the pages of Avance and in the contemporary press on the Lyceum reveal that both institutions shared a core set of national values with roots in the Cuban opposition movement. These national values were at the heart of the vanguard's political critique as well as its program for new practices in national art. An understanding of these national values provides important insight into the relationship of vanguard art and politics, as well as the privileged role played by women in the promotion of the vanguard's agenda.
The Lyceum women's club was founded in December 1928 when the journalist Renée Méndez Capote returned to Havana from Spain, inspired to found a club in the city similar to the Lyceum she had visited in Madrid (Arocena 1949a, b). She enlisted her friend Berta Arocena to act as the group's first president. These two women belonged to the city's old, propertied elite, and, although the club also had middle‐class members, the Lyceum's reliance on education and culture to bring about national reform has been labeled “aristocratic” (Stoner 1991, p. 74). Yet their approach was borrowed from the middle‐ and upper‐class intellectuals of the vanguard, many of whom worked for more radical labor organizations, as well. Consistent with the vanguard's interest in being current with international trends in the arts and sciences, Arocena quickly appointed two more directors: María Josefa Vidaurreta (wife of Avance editor Marinello) as science director and María Teresa Moré (wife of vanguard art critic Rafael Suárez y Solís) as fine arts director. A portrait of the nineteenth‐century Cuban poet Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda hung in the Lyceum's principal gathering space, and a bust of José Martí adorned the library, suggesting the Lyceistas aligned themselves with nineteenth‐century criollo founders of national culture. Martí, a poet‐revolutionary, was a hero to the Cuban vanguard for his example of working simultaneously for cultural and political change.
The Lyceum's ties to the early vanguard were confirmed in a review by Suárez y Solís of a 1935 exhibition of vanguard painting by Amelia Peláez. He wrote that the women's club was part of the “responsible minority” that concerned itself with the “crisis of high culture in Cuba.” This was a direct reference to a talk of the same name given by the vanguard intellectual, philosopher, and nationalist Jorge Mañach (1898–1961) in 1925. In that lecture, Mañach argued that Cuban culture had stagnated as a result of the long struggle for independence from Spain. At that time, Mañach was active in the Minorista Group, a cohort of poets, journalists, and artists, who, starting in 1923, met for regular Saturday lunches to discuss national culture reform (Cairo 1978). These meetings ceased in 1928, as many of the leading members were by then involved in publishing Avance. As an occasional attendee of the Minorista Group, and as a husband to a Lyceum director, Suárez y Solís was in a good position to compare the Minoristas and Lyceistas. His Peláez review articulated the Minoristas' long‐standing interests in national renovation in terms of the contemplation of “national values” and the feminine. He wrote that the Lyceum promoted its program within its community, “justifying itself to itself,” by studying women's intellectual virtue and femininity. Given that this was a women's club, these would be projects aimed at fostering self‐knowledge. This was confirmed in 1940, when Lyceum director Elena Mederos de González reported that self‐knowledge, and the realization of the vanguard “personality,” were the most important goals of the club.
What, then, did personality have to do with national culture? From the vanguard's very beginnings, critics urged artists to develop a national style of painting through the exploration of their own interior selves. In 1924, Mañach suggested that one day, national art would be defined by personality, psychology, customs, and lifestyle. These early assertions were flushed out by the Minorista Luis Baralt (1892–1969); Baralt was a theater director who also worked as an art critic and as the secretary of the Asociación de Pintores y Escultores (Painters and Sculptors' Association), an organization that had presented traditional artist salons for years. Drawing on this background, he effectively organized the first vanguard exhibitions in 1927, which included a show of the French cubist Pierre Flouquet. Baralt essentially introduced the Cuban public to modern art and brought them up to date with European trends, a key concern of Avance. In a 1927 piece on the Flouquet exhibition that ran in the journal, Baralt argued that more than merely experimenting with materials and techniques, modern artists created a new reality based on their own personalities and emotional experiences; because the work was based on the artist's personal sensibilities, Baralt argued that “the true information is interior.” These links between self‐knowledge and one's internal, or personal, voice were made repeatedly in Avance (Pérez Ferrero 1928; Ichaso 1930; Lugo‐Viña 1930; Elliott 2010, note 58). In the first issue from March 15, 1927, artists Rafael Blanco (1885–1955), Víctor Manuel, and Domingo Ravenet (1905–1969) were all singled out for praise on these terms (Casanovas 1927; Elliott 2010, note 60).
Whereas vanguard critics encouraged artists to search inside themselves to find authentic expression, Avance's editorial board pondered the question of national identity by investigating Cuban character in general. Many essays on national character were couched in terms of self‐knowledge, and many writers asked why Cubans continually tolerated a tyrannical government, as in Francisco Ichaso's 1929 analysis of the Cuban trait embullo (revelry). Ichaso (1901–1962) was a Minorista, journalist, and editor of Avance. His notion of embullo referred in part to Cubans' impulsiveness, moving the normally apathetic Cuban to act, as in the case of the Independence Wars; but it also denoted a lack of initiative and confidence supposedly marking Cubans as a submissive population. Mañach undertook a similar study of Cuban character in 1928, in his Avance essay “Inquiry into ‘el choteo’” (joking humor). He imputed to el choteo the sense of humor and irreverence for authority that both impelled Cubans toward independence and crippled those efforts in an ultimate failure to take things seriously. In late 1929, Mañach argued that the United States' intrusions in Cuban domestic politics demoralized and therefore stymied the will for political change among Cubans, resulting in a primarily psychological colonialism. Juan Marinello (1929) argued that Cuba's “patriotic crisis is in ourselves,” blaming Cubans' permissive attitude toward domestic and foreign abuses for the country's larger political and economic woes (Directrices: Colonos contra la colonia 1930b).
The approach of Avance to the genesis of national art was mostly concerned with national self‐discovery, enacted by individual artists involved in discovering themselves and by intellectuals who investigated broader trends in national character. Character had political implications for critics who sought explanation for the failure of the Republic to live up to the dreams of the Independence Wars. To date, art historians have assumed that the Cuban vanguard expressed its politics only via its subject matter. Landscape paintings and representations of guajiros (criollo peasants) who worked the land have been understood as a means of expressing nationalist resistance to US landowners and agricultural policies that usurped Cuban sovereignty (Martínez 1994). But what about the vanguard's aesthetic insistence on a personal art grounded in the artist's inner emotional subjectivity?
In May 1927, the Avance editors critiqued the first twenty‐five years of the Republican government with an indictment of Cuban politics that coincided with the terms of their art criticism. Colonial political traditions such as nepotism, graft, censorship, and repression continued to plague Cuba even after it gained independence from Spain. In contrast, the editors argued that the highest ideals of the Republic should be the freedom to think, to be, and to affirm personality (Directrices 1927). Personality was thus associated with freedom of expression – “the dissemination [and] careful consideration of national values,” as Suárez y Solís put it in regard to the Lyceum's mission. The varying uses of the term “personality” in Avance suggest that personal expression can refer to both innovative art and political protest. The personal orientation of vanguard art was constructed in opposition to the failures of Cuba's leaders, and viewed as essential to keeping artists engaged in the nation's sociopolitical life.
This rhetoric of personality and the journal's focus on national character may be traced to the origins of the Minorista Group in 1923, which was, in turn, a legacy of the Veterans' and Patriots' Movement (1923–1924). The movement rallied in opposition to the corruption of the Zayas administration (1921–1925) and its misguided allegiance to United States' interests over those of Cuba. In response, the movement came to symbolize