Marcelo Pogolotti George

Important painter, draftsman and polymath. Cuban exponent of the futurist tendency.

He was born in La Habana. His childhood took place in Cuba and Europe, mainly Italy, where he completed primary studies, acquiring secondary education in the United States.

In 1919 he began studies in Engineering and Philosophy in the United States, but abandoned them to dedicate himself entirely to art.

In 1923, he enrolled in the Art Students League in New York, where he identified with postimpressionist painting. During his subsequent stay in Cuba, between 1924 and 1927, he created portrait paintings. He painted postimpressionist landscapes, with hints of Fauvism and neocubism. He also took part in the New Art Exhibition (1927), organized by the Revista de Avance and recognized as the launching of the first generation of Cuban artistic vanguardism.

Thanks to the skills acquired through his mechanical engineering studies at the Rensselaer Institute of Troy (New York), and his work as a draftsman in the Cuban Ministry of Public Works, he created precise pen drawings of colonial buildings, urban spaces and monuments in La Habana. Among these is the Palacio Pedroso, where he lived for a time. Those drawings constituted links in the expressive search that the author would continue through line, architectural symbolism and the presence of machinery. The fact that he was an eminently urban painter makes him an exponent of modernity, according to the opinion of specialist Luz Merino Acosta.

Around 1929, due to common interest in the machine, he joined the second Italian Futurism: that of Turin. Also identified with the dynamism and mechanicist aesthetics of the French Amedée Ozenfant, the Caribbean artist composed, in 1931, El hombre de hierro and Campos magnéticos, where he introduced applications or "metal collages". The use of collage or montage has been noted as an artistic principle in the formation of vanguardist or inorganic artwork. Filippo Marinetti stated that these compositions were "fully conscious of futurist sensibility" and the 1931 Manifesto of Futurist Sacred Art recognized the Cuban artist among "the hundred best painters of the Italian futurist movement".

The oil painting Aeropintura (1931) is an exponent of Marcelo Pogolotti's incursion into the artistic modalities practiced by the Turin collective. Its appearance, with ambiguous morphology, has led to it being confused with abstract painting, although his intention was to express the supraeterrestrial perspective provided by the airplane, a then-novel machine.

Pogolotti properly experimented with abstraction in Aguamarina (1929). This fleeting experimentation served him in achieving a kind of compositional synthesis, an iconic rationalism. See, for example, Alba (1934), where factories appear geometricized as rectangles.

Around that same year, Marcelo Pogolotti definitively broke with the futurist group, due to irreconcilable aesthetic-artistic and political-ideological antagonisms. The Turin futurists were not interested in the "human heartbeat" of the machine, but in its geometry, and their leader "vociferated" his fascist affiliation.

The first distancing occurred when Pogolotti escaped from Mussolini's Italy, in the wake of the uproar caused by his series of drawings Nuestro Tiempo (1930-1931), which the painter called this because it summarized "all the social aspects of the moment". With only the use of pencil and crayon on paper, he achieved such an interplay of lines, textures and visual effects that some critics confused these drawings with oils or engravings. In the series, Pogolotti decomposed the kaleidoscopic vision that he later tried to unify in unique works, called chronotopic: El siglo XX or El regalo a la querida (1933) and El cielo y la tierra (1934), among others of great compositional complexity due to the simultaneity of actions, times and places.

The problem of work—especially industrial work—was very close to the only child of Domenico (Dino) Pogolotti, founder in 1911 of the Pogolotti neighborhood or Redención, Cuba's first workers' district. Although the painter eventually came to simplify compositions in single scenes, he represented the phenomena of Taylorism and Fordism in their intrinsic complexity. Paradigmatic of this is the painting Cronometraje (1934), which some have associated with Charles Chaplin's film Modern Times.

In 1933 Paris, the Cuban intellectual joined another vanguard collective: the Association of Revolutionary Writers and Artists. He thus communed with the Marxist tendency of surrealism cultivated by that organization, led by Louis Aragon, who encouraged him to write and conceived for him a pseudonym, M. Marceletti, under which he published his first text on visual arts in the magazine Commune, in June 1934.

In drawings dated around 1935, Pogolotti composed apparently irrational scenes that, in essence, expressed Cuban cultural hybridization. He also painted paradoxes of historical-social significance, such as Encuentro de dos épocas (1938), his last painting.

During his European stay (1928-1939), he identified with the vanguard not merely aesthetic-artistic, but also ideopolitical. Unlike other modern Cuban artists, Pogolotti was not stuck in the vanguard-nationalism problematic. With resources of an internationalized visual language, he sought to merge the global and the particular: what is now called "glocal". His painting Paisaje cubano (1933) is, in reality, a model reflection of the neocolonial dictatorships throughout the world. And his vision of the "technologized" and "dehumanized" world not only proved ecumenical but remains current.

In a chronicle written in Paris in 1931, Alejo Carpentier judged him as "the artist of most advanced technique and ideas" that Cuba had produced up to that moment. After his permanent blindness in 1938, Pogolotti dedicated himself exclusively to writing, which included that concerning visual arts. After his first individual exhibition (1938), held in Paris and presented by Jean Cassou, the visual production or first creative period of Marcelo Pogolotti was closed. Subsequently, he extended his work as a performing artist thanks to the continuous socialization of his work, to which caricature (Hitler, 1935), festive art (Fiesta campestre, ca. 1936), and dreamlike work (Sonia, 1931 and Evasión, 1937) were not unrelated. His autobiography, Del barro y las voces, has been published several times and constitutes a classic of Cuban testimonial literature.

Marcelo Pogolotti was the first representative of the creole "new art" who enlisted in some European vanguard collective and anticipated by almost twenty years the emergence of abstractionism in Cuba. He established himself, before Wifredo Lam, as the modern Cuban artist with the greatest recognition outside his homeland, with consecrating valuations from prominent foreign intellectuals.

Although brief (1923-1938), his career as a painter and draftsman was intense. Opposed to what he called "laboratory art" or mere formal experimentation, Pogolotti practiced "plastic or visual essay", understood as the freedom of creation responsibly and coherently oriented toward the solution of an artistic-aesthetic problem.

Source: EnCaribe.org