interior world” and the “emotiveness” present in the faces of the mysterious women she painted, each one a symbol of an emotional or mental state (Ordetx 1932).
Víctor Manuel's art, too, was seen by critics to exemplify the sort of personal expression advocated by the vanguard; his female figures were understood to make manifest his emotional life. In fact, in his review of Víctor Manuel's 1933 Lyceum show, Pérez Castillo drew a parallel between the subjectivity of the artist and the subjectivity of his female figures, and in so doing, effectively placed the vanguard preference for emotional expression onto the female figure, thereby making the female figure an icon of vanguard subjectivity. When Pérez Castillo compares Víctor Manuel's work to the tradition of removing young Cuban girls from society, he invokes the nineteenth‐century custom in which criollo women remain primarily at home for the protection of their moral virtue. Pérez Castillo's comparison of this criollo domesticity to Víctor Manuel's emotionally grounded images suggests that the vanguard's practice of withdrawal into oneself was akin to the traditional withdrawal of criollo women from society.
Responses to a 1934 Rita Longa (1912–2000) sculpture show at the Lyceum also engaged the contemplative nature critics attributed to Víctor Manuel's depictions of women (R.S.S. 1935). Critic Sarah Cabrera (1934) noted the questioning way Longa's female figure in Interrogación (Question, c.1924) looks at herself in a mirror. Cabrera argued that the answer to her question was in the mirror's image, as if the woman were able to look inside herself. In this sculpture, Longa has shaped a lithe female body into a graceful question mark. The simple form leaves no doubt as to the symbol her body is meant to invoke: the arch of her back, extension of her hair, and close proximity of her face to the mirror she holds suggests extreme introversion. The curve of her body forces all of her attention into the mirror; she is unavailable for anyone else. The artist has used both composition and form to create a symbol of inquiry out of the introspective pose of the woman's body. The implication is that women may find in themselves the answers to the artistic and intellectual restlessness embodied by the vanguard.
These reviews reveal a tendency by critics to associate vanguard practices – the interior‐oriented, subjective, and nonrepresentational use of the formal tools of art for emotional expression – with a set of stereotypes about women in general. Critics repeatedly read female figures in Cuban painting as symbolic of the vanguard's sincere, personal, and interior‐derived expression. This interpretation stems from contemporary expectations that women were innately predisposed to interiority and that they were also removed from the larger problems that stimulated the vanguard's approach.
The vanguard was pursuing the basic principles of modern art in Europe, which they recoded via a notion of internal personal expression to be both Cuban and specific to Cuban politics. The emphasis on personal orientation precludes the possibility of a group style, hence the vanguard's pride in the diversity of expression among their cohort. The political nature that critics attributed to this, although not visible in any precise iconographic or formal expression, is in the sincerity of self‐exploration and personal expression. How such an apparently apolitical program could have been thought to be political can be understood only in the context of political corruption and repression, where sincerity was largely absent in official public discourse and personal expression could bring arrest, or worse.
Notwithstanding these very real pressures on the vanguardistas' political activism, the possibility exists that this retreat inside, in pursuit of emotional subjectivity, was in itself an escape from the sociopolitical instability that threatened the vanguard's middle‐class comforts. Shut out of traditional politics by the elites and threatened by economic fragility and the recent organization of labor groups with descent into the lower classes, middle‐class intellectuals used culture (Whitney 2001) and virtue to differentiate themselves. Could it be that these motives for their combined cultural and political project also compelled them to seek an escape from these troubling circumstances?
It is possible, too, that the association made by critics between vanguard interiority and female figures that were often introspective and melancholic was also a salve indirectly encouraged by feminists. Middle‐ and upper‐class women of leisure who had the education and spare time for activism promoted an image of women that was characterized by notions of comfort and caretaking in a time of national distress. Works like Víctor Manuel's Tropical Gypsy, which have become emblematic of the early vanguard and interpreted as a national archetype, could perhaps be understood as registering the discontent of the era via the sad visage of the sitter. Yet at the same time, Tropical Gypsy offers an image of lyrical beauty, and perhaps reassurance. This strategy effectively evades the sociopolitical turmoil that required comfort in the first place.
Critics blamed Cuba's chaos on men's ineffectual work in the public sphere. They explicitly contrasted these failures to women's – and the Lyceum's – natural emotional and psychological inclinations. In 1936, A. Martínez Bello reported in the daily El Mundo that facing “an insurmountable crisis, the woman – the Lyceum – has made its efforts succeed spiritually in every way possible, far above the petty (greedy) and sometimes negative results of men's toil.” Women and the Lyceum were synonymous, and more effective than men in addressing the nation's crisis. Women were well suited to what Martínez Bello labeled as a spiritual agenda for the improvement of Cuban society “in the face of the energetic cultural initiative of the feminine Lyceum and their untiring impulse to improve the environment of a society that's almost indifferent, like ours, to the higher objectives of the spirit.”
Martínez Bello argued that women, and the Lyceum, were more effective than men on the account of a supposed psychospiritual advantage they possessed. His language resonates with the contemplation the vanguard encouraged for national self‐discovery and for artistic expression. He argued that while men have been debating the “viscose grays of politics,” women, particularly at the Lyceum, have located the “spirit” discarded by others and raised it to “the most ascetic atmospheres of emotion and thought.” This is the same opposition articulated in Avance – inept politics versus the productive emotional and intellectual exploration of the vanguard – now articulated in expressly gendered terms. He used the vanguard term las inquietudes, which referred to the anxiety and action of the opposition in the face of the frustrations of the Republic, aligning the Lyceum with the vanguard's project: “the Lyceum … is, without doubt, one of our institutions most deeply nourished by the ‘inquietudes’ that give attitude to this epoch.” Martínez Bello elaborated on his suggestion of the Lyceum's gendered effectiveness on behalf of the vanguard and its relationship to what he viewed as women's unique intuitive sensibility:
Intuition is one of the best qualities of a woman. And intuition, when it is disciplined, is a sense that tells more of the secret pulse of things, that which enlivens the fullness of the open soul: to experience, Werner would say, the artist's own deepest feeling and thinking for a while. (1936, n.p.)
Women's intuition was assumed to make them more spiritually sensitive and more open to deep emotion and thought – the same aims of vanguard expression. Martínez Bello's statement suggests that focus on intuition was the key to understanding some underlying secret, or perhaps even the soul.
Martínez Bello felt Cuban women were particularly well suited to such spiritual explorations. He remarked (1936) that the contemporary intellectual triumph of women prepared them for an “altruistic creativity” and the “generous spirit in new directions.” In Spanish, these new directions were once again referred to by a vanguard buzzword: nuevos rumbos (new directions). Both this language, and the altruistic nature of women's intellectual creativity, reinforced the idea that women were uniquely suited to contribute to the vanguard's renovation of national culture, for the vanguard conceived of itself as an intellectual contributor to the betterment of national culture and society. This was just as Suárez y Solís implied in his 1935 Peláez review when he remarked that the Lyceum disseminated national values.
Writing about the Lyceum, Martínez Bello (1936) argued that women were more effective than men in the vanguard project of national reform. He attributed this supposed advantage to their spiritual, emotional, thoughtful, and intuitive nature. These are many of the same attributes contemporary critics sought in vanguard painting,