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Amelia Pelaez.
Born Yaguajay, Cuba, 1896. Died Havana, 1968
Amelia Pelaez
entered San Alejandro at the relatively late age of twenty, graduating with
honors in 1924, At San Alejandro she was one of Romaņach's leading students
in the areas of drawing, color, and landscape. The year of her graduation
she and her colleague Maria Pepa Lamarque held a two-person show at the
Association of Painters and Sculptors in Havana, where Pelaez exhibited a
series of romantic landscapes typical of her early work. In the summer of
I924 she visited New York on a travel grant and studied at the Arts Student
League for six months. A more substantial grant from the Cuban government
sent her to Paris in I927 for the purpose of studying French museums and
academies.
In Paris, Pelaez
attended drawing and art history courses at La Grande Chaumiere, the Ecole
Nationale Superieure de Beaux Arts, and the Ecole de Louvre. She also drew
and painted at the Louvre. She obtained what she considered her most
important formal training from Alexandra Exter's courses in design and color
theory in which she enrolled between 1931 and 1934. She has also
acknowledged her debt to the art of Matisse, Braque, and Picasso in
developing at this time a personal version of synthetic cubism. Her Parisian
stay culminated with a one-person show at the Galerie Zak in 1933, where she
presented thirty-eight paintings and gouaches of landscapes, female figures,
and still lifes with an introduction by Francis de Miomandre. The following
year she participated in the Exposition de Livres Manuscrits at the Galerie
Myrbor with her illustrations for Leon Paul Fargue's Sept Poemes. Before
leaving Paris she published in La Volonte an article on modern Cuban
painting entitled "Les peintres cubains in Paris."
Pelaez returned to
Cuba in 1934, making a studio at her home in the Vibora district of Havana.
Although she lived and worked in relative isolation, she was an active
participant in the vanguard (1927-38) and the classical (1938-51) phases of
Cuban modernism. For two years after her arrival she concentrated on
drawing, working out her understanding of European modern art and
formulating a new subject matter based on her rediscovery of Cuba. She
returned to painting in the late 1930s with still lifes representing Cuba's
flora in an austere version of cubism. Around 1940 she developed her
signature style by enriching her cubist vocabulary with arabesques, bright
color areas, and elaborate baroque compositions derived from
nineteenth-century Cuban architectural decoration and furniture design. She
found in her immediate environment--her home, garden, and neighborhood--a
new source for artistic inspiration and cultural expression. She helped make
colonial architecture a symbol of cubanidad and expanded on the
nineteenth-century tradition of the use of tropical fruits and flowers for
the same purpose. She also represented abstracted female figures at rest in
intimate interiors that also allude to a particular way of life.
In the 1950s Pelaez
turned toward greater abstraction and geometric simplification. From 1950 to
1962 she dedicated much of her attention to decorating and designing
ceramics and making murals. Two of her outstanding mural projects were one
in ceramics for the Tribunal de Cuentas in 1953 and another in tessera (now
destroyed) for the hotel Habana-Hilton in 1958. During the 1960s, she
concentrated again on oil painting, returning in part to the elaborate
arabesques, brilliant colors, and still-life themes of her 1940s work.
Pelaez began to
exhibit regularly in Havana in 1918, and after her one-person show at the
Lyceum in 1935 she became one of the leading representatives of the
vanguardia. She held numerous one-person shows during her lifetime and has
been the subject of major retrospective exhibitions at the Museo Nacional in
Havana 1968, the Cuban Museum of Art and Culture in Miami 1988, and the
Fundacion Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas 1991. She participated in most of
the National Salons held in Havana and won awards at the salons of 1935,
1938, 1956, and 1959. In the 1940s she began to exhibit in the United States
and Latin America, gaining a measure of international recognition which
today is on the increase. Her paintings and ceramics are in numerous private
and public collections in Cuba, Latin America, and the United States. In the
United States there are important examples of her paintings in the
collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Art Museum of
the Americas in Washington. D.C
[ Home ] [ Up ] [ PINTORES DE HOY ] [ AMELIA PELAEZ ] [ WILFREDO LAM ] [ MENDIVE ] [ RENE PORTOCARRERO ] [ ROMAŅAC ] [ Servando Cabrera Moreno ] [ EDUARDO ABELA ] [ VICTOR MANUEL ] [ CARREŅO ] [ CARLOS ENRRIQUEZ ]
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