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Paisajes en la Oficina del Historiador (Landscapes at the City Historian’s Office) is the name of the event in relation with plastic arts that is taking place these days in Havana.
Organized by the Museum of Colonial Art, with a program that includes theoretical panels, guided tours, conferences and exhibitions, the meeting dedicated to the Cuban landscape opened its doors to the public last September 18 at the Centro Hispanoamericano de Cultura, with attendance of the City Historian, Dr. Eusebio Leal Spengler, who pronounced the inaugural words.
The exhibition Paisaje cubano: siglos XIX y XX (Cuban Landscape: 19th and 20th centuries), with curatorial work by Dr. Olga López, a specialist at the National Museum of Fine Arts, was presented. The pieces were exhibited and selected with inclusive criterion, since they cover from the first works of the colonial period up to the present moment, showing both their evolution and the plural approaches in handling the theme throughout diverse periods.
Landscape art had its greatest splendor during the second half of the 19th century, when both Cuban and foreign painters, fascinated by the Island’s lush nature, favored that theme in the two predominant trends of the period: the romantic school, which focused its aesthetic premises in the idealization of the landscape and the poetic language, and realism, with emphasis on daily life, textures and the sense of authenticity concerning color and light.
In the following century the Cuban landscape continued having space in the work of a group of artists, gathered around San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts, the institution to which the main figures of those days were linked. One of them was Leopoldo Romañach who, beyond his teaching activity, is the author of a valuable number of pieces, among which stand out his seascapes, bursting with luminosity and color.
Further on, in the first half of the 20th century, when the so-called “modern art” irrupted in our country, the landscape adopted new codes in compositions where a freedom of forms, lines and colors predominated without necessarily reflecting the “objective reality”. That was the case of Mariano Rodríguez, Víctor Manuel and Carlos Enríquez, whose very personal ways of interpreting that “reality” left us works of the quality of Botes (Boats), Paisaje con girasoles (Landscape with Sunflowers) and Paisaje con río (Landscape with River), now exhibited at the gallery of the Centro Hispanoamericano. As representatives of the most recent generations of landscape painters, the exhibition proposes the contemporary Tomás Sánchez and Pedro Pablo Oliva.
On Wednesday, September 19, Paisajes en la Oficina del Historiador moved to Palacio de Lombillo —venue of the Museum of Colonial Art—where the exhibition Homenaje (Tribute), is exhibited, dedicated to Mario García Portela, with curatorial work by Noemí Díaz Vilches.
The following day, at the houses of Mexico and Guayasamín, in Habana Vieja, two new exhibitions were inaugurated: Defensores de una tradición (Defenders of a Tradition) and Pensando desde el paisaje (Thinking from the Landscape), respectively, which not only present painting but also photography.
The theoretical complement of the event is to take place on September 25, 26 and 27. The first day there will be a guided tour led by master Niurka Fanego through the hall of Italian landscape in the universal art building. On September 26 the appointment will be with Alejandro Alonso and the conference entitled “Paisaje 82” at 10 a.m. at Casa de Mexico. On Thursday, September 27, again at the House of México, there will be a panel entitled “El paisaje y su vigencia” (The Landscape and Its Validity, with critics David Mateo, Toni Piñera, Jorge Bermúdez and Rafael Acosta de Arriba, who will be joined by a group of plastic artists invited to the closing ceremony. The panel will be conducted by Dr. Luz Merino Acosta.
All the exhibitions – including the one at Centro Hispano Americano de Cultura— will remain open until October 31. This will be an inexcusable opportunity to revisit our landscape, as seen and interpreted by the masters of Cuban painting of the 19th and 20th centuries.
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