Juana Borrero Pierra

Cuban poet and painter from the late nineteenth century.

She was born in Santos Suárez, Ciudad de La Habana, where she spent most of her brief but intense life. Daughter of Consuelo Pierra and Esteban Borrero Echevarría, a physician by profession and poet by avocation. Together with her siblings, Juana received a carefully cultivated education, guided by her own family and enriched by the favorable cultural environment fostered by the frequent literary gatherings organized by her father at the house in Puentes Grandes, visited by Julián del Casal, brothers Carlos and Francisco Pío Uhrbach, among other modernist poets.

Juana Borrero stood out above all for the precocity of her talent. Between the ages of five and seven, she spontaneously created her first drawings and poems.

Her literary work was disseminated through the pages of several of the most important publications of the era, including: El Fígaro, La Habana Elegante, La Habana Literaria and the New York-based magazine Las Tres Américas. Likewise, several of her poems also appeared in the volume of Cuban poetesses by Manuela Herrera de Herrera titled: Escritoras cubanas. Composiciones escogidas de las más notables autoras de la Isla de Cuba and in the book Grupo de familia. Poesías de los Borrero, published by her father in 1895.

Although less known and studied, her work as a painter also had notable development. In 1887 she enrolled in the Academia de Dibujo y Pintura de San Alejandro, which under the direction of Miguel Melero opened the doors of artistic instruction to women.

In this setting she was a classmate of future painters such as Elvira Martínez and Adriana Bellini. Although in 1888 she left the classrooms of Academia San Alejandro, she continued receiving lessons from professor Dolores Desvernine and later from the renowned Armando Menocal. Newly arrived from Spain, mario-garcia-menocal took her on as a student and soon perceived her excellent aptitude for painting, as well as the independence of her ingenuity.

This early training was later complemented thanks to the trips she made with her father to the United States in 1892 and 1893, respectively. Her stay in that country allowed her to come into contact with the cultural environment of her era on an international scale: in New York she met José Martí, visited the International Exposition of Chicago, kept current through the press regarding the European currents in vogue, and received lessons in the studio of American portraitist Harold McDonald, who is said to have instructed her in impressionist technique.

The skill evident in her works earned her the admiration of her contemporaries and the circulation of her work in promotional spaces such as the Salón Pola (1892). Indeed, in 1893 the City Council Administration granted her a scholarship to study painting in Europe, an opportunity that the young woman rejected for political reasons; her father requested that she be transferred to the United States, where he was to travel again to occupy himself with the preparations for the War of '95. Although this petition was not granted, both traveled to that country in the summer of 1893.

In 1896 the Borrero family had to move definitively to Cayo Hueso following the outbreak of the War and the consequent persecution by Spanish authorities. During her brief stay in that region, her literary activity, especially epistolary, proliferated greatly, given the continuous correspondence with her fiancé, Matanzas poet Carlos Pío Uhrbach.

Juana died in March of that same year, a victim of typhoid fever, just two months before turning 19 years old.

Despite the brevity of her life, she left sufficient testimony of her literary and pictorial genius. In the latter case, her works are characterized by drawing with sure and vigorous line, as was also her own personality. Taking into account that some of these pieces she conceived as illustrations of her poems, the allegorical theme predominates, although she also worked on genre scenes, still life, and some landscapes. In her style, much more indebted to the Spanish school than to the French, one can however glimpse the influence of the mythological universe of Puvis de Chavannes and the sure stroke of Toulouse Lautrec, of whom she was a faithful admirer.

This young woman is above all a figure of transition, whose ideal of modernity does not disregard previous heritage, but rather from it sketches the signs of change, of preference for new themes with tints of social realism. In this sense, one of her best-known titles is noteworthy, Pilluelos, exhibited in the Art room of the Colonia of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (Cuba) in La Habana. The peculiarity of this work lies not only in having been created by the artist shortly before her death, but in the grace itself of its finish, in the freshness and spontaneity it retains, as well as in the acuity of incorporating the image of the Black person in painting beyond the humorous tone customary in the era.

The Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (Cuba) preserves several pieces by her. The work of Juana Borrero also appeared in the exhibition 300 years of art in Cuba, held in La Habana in April 1940; and later, in 1977 the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (Cuba) in coordination with the Ministry of Culture held a tribute exhibition in the year of her centennial.

This is an artist around whom studies should be conducted that weigh her place within the continuum of Cuban art. Although she disappeared at the close of the nineteenth century, her name should perhaps head the roster of protagonists of the twentieth century.

Some comments around her work can sufficiently illustrate its importance for Cuban literature and art:

"She will offer us afterward, in the shell of rhyme, the pearl of her dreams, pale at times and dazzling at others, but always of inestimable worth. Thus she spends the days of her childhood this truly astonishing girl, whose pictorial genius, as much as her poetic one, promises to illuminate the name of the homeland that saw her born." Julián del Casal.

"But I will say what she was worth, what she was, what she could have been, where it would have been easy for her to reach, because her wings were powerful enough to soar over the marvelous summits of art, because the structure of her breast was not constituted to breathe the miasmas of the earth. No one more thirsty for ideality than she!" Carlos Pío Uhrbach.

"Juana's destiny must be understood from the ultra-romantic assumptions diffused in the artistic circles of the end of the century and represented among us with special sincerity and clarity by her beloved teacher Julián del Casal. Among these assumptions or quintessences two can be pointed out: Nature is abominable; joy is vulgar." Cintio Vitier