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Cuban art makes a grand showing in Montreal By Diane E. Foulds, Globe Correspondent | February 3, 2008 MONTREAL - Canada is a great enabler. For years it has served as a virtual way station for travelers, allowing them passage to Havana without running afoul of US travel restrictions. Now it is making possible a journey through Cuban art. The prestigious Montreal Museum of Fine Arts is hosting the most comprehensive retrospective of Cuban art ever held outside Cuba's borders. More than three years in the making, the show surveys some 400 works by more than 100 Cuban artists. More than half of the works were brought from Cuba; the rest are on loan, largely from private collections in New York and Miami and museums, particularly Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art and the Arizona State University Art Museum in Tempe, whose holdings of Cuban art are the world's largest outside Cuba. Paintings and photography dominate, but sculpture, poster art, music, video, magazine covers, installations, films, even cigar wrappers make an appearance, all with the objective of capturing Cuba's elusive national identity, or "cubanida." It is an ambitious task. For historical perspective, the museum has subdivided the show into five categories: colonial art of the 19th century, interwar avant garde, the post-World War II renaissance, revolutionary art after Fidel Castro's rise in 1959, and the caustic conceptualist art that has emerged since 1980. Each section begins with photographic close-ups of the people, conditions, and mood of the era, which is an education in itself. Murder victims slumped on the street, an unsmiling Ernest Hemingway in a bar, prostitutes waiting for customers. Girded with these impressions, you then see the period through an artistic lens. There are dark-haired beauties and strong colors, which you would expect in Caribbean art. Less predictable is the originality of the work, the result, in part, of the island's geographic isolation. The big surprise is how good it is. For Nathalie Bondil, director of the Montreal museum, it was a revelation. Having accepted an invitation to visit Havana's newly renovated Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, the French-born art historian was astounded "by the scale and quality of the art," she said. On a whim, she proposed an exhibit. In the three years that followed, Bondil traveled to Havana eight times. Bureaucracy was minimal, she said, as unlike the United States, Canada enjoys good relations with Cuba. But the magnitude of the undertaking raises questions. Why, with Castro ailing, would Cuba roll out such a candid look at domestic achievements, hopes, and disappointments? Could the regime be loosening its grip? The timing was "nothing political," Bondil said. She acknowledged Cuba's current drive to spur tourism, saying more Canadians visit its ocean-swept beaches than any other nationality. Bondil's motive was simple: to take the lid off Cuban culture. To make it happen, Montreal has picked up the tab. The museum has added several pieces to its collection and is keeping the door open for future collaboration. Meanwhile, it is turning the show into a veritable Cuban celebration. Ongoing events include lectures, tours, and a Cuban film festival, including "Strawberry and Chocolate," an Academy-Award-nominated 1995 comedy about homosexuality. A 424-page catalog is being published in English, French, and Spanish. In its five chapters, some artists are given long-deserved recognition, like Marcelo Pogolotti, who produced hauntingly colorful avant-garde work in the interwar years. Authored largely by Cuban scholars, the essays don't mince words. Discussing a contemporary artist's habit of ridiculing political propaganda, for example, Panama-based art critic Gerardo Mosquera laments that political slogans "have reached heights of absurdity comparable to North Korean standards." The subtext is hard to miss. One is the message that there's a lot more to Cuban culture than crumbling facades and 1950s-era American cars. The fact that Canada is hosting the exhibit and not the United States, even though US institutions have larger collections of Cuban art, is a subtle reminder of the price the US public is paying for the embargo. Havana boasts a world-class art academy, an esteemed photography school, and an impressive, if little known, art scene. Little known, that is, except for Wifredo Lam (1902-82), who ranks among the 20th century's leading painters. A whole gallery of the show is dedicated to Lam, a surrealist and Picasso protégé who died in Paris and whose paintings are stylistic hybrids reminiscent of Joan Miró, Fernand Léger, and Wassily Kandinsky. Born to a Chinese father and an African-Cuban mother, Lam spent most of his life deconstructing the Afro-Cuban aesthetic. He lived many years in Europe, but returned to Havana in the 1960s. In 1967 he orchestrated one of Cuba's greatest artistic moments, the collective painting of a massive pro-revolutionary mural. The canvas, a patchwork of images radiating outward in a great spiral, was the handiwork of some 100 Cuban and foreign writers, painters, and intellectuals. Each was assigned a square; number 26 was reserved for Castro, but he never showed up, so the square was left blank. This is the mural's first appearance outside Cuba. One of the show's biggest revelations is how tolerant Castro has been of provocative art. Though dependent on Soviet subsidies, the Cuban leader eschewed Socialist Realism. And though artists were censored and even jailed in the 1980s and beyond, their defiance was not quelled. "Castro was always open to abstract and Pop Art," Bondil said. "It was completely different from the situation in Russia." When the Soviet subsidies vanished, living standards dropped, and works of art became even more politically abrasive, taking aim not only at Castro, but at the United States, too. A display called "Cuba, Island of Fiesta and Siesta," parodies the Cuban stereotypes pervasive in US society. But with Florida only 90 miles away, the US presence remains a constant in Cuban thought. All the more reason to hope that a similar show opens in the States. "I must say that the lenders have been especially touched and happy to collaborate with us on this show," said Bondil in an interview published in the January issue of the museum's magazine. "The passion for Cuban art transcends all borders." Diane E. Foulds, a freelance writer in Burlington, Vt., can be reached at dianefoulds@burlingtontelecom.net. http://www.boston.com/travel/getaways/canada/articles/2008/02/03/cuban_art_makes_a_grand_showing_in_montreal?mode=PF

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/03/arts/design/03darc.html?_r=3&oref=slogin&ref=arts&pagewanted=print February 3, 2008 Art It’s Not Politics. It’s Just Cuba. By DAVID D’ARCY IMAGES of boats and the horizon are a relative constant in Cuban art. For Cubans they’re often an expression of longing for life beyond a geographically and politically enclosed space. For the rare Americans who ever see Cuban art, the images can be a reminder of a place they are forbidden to visit. For the next five months, witnessing at least one aspect of Cuba will in theory be a bit easier for Americans. “¡Cuba! Art and History from 1868 to Today,” an exhibition that just opened at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, offers more than 400 images and objects from the island that Christopher Columbus is said to have called “the most beautiful land that eyes have ever seen.” Many of the paintings were lent by the National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana with encouragement from Cuban officials who want to promote the notion of Cuban culture, said Moraima Clavijo Colom, the museum director. “That Cuba was not just a place of sun, beaches, rum and dancing,” she said in a telephone interview. It may seem provocative to dangle this forbidden fruit near the border of the United States, whose citizens can face fines for traveling to Cuba under the latest version of a 46-year-old trade embargo. But Nathalie Bondil, the director of the Montreal museum and the curator of the exhibition, said: “It’s not a political show. It’s just a show.” She declined to speculate on whether any museum in the United States could cooperate legally on such a scale with a comparable Cuban institution. “It’s not a question,” she said. “Canada is a different country.” Canada is one of Cuba’s most important trading partners, and Canadians make up the largest group of tourists who visit Cuba, she said, “so Cuba is an obvious partner for us.” Still, given Cuba’s history, any exhibition of work produced there seems to become a show about Cuba and Cuban identity. The date of 1868 was anything but arbitrary, Ms. Bondil noted: it was the year in which Cubans in the town of Bayamo first declared independence from Spain. And by including “art and history” in the exhibition title, the curators also signal that the subject of much Cuban art is Cuba and Cubans. “Cuban art cannot escape the necessary negotiation with the historical situation in which it occurs — that seems to be the defining element,” said Stéphane Aquin, the Montreal curator who selected the works made after 1959. “The best that I’ve seen of Cuban art is always negotiating its space or reacting to its historical condition.” Like any survey of art and history in a Western country, this one rolls through landscape painting, portraiture and genre scenes, beginning with folkloric images of Afro-Cuban rural life. (Slavery was not banned in Cuba until 1888.) Yet two mediums help to set Cuba and this exhibition apart from other marches through history. Photographers have documented Cuban life since the middle of the 19th century, and some 200 photographs lent by the Fototeca de Cuba in Havana guide visitors from the 1860s to the present. Among them are Walker Evans’s grim images of Havana street life, included in Carleton Beals’s 1933 book, “The Crime of Cuba,” a lament for ordinary people living under the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado y Morales (1925-1933). There are also abundant images from an inventive graphic arts industry that advertised to a growing consumer population in the 1920s and 1930s, deploying the new vocabularies of Modernism and Surrealism. Cuba’s vibrant poster culture was so strong that it survived the transition to one-party Communism after Fidel Castro’s takeover in 1959. Yet if there is a star to be celebrated in this show, it is not Mr. Castro but Wifredo Lam, born in 1902 of Chinese and Afro-Cuban parents. He traveled to Europe to study art in 1923, joined André Breton’s Surrealist circle, fought in the Spanish Civil War and painted in a Surrealist style that caught Picasso’s eye with its use of African imagery, which resembled forms that Picasso borrowed earlier in the century. Picasso was much quoted as saying: “He’s got the right. He’s a Negro.” Back in Cuba in 1942 as a refugee from the Nazis, Lam caught the eye of Alfred H. Barr Jr., director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Although Lam steered clear of Barr’s 1944 exhibition “Modern Painters of Cuba” for fear of being labeled a “Cuban painter” — he showed at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York instead — MoMA acquired Lam’s large 1943 canvas “The Jungle,” a thicket of vegetal fronds and human-animal figures in dark greens, now considered his masterpiece. MoMA is not lending “The Jungle” for the show because of its fragility but contributed “Mother and Child II” (1939), one of 14 paintings by Lam on view. Lam’s family, one of the largest holders of his works, did not lend pictures to the exhibition. Reached by telephone at his home in Paris, Lam’s son Eskil, 46, said that Ms. Bondil sought his advice on the exhibition but no loans. He said that he had not read the exhibition catalog, which includes two essays on his father and another on a collective mural that his father played a role in conceiving and painting. He chuckled at the title of one essay, “Lam: A Visual Arts Manifesto for the Third World.” “It’s always complicated with Cuba,” he said. “With Cuba there’s always an ideological supervision. I wouldn’t say control, but supervision. They want to make sure that what is being said, or the message put forth in a foreign exhibition, doesn’t go against today’s Cuba.” “My father supported the revolution when it took place,” Mr. Lam noted, adding, “I would say that my father was a humanist more than anything else, and that his participation in or his enthusiasm for the Cuban Revolution was definitely one from the 1960s, for a movement of emancipation of liberation more than as an ideological communist venture.” Lam remains the through-line of the Montreal show, even though he left Cuba in 1946 and never lived there full time again. The exhibition’s centerpiece is “Cuba Colectiva,” a gigantic 1967 mural on six panels that was initially conceived by Lam and created by 100 Cuban and European artists for the Salon de Mai, an annual exhibition. Although artists were making “collective works” in the United States and Europe at the time, often in protest of the Vietnam War, this mural was a tribute to a romantic view of Cuban Socialism that inspired many Europeans artists at the time. The huge mural traveled the following year from Cuba to France, where curators said it was taken off display after a few hours to avoid damage in the May 1968 student uprising. Back in Havana, it was eventually placed in storage. When the museum was emptied in 1999 for renovation, the mural and its frame were found to have been invaded by termites. Without money to restore it, the Cubans found a Parisian dealer to underwrite the job, and the mural is being shown for the first time outside Cuba since its conservation. Like the mural, much Cuban art since 1959 has been in the service of the Castro regime, either in Socialist-Realist styles through the 1970s (when Russians taught in art academies there) or in a Pop Art style adapted to official portraiture of figures like Mr. Castro and Che Guevara. “It’s a Pop form of vocabulary — the flashy colors, the bright letters, said Mr. Aquin of the Montreal museum. “They were taking the Pop aesthetic and functionalizing it.” Less functional ideologically are works made by contemporary artists who are beginning to find markets abroad after years during which their only client was the state. In the 1980s and ’90s, as Soviet aid dried up, art materials were particularly scarce, and mixed-media artists like Alexis Leyva (Kcho) and the duo, Los Carpinteros ( all represented in the Montreal show) constructed work from whatever they could scavenge. It was a new Cuban hybridization: a mix of found objects and Arte Povera. “I bought a sculpture, and I asked the artist if he could put it in bubble wrap for me,” said Howard Farber, an American collector. “He didn’t know what I was talking about.” While most Cuban artists struggle, some are thriving, like Carlos Garaicoa, who takes photographs of empty sites where buildings once stood in Havana and then constructs the former structures in delicate thread atop the pictures. Mr. Garaicoa, 40, has had solo exhibitions in the United States that included his large installations of sculptural urban ensembles — he calls them “utopian cities” — but he has not been granted a visa to enter the country. One of his clusters is the final installation in the Montreal museum’s show. Mr. Garaicoa’s dealer, Lea Freid of Lombard-Freid Projects, suggested that this softly illuminated city in miniature could be an image of a place awaiting Cubans one day after the death of Mr. Castro, or after the end of the United States embargo. She said it was no surprise that Mr. Garaicoa’s work is celebrated in Montreal. “I think there is a connection, an affection and an ongoing relationship on all levels that doesn’t occur here,” she said. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company