Cuban vanguard has long been considered a joint cultural and political project for national reform, though the relationship of vanguard artistic practices to their political agenda has yet to be fully articulated. Scholars have argued that “modern” art was adopted because it was seen as an opportunity to break with the academic training initiated under colonial rule (Wood 1990) and that this rupture was grounded in artistic experimentation and freedom of expression (Juan 1978). Unsatisfied with their studies at Havana's San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts, many vanguard painters left to seek modernist training in Paris in the late 1920s. The first to return and exhibit modern approaches to painting were Víctor Manuel and Antonio Gattorno (1904–1980). Each enjoyed solo exhibitions in February and March 1927, respectively, in which they exhibited work that departed from academic realism by embracing the simplification of color and form typical of European modernism. In May they were joined by Eduardo Abela (1889–1965), Rafael Blanco (1885–1955), Carlos Enríquez (1900–1957), Marcelo Pogolotti (1902–1988), and Lorenzo Romero Arciaga (b. 1905) for an “Exhibition of New Art” that inaugurated the vanguard group. The exhibition was sponsored by a new vanguard periodical, the Revista de Avance (1927–1930).
It has been suggested that Avance initiated the vanguard's dual agenda for cultural and political reform by exposing Cuba to contemporary intellectual debates from abroad as part of its goal to foster independence and progress, while artists turned toward emotional expression grounded in everyday life (Martínez 1994). Some have argued that that the novelty of Cuban modernism was signaled by the artistic depiction of racialized others (Aranda‐Alvarado 2001). Prime examples include Carlos Enríquez's eroticized portraits of mulatta (i.e. Afro‐Cuban) women and Wifredo Lam's (1902–1982) Afro‐Cuban santería‐inspired canvases. Others have suggested that vanguard intellectuals identified themselves with Cuba's many “marginalized others” – women, blacks, and laborers (Maseillo 1993). The criollo (Cuban‐born Spaniards) peasant was lionized by artists such as Eduardo Abela, Carlos Enríquez, and Lorenzo Romero Arciaga. Acerbic critiques of the conditions of the Cuban worker were painted by Marcelo Pogolotti, Jorge Arche (1905–1956), and Carlos Enríquez. Women, and their domain, were the primary subjects of Víctor Manuel and Amelia Peláez (1896–1968), and Fidelio Ponce de León (1895–1949) addressed the plight of children and the sick. The impact of the economic crisis on Afro‐Cuban working women, one of Cuba's most marginalized groups, was decried in Alberto Peña's (1894–1938) painting.
Vanguard intellectuals found a crucial partner in one of these marginalized groups via a women's organization known as the Lyceum. The Lyceum was a women's club founded in 1928 to promote women's interests and national culture through exhibitions, concerts, poetry readings, and lectures; in 1939 they added sport when they merged with a women's tennis association and became known as the Lyceum and Lawn Tennis Club (Stoner 1991). When the Lyceum inaugurated their clubhouse in 1929 they signaled their allegiance to vanguard activities by hosting the Exhibition of New Art, echoing the title and emulating the content of the vanguard's inaugural exhibition in 1927 and featuring a lecture by Avance editor Juan Marinello, a Marxist and member of the Cuban Communist Party. When political repression forced the closure of the periodical in 1930, the Lyceum became the only venue for vanguard art and debate during the most difficult years of the Gerardo Machado dictatorship (1928–1933). The ties between the Avance group and the Lyceum were so tight that in 1936 one of the Lyceistas (as they were known) referred to the group as the “husbands of the Lyceum,” and commentators from both groups remarked that without the Lyceum's support, the vanguard would have had little opportunity for cultural work through the 1930s (Arocena 1949b, pp. 36–37). Despite these ties, the Lyceum's relationship to the vanguard has not yet been closely examined.
Descriptions of vanguard activities in the pages of Avance and in the contemporary press on the Lyceum reveal that both institutions shared a core set of national values with roots in the Cuban opposition movement. These national values were at the heart of the vanguard's political critique as well as its program for new practices in national art. An understanding of these national values provides important insight into the relationship of vanguard art and politics, as well as the privileged role played by women in the promotion of the vanguard's agenda.
The Lyceum women's club was founded in December 1928 when the journalist Renée Méndez Capote returned to Havana from Spain, inspired to found a club in the city similar to the Lyceum she had visited in Madrid (Arocena 1949a, b). She enlisted her friend Berta Arocena to act as the group's first president. These two women belonged to the city's old, propertied elite, and, although the club also had middle‐class members, the Lyceum's reliance on education and culture to bring about national reform has been labeled “aristocratic” (Stoner 1991, p. 74). Yet their approach was borrowed from the middle‐ and upper‐class intellectuals of the vanguard, many of whom worked for more radical labor organizations, as well. Consistent with the vanguard's interest in being current with international trends in the arts and sciences, Arocena quickly appointed two more directors: María Josefa Vidaurreta (wife of Avance editor Marinello) as science director and María Teresa Moré (wife of vanguard art critic Rafael Suárez y Solís) as fine arts director. A portrait of the nineteenth‐century Cuban poet Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda hung in the Lyceum's principal gathering space, and a bust of José Martí adorned the library, suggesting the Lyceistas aligned themselves with nineteenth‐century criollo founders of national culture. Martí, a poet‐revolutionary, was a hero to the Cuban vanguard for his example of working simultaneously for cultural and political change.
The Lyceum's ties to the early vanguard were confirmed in a review by Suárez y Solís of a 1935 exhibition of vanguard painting by Amelia Peláez. He wrote that the women's club was part of the “responsible minority” that concerned itself with the “crisis of high culture in Cuba.” This was a direct reference to a talk of the same name given by the vanguard intellectual, philosopher, and nationalist Jorge Mañach (1898–1961) in 1925. In that lecture, Mañach argued that Cuban culture had stagnated as a result of the long struggle for independence from Spain. At that time, Mañach was active in the Minorista Group, a cohort of poets, journalists, and artists, who, starting in 1923, met for regular Saturday lunches to discuss national culture reform (Cairo 1978). These meetings ceased in 1928, as many of the leading members were by then involved in publishing Avance. As an occasional attendee of the Minorista Group, and as a husband to a Lyceum director, Suárez y Solís was in a good position to compare the Minoristas and Lyceistas. His Peláez review articulated the Minoristas' long‐standing interests in national renovation in terms of the contemplation of “national values” and the feminine. He wrote that the Lyceum promoted its program within its community, “justifying itself to itself,” by studying women's intellectual virtue and femininity. Given that this was a women's club, these would be projects aimed at fostering self‐knowledge. This was confirmed in 1940, when Lyceum director Elena Mederos de González reported that self‐knowledge, and the realization of the vanguard “personality,” were the most important goals of the club.
What, then, did personality have to do with national culture? From the vanguard's very beginnings, critics urged artists to develop a national style of painting through the exploration of their own interior selves. In 1924, Mañach suggested that one day, national art would be defined by personality, psychology, customs, and lifestyle. These early assertions were flushed out by the Minorista Luis Baralt (1892–1969); Baralt was a theater director who also worked as an art critic and as the secretary of the Asociación de Pintores y Escultores (Painters and Sculptors' Association), an organization that had presented traditional artist salons for years. Drawing on this background, he effectively organized the first vanguard exhibitions in 1927, which included a show of the French cubist Pierre Flouquet. Baralt essentially introduced the Cuban public to modern art and brought them up to date with European trends, a key concern of Avance. In a 1927 piece on the Flouquet exhibition that ran in the journal, Baralt argued that more than merely experimenting with materials and techniques, modern artists created a new reality based on their own personalities and emotional experiences; because the work was based on the artist's personal sensibilities, Baralt argued that “the true information is interior.” These links between self‐knowledge
