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| The Polemics
of Abstraction and the Horizons of Cuba’s Last Avant-Garde Abigail McEwen, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University |
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| The following is an abstract of the paper presented at the conference.
The development of Cuban abstraction spanned the decade of the 1950s, conceptually bridging and defining cultural politics from the Fulgencio Batista coup of 1952 to the socialist revolution in 1959. Both a visual form and an ideological platform, abstraction attracted a left-wing intelligentsia seeking on the one hand a non-referential idiom, removed from the corrupt politics of dictatorship, and on the other a more contemporary, international face to Cuban culture. The fight for abstraction was situated within a broader social debate that hinged on Cuba’s political futures – socialist or democratic – and it defined, for the first time in the avant-garde’s pursuit of this projected, modern future, a new horizon of possibility for art as a means of social transformation. For this generation, the ethics of abstraction demanded a commitment no less than revolution, and the legacy of this final avant-garde would be to push painting toward pure praxis – toward one Modernist ideal – almost ahead of its time. Using the epiphenomenon of abstraction as a paradigmatic case, this paper explores the strategies and contingencies of the highly self-aware avant-garde apparatus and mentality that emerged in Cuba in the late 1950s. The last of Cuba’s three vanguardia generations, the abstractionists occupied an improbable historical position: they represented the final gestation of Cuba’s historical avant-garde, with a utopian vision tied to the promise of social revolution, yet they acted in a world defined by Cold War politics and chastened by the failures of the European avant-garde. The international alignments of abstraction, and the competing neo-colonial claims on it, politicized this art from the beginning, bringing new pressures to bear on the question of what a vanguard modernism could mean at this time. At the center of this investigation lies a concern to historicize both the conceptual origins of this avant-garde, compromised by its belated historical situation, and the intense politicization of abstraction, whose critical fortunes became a barometer of cultural beliefs in the project of Modernism itself. |
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