Cuban Painting History

Cuban academic painting is characterized, since its inception, by backed of neoclassical canons of French and Italian school. This condition determined during the nineteenth and early twentieth century artistic guidance of Cuban painting. Art as a way to represent the sublime and uplifting will determine not only the subject but also, of course, the form of representation of this theme. In other words, beauty will not only physically by the perfection of form, but the matter to be addressed in the paint will have a fundamental weight when designing the paintings. It is ultimately the application of Academy Aristotelian concept of beauty. Hence, the historical theme and allegory by the landscape and portrait, prevail in the landscape of the academy. For the landscape, the idyllic. In the portrait, the ideal. Of course, within the body of exponents that will paint his future there will be variations, without openly breaking with established codes, they make concessions to other ways to make themselves nineteenth. Century as in the case of romanticism and realism. The latter is almost a rarity in the context of Cuban painting of the period. The Vasco painter, based in Cuba since 1850, Victor Patricio de Landaluce, is a major character. Just two years in Cuba makes the book illustrated by him and José Robles, painted by Cubans themselves.

But this work despite its title does not play in his illustrations of a black image that was part of our population. They will have to wait several years for the same painter offered his monumental book types and customs, published in 1881 by Miguel de Villa in Havana. It appears his last drawings to fototipia by Taveira. In his paintings and engravings that makes for the serial press as "El Moro Muza" and other shows characters that were part of the so-called "brown and dark”, slaves or freedmen time its normal work in the city, as carriages pullers, hand servants, street vendors, artisans ... and in the field, as the sower and cane cutter machines in the mill, coffee plantations and other agricultural work. Landaluce is the genre painter par excellence; his pupil trained for 30 years in Cuban soil, specifically Guanabacoa, set everything on the canvas moving in its environment. The painter Victor Patricio de Landaluce has left the legacy of the Festival of the Kings, reflected in his paintings with great pictorial agility: rich document for the reconstruction of the lives of slaves and free man and their "Iremes" which fascinated foreigners visited the island. Can be identified in his paintings the costumes worn by the different ethnic groups, their drums, their religious attributes.