Cuba's Rising Art Scene Not Frozen in Time

Cuba's Rising Art Scene Not Frozen in Time

Jun 13, 2014 6:45 PM GMT+0200



In a country sealed against time, Patrick Symmes discovers the

irrepressible cultural vibrancy of an island with storied works from the

past, rising art stars of today, and an eye on the future.



"That's a Picasso behind you," the poet said. He climbed up the

stairwell of his house, slowly, on aged legs. A venerable figure in

Cuba, he was trying to enjoy these late years of life. On the landing,

he pointed with quiet satisfaction to a charcoal drawing.



Actually, there were two Picassos in the stairwell, he said. Could I

pick out the other one?



Not an easy task in this house, which was small but decorated floor to

ceiling with more than 150 paintings. Small drawings and prints crowded

against big oil canvases in rococo frames. Even the stairwell, two

stories high, was covered with art, corner to corner, top to bottom. I

had come to visit the poet (who asked to remain anonymous) at the behest

of a Cuban friend, who had told me that I would be stunned by his art

collection, and indeed I was.



I searched the stairwell, but not long. The poet nodded when I pointed

low and left, to a tiny, minimalist sketch only inches across. A few

curving lines in black. The Blue Period without the blue. Yes, he said,

that was the second Picasso.



I had to ask. How did you get two Picassos?



"He gave them to me," the poet replied.



Of course. It's Cuba. Anything is possible.



Everywhere you look, there is an object for the eye in Cuba, an item to

lust after. Many of them are hidden in private collections, many more

are hidden in plain sight. A freshly refurbished 1957 Buick, with a new

coat of paint and an engine retrofitted with parts from a Soviet

tractor. A first edition of The Old Man and the Sea, in a used-book bin

for less than a dollar. An antique wardrobe, in continuous use since

1776, tucked into the back of a neighborhood church. A landmark mansion

divided into cuartería, the plywood bedrooms that Cubans build beneath

the chandeliers of the old aristocracy. The old aristocracy itself,

still housed in the great neighborhoods of Havana.



But this is not a country whose cultural production is a thing of the

past. Cuba's robust tradition of visual arts continues today, in a long

line that leads from pre-revolution modernist masterpieces to

contemporary paintings and sculptures by a number of increasingly

celebrated Cuban artists with international followings. The Havana

Biennial—held, in typical Cuban style, every three years or so—has

become a major stop for American gallery owners and collectors (the next

one is in May 2015), and Cuban superstars like the conceptual collective

Los Carpinteros and the sculptor Alexandre Arrechea are represented,

respectively, at Sean Kelly and Magnan Metz in New York.



The overflowing talent on the island draws art lovers from abroad, not

just to buy but to live. Jean Marc Ville, a 61-year-old Frenchman, has

filled his Art Deco house in Havana with works by Manuel Mendive, Belkis

Ayón, Roberto Di- ago, Raúl Martinez, and others—all at bargain prices,

as his wife, Gretchen, a 38-year-old Cuban, admitted. "We never bought

for money, we bought for pleasure," she told me when I visited her and

her husband. "But some of them are now worth 100 times as much as we paid."



For Americans, Cuban art old and new exists in a gray zone. With a few

crucial exceptions, U.S. citizens can't visit Cuba. And for those who

do, it isn't possible to return home with many of the amazing antiques

and decorative objects that this country offers. Cubans have houses full

of things they would sell if they could, and their own government only

recently surrendered a monopoly on the sale of art and collectibles. In

the 1990s, the revolution even opened a pawn shop on the outskirts of

Havana, where an anonymous door led to a storehouse of family heirlooms

being sold on consignment to foreigners, with the government keeping up

to 90 percent of the take. In those desperate years, Cubans were willing

to part with anything to survive, and a kind of mad looting spree broke

out in Havana. I was told of foreigners buying up crates of art for

cash, of entire private libraries disappearing into the belly of the

Iberia plane departing daily for Madrid, and of Art Deco metalwork being

pried off buildings and offered to architecture buffs.



Artworks are, oddly enough, almost the only thing that Americans can buy

in Cuba, an exception to the half-century-old embargo imposed by the

U.S. government and maintained by the Treasury Department. A rolled-up

canvas, a print, or a sculpture being considered "informational

material"—unlike, say, a chair or a cigar—the Treasury Department allows

Americans working in the arts to visit Cuba and permits any American

here legally to return with no limit on purchased art objects.



"The arrival of foreign collectors sounded an alarm for the Cuban

government," said Luis Miret Pérez, the most prominent of a new

generation of art dealers emerging as Havana experiments with

liberalizing the economy and, with it, the buying and selling of art.

Pérez, whose small Galería Habana represents Los Carpinteros, said that

the chaotic cash-and-carry art deals of the 1990s have given way to a

stable, informed market.



Regulation has helped. A few years ago Eusebio Leal, the

forward-thinking historian who was responsible for the successful

restoration of Old Havana, came up with an initiative that requires the

Cuban government to preserve Cuban art. Now, the dismal and confiscatory

government-run pawn shop has been replaced by an annual auction for

international art dealers, a sort of Red Christie's where the government

gavels off artworks, valuables, and antiques from its own collection, a

systematic de-accessioning of works seized from the Cuban people. The

morality of buying art this way is hard to parse—who are the looters,

the buyers, the sellers?—but that's typical for Havana, and the

merchandise is first-rate.



Private galleries are now legal in Havana, and Fidel Castro himself

recently crashed an opening for Kcho, an installation artist who sits in

Cuba's legislature. One night, I turned up for an opening at Servando

Galería de Arte and discovered the kind of social scene that would be

normal elsewhere but which seemed to me unprecedented in Cuba. I'd

expected a quiet affair, but the triangular space was packed with people

for a double exhibit by José Figueroa, a legendary realist photographer,

and the younger artist Alejandro González. I was immediately struck by

the fact that, among the whirling, chattering crowd of art lovers and

cultural mavens, few seemed to be looking at the works

themselves—typical in jaded New York but rare in stimulus-starved Cuba.



It was the art itself that was the problem: It was political. You could

see people deliberately avoiding it, and for good reason. Art isn't a

safe thing in Cuba; at any moment it may open your veins. González's

still lifes were elaborate fakes, documentary-style re-stagings of dark

moments in the Socialist-Realist nightmare: In a 1989 mockumentary, the

Berlin Wall is coming down as a Cuban surveillance office sits

abandoned; Havana graffiti is rubbed out by a loyalist; the TV shows the

face of General Arnaldo Ochoa, purged and shot by the government that

same year. These events disappeared down the memory hole of Cuba's

official media, erased from history, and González was taking a risk.

Themes of spying and the unknown are one thing, but when I pointed out

Ochoa's face, one Cuban woman physically recoiled, crying out, "Him!"

Art is the only way Cubans can think, feel, and remember.



One of the most prominent, if most improbable, experts on the burgeoning

Cuban art scene is the Miami-based philanthropist Ella

Fontanals-Cisneros. Born in Cuba and raised in exile, she has become a

patron and a huge player here, building her own collection of

twentieth-century Cuban paintings while scattering support,

encouragement, and party favors to a range of local artists old and

young. And although she has properties in Miami, New York, Madrid,

London, and Switzerland, Fontanals-Cisneros now spends much of her year

in Socialist Cuba, at an elegant house in the Siboney neighborhood

outside Havana.



Fontanals-Cisneros feels touched, even awakened, by the difficult lives

of the Cubans she meets. "People have a solidarity," she said. "They

want to live. Everything means something, even a plate of food.

Everybody lives every moment. They take nothing for granted." She is

also struck by how the arts are held in such high regard, as if the

culture of Cuba existed "in some other time" than our degraded pop

moment. Indeed, in Havana there is none of the advertising and

salesmanship that shout at you in American cities. "I feel like I'm

living in the 1950s when I'm here," she said.



For Fontanals-Cisneros, the island is littered with surprises. She

recalled someone offering her a look at some works from the 1940s'

Concrete period, a brief abstract movement that thrived in Cuba a little

longer than elsewhere. "They opened a drawer, and I saw two paintings,"

she recalled. "I said, how much? They said, $800. I said, I'll take both."



But there is also a flood of counterfeits—lost treasures are a

commercial meme here, routinely faked. There was a time when antique

ceramics from Argentina were imported and resold at a markup to tourists

seeking "Cuban" antiques. Fontanals-Cisneros's collecting has made her a

target of the wrong people. At one point, she was approached by an

intermediary who asked her, "Do you know somebody by the name of Poyack?"



"I said, you mean Pollack? Show me where this painting is."



The person could never produce a "Poyack." Fontanals-Cisneros believes

that if she had expressed interest, a painter would have been found to

counterfeit a Jackson Pollack for her.



There is another side of the art market, of course—that of the artists

themselves. Cuba's strange isolation has made it one of the rare places

where an artist can live off art alone, and exert a surprising degree of

influence on a uniform and materialistic social system. From the

beginning, the revolution promoted popular culture, from films and

theater to music and dance, but also invested in the strictly visual

fields, opening up dozens of schools of art or design, including the

nation's premier academy of art, ICAIC, to train students as young as

13. There is no penalty for being an artist here: You are paid the same,

fed the same, and housed the same as the bu- reaucrat and the laborer,

your output taken as seriously as theirs, or more so. If you are going

to be broke, Havana is a fine place to do it.



Cuba has a huge class of professional artists, including an undeniably

talented and productive industry for the tourist trade, with every

street corner sprouting a display of lurid oils on canvas, mostly

sentimental sunsets, erotic nudes, and old cars painted with

market-tested naïveté. There is also a smaller but substantial wedge of

trained talent—superb draftsmen, abstract painters, pop impresarios,

video provocateurs—as well as a circle of deal-making professionals who

cluster around them. Artists are among the few Cubans who are routinely

allowed to travel abroad, on the correct assumption that once they see

the financial standing of artists in the rest of the world, they will

return. As a result, they have become a kind of Cuban elite, well

traveled, better informed, in the powerful position of having contacts

abroad and the image of the nation in their hands—ambassadors of an

isolated people.



A 47-year-old painter known as Angél told me that he'd been to 15

countries and that, because the cost of living is so low in Cuba, the

sale of a single canvas in Europe could support his family for years. I

heard something similar from Osy Milian, a 21-year-old painter with a

growing reputation, whom I visited in Havana. She graduated from the

country's best art school with rigorous training and zero debt, and

after selling a few canvases on a tour of the United States was free to

pursue her muse for months. Coco Fusco, a Cuban-American artist and

writer who has championed Cuban artists, fears that "collectors are

getting off too cheap" but still cheers a boom that lets artists show

their talent and earn a living. "Someone who makes $5,000 at a

Biennial," she noted, "can live like a king for a year."



For Angél, foreign contact has been good for the bottom line—he once

sold every painting from a New York show—but even better from a creative

point of view. There is no such thing as a dedicated art supply store in

Cuba, so Angél has friends bring him paint from abroad, a year's worth

at a time. He said that Cuban artists have been able to combine the

fruits of foreign contact with a Cuban talent for scrounging supplies

from the garbage, and the result of the contradictory forces of scarcity

and surplus is "an explosion of creativity."



"The lack of materials forces you to develop your intellect," he said.

"How do I create something with nothing? It's easy to work with plenty.

The hard thing is to work with little."



History regresses to the mean, and I've long believed that the next

Havana, the one after this, will be more like Old Havana. Searching for

the future, then, took me to meet the woman who perhaps best embodies

the past and Cuba's long memory. That is Naty Revuelta, the legendary

socialite, revolutionary, and lover of Fidel Castro who has been

collecting art and stories continuously since the pre-revolutionary

world of cosmopolitan Cuba. She, like other old-guard collectors, has

held on to them all these years, in diminishing and fading glory.



Now 87, Revuelta met Fidel Castro in the 1950s, when he was an ambitious

young lawyer on the make in Havana and she was a high-society debutante

with an ingenue's smile and eyes that could put any man, even a

disciplined revolutionary, into a trance. The story is that Fidel

arrived at Revuelta's door one night, breathless, claiming that enemies

were pursuing him. She sheltered him, and their epic love affair—a

scandal of pre-revolutionary Havana—produced a love child.



Revuelta's mid-century modern house, a mixture of South Florida

horizontalism and Cuban eclectica, is more than the usual family museum.

There are perhaps 100 works of art tucked into every bit of wall space,

along with old photographs and small sculptures and tables crowded with

candelabras, outdated telephones, serving bowls, great piles of reading

(including up-to-date issues of Martha Stewart Living and a stack of New

Yorkers), and a can of Silvo Tarnish Guard.



Her greatest pride is her library, a dense but well-curated collection

on wide-ranging topics housed in a shaded study. This is the realm of an

archivist, the windows covered to protect the books, the shelves

organized and neatly labeled, her oldest volumes—a pair of

eighteenth-century Spanish tomes on Cuba—wrapped in butcher's paper

against the elements and tied with string. Memorabilia dot the upper

walls, a fine collection of revolutionary posters and graphic art, many

of them incorporating images, small or large, of her former paramour

Fidel in his man-of-destiny moments.



When you grow up rich and beautiful, people give you things. She got a

great Wifredo Lam that way ("He gave it to me. It was a mujer caballo in

profile"). But she had been forced to sell it, along with two paintings

by the noted painter Fidelio Ponce de León, during the economic

catastrophe of the 1990s. Loyal to a fault, Revuelta had been living

then on nothing but her official $20-a- month state pension. People

around Havana were starving, and sacrifices had to be made. Selling

three paintings provided "enough for my family to live for four years."

Of the rest of the artists in her collection, she said, "He died, he

died, he died, he died, he died, he's alive, he died, he died, he died,

he's alive."



Pride of place on her wall goes, with reason, to a large oil portrait of

Revuelta herself in high society mode. "Other people say it doesn't

capture me," she said, "but I think it does." I can't agree—Felix de

Cossio's portrait is emotional and vivid, depicting the beautiful young

woman, but is stiffly conventional and misses something so visible in

the subject before me more than half a century later: elegance, confi-

dence, a playful command of the world.



At the door, she bid me farewell. "Be good," she said. "And if you can't

be good, be careful. And if you can't be careful, name it after me." She

waved me off, her naughty remark ringing in my ears. It was the winking

Old Havana of the 1950s, everything coming back around again. The new

Havana promises to be full of aspiration, glory, beauty, and sass. It's

going to be a wonderful party.



Source: Cuba's Rising Art Scene Not Frozen in Time - Bloomberg -

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-06-13/cuba-s-rising-art-scene-not-frozen-in-time.html