José Joaquín Tejeda Revilla

Cuban painter whose most accomplished sector was landscape painting. He was a professor and director of the Municipal Academy of Fine Arts, president of the Artistic Association of the East, member of the Academy of Arts and Letters, and president, organizer, and principal figure of the "l Congreso de Arte".

His early passion for painting led him to copy lithographs by his grandfather, Don Joaquín de Mata y Tejada, one of the pioneers of Cuban engraving. While still very young, he obtained a scholarship from the Santiago de Cuba City Council and traveled to Spain first, then to Italy, France, and Holland. He visited the United States, exhibited his paintings in New York, and his work received very favorable reviews, including the famous article dedicated to him by José Martí.

His most widely known work was La lista de lotería, also known as La Confronta, whose original is displayed in the Museo Emilio Bacardí Moreau, in Santiago de Cuba.

The events of Cuba's War of Independence led him to Mexico, where he resided for 3 years. In his paintings from this period, the influence of the peculiar color of Aztec lands is reflected. Upon his return to his homeland, he established his permanent residence in Santiago de Cuba.

The eastern landscape is the most accomplished sector of his varied and abundant production, in which the influence of the landscape painters of the Barbizon school (France) is evident, in their way of treating the atmosphere and their tendency to poeticize the landscape.

He spread his conservative ideas through the teaching he instilled in his disciples and in such circumstances he made known his magnificent essays in the magazine Luz de Oriente. His theoretical work began in late 1922 with the essay El Arte de la Pintura Comparado. In this document the author emphasizes the differences of painting with respect to the rest of the arts (Music, Literature, Theater, Architecture, and Sculpture) and affirms the complexity that its teaching presents, as he recognizes the existence of artistic talents in the previous manifestations, however, he points out the absence of these in the world of plastic arts.

He advocates for a realistic-naturalistic character of the concept of painting and contrasts it with the abstract message that, for example, music and literature possess. He is a proponent of the direct language employed on the canvas, which is more accessible to all types of audiences, and this allows his reaffirmation within an academic and conservative spirit. However, he does not fail to admit the reciprocal relationship established between painting and the rest of the arts, for him all function as a whole, that is, the plastic discourse supports and complements the literary or scenographic discourse, to cite only two examples.

He always departs from the sine qua non condition of art as imitation of nature and its intrinsic beauties. His vocabulary denotes technical knowledge on the subject matter treated and reveals the depth of his knowledge in the vast world of the arts in general. He conveys in his lines a sociological reflection on the artistic phenomenon as he values the receiving public of the message as an influential object within the artistic fact and vice versa.