Situated in a spot which Cristobal Colon described as “without doubt the most beautiful any human eye has ever seen,” such an art center would be sufficiently remote from the continents to facilitate an unbiased exchange of culture and yet to be accessible to travelers and to new tendencies. The animating rays of this sun might become even more far-reaching if a project were realized which so far only figures among Gómez Sicre’s pet dreams: the Inter-American Museum at Havana. “If you have any talent at all,” says Cuban critic José Gómez Sicre, “you are compelled by our sun to paint.” This is evident in the double invasion of Cuban art in New York, the painter Mario Carreño, besides being represented in the Museum, having just held an extensive show at the Perls Galleries. These merits, upon investigation, can only be ascribed to the sun of the Elysian island-a sun whose radiance is even more intense than the one that dazzled Van Gogh at Arles. Official goodneighborliness (somehow always too strongly subjected to political considerations) has thereafter less to do with the Museum’s current presentation of Cuba’s contemporary painters than genuine interest in a young and daring generation of artists who ask nothing better than a chance to present their work abroad and let it stand on its own merits. “Imports from Cuba: Verve at the Modern Museum”Īmong all the countries represented at last year’s Latin American exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art there was one whose vivacity and variety was outstanding: little Cuba, our island neighbor, stretching like an eel between the Caribbean and the Atlantic, opposite Key West. Felix Kraus praised the show and its artists, most of whom were largely unknown in America, for their “freshness” and “enthusiasm.” He also drew on unfortunate presumptions and language indicative of the time. In mind of the occasion-and in part to portray ways that colonialist and racially problematic means of thinking about Cuba and artists from different locales have changed-we have republished a review of the MoMA show from the Apissue of ARTnews. “The Enthusiastic, Energetic Cuban Art Scene Comes to MoMA, in 1944”Ĭurrently on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston is “Adiós Utopia: Dreams and Deceptions in Cuban Art Since 1950,” the biggest survey of Cuban art in America since a 1944 Museum of Modern Art exhibition. ©ARCHIVO RAUL MARTÍNEZ/PATRICIA AND HOWARD FARBER COLLECTION, NEW YORK Raul Martínez, Rosas y Estrellas (Roses and Stars), 1972, oil on canvas.