Servando Cabrera Moreno

He is one of the great Cuban painters of all time, who possesses one of the most valuable productions in Cuba's artistic heritage and has one of the most multifaceted formations, hence the visual richness that emanates from all his work. In his prolific life he created more than 130 paintings.

He was born in the house at Obispo Street No. 105, third floor. He studied at the San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts, where he graduated in 1942 with first place in the painting degree exams. Two years earlier he had participated in his first exhibition, in the XXII Fine Arts Salon of February 1940. His first solo show was held at the Lyceum of Havana in September 1943. In the following years he exhibited works linked to his academic experience, in the annual salons of the Circle of Fine Arts and in other institutions.

In 1946 he traveled through the United States and took a course at the Art Students League in New York. Around this time he became involved in theater and the design of costumes and scenography. He discovered among other artists Pablo Picasso, who would be, as the painter himself acknowledged, the greatest influence on his work throughout all his stages. Under the influence of Picasso's Blue, Rose, and Neoclassical periods, he began a timid evolution that led to a true break with academic canons.

In 1949 he traveled to Europe. He visited museums and attended the Grandé Chaumiere in Paris. His first break occurred then with the oils of 1950 and 1951, where one can observe a geometrizing stabilization of Cubist affiliation that brought him closer to Abstraction. Later, the influence of Joan Miró and Paul Klee, mainly, dominated his brief but intense abstract experience (1954), whose results he exhibited in Spain and France. The rejection of the mechanisms of the art market, which he experienced during his Paris exhibition in January 1954, provoked a sudden turning point in his artistic creation.

In 1954 Servando participated in the filming of the documentary El Mégano, together with Julio García Espinosa, living the essence of this audiovisual which is to reflect the lives of charcoal makers and this inspired him to create a series of drawings of exquisite craftsmanship and a single oil that is in a private collection and which constitutes the most direct precedent of this type of work that Servando creates toward 1959, when this period truly begins.

In Spain he created an important series of realistic charcoal drawings with rural characters, which he continued that same year in Cuba, culminating in the oil painting Los carboneros del Mégano. He traveled again through Spain, Italy and Greece and visited Mexico and Central America for the first time.

Popular art—of which he became an enthusiastic collector—powerfully influenced the configuration of his new style, in which he integrated elements of colonial architectural ornamentation and discoveries of modern painting: Matisse and Cubist Picasso.

It is a very personal, baroque and brilliant stage, whose primary sources are, according to the painter, "the Atlantic, the flora, the fauna, the architecture, the human above all else."

With the Triumph of the Revolution, Cabrera Moreno already possessed vast formal experience and was master of his instrument of expression. Revolutionary themes entered his painting in 1959 itself, but his style fully adapted to reality in 1961. At the end of that year he exhibited at the Palace of Fine Arts works from the first moment of his great circle of epic painting, which culminates with the series of Heroes, Horsemen and Couples shown at the Havana Gallery in 1964.

In 1965 he traveled again to Europe, where he saw the painting of Willen de Kooning, and resumed some of the concerns that had been manifesting themselves sporadically in his work and began an Expressionist period.

He exhibited his first results at the Havana Gallery in 1966. "… naked bodies like mountains, as if nature were conceived as a gigantic, maternal and open body, bodies like cosmic columns without end, great geological bodies lying down" (Antonio Saura).

Around 1970 violent expressionism disappeared, and grotesque figuration gave way to the stylization of torsos, human fragments, coupled pairs, etc., which is inscribed within the cycle of Erotic Painting in which he worked thereafter.

In 1972 the vigorous "guerrilla faces" emerged and shortly afterward he began the abundant series of young faces with guano hats and, finally, the female heads, a collection that was exhibited at the Havana Gallery under the title "Habanera Tú" in June 1975.

Over 40 years, from 1940 to 1980, he participated in 109 group exhibitions and held 20 solo shows. From 1962 to 1965 he served as a painting professor at the "National School of Art" in Cubanacán, where he taught numerous generations of artists.

Among his greatest satisfactions was teaching classes and he was deeply loved by his students. Flavio Garciandía, an artist-educator if ever there was one, put it this way: "Servando was a super teacher from his work as an artist, from his rigor and dedication to Painting with a capital P." Roberto Fabelo recently told me that although he was not his student, he also joined the silent group of students who went to see him clandestinely and that he was a generous man in sharing his knowledge with younger people.

In 1965, when he was suspended and could no longer teach because he was homosexual, his students were the first to suffer. That was an unjust decision that made him suffer in solitude. Servando had, from that moment on, a difficult life due to the homophobia prevalent in the country during the turbulent sixties. His condition as a homosexual, assumed with frankness, and his willingness to defend his sexual freedom with dignity, provoked first his dismissal as a professor and later a prolonged ostracism as a creator.

In 1971, at this same institution, an exhibition of his work was censored, which constituted a despicable and abusive act. Twelve years later, after Servando's death, the museum held a reparatory exhibition, continued in 2008 with another. However, Cabrera Moreno died without being able to see those vindications. He died with ridicule alive and latent.

Those who walk through the crowded and old-Havana Obispo Street encounter numerous galleries, some private, others state-run, that invite you to stop, cross the threshold, and take a look at the dazzling Cuban plastic art production of today. On that street of painters—at number 463 almost at the corner of Villegas—one of today's most revered by critics and best-priced by collectors was born: Servando Cabrera Moreno, a man who in his 58 years of life and in his many more of immortal afterlife becomes one of the symbols of twentieth-century Cuban painting and drawing, as well as an artistic event each time a retrospective of his work is announced.

Those who study his work detect that the artist begins with a stage with a tendency toward the Geometrization of figures, which is sometimes identified with Cubism and at other times with Abstractionism. Later, all of that gives way to a more direct approach, an approximation to figures of the people: peasants, young women, simple folk. "From 1959 onwards—observes Ursulina Cruz Díaz—he was the first Cuban painter to paint the militiaman and the epic of Playa Girón, which occurred in Cuba in 1961.

His drawings are strong, sensual, vigorous and of exquisite transparency. His female nudes are surprising for the monumentality and refinement with which he treats them."

Despite his fertility, the painter evades the traps of facilism and pamphlet delivery; he sharpens the sensuality and eroticism of some of his paintings, in which the physiognomies threaten to transcend the canvas to accompany the visitor—dilettante or critic—in their walk through the exhibition hall.

He is among the rare painters who enjoy the capricious privilege of popularity.

The couples of lovers, the guerrillas, the habaneras, the families, the types that populate Cabrera Moreno's catalog of images diversify like reality itself. The contours of his figures stand out, but not the limits of this creator's interests, one of whose most famous paintings captures the face of a young woman with flowers and ribbons in her hair, swayed by the wind.

In Servando, woman—one of the prevailing motifs in his drawing and painting—reaches heroic profiles that only an artist deeply attached to the scents of his homeland can trace with mastery, authenticity and conviction.

Servando Cabrera died of a massive heart attack in his house in Havana.

Solo Exhibitions
Among the solo exhibitions presented we can mention:

In 1943 "Exhibition of Charcoal Portraits by Servando Cabrera Moreno". Lyceum, Havana.
In 1952 "Cabrera Moreno, oils and gouaches" Caralt Gallery, Barcelona, SPAIN.
In 1954 "Cabrera Moreno" Galerie La Roue, Paris, FRANCE.
In 1956 "Paintings by Cabrera Moreno" National Museum of Fine Arts, Havana.
In 1959 "Cabrera Moreno of Cuba" Pan American Union, Washington, D.C., USA.
In 1961 exhibits among others, "Cabrera Moreno" National Museum of Fine Arts, Havana.
In 1967 "Servando Cabrera Moreno" Sopot/Lublin, POLAND.
In 1988 "Exhibition of Selected Works by Servando Cabrera Moreno" Christie's, Amsterdam, NETHERLANDS.
In 1995 "Servando Cabrera Moreno" Marpad Art Gallery, Coral Gables, Florida, USA.

Group Exhibitions
Beginning in 1941 he participates in group exhibitions such as "Exhibition of Modern and Classical Art (Contemporary Painting and Sculpture in Cuba)" Municipal Palace, Havana, CUBA.
In 1946 III National Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture. Hall of Lost Steps, National Capitol, Havana.
In 1951 he exhibits in "Art Cubain Contemporain" Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris, FRANCE, and in the 1st. Hispano-American Art Biennial. Madrid 1951.
In 1952 he participated in the XXVI Biennale di Venezia Venice, ITALY.
In 1957 in the IV Biennial of the Museum of Modern Art in São Paulo. Ibirapuera Park, São Paulo and in the 5th. São Paulo Biennial. Ibirapuera Park, São Paulo, BRAZIL.
In 1960 he was present at the II Inter-American Biennial of Painting, Sculpture and Printmaking. National Museum of Modern Art, Mexico City, MEXICO.
In 1961 and 1963 he exhibited in the VI and VII São Paulo Biennials Museum of Modern Art. Ibirapuera Park, São Paulo, BRAZIL
In 1969 and 1970 he participated in the VIII and IX International Joan Miró Drawing Prize at the Palace of the Viceroy, Barcelona and College of Architects, Catalonia and the Balearic Islands, Barcelona, SPAIN.
In 1994 he was in the exhibition "Cuban Art. The Last Sixty Years" Panamerican Art Gallery, Dallas, Texas, USA.
In 2000 in "People at Home. Contemporary Collection" 7th. Havana Biennial.

Awards
Among the awards and distinctions obtained are:

In 1942, Honorable Mention. XXIV Fine Arts Salon. Circle of Fine Arts, Havana.
In 1946 Silver Medal. XXVIII Annual Salon of Painting and Sculpture. Circle of Fine Arts, Havana.
In 1948 Accésit. Gold Medal. XXX Fine Arts Salon. Circle of Fine Arts, Havana.
In 1969 First Mention. VIII International Joan Miró Drawing Prize. Palace of the Viceroy, Barcelona, SPAIN.

Works in Collections
His work is exhibited in:

Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, SPAIN.
Fundación Verannemam, BELGIUM.
National Gallery, Sofia, BULGARIA.
Cuban Institute of Film Art and Industry (ICAIC), Havana.
Cuban Mission, United Nations Organization (UN), New York, USA.
Bacardí Museum, Santiago de Cuba.
Museum of Modern Art, Lodz, POLAND.
Museum of Fine Arts, Bucharest, ROMANIA.
Museum of the City, Havana.
Ignacio Agramonte Museum, Camagüey, CUBA.
National Museum of Fine Arts, Havana.
Palace of the Revolution, Havana, CUBA.