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Geographies of Cuban Abstraction

ion 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 U.S. 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. 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,

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 discoursecubanía-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 U.S. 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. 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, mounting political resistance against Batista's government serve as a dramatic backdrop. The first chapter, "The Horizon of Vanguards," expands in depth and breadth the arguments foreshadowed in the introductory remarks, detailing how an emerging generation of artists was shaped in equal measure by Batista's coup, an emphatic championing of modernist aesthetics, and an expanding media and institutional apparatus nurturing their endeavors. Here McEwen rekindles a generational account of three different national artistic vanguards, to situate Los Once's work as part of its third iteration.
Los Once, the author explains, would burst in the cultural field by restaging notions of vanguardism that had been brewing among Cuban cultural producers and intellectuals since the 1920s, even as their exhibitions, texts, and interactions stressed the group's political iconoclasm and aesthetic rupture with respect to previous generations of Cuban artists. To illuminate these connections, McEwen uncovers the debt of Los Once's to their forerunners, the group of 23 artists and a critic that initiated its members in the cultural politics of modernism and the national debates of the moment: "The cohort of 'los 23 y medio' thus inherited a double legacy from the elder vanguardias: from the Generation of 1927, a model of commitment to political freedom; and from the Orígenes group, a vision of Cuban universalism drawn from broadly americanista roots" (14). (For scholars of Hispanic culture, it is worth noting that Revolutionary Horizons uses the term "Generation of 1927" indistinguishably to refer to Cuba's cultural vanguard of the late 1920s, "los nuevos," and to the Spanish intellectual constellation more often associated to the name-some of whom traveled to and from Cuba during those years, or lived in exile in Havana and elsewhere in Latin America after the Spanish Civil War.) Chapters 2 and 3 sketch a fuller group portrait of Los Once, from their founding in "Los Once and the Polemics of Abstraction," to their disbandment in "Anti-Bienal, Bienal, and the Dissolution of Los Once." An opening discussion of select works and figures of the first and second vanguard prefigures the crucible in which Los Once, and the metacritical legacy of abstraction in Cuba, would later be forged. The likes of Enrique Riverón, Amelia Peláez, Roberto Diago, Wifredo Lam, and Marcelo Pogolotti grace this section. It also features the behind-the-scenes maneuverings of the National Salons of 1950Salons of , 1951Salons of , and 1953 where the leadership of the renowned Havana School of the 1940s, and the local reception of abstraction, were negotiated and challenged. McEwen's apt emphasis on the political uses of abstraction by Los Once tends to eclipse more specialized aesthetic debates, frequently relegating the particularities of the artist's individual crafts to a second plane. As a consequence, the critical treatment of abstraction echoes that of Los Once's own: "As a tabula rasa, the medium of abstraction appeared ripe for the taking, and its interpretive elasticity enabled it to be profitably instrumentalized by the onceños and others" (51). Even so, graduate students, curators, and scholars of various interests-in Latin American and Cuban art, post-World War II abstraction, and/or Cuban cultural politics for example-will find very useful scoops in these pages. Cuban concrete artists, offering a different path to abstraction from that of Los Once, relied on the promises of an epistemological transformation to be achieved through the visual creation of the real anew, rather than through the shock gesture of abstraction as a value in itself. This leads McEwen to argue that "[c]oncrete art, which arrived at once too early and too late in Cuba, was inevitably a failed project," and to pit the collective of Los Diez Pintores Concretos against Los Once, the group at the core of the author's own Revolutionary Horizons (175). A counternarrative of the concrete finds more fertile ground in another recent work, Rachel Price's The Object of the Atlantic: Concrete Aesthetics in Cuba, Brazil, and Spain, 1868-1968(2014, which unearths the economic subtexts, unexpected genealogies, and political wagers of the Spanish, Cuban, and Brazilian concretos. With this comprehensive portrait of the Cuban abstractos, McEwen brings to life the links between aesthetic abstraction, the ethos of insurgency, and national politics in the eve of revolution. The book's final assessment of their legacies does not reject the standard definitions and periodizations of Cuban art history, which the author addresses explicitly in the introductory remarks: "the book takes the impassioned terms of the decade . . . largely at face value" (7). A direct implication of this decision is that more seasoned scholars of Cuban culture will greatly benefit from unique archival finds but will find less challenging McEwen's takes on the notion of cultural vanguard or on the cultural debates of the early revolutionary period: "Although abstract art was censured for its alleged lack of social commitment, the more damning charge was its persistent identification with cubanía rebelde, the ideology of dissent radicalized during the 1950s, and its reluctance to embrace the Marxist socialism of the new cubanía With a well-thought design and an elegant production value, however, it would be a disservice to describe Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight as just a companion catalogue. As an exquisitely crafted artifact, the book renders tribute to one of Herrera's signatures as an artist: the treatment of the painting as a three-dimensional object. This is why I opened this review with a comment on the book's materiality, a testament to the discerning choices of curator Dana Miller and her design and photography team. And while it is not reasonable to expect that a catalogue recreate the experience of the exhibit, the book more than compensates by reproducing works that are not shown or whose whereabouts are unknown, and by bringing together as many works that belong to the same series as possible. The plates displaying Herrera's artwork provide the multiple photographic angles needed to appreciate how her paintings perform unexpected transformations according to the position of the observer with respect to the canvas. For students of Herrera's brushwork, moreover, these reproductions offer close-ups of significant textural details, which a nervous museum guard or a slow-moving crowd might not accommodate in a live event. abstraction or action painting). Untimely and unplaceable at once, argues Miller, Herrera was always reluctant to imprint her work with any of the identities she has inhabited or that have been imposed onto her, as a woman, as Cuban-born, or as a Latin American abstractionist.
The middle essays, penned by two well-known art critics, deliver the least provocative interventions of the four. Gerardo Mosquera's "Carmen Herrera: Cuba, Inside and Out" adds the necessary Cuban dimension to Herrera's largely invisible presence in her native country but repeats many of the biographical details already teased out in Miller's piece. Through the identification of four distinct styles in Herrera's early works, Mosquera nonetheless succeeds in contextualizing the artist's turn to abstraction within the Cuban modernist frames of references to which she was exposed in Havana before the New York and Paris years, and during her counted visits to Cuba afterward. In fact, the assertion that "Herrera's persona and work are, in themselves, a critique of nationalism in art" might be Mosquera's most pertinent observation here (43). Given the persistent preference for figurative languages in the Cuban visual artsmuch in the same way that realism has prevailed in the national literary landscape-Mosquera's reminder that "abstractionism was most significant in the history of Cuban art during the 1950s In "Paris est une fête," the third entry of the volume, Serge Lemoine is tasked with the mise en scène of Herrera's Paris years, 1948Paris years, -1954. Lemoine details the unique encounters with experimental visual languages afforded by Paris, whose indisputable centers were the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, and the sway of Auguste Herbin's towering persona. This does not make up for some missed opportunities. In particular, a focus on tangential individuals and styles leave much unexplored about the material realities of postwar Paris, and, for example, how they might have influenced Herrera's inventive use of burlap and her comparatively early adoption of acrylics over oils. And because Lemoine's cursory judgments of her early works reduce Herrera's pre-Paris creative output to a wandering apprenticeship-directly at odds with the artist's own recollections as well as Miller's, Mosquera's, and Sullivan's neighboring pieces-"Paris est une fête" succeeds only in repeating an uninspired cliché about the magic of Paris.
In contrast, Edward J. Sullivan's "Carmen Herrera: South to North" delivers the last and most compelling contribution of the four essays. If Miller's biography analyzes Herrera's works from the question of her (un)timelines, Sullivan complements the curator's text by mapping the artist's place within the hemispheric and trans-Atlantic spatial networks of abstraction of the mid-twentieth century. This approximation resolves questions that remained intractable in previous texts: the relative positionality of abstraction's politics on one hand, and Herrera's inescapable dialogues with her better-known counterparts in New York and Latin America, even as an outsider, on the other. Framed by what Sullivan terms the "Contact Zones of Fluidity"after Mary Louise Pratt's "contact zones"-hidden connections between Herrera and other Latin American artists are thus read anew. Select works by César Patternosto, Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, and others provide visual and conceptual support to Sullivan's interpretations.
Careful to avoid putative lineages, this analytic framework unveils the philosophical and stylistic affinities of "a hemisphere-wide utopian sensibility," suggesting "that the utopianism of [Herrera's] turn toward a purer form of abstract art reveals a personal affinity, perhaps elusive or even unconscious, with a social moment of hopefulness that links her work to that of certain Brazilian Concrete and Neo-Concrete artists of this era. Our understanding of Herrera's art deepens when we see it against the panorama of a (short-lived) postwar utopianism that was, I think, perceived in a particularly palpable way in Latin America" (69, 75). Moreover, Sullivan argues that this utopian undercurrent of geometric abstractionism is brought into public view with the major state-backed architectural projects of mid-twentieth century in México, Venezuela, Brazil, and Cuba, as the expression of "its evil doppelgänger, Developmentalism" This may be the place to mention three final twists in these two stories, not included in the reviewed texts, that underscore the complex geographies of Cuban abstraction-continental, transatlantic, and national-featured in these two books. First, if the fluid and dynamic geographies of post-war abstraction provide a better understanding of Carmen Herrera's long overshadowed but manifest significance, it is worth noting that Torres-García's vital América Invertida, which inspires the title of Sullivan's essay, does not include Cuba or any of the other Caribbean islands, placing the region, by defect, in a limbo between the North and the South.
And though the French connection vertebrates many of these newly suggested topographies, Interestingly, Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight's "small prints"-the list of benefactors, collectors, auctions, exhibits-also provide a roadmap of sorts to understand the key individuals and institutions promoting the reappraisal of mid-twentieth-century Latin American abstract artists in the global art market and exhibit circuit, a growing demand that includes many of the Cuban modernist painters that appear on the pages of both books. But is there anything beyond a collector-driven demand for Latin American abstract art and the simultaneous and long-overdue revisionist scholarship of this visual corpus? Is there a contemporary desire for abstraction that fuels the rediscovery of radically reimagined languages for art, of its alternative histories and trajectories? True to the ambiguous and, in its own time, polemical relationship of abstraction to the idea of socially committed art, the persistent allure of abstract art is open to several readings.
The reevaluation of abstraction can be dismissed as a farcical repetition-and nostalgic reification-of a marketable utopianism. Or its revived visibility can be taken seriously as a symptom of the collective desires unfulfilled and frustrated by the mass utopias of twentiethcentury modernizations that witnessed the emergence of abstraction and that still demand a reinvention of experience and consequently of our modes of thinking critically, aesthetically, about it.
If the appeal of modern abstraction resides in its ability to call forth mutinous imaginaries against the familiarity of the same, perhaps then the fitting title of Herrera's exhibit and catalogue, reminiscent of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's "lines of flight," can be read as a clue. For an observer of Herrera's canvases familiar with A Thousand Plateaus-where Mondrian appears as a teacher, too-the painter's study of color and lines highlights the debt of Deleuze and Guattari's terminology for a new mode of philosophical inquiry (planes, lines of becoming, punctual systems, smooth and striated spaces, bodies without organs, haecceities, relations of speed and slowness, of being and becoming) to the language of modern abstraction.
Herrera's color blocks and lines break the two-dimensional surface by continuing beyond the edge of the painting, wrapping the frame along with the canvas, in flight. The relationship between space, lines, and colors is suspended in permanent tension, that is, the lines resist being