AMELIA PELÁEZ (Cuba, 1896 - 1968). "Interior with still life", 1949. Mixed media on cardboard glued to canvas.

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CONTEMPORARY AND ACTUAL ART

By Setdart Auction House

Jul 27, 2021

Set Reminder 2021-07-27 08:00:00 2021-07-27 08:00:00 America/New_York Bidsquare Bidsquare : CONTEMPORARY AND ACTUAL ART https://www.bidsquare.com/auctions/setdart-auction-house/contemporary-and-actual-art-7261
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• Lot Description
  AMELIA PELÁEZ (Cuba, 1896 - 1968). "Interior with still life", 1949. Mixed media on cardboard glued to canvas. Signed and dated in the lower right corner. Certificate attached. Measurements: 61 x 46 cm; 87 x 72 cm (frame). Amelia Peláez is recognized as the first and only female artist to emerge from Cuba's avant-garde generation. The work we are dealing with, a variegated composition made in 1949, year in which she traveled for the third time to Europe, corresponds to the series of still lifes that Peláez began in 1936. It is a canvas bathed in her unmistakable aesthetic, with representations of fruits and flowers arranged on a background inspired by the colonial architecture that so moved the artist. Amelia Pelaéz 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 ends up finding her style, looking at the city of Havana. She went through the city, her childhood memories, the craftsmanship, the roots, the stained glass windows, the latticework. In short, everything that defines the city of Havana as a chromatic city.
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