Amelia Peláez del Casal

Painter and pioneer of Cuban artistic ceramics.

She was born in Yaguajay, Santa Clara. At 19 years old she moved to La Habana, where she lived until the end of her life. From her childhood she had a passion for painting and, upon arriving in La Habana, she enrolled in the elementary drawing course at the Professional School of Painting and Sculpture of San Alejandro (San Alejandro Academy).

Several advanced courses taken over four years at that institution established her as an academic painter; that is, an expert in pictorial technique.

Her first experiences in national exhibition halls —Annual Salons of Painting and Sculpture of the Association of Painters and Sculptors (APEC), from 1918 to 1926— and an exhibition of landscapes with another painter —Amelia Peláez and María Pepa Lamarque, APEC, 1924— earned her the attention of critics for the luminosity of her landscapes.

The great transformation of the young academic Peláez occurred in the decade of her first trips abroad. Her "worldview" expanded immediately with the travel grant she won to study for six months at the Art Student League in Nueva York (1924) and with her seven-year stay —from 1927 to 1934— in París, then the center of the arts, from where she undertook an extensive tour of Europe.

The París years were intense study in various institutions —Ecôle Nationale Supérieure de Beaux Arts, Grande Chaumière, Ecôle du Louvre— and, above all, in the classes she took from 1931 to 1934 with Russian constructivist Mme. Alexandra Exter. This, and her proximity to the works of great contemporary masters, were determining factors in her transition to modern art. Results of that second stage of training are the works exhibited in two solo shows, first at Galería Zak in París in 1933 and, upon her return to La Habana, at the Lyceum in 1935.

Through her own manner of expression in this new language she immediately conquered a space of attention in the Cuban vanguard of plastic artists, through solo and collective exhibitions, awards in salons (1935 and 1938) and murals created in public and private centers.

In the fourth decade of the century, her first retrospective at the Hispano-Cuban Institution of Culture (1943) stood out, the exhibition of sixteen of her works in the important exhibition Art in Cuba, held at the University of La Habana in 1940, and the sending of eleven works to the Museum of Modern Art in Nueva York for Modern Cuban Painters, an exhibition that made known in 1942 —as a unified group— what became known as the Escuela de La Habana.

She who, by the prestige she had achieved, everyone simply knew as Amelia, continued her career with new travels, multiple solo and collective exhibitions, traveling shows through cities of Europe, Latin America and the United States, awards and important murals. In París she drew on the structural achievements of cubism, as seen in Still Life in Ochre (1930); in Portrait of a Woman she exchanged the delicacy of her academic landscapes for aggressive "fauvista-style" colors. Other paintings of hers from that period are modiglianesque, and there is no lack of the gray imprint of a Soutine. Upon observing the drawings and sketches —Still Life with Fruits (1936)— that she executed as an exercise over three years after her return from París, we can verify how much effort she made to achieve, based on the known artistic movements and the studies she conducted particularly with Alexandra Exter, a language that would identify her, as she had set out to do at the beginning of her trajectory as an avant-garde artist. The White Tablecloth (1935) is an anthological work of that moment, in which she prioritized structural solidity, simplicity and brilliance of color. Shortly thereafter the black line made its appearance in Amelia's art, becoming increasingly dominant. The prominence of this resource shows itself perfectly already in Still Life with Fruits of 1941; later, in The Two Sisters of 1945, where she offers a language of great harshness, both in the thickness of the black outlines and in the appearance of the female figures. Still Life (1946) possesses the same force: an aggressive spiral solution of rhombic, ovoid, rectangular areas occupy the entire surface area as if it were the center of something larger.

Her journey through ceramics was equally significant. Work on volume had trained her in enveloping and harmonious structures, and if in her first attempts the figures appeared isolated, she soon found a design coherent with the form of the piece, linking the figures and creating several continuous background planes. The Blue Pitcher of Fish (1951) is an example of the new mastery achieved in the brief period —from 1950 to 1953— when she was working at the {ln:Ceramic Workshop of Santiago de las Vegas}. Her prestige as an avant-garde artist and the level of her ceramic work led to the fact that, for the first time, Cuban ceramics appeared alongside other manifestations in a major joint exhibition held in 1953 to celebrate the inauguration of the building of the Dental Retreat (today Mella Building of the University of La Habana) and the assignment of a large mural of ceramic tiles for the facade of the Court of Accounts (today Ministry of the Interior).

Her second ceramic period, from 1955 until approximately 1962, took place at Cerámica Cubana, her own workshop near her house in the La Víbora neighborhood. The possibilities offered by the imported material for her workshop enabled her to create more varied ceramics, whether through the intensity of color in the glazes —Bottle of Women with Pineapples (1960)— or through the pursuit of simplicity —White Bottle (1958)—, without losing thereby the imprint of the language that identified her —Blue Plate of the Two Women (1958). Between 1957 and 1958 she created the splendid mosaic tile mural of the Hotel Habana Hilton (today Hotel Habana Libre) which she titled Cuban Fruits, although in it, the privileged place belongs to the distinctive Pacific sea.

The freedoms she allowed herself in light of the more intimate character of the small ceramic pieces softened the harshness of her previous pictorial language, making her palette lighter. The change is already perceptible in the painting Interior with Columns (1951); and when comparing The Two Sisters of 1945 with Women of 1958, a marked humanization of the figures and, in general, of the pictorial solution becomes evident.

Her language renewed itself organically, yet always faithful to the identity meanings of the Havana avant-gardes that she captured, especially through her reformulation of interior environments, indebted to Cuban-colonial style, where she synthesized architectural elements, tablecloths, furniture and fruits in a masterly way. The theme of interiors was recurrent from the moment it appeared in works from the early years of her reunion with La Habana until the end of her days. Evidence of this are the splendid interiors from her last period: Still Life with Mamey Apples (1959), Still Life in Blue (1964) and Still Life with Pineapple (1967).

The works of Amelia display structural solidity and force; aggression at times and placidity at others, but never complacency. She also legitimized the splendor of color and luminosity of the Caribbean surroundings and cultural elements of the environment, without succumbing to picturesqueness.

Amelia Peláez became one of the figures who contributed to generating modern language in the twentieth century, by having wisely grafted the technique of her París training —acquired at a time when the syncretism of artistic movements was occurring— onto her Cuban roots.

She died in 1968. In November of that same year, the National Museum of Fine Arts of La Habana inaugurated a major retrospective in her memory, which brought together 163 paintings and drawings as well as ceramics, supreme examples of her contributions to modern art through her personal manner of expression.

Pictorial Works:
Still Life on Ochre, 1930, oil on canvas, 66 x 51cm, National Museum Collection.

Woman, 1933, oil on canvas, 57 x 44 cm, National Museum Collection.

The White Tablecloth, 1935, oil on canvas, 64 x 79.5 cm, National Museum Collection.

Still Life with Fruits, 1936, sketch, tempera on alba paper, 3.4 x 2.8 cm, National Museum Collection.

Pacific Sea (Hibiscus), 1943, oil on canvas, 45 1/2" x 35", Collection of the Museum of Art of the Americas of the Organization of American States (OAS).

Still Life with Fruits, 1941, tempera on paper, mounted on canvas, 79 x 64 cm, Peláez Collection.

The Two Sisters, 1945, oil on canvas, 102.5 x 77 cm, National Museum Collection.

Flowers, 1949, tempera, 77 x 102 cm, Peláez Collection.

Still Life, 1949, tempera on paper, 105.5 x 89 cm, National Museum Collection.

Interior with Columns, 1951, tempera on cardboard, 142 x 99 cm, National Museum Collection.

Blue Pitcher of Fish, 1951, red clay with slip, underglaze painting, height 35 cm, Peláez Collection at the National Museum of Ceramics.

Cuban Fruits, 1957-58, mural at Hotel Habana Hilton (today Hotel Habana Libre), vitreous paste mosaic tiles, 670 m2, La Rampa, Vedado, La Habana.

Blue Plate of the Two Women, 1958, white paste, diameter 43.5 cm. National Museum of Ceramics Collection.

White Bottle, 1958, white paste, height 58 cm, Peláez Collection.

Bottle of Women with Pineapples, 1960, white paste, height 36 cm, National Museum of Ceramics Collection.

Women, 1958, oil on canvas, 129.5 x 100 cm, National Museum Collection.

Still Life with Mamey Apples, 1959, oil on canvas, 107.5 x 86 cm, National Museum Collection.

Still Life in Blue, 1964, oil on canvas, 94 x 122 cm, National Museum Collection.

Still Life with Pineapple, 1967, oil on canvas, 119 x 91.5 cm, National Museum Collection.