Cuban Painter Umberto Peña Dies in Salamanca, Spain

June 25, 2023

Casa de las Américas mourns the death of the renowned visual artist Umberto Peña, who as a designer imprinted a particular and unforgettable mark on the identity of the Casa and its publications for more than two decades.

Despite the distance, the bond with this institution remained unchanged. In 2013 the Galería Latinoamericana of Casa de las Américas exhibited the show "Umberto Peña: el regreso a un pintor visceral" which brought together pieces of his created between 1963 and 1971.

Recently Umberto designed the cover of issue 300 of Casa de las Américas magazine, his magazine, as well as a poster dedicated to the centennial of Haydee Santamaría -perhaps the last one he would create-, as part of a project called by the Casa to pay homage to its founder.

The Cuban painter, printmaker and designer Umberto Peña (1937-2023) died this Wednesday, June 21 at the age of 85 in the city of Salamanca, Spain, according to people close to the artist who confirmed to the press.

Trained between 1954 and 1958 at the Academia de San Alejandro, Peña joined the Asociación de Grabadores de Cuba in the first months of 1959 and, a year later, received a scholarship at the Instituto Superior Politécnico de México. There he learned about mural painting techniques, and later, also in Mexico, he took a Byzantine mosaic course at the Escuela de Artes Aplicadas La Ciudadela.

To that period belongs his mural woodcut Las dictaduras en América. The Centro de Arte Mexicano Contemporáneo also hosted his first solo exhibition, before he returned to Cuba to take on graphic design work at the Propaganda Department of the Consejo Nacional de Cultura and, from 1963 onwards, to take charge of the artistic direction of Casa de las Américas.

The aesthetic conception and communicative functionality of the publications and posters of that institution (notably, the Casa magazine) constituted one of the highest points of island graphic design –along with film posters– during the following two decades.

Since the sixties, his pieces were exhibited in solo or group shows in Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Soviet Union, Poland, France –where he spent some months on a scholarship after the V Biennale de la Jeune Peinture of 1967–, United Kingdom, Canada, Italy, Sweden and Japan.

According to the website of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Cuba, Umberto Peña began in the mid-seventies "his monumental work of textile experimentation exhibited four years later in the Trapices exhibition, at the Capitolio Nacional".

Another example of his desire for artistic exploration and his remarkable multifaceted capacity, as is equally demonstrated by his set and costume designs for the theatrical play Morir del cuento, written and directed by Abelardo Estorino and staged in 1983 by the Teatro Estudio group.

But something had happened… At the end of the sixties and beginning of the seventies, Umberto Peña's pictorial work –viscerally expressionist and with a high erotic content at that time– suffered, like those of his colleagues Raúl Martínez, Antonia Eiriz and Santiago "Chago" Armada, the blows of parameterization and bureaucratic censorship of art and literature in Cuba.

According to Cuban critic Hamlet Fernández, Peña was "another of the great victims of socialist cultural policy", and likewise: "another of the artists who, in a very radical way, makes the decision to stop painting and engraving in 71".

After leaving Cuba permanently, the artist lived in the United States for about twelve years. In 2006, he finally moved to Salamanca.

In 2012, he exhibited Acerca de Salamanca. Pinturas y dibujos recientes, his first solo show since that retrospective of 1988 –made up of lithographs and one of his "trapices"– with which he emerged from ostracism in his native country.

"I may be wrong, but I think that in the sixties/seventies there is no painter as spectacularly violent as Peña on the island," writer Carlos A. Aguilera told Rialta Noticias, author of the volume Umberto Peña. Bocas, dientes, cepillos, restos. "You would have to wait for an Esson, for example, fifteen years later, to see something that equals it in intensity. If you observe a lithograph like 4, 5, 6 up, down, from 1968, you will see that the drama and that violence were not only in the bodies and their defecations, but in gestures as simple as brushing one's teeth, in the everyday. Peña's great punctum is having understood that creating is not only part of a dialogue with the present or with the Self, but of a physical-gestural deployment, of a slap, of the construction of a style. And that style (which is above all an energy and in many cases an anguish) can be traced from some of his oxen to his most recent drawings, those where thunderbolts and lashes intertwine".