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  • Geographies of Cuban Abstraction
  • Paloma Duong

Abstraction, Twentieth Century Latin American Art, Cuban Abstract Art, Modernism in Visual Arts

Abigail Mcewen. Revolutionary Horizons: Art and Polemics in 1950s Cuba. Yale UP, 2016, 272 pp.
Dana Miller, editor. Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight. Whitney Museum of American Art, 2016, 232 pp.

The connection between Revolutionary Horizons and Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight can be said to be orthogonal—orthogonality being a core compositional principle of post-war abstraction. Both stories begin in Havana and come to age in the long 1950s. They are accounts of divergent geographies of Cuban abstraction in the visual arts but with multiple and concurrent tangential points of contact. McEwen's Revolutionary Horizons chronicles the pursuit of abstraction in the Cuban visual arts at a time of deep political unrest and ideologically charged aesthetic choices. Under the care of curator Dana Miller, Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight accompanies the eponymous exhibit at the Whitney Museum for American Art with a collection of four texts and 82 color plates, profiling the lifelong oeuvre of the Cuban-born, New York-based abstract artist Carmen Herrera. The most comprehensive retrospective of Herrera's work to date, this is only the latest in an increasingly long list of events and materials—including a documentary—celebrating the rediscovery of her art.

Revolutionary Horizons features the leading figures and debates underpinning the social history of abstraction in the Cuban visual arts of the 1950s. It argues that "while the politics of abstraction may appear superficially coincidental, in other words a mere product of historical circumstance, . . . they were in fact deeply imbricated within a historicist national discourse—cubanía—that provided both an idealist order and the grassroots impetus for action" (3). McEwen traces cubanía to an inaugural, more militant form of cultural nationalism obversely shaped by active resistance to US economic and military imperialism. In McEwen's exegesis, this cubanista temperament would be nurtured and transformed in the 1940s and 1950s by subsequent polemical engagements with notions like cosmopolitanism, gangsterism, consumerism, and Americanism. [End Page 219] This period witnesses the emergence of a second philosophical variant of cubanía, associated as a matter of course to Cuban writer José Lezama Lima and to the intellectual group around the journal Orígenes. This origenista view of culture—the pursuit of a quasi-mystical, transformative aesthetic grounded in teleological ontologies of the national—also runs through the Cuban abstractos profiled in the book, argues the author, albeit conceptually and ideologically adapted to these visual artists' more politically active endeavors. By historicizing cubanía, McEwen lays the groundwork for an interpretation of the situated politics of abstraction and outlines a comparative framework for the political engagement of three distinct generations of cultural vanguard. And though the author relies on Antoni Kapcia's descriptive terms of generational cultural nationalisms, her juxtaposition of these categories with the ideological clout of abstraction is a welcome correction to the otherwise reductive tendencies of Kapcia's taxonomies.

These claims are advanced mainly through the story of Los Once, a group of painters and sculptors who emerged in the visual arts scene of Havana in the early 1950s. In this sense, McEwen's pioneer in-depth study of Los Once offers at least two paths for the reader to follow. One of these is the story of how Los Once combined the aesthetics of abstraction with a nationalist ethos and mobilized abstraction as a rebellious practice against the 1952 military coup and the seven-year-long dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista installed in its wake. McEwen's simultaneous contextualization and historicizing of Los Once's discourse of abstraction also tells a second story, ciphered in the understudied cultural activity of the Cuban state under Batista's rule. This frame of reference, in turn, will explain many of the factors surrounding the fate of Cuban abstraction after the 1959 revolution that unseated Batista. By bringing into relief the labor of art schools, exhibition venues, salons, critical fora, and innovative journals and magazines of the period, McEwen's archival diligence adds a largely unexplored layer of complexity to a cultural landscape in the throes of large-scale modernization projects. With this double-barrel approach...

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