Antonio Gattorno Águila

Distinguished Cuban painter, his work set the standard for the generation of La Vanguardia.

He was born in La Habana in an affluent family, and at age 12 he had won, through competitive examination, his place at the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes San Alejandro, with Leopoldo Romañach as his teacher, who taught him how to apply colors to the palette.

In 1919, while in his third year as a painting student at the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes San Alejandro in La Habana, he won a five-year scholarship to study in Europe. He remained there for seven years, sharing studies in París, France and Italy with Cuban sculptor Juan José Sicre.

He made copies of Rafael and Sandro Botticelli, thus nourishing himself from the genius of the great masters, especially the Italian primitives. Later he spent time in Spain studying El Greco and Goya, among others, and finally moved to París, where the free school of Montparnasse was abuzz with aesthetic debates about the new directions of world art. He became familiar with the technique of Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin, worked firsthand with Jules Pascin and Georges Rouault, with whom he formed friendships.

During his third year as a scholarship recipient, when Gattorno was in France, the Academy attempted to withdraw his stipend due to the evident anti-canonical spirit of his recent submissions. In response to this reaction from several professors, Romañach came to his defense, asserting the right of every young artist to have the opportunity to find their own expressive means through research and experimentation.

His intellectual experience in the old continent was decisive in the artist's growth, as he assimilated formal elements from diverse sources for the formation of his style. Thus he would become one of the architects of the new sensibility in Cuban art in the 1920s.

Upon his return to Cuba in 1927, he settled in the Pogolotti neighborhood of the capital (Marianao), where he lived and worked with his first wife, French actress Llilianne Cointepax. During this period he worked as an Art Instructor at the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes San Alejandro. He held a solo exhibition that summarized his fruitful stay in Europe and included works painted upon his return.

This exhibition, preceded by those of Víctor Manuel and sculptor Juan José Sicre, paved the way for the great exhibition of Arte Nuevo in May of that same year, where he exhibited "Mujeres junto al río". A pioneer of criollismo imagery, he contributed to this trend "El Mural" created in the 1930s, "Guajiros en Nueva York", which would prompt one of the finest chronicles written by Pablo de la Torriente Brau.

During the following decade from 1927 to 1939, he perfected his plastic technique, while exploring traditional Cuban themes in non-traditional ways. His work from this period set the standard for the generation of Cuban painters known as La Vanguardia, a group that includes Wilfredo Lam, Víctor Manuel and Amelia Peláez. He was a member of the Grupo Minorista, and portrayed Rubén Martínez Villena in fine pen and ink.

He created murals in public buildings in La Habana, as well as in private residences, and theatrical decoration extended throughout Cuba; many of these murals have since disappeared.

Subsequently he exhibited 5 oils and 18 drawings at the Sociedad Lyceum on November 22, 1933. He presented his work Self-Portrait and Models at the Salón Nacional de Pintura y Escultura, for which he was awarded first prize by the first two juries, which were later dissolved, and finally a third jury decided to award him second prize while the first place remained vacant. Two years later, in 1935, a monographic book was published with his principal works, a total of 36 works in diverse techniques. The volume included critical texts by Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Ramón Guirao, Alejo Carpentier and others.

The application of the presuppositions of European modern painting to Cuban themes, initiated after his return from his scholarship, resulted in the conception of the celebrated guajiros of the 1930s, about which Pablo de la Torriente Brau highlighted an evident substrate of social denunciation. One of the best-known works of that criollista tendency that critically recreated rurality was "Would You Like More Coffee, Don Ignacio?", awarded a prize at the 1938 Salón Nacional. Here one observes one of his most recurring formal traits: the dynamic figure-background relationship that decenters the focalization of the figurative space with multiple levels of representation. Even in this painting his visual semiosis is complexified with an elliptical level: the one supposedly occupied by the character of Don Ignacio, who does not appear as such but is suggested in relation to the space of the viewer. The primitivist taste, reminiscent of Gauguin, characterized this period that would become the most genuine of his trajectory.

While he remained in La Habana, he served as an instructor at San Alejandro, executed commissioned murals in public buildings in the city and in private houses, among other decorative work. Toward the end of the 1930s he decided to emigrate to the United States.

His monograph, written and published by Ernest Hemingway in April 1935, contains reproductions of 36 works in oil, watercolors, pencil, and ink and pencil. Hemingway sponsored Gattorno's first solo exhibition in the United States of America at Galería Georgette Passedoit, Nueva York, January 12 to February 2, 1936.

At the end of the 1930s he decided to relocate to the United States of America. There he abandoned painting of rural inspiration and turned, under the influence of Dalí, to the surrealist school. He held two solo exhibitions, systematically, at Galería Marquié and traveled to Cuba every two years on vacation.

From 1936 to 1955 he presented several solo and group exhibitions in Nueva York. His work traveled to other American cities such as San Francisco, Dallas, Memphis and Wichita; various places in Latin America, including Venezuela and Cuba; and Europe.

Gattorno was the first Cuban artist of his generation to achieve international renown. His move to the United States provoked no small amount of negative criticism (for example, that of José Gómez Sicre) who reproached him for abandoning the artistic leadership he had achieved, by redirecting his visual discourse toward surrealism and distancing himself from Cuban cultural heritage. Certainly he yielded to the most picturesque and exterior aspects of criollista painting to transform himself into a displaced painter, losing the cosmogonic foundation that had sustained the most authentic aspects of his practice. This contradicted Hemingway's assertion that wherever the artist painted, he would carry his island with him. His exclusion from one of the most important exhibitions of modern Cuban art that took place at MOMA in the 1940s—again a victim of the rejection provoked by his emigration—motivated Gattorno to write a letter of protest to Alfred Barr, then director of that museum. A retrospective exhibition that brought together 60 years of the painter's work was held at the University of Massachusetts in October 1978.

In 1959 he traveled to Cuba for the last time. He turned over his parents' estate and painted "The Fallen Hero", dedicated to Pablo de la Torriente Brau and his struggle in Spain. This painting has disappeared.

In the last two decades of his life, he confirmed himself as an exuberant surrealist, heavily influenced by Dalí. Antonio Gattorno died on April 5, 1980, in his home in Massachussets.

Awards
1st Prize at the First National Exhibition in La Habana, Cuba, 1934
1st Prize at the Second National Exhibition in La Habana, Cuba, 1937.
Watson F. Blair Acquisition Prize at the International Watercolor Exhibition 15 at the Art Institute of Chicago, 1936.