Amelia Pelaez

AMELIA PELÁEZ (Cuba, 1896 - 1968).
Untitled, 1959.
Tempera and ink on cardboard.
Signed and dated in the lower right corner.
Measurements: 20 x 27 cm; 31 x 38 cm (frame).

This work belongs to the so-called baroque period of the author, considered one of the most prolific of her career. In the image Peláez displays her characteristic pictorial imagery offering the viewer a striking figurative composition formed through simplified lines that outline very marked contours. Resembling a stained glass window, or a folded window that receives the light, she shows us a lady whose contours are delimited through a synthetic line of great thickness, next to a table or tablecloth. Pelaez, inspired by the architecture of her native Cuba, knew how to transform her cultural tradition into contemporaneity like no one else.

Amelia Peláez painted her most interesting works during her maturity. At first her aesthetics were closely linked to the academy. In 1916 she began her studies at the Academy of San Alejandro and in 1921 she went to New York. She commented at first that the United States did not bring her anything, but there she got in touch with modernity, coming into contact with different, new and avant-garde art. Finally she returned to the Academy of San Alejandro to finish graduating in 1926 with honors, and from the hand of Romanach, that is to say, from the hand of the most academic art. He then traveled to Paris in 1927 and stayed there for seven years. She arrived with a state commission, in order to investigate the schools and find out how the art scene was constituted. During this period Amalia immersed herself in art, which for her was a renewal. She enrolled at the Louvre school, also in that classical environment, and in 1931 she entered a newly opened academy, the contemporary academy of Fernand Léger, where there was a teacher who was an artistic revelation for Amelia. Alejandra Exter (1882-1949) Russian painter and designer, who followed the ideas of constructivism and exerted a great influence on the formation of Amalia. Through her works of geometric character and superimpositions of planes. Amelia found in the Europe of the avant-garde not the purism of these, but something more postmodern, but still interested her because it was a whole world of suggestions to assimilate and create a new aesthetic. In an article she wrote in a Paris newspaper about Cuban painters, she said that they were interested in the great masters of the contemporary in order to create a revolution in Havana. Those returning to Cuba assimilated the classical tradition, but were inspired by the themes of their country, although they were also interested in Gauguin, and the art of the blacks. In Paris he assimilated what he was seeing and made paintings of this type, with a strong weight based on figuration and post-avant-gardism. He opted for geometric rigor and broke with conventional space, betting on a purely plastic vision, typical of the avant-garde. In 1934 he returned to Havana, in the midst of political change, when Batista was coming to power. He secluded himself in his studio and dedicated himself to shaping his definitive work. He eliminated his academic burdens belatedly. When the catharsis of arriving in her homeland took place, she began to produce her own language, since it was in Havana where she realized that she did not want to be a simple painter of the School of Paris, but a modern and avant-garde Cuban artist. She got in touch with Wilfredo Lam, who knew in depth the Afro-Cuban traditions after coming from Paris, and she herself ended up finding her style, looking at her city.