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Cuba: Art and History from 1868 to Today,
ed. Nathalie Bondil (The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts/Prestel, ISBN
978-2-89192-323-1, 424 pp)
Review by Nicholas Laughlin
First
published in The Caribbean Review of Books, August 2008
On 10 October, 1868, Carlos Manuel de
Céspedes, a wealthy landowner from eastern Cuba, assembled the
slaves on his hacienda, told
them they were now free, and made a proclamation that has come to be
known as the Grito de Yara: a
declaration of independence for Cuba. It was the start of the Ten
Years’ War, the first of three wars against the Spanish colonial powers
that finally ended, after yanqui
intervention, in Cuban independence. In some versions of the narrative
of nationhood, therefore, 1868 is the birth-year of modern Cuba. It is
also the zero point for Cuba: Art and History from 1868 to Today,
a major exhibition of Cuban art that ran at the Montreal Museum of Fine
Arts from January to June 2008, and its massive eponymous catalogue.
Cuba is the indisputable
heavyweight of the Caribbean art scene. One reason for (and also
consequence of) this status is the strength of the country’s
state-funded art institutions. Cuba:
Art and History drew mostly on the collections of the Museo
Nacional de Bellas Artes (supplemented by loans from other museums and
private collectors). Even in the era of Fidel Castro’s supposed
retirement it’s impossible to imagine any US institution collaborating
so intimately with Cuba’s art establishment. Canada has been a far
friendlier trade and tourism partner, and it’s hard not to think of Cuba: Art and History as a lavish
act of cultural diplomacy on the part of the Museum of Fine Arts. Far
fewer people saw the show than if it had opened, say, in New York, but
the gorgeous catalogue (which reproduces over four hundred works)
offers the prospect of a long afterlife.
Almost the first works we see are
three paintings by the Canadian artist James Wilson Morrice, who
travelled in the Caribbean in the early twentieth century. (Uncannily,
Morrice’s oil paintings stylistically prefigure the later work of Peter
Doig, the Scottish-Canadian artist who currently lives and works in
Trinidad — at a quick glance The
Pond, West Indies (1921) could pass for a Doig.) But this
glimpse of Cuba-as-seen-by-visitors is quickly succeded by a selection
of topographical landscapes, portraits, and academic studies of local
festivals and “types” by native sons (not yet daughters) — engaged, the
catalogue text suggests, in “finding ways to express a nation.” They
look suitably antiquated to our eyes, but the first stage of incipient
nationhood, political or cultural, is perhaps necessarily reactionary.
Two monumentally scaled historical paintings by the padre-hijo pair Armando and Augusto
García Menocal hint at subversions to come. Bobadilla Sending Off Columbus
(1893) depicts the expulsion from Cuba of the former Admiral of the
Indies; I Don’t Want to Go to Heaven
(1930) takes its title from the defiant dying words of the Taíno
leader Hatuey, refusing conversion to Christianity as he was burned at
the stake by the Spanish. The symbolic weight of both moments is no
less poignant for being obvious.
These older works are an edifying
prologue to the more celebrated modernists of the so-called vanguardia who emerged in the
1920s, inspired equally by radical politics, the European avant-garde,
and a searching exploration of creole and Afro-Cuban culture. They
broke into the consciousness of the international art world in the 1944
show Modern Cuban Painters at
the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The key figure missing from this
seminal event was Wifredo Lam, up to this day considered the major Caribbean art historical
figure (and the one against whom painters of a certain generation and
style are still measured — haven’t you heard Leroy Clarke described as
the Trinidadian Lam, or Philip Moore as the Guyanese version?). Lam
didn’t want to be pigeonholed as “Cuban.” His ambitions were global,
even if his “exotic” origin was a key element of his fame. (It is a
dilemma many Caribbean artists still face.) The catalogue grants him
his own chapter, appropriately at the exact centre of the physical
volume.
There are two interlacing narrative
strands in Cuba: Art and History,
made explicit in the title. Each chronological section of artworks
opens with a selection of scene-setting documentary photographs, many
borrowed from the Fototeca de Cuba in Havana. (Some of these are works
of art in their own right; see the photos shot in 1933 by the American
photographer Walker Evans and lent by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.)
Nowhere does this “history” and “art” alternation work so seductively
as at the start of the section “Within the Revolution, Everything,
Against the Revolution, Nothing”. Cool geometrical abstractions of the
1950s suddenly give way, at the turn of a page, to a seething parade of
revolutionary cavalry, followed by Alberto Korda’s iconic portrait of
Che Guevara, marching militia, Fidel declaiming to a crowd of tens of
thousands, and a close-up of The Beard.
An essay on post-Revolutionary
artists of the 1960s and 70s is demurely titled “Rediscovering
Identity”. Well, to say the least. The works that follow are louder,
more aggressive, more overtly ideological. “The clear, incredible
force” of the Revolution, writes Liana Ríos Fitzsimmons, “was
manifested in a sense of justice and freedom that ... broke with the
motivations behind and norms of the abstract art that went before.”
Perhaps the period is best exemplified by the technicolour political
and cinema posters reproduced here, and the faux-naïf Cuba Colectiva Mural,
famously painted overnight on 17 and 18 July, 1967, by an assortment of
international and Cuban artists at the Salón de Mayo.
“The renewal of the arts that took
place in Cuba beginning in about 1979 ... brought with it a total
change in the cultural landscape,” writes Corina Matamoros Tuma in an
introduction to the catalogue’s final section. “A whole new generation
side-stepped the prevailing aesthetic.” She identifies key elements:
the influence of conceptual art, and a new engagement with popular
culture and “Cuba kitsch”; the appearance of artists’ collectives,
installations, and “found” art; and the launching of the Havana
Biennale, which drew the Cuban capital into a reconfigured
international art circuit. The collapse of the Soviet Union, and the
withdrawal of its subsidies to Cuba, was a decisive moment for these
artists. In the consequent economic and social upheaval, many chose
exile and access to new opportunities in North America and Europe.
Today they are established players in the international art economy, if
not quite in the major league.
The arc of the narrative that
unfolds in these pages has many parallels in the separate art histories
of the Caribbean. The singular experience of the 1959 Revolution aside,
Cuban artists’ early attempts to adapt the ideas and techniques of
international modernism to local subjects, to create works of art that
shape and reinforce specific notions of national culture, and their
ongoing, fruitful, often anxious negotiation between outside influences
and inside circumstances, “home” and “away,” are familiar to artists
and art historians of the wider region.
The poet Robert Frost summarised
the European settlement of North America in a famous line: “The land
was ours before we were the land’s.” For most of us in the Caribbean,
our experience was the exact opposite. We were the land’s —
plantation-bound, with little choice in the matter — long before we
could conceive of the land as ours, whether that possession means
physical real estate or territorial independence, political
self-determination or cultural self-realisation. Cuba: Art and History is the story
of five generations of artists trying to define, understand, and assert
ownership of their place in the world — to own it and belong to it — even as their
country does the same. +