Paintings
Biography

1. By Giulio V. Blanc. 

           Amelia Pelaez, always the student and observer, was conscious of her influences and never loath to admit them.  In response to a 1943 questionnaire about her work she wrote:
            “The artists who most interest me are, from France, Ingres, Seurat, Cezanne, Picasso, Braque and Matisse.”
            In addition to painting, in 1933 Amelia tried her hand at writing with an article entitled “Les peintres cubains et Paris,” Cuban Painters and Paris”, published in the newspaper La Volonte in the French capital.  This article, doubtless translated from the Spanish, demonstrates Amelia’s awareness and defense of the avante-garde in Cuba.  It also points to the major role early twentieth century Paris played for the first generation of Cuban modernists.  Amelia was historically conscious regarding art and knew of her colleagues’ struggles to arrive at something that partook of both the national and the universal.  In her own mind then, as the article shows, this was a subject of importance that she too had to come to terms with:
            “These avant-garde painters, inspired first by Gauguin and African art, became inspired finally by the characteristic subjects of their country.  The charm, the picturesque quality, the beauty of the places and the people of our lands understood…”
            In a rare discussion of her own work in 1936, Amelia summed up her attitude toward painting and makes us realize that we are dealing with more than exercises in color and composition and that the subjective, expressive dimension cannot be ignored:
            “I am not interested in copying the object.  Sometimes I ask myself, why paint oranges realistically?  What matters is the relation of the motif with oneself, with one’s personality, and the power the artist has to organize his emotions.  This is the reason I deliberately broke with appearances.  One of the major acquisitions of today’s artists is that of having found expression through color…Accustomed as I am to expressing my emotions through painting, what could I tell the public via the written word to make it feel, not understand, naturally, these deep emotions, this clash of my sensibility with nature?”            

-excerpts from essay by Giulio V. Blanc
           of the Cuban Museum of Art and Culture
           in the exhibition catalogue of 
           “Amelia Pelaez 1896-1968: A Retrospective”


(scroll down for the essay by José Gomez Sicre)
in the collection
Writings by the artist
Writings about the artist
Permanent Collection
 
 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2. By Jose Gomez Sicre.

            An early interpreter of the modern movement, Amelia Pelaez, brought together the new lessons of Cubism and the traditions of the past in her powerful work.  Though she traveled and studied abroad, Pelaez was inspired by her home, where she spent the last decades of her life. 

            Amelia rejected the teachings of artist like Andre Lhote and Amedee Ozenfant, who prescribed methods for the new art.  She sought instead to acquire a clean and free technical foundation, not a system of painting in the mode of her teachers.  So, when the Academie Moderne opened in Paris in 1930, she registered, not in painting, but in theatre set designing and color dynamics, under the Russian artist Alaxandra Exter.  From Exter, whose talent in art was recognized only in the field of theatrical set design, she gained the technical basis for her own expressions in painting.

            Various influences let their marks on her early work.  The human forms in those compositions are reminiscent of Modigliani with their elongated faces and necks.  Sometimes forms are executed in flat planes of burnished colors, and at other times composed of thick layers of deep tones energetically spread with a spatula, in the style of Soutine.  The still lifes have some of those elements, although not yet entering into the cubist idiom.  She experimented with pencil in small, sober cubist drawings.  To these she added pieces of paper and playing cards, creating an interesting series of collages.

            But she did not limit herself to cubism and French modern art.  When she arrived in Paris, she was already thirty years old, and not easily impressed.  She avoided the orthodox opinions and excessive theorization often affected by young artist studying in Paris.  Instead she wanted to learn how to paint anew.

            Interested in gothic architecture, she traveled to Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and Czechoslovakia.  She admired Rembrandt in the museums of Amsterdam and The Hague.  Her intent was not to miss a single contact with anything great that had been accomplished in visual arts up to her time.

            By the spring of 1933, she had completed thirty-four oils and three gouaches for a show at the Zak Gallery in Paris.  In Francis de Miomandre’s exuberant catalogue introduction, the critic wrote that Amelia’s work is a “whole world self-contained, complete, tormented by an enigmatic silence.”  All the art critics submitted laudatory notes.  One wrote, “those canvases, conceived through long meditation and spontaneously executed, denote a spiritual life and a sensuality as a painter not at all common.”  The critic for Beaux Arts found in her works “a universe somewhat mysterious.”  Another said that he was made to think “more of an echo coming from our distant past, charged with fantasies…”  Amelia Pelaez had succeeded in Paris.

            One of Cuba’s great painters, she continued to work and find inspiration in her home and surroundings until her death in 1968.

                                                            -excerpts from essay by Jose Gomez Sicre
                                                            taken from “The Metropolitan”, August 1978

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