on Peruvian Reality (trans. M. Urquidi). Austin: University of Texas Press.
14 Mariátegui, J.C. (1994). Mariátegui total. 2 volumes. Lima: Empresa Editora Amauta.
15 Mariátegui, J.C. (1996). The Heroic and Creative Meaning of Socialism: Selected Essays (ed. and trans. Michael Pearlman). Amherst, NY: Humanity Books.
16 Mariátegui, J.C. (2011). José Carlos Mariátegui: An Anthology (ed. and trans. H. E. Vanden and M. Becker). New York: Monthly Review Press.
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18 Marzal, M.M. (1993). Historia de la antropología indigenista: México y Perú. Barcelona: Anthropos.
19 Nietzsche, F. (1986 [1880]). Human, All Too Human (trans. R.J. Hollingdale). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
20 Nugent, J.G. (1991). El conflicto de las sensibilidades. Propuesta para una interpretación y crítica del siglo veinte peruano. Lima: Instituto Bartolomé de las Casas‐Rímac.
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25 Trotsky, L., Breton, A., and Rivera, D. (1992). Manifesto: Towards a free revolutionary art. In: Art and Revolution: Writings on Literature, Politics, and Culture (ed. P.N. Siegel), 122–129. New York: Pathfinder.
4 National Values: The Havana Vanguard in the Revista de Avance and the Lyceum Gallery
Ingrid W. Elliott
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In 1933, Víctor M (1897–1969), the leading painter of the Cuban vanguard, had a solo exhibition at the Lyceum Gallery, Havana. In a review of the show, student activist and occasional art critic Gilberto Pérez Castillo (1933) suggested that the artist attained his highest form of expression in his depiction of female figures, which he painted from his imagination and were “completely subjective like their author.” Contemporary critics concurred that Víctor Manuel conveyed his subjectivity via free brushstrokes, an expressionistic use of color, and simplified subjects, as in his portrait of a young girl that accompanied Pérez Castillo's review (Figure 4.1). The title of the portrait, Vida interior (Interior Life) (c.1933), and the critic's emphasis on the role of the artist's imagination underscores the origin of the painter's artistic practice in his emotional interior. Furthermore, the title of this essay – “pintor abstraído” – could be translated as either abstract painter or painter lost in thought, suggesting self‐absorption was crucial to Víctor Manuel's artistic practice. Pérez Castillo went on to compare Víctor Manuel's work to a sheltered little girl, brought up in an old‐fashioned way, considered to be “good” because she was removed from society. He also tied Víctor Manuel's female figures to his vanguard process and to the Cuban nation when he wrote that his women possessed not only the “eternal melancholy of the artist” but also the “melancholy of the suffering people of the tropics.” (At this time, Cuba was often referred to in “tropical” terms.) Pérez Castillo seems to have had Víctor Manuel's iconic 1929 La gitana tropical (Tropical Gypsy) in mind, a key early work that symbolizes the nascent vanguard for many, to this day. His review suggests the vanguard's interior‐oriented artistic practices may have been perceived to be connected to women's traditional roles in Cuba and that both may have links to Cuban nationalism.
Figure 4.1 Víctor Manuel, Vida interior (Interior Life), 1933. Revista Social 18 (5) May.
The Cuban vanguard has long been considered a joint cultural and political project for national reform, though the relationship of vanguard artistic practices to their political agenda has yet to be fully articulated. Scholars have argued that “modern” art was adopted because it was seen as an opportunity to break with the academic training initiated under colonial rule (Wood 1990) and that this rupture was grounded in artistic experimentation and freedom of expression (Juan 1978). Unsatisfied with their studies at Havana's San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts, many vanguard painters left to seek modernist training in Paris in the late 1920s. The first to return and exhibit modern approaches to painting were Víctor Manuel and Antonio Gattorno (1904–1980). Each enjoyed solo exhibitions in February and March 1927, respectively, in which they exhibited work that departed from academic realism by embracing the simplification of color and form typical of European modernism. In May they were joined by Eduardo Abela (1889–1965), Rafael Blanco (1885–1955), Carlos Enríquez (1900–1957), Marcelo Pogolotti (1902–1988), and Lorenzo Romero Arciaga (b. 1905) for an “Exhibition of New Art” that inaugurated the vanguard group. The exhibition was sponsored by a new vanguard periodical, the Revista de Avance (1927–1930).
It has been suggested that Avance initiated the vanguard's dual agenda for cultural and political reform by exposing Cuba to contemporary intellectual debates from abroad as part of its goal to foster independence and progress, while artists turned toward emotional expression grounded in everyday life (Martínez 1994). Some have argued that that the novelty of Cuban modernism was signaled by the artistic depiction of racialized others (Aranda‐Alvarado 2001). Prime examples include Carlos Enríquez's eroticized portraits of mulatta (i.e. Afro‐Cuban) women and Wifredo Lam's (1902–1982) Afro‐Cuban santería‐inspired canvases. Others have suggested that vanguard intellectuals identified themselves with Cuba's many “marginalized others” – women, blacks, and laborers (Maseillo 1993). The criollo (Cuban‐born Spaniards) peasant was lionized by artists such as Eduardo Abela, Carlos Enríquez, and Lorenzo Romero Arciaga. Acerbic critiques of the conditions of the Cuban worker were painted by Marcelo Pogolotti, Jorge Arche (1905–1956), and Carlos Enríquez. Women, and their domain, were the primary subjects of Víctor Manuel and Amelia Peláez (1896–1968), and Fidelio Ponce de León (1895–1949) addressed the plight of children and the sick. The impact of the economic crisis on Afro‐Cuban working women, one of Cuba's most marginalized groups, was decried in Alberto Peña's (1894–1938) painting.
Vanguard intellectuals found a crucial partner in one of these marginalized groups via a women's organization known as the Lyceum. The Lyceum was a women's club founded in 1928 to promote women's interests and national culture through exhibitions, concerts, poetry readings, and lectures; in 1939 they added sport when they merged with a women's tennis association and became known as the Lyceum and Lawn Tennis Club (Stoner 1991). When the Lyceum inaugurated their clubhouse in 1929 they signaled their allegiance to vanguard activities by hosting the Exhibition of New Art, echoing the title and emulating the content of the vanguard's inaugural exhibition in 1927 and featuring a lecture by Avance editor Juan Marinello, a Marxist and member of the Cuban Communist Party. When political repression forced the closure of the periodical in 1930, the Lyceum became the only venue for vanguard art and debate during the most difficult years of the Gerardo Machado dictatorship (1928–1933). The ties between the Avance group and the Lyceum were so tight that in 1936 one of the Lyceistas (as they were known) referred to the group as the “husbands of the Lyceum,” and commentators from both groups remarked that without the Lyceum's support, the vanguard would have had little opportunity for cultural work through the 1930s (Arocena 1949b, pp. 36–37). Despite these ties, the Lyceum's relationship to the vanguard