encouraged by feminists. Middle‐ and upper‐class women of leisure who had the education and spare time for activism promoted an image of women that was characterized by notions of comfort and caretaking in a time of national distress. Works like Víctor Manuel's Tropical Gypsy, which have become emblematic of the early vanguard and interpreted as a national archetype, could perhaps be understood as registering the discontent of the era via the sad visage of the sitter. Yet at the same time, Tropical Gypsy offers an image of lyrical beauty, and perhaps reassurance. This strategy effectively evades the sociopolitical turmoil that required comfort in the first place.
Critics blamed Cuba's chaos on men's ineffectual work in the public sphere. They explicitly contrasted these failures to women's – and the Lyceum's – natural emotional and psychological inclinations. In 1936, A. Martínez Bello reported in the daily El Mundo that facing “an insurmountable crisis, the woman – the Lyceum – has made its efforts succeed spiritually in every way possible, far above the petty (greedy) and sometimes negative results of men's toil.” Women and the Lyceum were synonymous, and more effective than men in addressing the nation's crisis. Women were well suited to what Martínez Bello labeled as a spiritual agenda for the improvement of Cuban society “in the face of the energetic cultural initiative of the feminine Lyceum and their untiring impulse to improve the environment of a society that's almost indifferent, like ours, to the higher objectives of the spirit.”
Martínez Bello argued that women, and the Lyceum, were more effective than men on the account of a supposed psychospiritual advantage they possessed. His language resonates with the contemplation the vanguard encouraged for national self‐discovery and for artistic expression. He argued that while men have been debating the “viscose grays of politics,” women, particularly at the Lyceum, have located the “spirit” discarded by others and raised it to “the most ascetic atmospheres of emotion and thought.” This is the same opposition articulated in Avance – inept politics versus the productive emotional and intellectual exploration of the vanguard – now articulated in expressly gendered terms. He used the vanguard term las inquietudes, which referred to the anxiety and action of the opposition in the face of the frustrations of the Republic, aligning the Lyceum with the vanguard's project: “the Lyceum … is, without doubt, one of our institutions most deeply nourished by the ‘inquietudes’ that give attitude to this epoch.” Martínez Bello elaborated on his suggestion of the Lyceum's gendered effectiveness on behalf of the vanguard and its relationship to what he viewed as women's unique intuitive sensibility:
Intuition is one of the best qualities of a woman. And intuition, when it is disciplined, is a sense that tells more of the secret pulse of things, that which enlivens the fullness of the open soul: to experience, Werner would say, the artist's own deepest feeling and thinking for a while. (1936, n.p.)
Women's intuition was assumed to make them more spiritually sensitive and more open to deep emotion and thought – the same aims of vanguard expression. Martínez Bello's statement suggests that focus on intuition was the key to understanding some underlying secret, or perhaps even the soul.
Martínez Bello felt Cuban women were particularly well suited to such spiritual explorations. He remarked (1936) that the contemporary intellectual triumph of women prepared them for an “altruistic creativity” and the “generous spirit in new directions.” In Spanish, these new directions were once again referred to by a vanguard buzzword: nuevos rumbos (new directions). Both this language, and the altruistic nature of women's intellectual creativity, reinforced the idea that women were uniquely suited to contribute to the vanguard's renovation of national culture, for the vanguard conceived of itself as an intellectual contributor to the betterment of national culture and society. This was just as Suárez y Solís implied in his 1935 Peláez review when he remarked that the Lyceum disseminated national values.
Writing about the Lyceum, Martínez Bello (1936) argued that women were more effective than men in the vanguard project of national reform. He attributed this supposed advantage to their spiritual, emotional, thoughtful, and intuitive nature. These are many of the same attributes contemporary critics sought in vanguard painting, and they resonate with the internal journey of self‐discovery that critics praised in vanguard work. Critics also ascribed many of these same traits to female figures depicted in the contemporary paintings of vanguard artists. Perceptions of the Lyceum echo contemporary thinking about women – as activists, as artists, and as figures in vanguard painting – namely that women possessed the character sorely lacking in the nation's public life.
Note
1 1 Translated by Martínez, J.A. (1994). Cuban Art and National Identity, 12. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida.
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