Though accelerated by the growing scholarly and institutional attention to the global history of modernism, and lubricated by the art market’s heightened interest in Cuba, the arrival in New York from London of David Zwirner’s “Concrete Cuba” exhibition (through February 20) is more than just momentum. Covering “Los Diez Pintores Concretos,” as this group of 10 Cuban artists inspired by concretism and active from 1959 to 1961 were called, this historical group exhibition is spread across two second-floor galleries at Zwirner’s West 20th Street fortress. Straddling the considerable political churn of the 1959 Castro revolution, these artists coalesced around a trio of early-adopters of concretism on the island nation: naturalized Romanian emigré Sandú Darié and his Cuban colleagues Mario Carreño and Martínez Pedro.Opposed to the Batista dictatorship and in some cases supporters of the Castro revolution, their hard-edged abstraction seemed to float above the political turbulence, earning Los Diez a degree of ambivalence from both regimes. The price of this ambivalence was eventual omission from the art historical record: Perceived as conspicuously cosmopolitan (with links regionally and to Western Europe) and non-committal on political matters (despite a foundational utopianism), Los Diez were briefly fostered by Havana’s Galería Color-Luz, and even showed in a 1961 exhibition at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana, but soon found themselves aesthetically out of favor in Castro’s Cuba.We teased out some of these questions — the social and political context of Cuban concretism, the historical position of Los Diez relative to Cuban and international modernists, and the eventual fate of these artists — with University of Maryland art historian Abigail McEwen, the author of two forthcoming volumes on Cuban art in the 1950s: “Revolutionary Horizons: Art and Polemics in 1950s Cuba” (Yale University Press, Fall 2016) and an exhibition catalogue to be published by David Zwirner Books. We spoke to McEwen after she gave a walkthrough of the exhibition on its opening weekend in New York.I’m curious how the work of Los Diez fits into the historical narrative for you. Do you view Cuban concretism as something within Cuban art history or outside of it?I would say the 1950s has been a problematic decade within Cuban history in general because people who have stayed have committed to revolution and want to see this decade as one of corruption, of dictatorship, as terrible, where nothing productive happened at all within the arts, and in that case it becomes very easy to scrub this generation from the national memory. For people who left Cuba, the diaspora, there is a tendency to look at the 1950s as the golden age of Cuban culture, a time when there was incredible promise, when Cuban art was becoming international for the first time, becoming avant garde.I’d say for me as a non-Cuban, I am not personally implicated in Cuban history, so I can look back at this decade and kind of think historically how does it fit within Cuban art. Is it in fact the third generation of the vanguardia, or the canon could see this art within a constellation stretching internationally from New York to Paris and the Southern cone. There is also a place for Cuban concretism there, in a way that the [Cuban] art of the 1930s and the 1940s struggles to have an international feel. In a sense I’d like to make both claims for this art, that it was both national, it was Cuban, but it was Cuban in the sense of its aspirational cosmopolitan that very much distinguished the 1950s from what had come before, or even after.You mentioned that after the mid-1960s Los Diez were evacuated from Cuban art history, but in 1961 they did show at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, as part of an early Castro government literacy drive. You mention that they were critical of Batista, but how did they specifically fall out of favor with Castro?There was nothing formalized in 1959 in the revolution, Castro didn’t have a really clear cultural agenda in the same way that it happened in the Soviet Union, so it took a while before, on the one hand, the revolution was declared communist, and then for there to be this consolidation of the cultural field with the emergence of a union of artists, where they were asked to pledge their revolutionary commitment. So in this grey period, from 1959 to 1962 or ’63, there wasn’t a clear dictate from the government [as far as] this is revolutionary art and this isn’t… Some artists for other reasons, not just visual ones, left Cuba, so it was very easy to cut them from the national history. Those artists who stayed, if they continued to work in abstraction, in some cases they were left alone, but they weren’t given big exhibitions or plum teaching spots, they were kind of forgotten, minimized.And so what was the aesthetic turn precipitated by the Castro revolution, how did that play out to the exclusion of this kind of abstraction? The older generation of Communist party stalwarts wanted Castro to commit to social realism, but he didn’t. What emerged in Cuba is a kind of Pop Art, which became very political, there was a great deal of interest in graphic design, poster design, book design, films. In a way, those were the more vital and viable art forms in the 1960s and 1970s within Cuba… Abstract art ended, it didn’t just end in Cuba, but elsewhere this utopian promise, whether in Caracas or Brazilia, there was a kind of end to it.In your walkthrough earlier you spoke of Los Diez as a “touchstone of modernity” in 1950s Cuba — could you expand on this notion?There was this incredible moment of modernization in Cuba, and in Havana of urbanization and urban development. Certainly Walter Gropius came to Havana, there was a meeting of CIAM [Congreso Internacional de Arquitectura Moderna] as well, and Havana commissioned Josep Lluís Sert of Cambridge to come down into the city to create a new urban plan, which was never quite implemented but parts of it managed to be developed after the revolution. There was this sense of making Havana, as they said at the time, “the New York of the Caribbean,” of wanting to modernize the city, and no doubt this kind of work in a way kind of signaled that as a kind of billboard, because some of this work was publicly positioned. For instance on the Havana Hilton hotel there is the [Amelia] Peláez mural — an earlier generation artist — but it’s quite abstract, a completely geometric mosaic of glass tiles, [and] the [Wifredo] Lam mural. There still are in Vedado street tiles by a number of these artists. There is a sense of what I call in my book the patterning of the city in abstract terms. In a way this art was referencing the larger sweeping modernization that was happening in Cuba, and it was also international and cosmopolitan in a sense.You also mentioned that some of these artists were posted diplomatically around the world, post-revolution. This would seem to complicate the notion of their failure in the eyes of the Castro government.They were supportive of the revolution, but they were practicing an art that was seen as not sufficiently revolutionary: so what to do with these artists? In a way, perhaps to remove them from the fray of Havana and to give them jobs and associate them with Cuba, they were posted.This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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