Читать книгу A Companion to Modern and Contemporary Latin American and Latina/o Art - Группа авторов - Страница 45

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 has not yet been closely examined.

Descriptions of vanguard activities in 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 the unadulterated, unrealized nineteenth‐century dreams for an independent Cuba. In protest, members of the Veterans' and Patriots' Movement and their associates demanded the “rectification,” “regeneration,” and “moralization” of Cuba (Whitney 2001, p. 32); this was true of the many opposition groups that emerged at this time (Stoner 1991, pp. 59, 69). A representative of Cuban workers said that more than any other specific demand they might have, the workers desired “the realization of the Cuban national personality” (Whitney 2001, p. 33). For the Veterans, the realization of national personality equated with self‐determination in the areas of politics and economics. They complained that “Cuban nationality” was compromised by US influence in Cuba (Whitney 2001, pp. 32–33). Ultimately, the Veterans' and Patriots' resented the favorable treatment – and resultant profits – received by North American investors in the Cuban sugar industry. The Platt Amendment, a 1903 treaty that granted the United States the right to intervene in Cuban affairs in order to protect the newly independent nation, symbolized and sustained the disproportionate role the United States played in Cuban politics and economics. The Veterans' and Patriots' uprising in April 1924 was easily quashed, but their moralizing, regenerative national rhetoric shaped the Minoristas' approach to national culture, particularly in the pages of Avance. The discourse emerging from the Veterans' and Patriots' Movement revealed the political nature of the vanguard's interest in national values and personality.

Multiple editorials that appeared in Avance in 1927 and 1928 argued that the key to socially and politically engaged art was the emotional awareness of the artist (Carpentier 1927; Marinello 1927; Casanovas 1928). The articles claimed that an artist integrated in contemporary life would have an emotional response to political realities and thus make art that reflected that political engagement. There was a paradox, then, at the intersection of art and politics in the vanguard's thinking. The journal's editors advocated a vanguard notion of art that was centered in the artist's inner, emotional life, while also being socially aware. Their idea seems to be that if an artist focused on his or her interiority, some response to what was going on in the world would necessarily follow.

“Sincerity” and “truth” were key terms used in both the praise for artists and the criticism of politicians published in Avance. Marinello suggested new art and literature with such traits would result from a revolutionary break with the corruption of the Machado regime (Marinello 1927). The political failings that motivated the editorials centered on character issues and focused on the lack of will for political change as one of the most urgent challenges to the nation. The editors also attacked the character of those who ran the nation and those who administered the art and literary academies, complaining that both sets of leadership lacked honesty, intellectual responsibility and a sense of democracy (Directrices: Frente a la academia 1930a, Directrices: La traición de los hombres ilustres 1930c). For the sake of both the Cuban government and cultural progress, the journal urged Cuba's youth to make a radical break with the crooked Republican generations. Character was clearly a national issue, in terms of identity and sovereignty, affecting both cultural and political realms.

The editors hinted at the nexus between art and politics when they suggested that their “devotion” to new art paralleled their desire for a free and just life on an individual and collective level (Directrices: La izquierda y la siniestra 1929b). This suggests that sincere, emotionally honest expression in art, poetry, or the essays of Avance paralleled their interest in free expression in the public sphere. One of the central tenets of the journal was to publish divergent opinions, from Cuba and abroad (Medina 1980, p. 26). The “American art” survey was one example of such debate. In 1928–1929 Avance published the varied responses of Cuban and Latin American artists and writers regarding the themes and aesthetics that should guide American art (Olea and Kervandjian 2012). The visual corollary to this heterogeneity of opinion was the diversity of styles employed by Cuban modernists. Critics were consistently proud of the fact that the Cuban artists did not display the stylistic consistency of a “school” but rather pursued widely divergent styles. This was a manifestation of their individual, personal expression, and this heterogeneity of expression was taken as a sign of national strength (Maseillo 1993).

The Avance editors might argue that at a time in which individual expression was regulated by political or academic officials, any departure from the officially acceptable standards of expression could be understood to be political. What they valued was sincere freedom of expression. Such expressions, even if they appeared on the surface to be simply cultural, spoke to a national value that had a political valence: that is, the freedom of personal expression. It seems the editors hoped that if citizens and politicians valued honesty and sincerity, the Cuban government would then operate in the best interests of the nation rather than serve the interests of the officeholders and their North American cronies.

Just how cultural practices of sincerity could come to have a political impact was left undefined. The articles suggest that the editors hoped that if the general populace strongly valued honesty and freedom of expression, then they would tolerate nothing less from their politicians and that this strength of feeling would translate somehow into political pressure. Whether or not this could be an effective strategy for political change is another question entirely. Nor is it clear how a discrete national identity could emerge from the widespread pursuit of personal expression by various authors and artists. Although a widespread practice of individually focused, free expression could ultimately have a political impact if enough of the work produced happened to have politically resonant content, this is clearly an uncertain political strategy. But this was not really the vanguard's aim. Close scrutiny of the journal's editorials and contemporary art criticism suggests that rather than produce a particular national identity, the vanguard's aim was to promote freedom of expression as a national value.

This editorial connection between personal expression and the desire for a free and just life could be seen as a veiled critique of the censorship and repression of the Machado regime. The Machado administration regularly jailed, tortured, and exiled its intellectual and militant opponents, as well as shut down periodicals and the university when threatened by the opinions they expressed. Machado's pressure on the editorial board of Avance became so insistent that the journal folded in September 1930. The arrest of Marinello, together with a dramatic rise in violence against the opposition, seems to have brought the journal to this point (Directrices: La agresión al trabajo 1930d). In the final issue, the editors stated that they would rather suspend publication than submit to government censorship. These ideals for government and for art were integral to the vanguard's project to moralize and regenerate national art and politics; the journal had urged for the adoption of these principles for a deeply personal artistic expression, implying that art could model the ethical performance lacking in national politics. In this way, Cuban modernism could be avant‐garde in the sense of being at the forefront – ahead of society – in leading Cuba to a new set of social norms.

During this time, the Lyceum remained open and continued to present vanguard art, poetry readings, and lectures. Former Avance editor and poet Eugenio Florit (1904–1999) remarked in 1936:

In respect to the period when tyranny violently shut the doors of our principal educational centers, we remember that the Lyceum was a truly free university, where the most distinguished professors broke the silence imposed on them, giving lectures and courses of great value. At the same time, the artists, writers, poets gave exhibitions, concerts, and recitals in our salons, attended by unsettled and enthusiastic youth, who also took part in the debates prompted by contemporary subjects and of transcendence in distinct orders of life. (pp. 156–160)

Particularly during the Machado dictatorship, the Lyceum is remembered for its contribution to Cuba's democracy, providing a rare venue for civil debate and disagreement. Lyceum director Elena Mederos de González (1954) also noted that although members were “homogeneous” in their views of the club's mission, beyond that there was great “heterogeneity” of opinion. The homogeneity of the Lyceum extended to race and class as well, for the majority of the members were middle‐to upper‐class, criollo, and presumably Catholic (Stoner 1991, p. 74). Nevertheless, the emphasis on the heterogeneity of thought welcomed and promoted at the Lyceum, the club's association with vanguard buzzwords like las inquietudes (restlessness) and “youth,” and its pursuit of democracy all align the Lyceum's activities with the vanguard's agenda (Mederos de González 1954). Florit (1936) remarked that this protection of the vanguard may not have been possible without a woman's touch. But when intellectuals – including those who regularly spoke at the Lyceum – were routinely persecuted by the Machado dictatorship, why would their host institution be exempt? The answer may have something to do with the traditional respect accorded Cuban women, which Cuban feminists had recently embraced as a part of their political strategy. The Cuban women's movement capitalized on women's traditional roles in their arguments advocating for women's potential to make a unique contribution to the nation.

Machado's respect for women's traditional roles, and also Cuba's elites, is illustrated by his response to women protesters in the tense political standoff resulting from the 1930 death of student leader Rafael Trejo González, for which the government was largely held responsible. Feminist leaders turned the funeral eulogy into a platform to decry Machado's repression and to call for united action against the regime. Just as Machado permitted the women mourner‐protesters to make these statements and participate in the funeral proceedings, he may have permitted the Lyceum's activities out of fear for how an attack on a women's cultural organization might be perceived by the general public. Even while responding to his opponents with extreme violence, Machado was not indifferent to public opinion. For example, in 1932 the dictator‐president released political prisoners in an attempt to rectify his image. Just as the mourner‐protesters at the Trejo González funeral were acting as caretakers, so too were the Lyceistas in their protection of national culture.

The Lyceistas themselves cited women's traditional life‐giving and child‐rearing roles as a model for their work as caretakers of Cuba's intellectual and cultural patrimony (Mederos de González 1936). Journalists, from the inauguration of the Lyceum's first clubhouse in 1929 throughout the history of the organization, repeatedly heralded the warm home and the hospitality the Lyceistas offered to the vanguard, and national culture more generally. The February 1929 coverage of the inauguration of the clubhouse and the celebratory New Art Exhibition in Avance heralded the Lyceum's domestic ambiance and the presence of many young women and young intellectuals, signaling the Lyceum's partnership with the vanguard:

Sunset, Street 81. A large house in old Vedado before the arrival of chalets. A Vedado still somewhat underdeveloped. A portal with fat columns. Wide wooden doors. A noble interior with old Creole furniture … The coming and going of conceited, smiling, and jubilant young women preparing for the opening. Lots of guests, who for the most part are young intellectuals.¹

The Lyceum was housed in a neoclassical home in the prestigious Vedado neighborhood, which the writer pointedly noted predated “chalets” – a US building style. Photographs of the interior reveal traditional Cuban living room furniture; from the inauguration through at least the 1930s, the domestic nature of the Lyceum's headquarters was frequently mentioned in journalistic accounts of the group's activities, and the club was often referred to as a “home” to Cuban culture (Almanaque 1929; Florit 1936; Mederos de González 1936; Borrero 1939; Arocena 1949a, b). In 1936, vanguard artist and children's art instructor Alfredo Lozano remarked that at “the Lyceum, intense focal point of national culture, there is also the warmth of home.”

As they had done at the funeral of Trejo González, the members of the Cuban women's movement were adept at using women's traditional roles to create a voice for themselves in national politics; the Lyceum was as much a partner to the women's movement as it was to the vanguard. In her history of the Cuban women's movement, Lynn Stoner (1991) argues that rather than targeting the patriarchy or the traditional Hispanic family, Cuban women embraced their self‐proclaimed femininity, lauded motherhood, and extended their caretaking roles to the public sphere, where they positioned themselves as authorities on social welfare issues, such as education, maternity hospitals and childhood disease research, charity and welfare, cultural events, and the morality of politics. Delegates of the National Women's Congress in 1923 and 1925 capitalized on their assumed moral superiority to argue that women could be the moral saviors of a new, more democratic, and more socially just Cuba. This position was in fact predicated on women's traditional roles, and as such, the majority at these congresses advocated the protection of marriage, the traditional family, and female chastity. From this platform, the feminists positioned themselves as matriarchs of a more socially progressive Cuba (p. 70).

Editorials in Avance occasionally addressed the women's movement, arguing that women offered the vanguard advantages in their struggle for sociopolitical change. In fall 1927, contributor Enrique José Varona (1849–1933) heralded feminism, associating it with the broader social revolution for which he and the journal's intellectuals fought. His praise brought the weight of a veteran of the Independence Wars, a former vice president (1913–1917) known for criticizing political corruption, a positivist philosopher and professor at the University of Havana who mentored contemporary students in the opposition. In a 1929 editorial on the women's movement's effort to win the right to vote for women, the editors argued that women were key to the democratization of Cuba as a means of escaping Cuba's history of political corruption, expressing that the “feminization” of Cuban politics could make the process more human (Directrices: Feminismo y democratización 1929a); another article from the same year praised the Lyceum, noting that “one must have deep faith in the public action of women” (Almanque 1929). Stoner argues that such positive assessments of women's abilities to aid the nation were pervasive throughout the twenties and thirties and resulted in the inclusion of many feminist reforms in the Constitution of 1940. The articles suggest that women were considered to exist outside the realm of historic corruption plaguing national politics and that their participation offered advantages in the opposition's quest for reform.

In 1936, a woman was appointed director of Cuba's Culture Ministry, a move the press celebrated in ways that reveal the national authenticity attributed to women's cultural work. Vanguard notions of nationalism and creativity, new social roles for women, and recent changes in Cuban government (Pérez 1995, pp. 276–277) were all associated with the appointment of Dra. Esperanza de Quesada y Villalón. Her appointment put a woman in charge of the preservation of Cuban culture, following the Lyceum's example. In the months leading up to Quesada's appointment, many articles had recapped the Lyceum's unique role in protecting the vanguard and preserving national culture during the difficult years of the Machado dictatorship. Echoing analogies made about the Lyceum, Grafos writer Conchita Gallardo (1936) compared a woman's role as mother educating her children – the citizens of tomorrow – to the national educational mandate of the Culture Ministry. For this reason, Gallardo argued that it was particularly appropriate to name a woman as chief. Furthermore, Gallardo lauded Quesada for her feminine nature and upstanding character: “She has the highest personality and idealism and the most effective action; she is a woman of today, possessing the gentle feminine spirit, [and] the energies of character, bravery, determination, and conscientiousness” (n.p.). Democratic character traits and female stewardship of national culture came together once again, as they had many times before in the commentary on the Lyceum found in the pages of Revista de Avance.

A key aspect of the potential for women's unique contribution to the nation seems to have been their perceived distance from the corruption that the vanguard sought to address in national politics. Critic Manuel Bisbé remarked that the Lyceum was a “refuge” from contentious national politics, a neutral place where diverse viewpoints could be expressed in a tolerant atmosphere (Caballero de Ichaso and Bisbé 1939). He said that such a refuge was necessary at that time more than ever; Cubans needed a “home to the spirit.” The only condition of debate was that “the passions have to remain outside, [as do] the shameless clothing, dirty from the blood and sludge of the fight” (pp. 29–30). His description gives the sense that uncensored and thus authentic debate was only possible in the safety of the private sphere, in locales like the Lyceum, where the scrutiny and compromised nature of public life could not interfere.

The traditional associations of women's domestic lives with the private sphere may have also affected how critics discussed a woman's place in the vanguard's contemplative pursuit of national art. Contemporary art criticism suggests female figures and domestic spaces were couched in terms of the emotional, inner reality of the artist that vanguard critics urged forth. One of the earliest examples of this is in a 1932 review of an exhibition of the work of Pura Rogríguez Castells, held at the Lyceum. The artist was praised for her “prodigious 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, and they resonate with the internal journey of self‐discovery that critics praised in vanguard work. Critics also ascribed many of these same traits to female figures depicted in the contemporary paintings of vanguard artists. Perceptions of the Lyceum echo contemporary thinking about women – as activists, as artists, and as figures in vanguard painting – namely that women possessed the character sorely lacking in the nation's public life.