Miami/The Patricia & Phillip Frost Museum of Art, at Florida International University (FIU), presents the exhibition until October 18 Modern Cuban Painters from Havana to New York Revisitedan exhibition that recovers one of the most significant episodes of the international projection of Cuban art: the Modern Cuban Painters exhibition, organized in 1944 by the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA).
The exhibition, curated by Elizabeth T. Goizueta and Cristina Figueroa Vives, reconstructs the artistic dialogue between Havana and New York during the 1940s, when a generation of Cuban creators began to conquer spaces in the main American institutions and galleries. The project also examines the role of Alfred H. Barr Jr., MoMA’s first director, and figures such as José Gómez Sicre and María Luisa Gómez Mena in promoting that avant-garde.
Among the artists represented are Wifredo Lam, Amelia Peláez, Carlos Enríquez, René Portocarrero, Mariano Rodríguez, Mario Carreño, Cundo Bermúdez, Fidelio Ponce, Roberto Diago, Víctor Manuel, Antonio Gattorno, Felipe Orlando and Luis Martínez Pedro.
One of the main attractions of the exhibition is that it brings together, for the first time in more than eight decades, several works that participated in that historic New York exhibition of 1944. It also incorporates paintings exhibited during those years in galleries such as Pierre Matisse, Perls, Julien Levy and Feigl, some of which had not been publicly presented for decades.
The tour is completed with photographs, letters, scrapbooks and unpublished documents from the José Gómez Sicre Visual Archive, materials that allow us to reconstruct the personal and intellectual networks that contributed to placing Cuban painting on the international scene.
Inaugurated on May 2, the exhibition offers an exceptional opportunity to rediscover the moment when Cuban artistic modernity began to consolidate its presence beyond the borders of the Island. Admission is free.
