very successful exhibition for the centenary of José Lezama Lima, an outstanding figure among Cuban intellectuals. We had a drawings retrospective to commemorate the bicentenary of Federico Mialhe, who was an essential figure in our cultural life during the colonial period. And in the case of Jorge Rigol, the MNBA deservedly celebrated his centenary. For this, we decided to do a retrospective show with a focus on his 1930s cutting-edge drawings, whose high quality was clearly evident in the exhibition. Most of these works are virtually unknown to the public, and are closely related to the cultural phenomenon known as the Escuela de La Habana (the Havana School), where the artist did his best work.“

You began working at the MNBA in the early 1980s, and have now been curator of the Cuban modern art collection for many years. Which moments in your career do you look back on with the most pleasure? And how has your work at the Museo Nacional influenced your understanding of Cuban art?

The Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes has been a school for me, indeed. When I was awarded my bachelor’s degree in art history at the University of Havana Faculty of Arts and Letters—where I had excellent teachers—I thought I knew it all. Then I began working in December 1982, in the museum's research department. I realized that I had a lot to learn, and that what I ‘d learned in college was just a starting point. My co-workers were my best advisers. With them, I learned basic but important things, such as measuring a painting or drawing, manipulating a painting, or recording relevant technical data.

I remember with pleasure the time I worked as an assistant to Maria del Carmen Rippe on an exhibition of European paintings—an exciting experience for me. And the preparation for the First Havana Biennial, which was organized by the Museo Nacional and the Wifredo Lam Center, was also very exciting. It was really demanding work. There hadn’t ever been an event of this kind in the whole country. The MNBA was the main headquarters, and all the works in competition were taken there. We worked late into the night on that.

When it comes to curatorship, I’d mention the exhibition Wifredo Lam, the Adventure of Creation, which was shown in 1998 in several Spanish cities, such as Salamanca, Palma de Mallorca, Cáceres and León. Also the exhibition Mariano, on the extraordinary artist Mariano Rodríguez. That show opened in a major exhibition hall in Monte Carlo, Monaco. Prince Albert attended that event.

In the case of the exhibition on Wifredo Lam, there was a rigorous selection of the best works in the MNBA. This coincided with the temporary closure of the institution for remodeling and renovation. That initiative allowed us to show the evolution of the artist, from paintings made in Paris in the late 1930s—with clear cubist and surreal influences—to his further development and commitment after his return to Havana. In the 1940s and 1950s, this universal genius finds his sources of inspiration in the poetry of the Afro-Cuban religions.

The exhibition Mariano presented a chronological and stylistic development of the various themes addressed by the artist, such as women, love, fighting cocks, still lifes, landscapes, farmers, and fishermen. And also his foray into the African aspects of our culture. Although these works are not well known to the public, he was able to respond with great sensitivity to these themes.

Among exhibitions presented in the MNBA special exhibition galleries, I feel a great satisfaction in recalling Raúl Martínez, the Challenge of the Sixties, which was curated with Elsa Vega. This show gathered together a large number of works, and emphasized the importance of Raúl´s paintings for Cuban and Latin American art at the time. There was also an exhibition on Umberto Peña, which marked the re-emergence of a major figure of the 1960s to the public and the critics.

Among the group shows, it’s worth mentioning the important exhibition Cuba! Art and History from 1868 to Today, jointly organized by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Museo Nacional, on which all of the Museo’s Cuban Art curators collaborated. Over 300 works were displayed in this 2008 exhibition, which was curated by Nathalie Bondil, the Montreal MFA director, with technical coordination by Hortensia Montero of the MNBA. It’s undoubtedly the largest and most important exhibition about Cuban art that has taken place offshore. It’s even more important than the legendary exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1944. As part of its overall survey, the Montreal exhibition devoted individual galleries to two key figures in Cuban visual arts: Wifredo Lam and Marcelo Pogolotti. It was a real milestone in the history of Cuban art, and a tremendous challenge for anyone trying to top it in the future.

You’ve curated major exhibitions by Cuban artists of the first and second avant-gardes, including Wifredo Lam, René Portocarrero, Mariano Rodriguez, Aristides Fernandez, Jorge Arche, and many other Cuban masters. You’ve also written articles, essays, and catalogues about them. Being a curator and expert on Cuban art, do you feel you’ve achieved what you set out to do? Of all the exhibitions you’ve curated to date, which ones do you think have had the most influence on your career?

Frankly, I don’t think I’ve achieved that much. I feel that I could do much more. My work is just a drop of water compared to the formidable achievements of other curators, both from the Museo Nacional and from other prestigious institutions like the Wifredo Lam Center and the Center for the Visual Arts Development—just to mention a few of the most important institutions. It’s also important to mention a group of curators working independently, who’ve been doing highly technical and creative work. When it comes to the work carried out by the Museum, there is still to much left to be done and many artists to rescue from oblivion—or even to just take into account the contributions they’ve made to the visual arts. The works of these artists are still valid.

Among the exhibitions with these goals is Aristides Fernandez, Between Oblivion and Memory. Fernandez is one of the key figures in Cuban visual arts, and most of his works are held by the MNBA. At various times, his work has been omitted from the canon of Cuban art. Another exhibition in this line is Samuel Feijóo, An Unknown Sun, which is an attempt to rescue the paintings that this extraordinary Cuban poet and intellectual made in the 1940s and 1950s. In parallel with his literary work, Feijóo was able to create an important body of visual art that’s little known by the public.

I should also mention the retrospective exhibition Mirta Cerra: Between Classic and Modern, which demonstrated the artist’s contributions to Cuban art, far beyond the guajiritos and Havana landscapes that she’s best known for. Excessive modesty is a disadvantage if an artist wants to succeed in life. And this is what happened with Mirta Cerra, whose retiring personality prevented her from exerting much influence in a thriving cultural environment. Mirta was an excellent magazine cover designer with very advanced ideas for the time. She was also a resolute explorer of abstract painting in the first half of the 1950s, without belonging to any particular artistic group. And her engravings made in New York, addressing social issues of the 1930s, are among the most significant artistic works made at that time.

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Late last month, Beijing’s famed 798 Art District welcomed the work of contemporary Cuban artists in a rare exhibition of art from the island. Presented by the Xin Dong Cheng Space for Contemporary Art, the exhibition Cuba Avant-Garde marks the 50th anniversary of Cuban-Chinese relations. Showcasing such artists as Lázaro Saveedra, Abel Barroso, Sandra Ramos, and Roberto Diago, the work ranges from painting and sculpture to photography, video, and installation art, with pieces by well over a dozen artists.

In an article appearing on the Global Times website, entrepreneur Cheng Xin Dong hailed the exhibition as “the first time someone has done this here in China,” noting that “Cuba is at the beginning of change now, and the politics between Cuba and China are changing also. That’s why now it’s the best time to hold this exhibition.”

Artist Roberto Fabelo, who attended the exhibition opening with his wife and father-in-law, found the trip to China intensely inspiring. “This is not just another country, this is another world,” he told the Global Times. “I want to be here, not just with my eyes open, but also with my mind open.”

Cuba Avant-Garde remains on view at the Xin Dong Cheng Space for Contemporary Art through December 31.

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In auctions at Sotheby’s and Christie’s in New York last week, key figures in Cuban and Latin American art achieved new sale records.
The results, covered by news media as well as the Christie’s and Sotheby’s websites of the auction houses (Sotheby's and Christie’s,) included a new record for Cuban artist Wifredo Lam. With a pre-auction estimate of $1.2-$1.8 million, his 1945 painting, Sur les traces, fetched a solid $1,426,500 (with buyer’s premium) at Sotheby’s, breaking the artist’s previous record at auction, set in 1997, of $1.32 million for the 1943 painting Ogue orisa.

Sur les traces had never been auctioned, said Carmen Melián, director of Sotheby's department of Latin American Art. “You can see elements of the jungle, mixed with surrealism and a touch of cubism,” Melián observed, referring to Lam’s attempts to create a visual language for the Antilles region.

Two additional Lam works sold well in the Sotheby’s sale: an untitled work on paper and the oil painting La femme magique. The works sold for $302,500 for Untitled and $362,500 for La femme magique. Other Latin American artists hit stellar price points. Diego Rivera’s 1946 portrait Retrato de Gladys March went for $662,500, three times its estimate. Mexican surrealist Leonora Carrington brought in $722,500 for The Ordeal of Owain, and Chilean Roberto Matta‘s 1952 Untitled went for $692,500. At Sotheby’s, net sales reached $16,777,050.

At Christie’s, net sales were $20,514,000, as Mexican and Cuban artists set new records in this sale as well. Frida Kahlo’s 1938 Sobreviviente (Survivor), a palm-sized painting that had not been seen in public for over 70 years, went for $1.178 million (including buyer’s commission), more than ten times its low estimate. The 1991 painting Basurero by Cuban Tomás Sánchez was bought for $182,500. Widely acknowledged as one of Cuba’s masters of landscape art, in Basurero, Sanchéz reveals his early concern for the deteriorating environment, through a hyper-realistic figuration and elaborate attention to detail.

Additional Sánchez works in the Christie’s sale also chalked up solid prices. La meditación (Meditation, 1986), Orilla (Shore, 1986), and Meditación antes del amanecer (Meditation before dawn 1994) all exceeded their top estimates, while Orilla (1992), like Basurero, came in well above the mid-estimate. Other works by the Cuban avant-garde also sold well, including Mario Carreño’s 1946 Portrait of a young woman, which at $434,500 beat its top estimate of $400,000; and Cundo Bermúdez’s untitled portrait (also of a young woman), which galloped past its top estimate of $70,000 to reach $110,500.

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On March 19, the Museum of Latin American Art established by the Malba Costantini Foundation will present Caminos de la Vanguardia Cubana (Trails of the Cuban Avant-Garde), a survey of approximately 150 works tracing the development of modern art in Cuba. Drawn from the holdings of the Museum of Fine Arts in Havana, the Cuban Photography Archive, and private collections, the exhibition is curated by Dr. Llillian Llanes, founder of the Wilfredo Lam Center and the Havana Biennial.

The exhibition explores three principal themes: a new look at women during these decades; the roots of Cuban nationalism; and the relationship between Cuban modern art and the social and political conflicts of the era. It is drawn primarily from works presented in the previous exhibitions Cuba Vanguardias 1920-1940 (Cuban Vanguards 1920-1940), shown at the Valencian Modern Art Institute and the Palazzo Bricherasio in Turin, and Cuba Art and History, presented at Montreal´s Museum of Fine Arts and the Gronningen Museum, Holland. The current show has been expanded with additional works.

Trails of the Cuban Avant-Garde brings the work of modernist, anti-academic Cuban artists to the Argentine public for the first time. With a bilingual catalogue in Spanish and English, the exhibition showcases the work of such artists as Antonio Gattorno, Jorge Arche, Amelia Peláez, Wifredo Lam, Mario Carreño, René Portocarrero, Mariano Rodríguez, Víctor Manuel García, Fidelio Ponce de León, Arístides Fernández, Carlos Enríquez, Eduardo Abela and Marcelo Pogolotti.

Since the first New Art Salon in 1927, until institutional recognition of their work in the early 1940s, these artists produced works focusing on the twin themes of modernity and nationalism, in an attempt to reflect the circumstances of their day. Eventually, their work paved the way to a non-dogmatic teaching of art in Cuba.

In 1943, several of these artists were selected by Alfred Barr Jr, first director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, for the first exhibition on Cuban art held in the US, titled Cuban Art Today.

Trails of the Cuban Avant-Garde runs through May 3.

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Earlier this month, the Cuban Art building of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana opened its doors to the exhibition Amelia Peláez: A Retrospective. Roberto Cobas, a senior curator with a lengthy career at the museum, has selected 40 works from the museum’s wide-ranging holdings of Peláez’s art. Through drawings, paintings, collages, and other works, the show traces Peláez’s prolific output from 1926 to 1967, the year before her death.

Peláez has been recognized by international critics as one of the essential creators of the 20th-century visual arts vanguard in Latin America, along with such artists as Frida Kahlo and Tarsila do Amaral of Brazil. Peláez applied rigorous and modern visual thinking to such European trends as as Cubism, Fauvism, and the Russian avant-garde. In the process, she turned traditional colonial architecture—including her own house—into an unmistakable, sensual, baroque style. Her work was focused almost entirely on the meticulous visual examination of the Cuban environment: house, city, and broader scene. Peláez spent the last decade of her life in Socialist Cuba, but her work made no concessions to political propaganda or moralizing melodrama.

Amelia Pelaez: A Retrospective is organized chronologically, opening with Paisaje de puentes grandes (Landscape of Big Bridges), a colorful canvas from 1926, full of of post-impressionist touches, which is part of the museum’s permanent collection. The show ends with the 1967 work Naturaleza muerta con piña (Still Life with Pineapple). It´s worth noting that even a year before she died, Peláez still maintained the firm stroke and acute creativity of her peak years. The show traces the development of Peláez’s artistic style as one of calm, steady, and continuous growth, with no radical leaps. Peláez deliberately limited the visual motifs that she worked with, and the resources that she used to express them.

Peláez studied at the San Alejandro Academy in Havana, where she was the favorite student of Leopoldo Romañach. There, she absorbed the influence of post-impressionist and symbolist Cuban art of the turn of the century. At the time she traveled to Paris in 1927, Havana was shaken by two movements: the beginnings of political opposition to President Gerardo Machado, and the New Art Show, a manifesto-exhibition of new painting in Cuba. Publications such as the Revista de Avance reported the initial stirrings of a nationalist art movement.

For Amelia Peláez, Paris was a party. The City of Light—the modern art mecca—was also the temporary residence of many Cuban artists (Victor Manuel, Eduardo Abela, Ramón Loy, Jaime Valls Díaz), and writers such as Alejo Carpentier. She enrolled in the free academy of La Grande Chaumière, she took in museums, became close friends with Cuban writer Lydia Cabrera, discovered Cézanne, Braque, Matisse, and especially, Aleksandra Exster, an artist and Russian refugee with whom she took classes in color dynamics and design. Exster’s influence left indelible marks in Peláez´s work.

Returning to Cuba in 1934, Peláez joined the active cultural community across the island. A year later, in February, she showcased her European works at the Lyceum, an important forum for female painters. There, renowned intellectuals recognized her untiring search for a modern Cuban art that did not make fleeting concessions to politics. Her work in the magazines Espuela de Plata (Silver Spur) and Orígenes (Origins), published by poet José Lezama Lima, linked her with Cuban poetry, and she found other ways to actively imagine “what Cuba is.”

Peláez’s style crystallized in the 1940s. The main subject of her work was the domestic environment, inspired by the light-filled house she shared with her sisters in the Víbora district of Havana. Through a sensual, rhythmic, almost zen approach, Peláez created visual structures which enclose planes of strong color, and which simultaneously serve as an expression of functional decorative elements of traditional Cuban architecture (window grilles, glassworks). Her interiors depicting native Cuban fruits broke with the closed environment of European academic paintings, where women read or look lost in thought; she presents the most intimate family environment— dining rooms, kitchens, reading salons—to the curious eye of the spectator. There is no rigorous, monastic closure, rather a joyous display of familial intimacy.

In 1944 the Museum of Modern Art organized the first major exhibition of Cuban art in New York; it included eleven pieces by Peláez, the most of any Cuban artist. Her work, considered essentially Latin American, merits further comparative studies with her contemporaries such as Remedios Varo (Spain) or Georgia O ‘Keeffe (USA).

Amelia Peláez: A Retrospective is on view at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana through April 17.

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Two masters of Cuban contemporary art, Manuel Mendive (born Havana 1944) and Flavio Garciandía (born Villa Clara 1954), are back in the spotlight with new exhibitions demonstrating that for both of them, the artistic pulse is still going strong and the mind is working with great clarity.

Critics and art experts have placed Mendive and Garciandía in two different cultural moments, but they have something significant in common: strong ties to Cuban popular culture. In the “prodigious” decade of the 1960s, when artists and art critics eagerly sought to depict the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in art, Mendive presented works full of Afro-Cuban Yoruba symbols and myths—a sin and a scandal in an atheist, Communist society. From the 1970s on, Garciandía was linked with the so-called generación de la esperanza cierta (the generation of certain hope), the rise of photorealism in Cuba, and the groundbreaking exhibition Volume I.

In the late 1980s, both Mendive and Garciandía were considered essential figures in contemporary Cuban art. Garciandía became an important teacher for successive waves of artists molded at the classrooms of the Instituto Superior de Arte; Mendive worked on well-publicized solo exhibitions at the National Museum of Fine Arts.

Set in a large, colonial-era building in Mexico City, the José Luis Cuevas Museum showcases a wide-ranging collection of works by many artists, amassed by the late Mexican artist for whom the museum was named. It also hosts temporary exhibitions, including Manuel Mendive: La Luz y Las Tinieblas (“The Light and the Darkness), on view through March 3.

Through painting, sculpture, and installation works, the exhibition examines the tri-part dynamic of life, death, and resurrection common to many religions, as reinterpreted by Mendive, a practitioner of the Regla de Ocha (“Rule of Ocha”), or Santería. In these works, the artist refashions myths in the materials and vocabulary of contemporary art. Mendive has been recognized in several Havana Biennials for vibrant performance works in which he painted dancers´naked bodies; his inspiration further extends to metal and bronze sculpture, site-specific installations, and urban interventions (as seen in the 1988 documentary Obataleo by Cuban filmmaker Humberto Solas). In these works, the wisdom of the African gods is melded with a philosophical inquiry about nature and culture.

In the exhibition catalogue, Cuban critic Darys Vázquez says of Mendive´s art: "As a Cuban, he involves the work with his own reality, but also with the reality of the Latin American man and man inside world cartography. And this is done with an infinite attachment to historical tradition."

Flavio Garciandía chose Villa Manuela Gallery, owned by the Union of Cuban Writers and Artists, as the space for his exhibition I was going to say something very important (. . . but I have already forgotten it.), which closed yesterday (January 31). The humorous tone of the title certainly refers that paradoxical nature of the large canvases that Garciandía has been doing for years. With their dense references to abstraction, they are exquisite lessons in his knowledge of art and artists.

Over the past decade, Garciandia’s work has become a museum of fragments—an immense collage, in which the act of painting is used to express his open and transparent admiration, one artist to another, for the work of others. Living in Monterrey, Mexico and making frequent visits to Havana, Garciandía expresses through his work the thought that he once put this way: “My craft as a painter boils down to what Picasso said: A painter is nothing more than a collector who collects what he likes of others’ work, made by himself.”

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