Victor Manuel García Valdés

Painter, he studied at the Academia de Bellas Artes de San Alejandro in La Habana. His most well-known painting is titled Gitana Tropical, and he painted it in París in 1929.

His vocation for painting manifests itself very early; thus, he enrolls -1910- at the Academia de Bellas Artes San Alejandro, where he is a student of Leopoldo Romañach. A year later he is appointed drawing professor.

He sets up his first exhibition at Las Galerías, La Habana. In 1925 his desire to change the system of artistic expression in Cuba drives him to travel to Europe for the first time. He begins to sign as Víctor Manuel during his stay in París, where he becomes acquainted with the works of Italian primitives and also those created by impressionists.

He returns to Cuba; in February 1927, he organizes a solo show at the Asociación de Pintores y Escultores, which surprises with the relative modernity of its conception. In May he joins the roster of those exhibiting in the Art Nouveau exhibition.

Víctor Manuel becomes an outstanding figure of the movement.

He travels to Europe again in 1929 and paints his oil Gitana Tropical in París, an example of the new language: a limited range of blues and grays with sparse touches of other colors; an exotic type of woman, obviously mixed-race, who stares directly at the viewer, representation of a moment of austerity in Cuban painting.

When he returns to Cuba, his style is defined as well as his themes: portraits almost always feminine and landscapes; all framed by a certain "post-impressionism" that moves from chromatic austerity to the "fauvist" fury of reds and greens that invade his works from the 1940s.

In 1935 he obtains a prize at the Exposición Nacional de Pintura y Escultura; in 1938 Gitana Tropical obtains a prize at the II Exposición Nacional de Pintura y Escultura.

He organizes solo exhibitions at the Universidad de la Habana (1945); the Asociación de Reporters (1951) and Galería Lex (1956). He exhibits frequently in the National Salons, and finally in 1959 a retrospective exhibition of his work is organized.

In 1964 he begins to express himself in a new medium: lithography, which he practices at the Taller Experimental de Gráfica de la Plaza de la Catedral.