Art History 500/800
Romantic Post-colonialism and Cuban Painting

Room L-166
Tuesdays, 4:00 - 6:'00 PM
Narciso Menocal
203 Elvehjem
(608) 263-2373
nmenocal@wisc.edu
Office hours: Mon. and Wed., 5'30 - 6'30 pm

COURSE DESCRIPTION
Post-colonial studies usually center on aspects of a racial, intellectual, social, economic, and identity crisis established by the clash of one group of people (the colonizer) with another (the colonized) and the travails of the colonized society to come to terms with its altered, compromised identity once at least a nominal independence is achieved.

But there is another kind of post-colonialism scholars have neglected which I call romantic post-colonialism. The term results from an interplay between two arguments establishing a teleological construct. On the one hand there is a deep-seated sense of exceptionalism acting as a natural tendency and directed toward the perfection of its own nature. The second argument is based on the belief of the existence of an achievable utopia.

A progressive dialectical interplay between what is considered as the innate right of exceptionalism and the inalienable right of attaining to the utopia is the basis for romantic post-colonialism. The dialectical process is a major contributory to a process of turning a colonial experience into a discrete national identity that is sustained by a belief that the natural environment is also exceptional since it is nothing less than an Arcadia that cries out for establishing a final harmony with the utopia. Romantic post-colonialism developed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries among people who much earlier colonized territories with a scant population or none at all, with possession of the land taking place through settlement and not through conquest. In these cases of settlement rather than of forceful occupation, colonizers tended to keep to themselves even if there were some natives in relative proximity. These were not enslaved; neither the colonizers were strong enough to launch a conquest nor the small native population-and their lack of material wealth--warranted the effort. While there were interchanges between the two groups, they were not sufficiently important to alter by much the social and economic infrastructure of either society. Nor was there much sexual intermingling between the two races during the early periods of colonization since both men and women established the colony with the family, not the individual, as the preferred social unit.. Consequently, during the early days of the colony a "third race" did not appear in any significant numbers, as was the case in Mexico and Peru, for example, where mestizos soon became members of the dominant class.

The case of Cuba falls into the romantic post-colonial category. While there were three groups of Indians on the island when the Spaniards arrived in 1510, they soon died out because of infection with European diseases (small pox, etc.), slaughter of villages to contain revolt, and individual and mass suicide of Indians. Though some small pockets of Indians survived here and there, to all intent and purposes the island was a clean slate by the mid sixteenth century and the Spanish were able to develop a colony without fear of a native population.

Small quantities of African slaves were introduced on the island by the early sixteenth century. The colony soon required a workforce larger than the one available and the importation of slaves fulfilled that need. Slaves, usually from the West Coast of Africa, brought with them their religions, their languages, their music, their art, their customs, their food, and other elements of culture. Whites considered these cultural expressions to be inferior, obscene, and even demonic, and yet, African customs trickled into the dominant class, but curiously, without losing their idiosyncracy. Concurrently, slaves also co-opted colonial culture as required by needs of survival or improvement of self. Cultural, social, political, and economic differences between the two races were set from the start.

By the nineteenth century a much improved economy allowed the dominant class to create an intellectual, social, artistic, and economic environment in which all the parts became progressively enmeshed into each other. This post-colonial culture-and the subsequent national one as well-emerged from colonial vernacular iconography, customs, attitudes, and preferences inherited from the metropolis, and subsequently adapted to local taste and needs. A realization that a vernacular phenomenon was a determinant of nationality, and was therefore proper (and even required) as the subject of a work of art expressing nationality, was a first step in the development of a post-colonial attitude. The threshold from colonial to post colonial, therefore, lay in the act of transcending the vernacular into high (or erudite) art. Thus, transfers of meaning were established between the environment, customs, art, literature on the one hand and the white population on the other to reinforce each other teleologically.

A clear differentiation between colony and metropolis was an important prerequisite for a romantic post-colonial experience to take place, with colonials coming to a self-realization of superiority to the "mother country," although they were still subservient to her. Soon, longings for independence turned into stirrings of revolt. While indeed political freedom became society's ultimate romantic goal, aesthetic and intellectual desires to express a nationalism inherent in a quest for liberty was a primordial existential need within the process of self-identification. Coming round, such a process would inform a final, utopian sense of liberty. In turn, that desire for liberty triggered an emotional impulse for creating a national literature and art. Once in place, such a body of work would act as a collective mirror in which nationals would see themselves reflected (or at least aspects of themselves) inasmuch as they were born to the land and were part of its culture one, furthermore, existing within an idyllic, Arcadian utopia.

The colony now morphed into a nation; a national identity was all but complete; and freedom from the metropolis was the last step required to reach the predestined fulfillment. It was at this moment that exceptionalism was aroused to new heights and a war of independence was seen as a romantic quest. It was nothing less than a fight for the utopia.

A conclusion one reaches from this state of euphoria is that since independence was a sine qua non for attaining to the utopia, the development of romantic post-colonialism was all-but-complete by the time a desire for independence developed. The process was therefore different from other kinds of post-colonialism that find relevancy only after a native population has gained independence and it is only then when it finds a need to define itself both to itself and to the world.

The emancipation that took place in slave-holding nations throughout the nineteenth century eventually allowed former Cuban slaves to live according to their choice, many of them attaining to middle-class status within a few generations. With freedom and better economic conditions than before, former slaves were able to enjoy openly their Afro-colonial culture, one that was a mixture of African and European-derived elements. Inasmuch as the former dominant class had been suffused with elements of the Afro-colonial culture for centuries, a process of transculturation that had started a long time before it reached its peak. Newly-minted national classical music and erudite art expressed Afro-national themes and iconography in the styles of the European avant-garde art. By the mid-1920s the process of national identification was complete, and as a matter of an almost existential collective subconscious, the nation at large turned the process of romantic post-colonialism into a series of myths informing nationhood for generations to come. Those myths, in turn, became the subjects of a national iconology.

The Cuban experience serves as well as a case study to help us realize the degree to which romantic post-colonialism and the political process are detached from one another, especially if it has its beginnings within a romantic period and is shaped by it, even if its fulfillment takes place later, in the twentieth century, as it was the case in Cuba. Moreover, romantic post-colonialism does not appear in all art forms at the same time. On the contrary, discrete reasons act on each medium at different times. While Cuba became independent from Spain in 1898, and from the United States in 1902, Cuban poetry, as an entity different from the preceding poetry in Cuba, appeared around 1825, a Cuban novel developed in the late 1830s, Cuban painting emerges in the 1860s, Afro-Cuban themes became the subject of high art around 1925, and, while one may argue for the rise of a Cuban architecture in the late 1920s and 1930s, a national mode of architecture did not blossom until the 1950s and early 1960s.

The particular political, social, and economic circumstances of the revolution of 1 January 1959 and its aftermath altered the dialectical rhythm between national identification and the arts. At first, artists, writers, composers, and architects served the Revolution enthusiastically developing triumphalist themes using the techniques, styles, and mythical syntheses of the arts of the 1950s. This first period lasted through the mid-1960s. Subsequently, there was a lull in the arts as many artists left the island disillusioned with the new idea that no art or literature was possible outside the needs of the Revolution. The artists who remained on the island had to adapt to new directives, many of them Stalinist in nature. By 1980 the climate had changed again, artists felt freer to create (most importantly painters), and literature sought to revive the post-colonial myth by reinterpreting nineteenth-century literary works and events in late twentieth-century terms as a metaphorical strategy to state political opinion. At the same time, a Cuban literature and art developed in exile, defining a newer kind of self-identification covering questions of nostalgia and santería as well as gender, and lesbian and gay issues.

DEVELOPMENT OF COURSE
INTRODUCTION

A. Taxonomic differentiation between myth and mythical aspiration within a Cuban experience; reasons for using the term myth exclusively within a twentieth-century context; issues of compression of time in post colonial development (turning mythical aspirations into myths in little more than a century); stages in the unfolding of that process; racial and gender issues; taxonomy: negros and negras, mulatos and mulatas; inadequacy of American-like racial terms, such as Afro-Cuban (except as an adjective modifying a noun signifying a social, literary, cultural, or artistic movement or trend, but never used to qualify a human being).

B. Rise of individualism; environmental, social, and economic reasons for the rise of individualism since the sixteenth century; in Havana, income mostly depending on local services rendered to transients passing through port for a few months in the yearly flota; scant population on the rest of the island living mostly on petty smuggling with pirates and buccaneers; modest developments of agriculture, cattle, and mining during the late seventeenth and most of the eighteenth centuries; failures in implementation of Spanish imperial economic and trade policies on an island military outpost (sixteenth through mid-eighteenth centuries).

C. La isla del azúcar, del tabaco y del café; rise of wealth, 1763-1868.

I. MYTHICAL ASPIRATIONS
A. THE IMAGINED IDYLLIC UTOPIA OF 19TH CENTURY WHITES
1. Antecedents: recognition of a differentiation from Spain in poetry by 1606; the poetry of Pedro de las Torres Sifonte and Silvestre de Balboa; use by both of the term criollo (meaning anyone or anything autochthonous or considered as such); origins of the term on the Islands of Cape Verde in the 1460s; parallelism with the Latin vernaculus; nationalism avant-la-lettre; 18th-century considerations of Havana as patria in history (José Martín Félix de Arrate and Beatriz de Jústiz y Zayas, Marquesa de Jústiz de Santa Ana).

2. Rise of a lyrical imagery as the first important nationalistic expression in the arts; idyllic themes of Cuba as Eden in poetry from the 1820s to the early 1870s (José María de Heredia to Juan Clemente Zenea); la novela costumbrista (Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda's Sab, and Cirilo Villaverde's Cecilia Valdés); romantic invention of a Siboney Indian culture: siboneyismo (El Cucalambé).

3. Colonial art, sixteenth through eighteenth centuries.

4. La Escuela de Pintura y Escultura de San Alejandro (founded 1818).

5. Cuban painting in contra-position to an earlier painting in Cuba; use of explicitly Cuban themes developed earlier in poetry from the 1860s on, especially that of the landscape as idyllic utopia; connections of these painters (Henry Cleenwerck, Esteban Chartrand, Federico Fernández Cavada, and Valentín Sanz Carta) with the New York Hudson River School; their acquaintance with the Tenth Street Studio; Goupil's New York office as a common agent of Cuban and American artists; softening of the American sublime into the Cuban lyrical.

6. Further developments of the lyrical in the late nineteenth-century; rejection of the chiaroscuro of the academy as a result of searching for tropical luminosity; use of pure colors as expression of a "Cuban environment" (José Arburu Morell and Guillermo Collazo).

7. Use of the idyllic myth on chromolithographed cigarette marquillas (labels) for commercial purposes; series based on lithographs in Juan Lembeye, Aves de Cuba (1850) and Edouard Laplante's illustrations of Justo Germán Cantero, Los ingenios de Cuba (1857); series on "El campo de Cuba."

8. Relationships of turn-of-the-century modernista poetry and painting; Julián del Casal's Symbolist aestheticism and his interest in the French painter Gustave Moreau; socio-political interests of José Martí; his desire for a social realist movement in painting to portray his notion of Nuestra América; his views on French impressionism; reasons why the ideas of neither of these two poets were accepted by painters

9. Further investigation of tropical light by artists through knowledge of the impressionism of Zuloaga in Spain and the macchiaioli in Italy (Armando Menocal and Leopoldo Romañach); Domingo Ramos and Esteban Valderrama; the end of the landscape as expression of the lyrical.

B. THE "OTHERNESS" OF NEGROS AND MULATOS AS PERCEIVED BY 19TH CENTURY WHITES
1. Antecedents: religious syncretism and secret societies: santería, palo monte, and los cabildos de negros; their origins in the eighteenth century; poetry in lengua bozal (Afro-Cuban dialect) by 18th and 19th -century negros; erudite poetry of 19th-century negros and mulatos: Francisco Manzano, Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés (Plácido), and others.

2. El choteo as a humiliating banter directed toward a person or persons of inferior social class or intellectual level.

3. El choteo in the theater of the mid and third quarter of the 19th century; the stereotypically stupid negro and the wily mulata; the teatro bufo; Bartolomé José Crespo y Borbón (Creto Gangá), Un ajiaco, o la boda de Pancha Jutía y Canuto Raspadura (1847) and Debajo del tamarindo (1864); José Socorro León, Garrotazo y Tente Tieso (1863) and Un bautizo en Jesús María (1865); Francisco Fernández Vilarós, Los negros catedráticos; Pedro N. Pequeño and F. Fernández, El negro cheche. Debut of Los bufos habaneros theater company in the Teatro de Villanueva in May 1868.

4. Choteo of negros and mulatos in cigarette marquillas; the mulata as a kept woman.

5. European conceptions of the negro as an exotic being; work of French and Spanish engravers (Frédéric Miahle, Edouard Laplante, Hippolyte Garneray, and Víctor Patricio Landaluze).

6. The slave as a noble being in the romantic novel.

II: MYTHS A. FROM MYTHICAL ASPIRATIONS TO MYTHS
Cultural developments and changes fostering an elision of mythical aspirations into myths; the dysfunction of a collective memory seeking cultural identification, the turning of "the fairly recent" into "the distant past"; the phenomenon of perceiving a factual recent past as "ancient times" resulting in a mythification of time itself.

B. RISE OF A HEROIC POLITICAL MYTH AS RESULT OF ASPIRATION FOR INDEPENDENCE
1. Antecedents: responses to South American independence; reformismo, anexionismo, and autonomismo as solutions to excesses of Spanish nineteenth-century imperial policies fostered by moderates; parallel endeavors of radicals for independence.

2. Ethnic results of the wars of independence (1868-1898); racial integration in the insurrecto army as result of comradeship among brothers-at-arms; full acceptance of mulatos and negros as generals, commanders, and colonels by whites; long strive for freedom progressively seen as a mythical heroic struggle for a republican political utopia; delay of the utopia by four years of American protectorate (1898-1902).

3. Rise the heroic myth; role of the rhetoric of José Martí, Vidal Morales, and others in its creation; the heroic myth as the basis of a nationalist religion; its heroes as saints of the new religion: El Bayardo de Cuba (Ignacio Agramonte), El Padre de la Patria (Carlos Manuel de Céspedes), El Titán de Bronce (Antonio Maceo), El Apóstol de la Independencia (José Martí); and as an extension of the myth in time: El Máximo Líder (Fidel Castro).

C. THE AFRO-CUBAN MYTH IN THE 1920s AND 1930s
1. Progressive acceptance of dances of "people of color" by whites from the late 19th century on; their full acceptance by the 1920s; the danzón, the danzonete, the conga, the rumba, and the guaracha; the mambo, and the chachachá; revivals of the 1950s; lyrics make el choteo y la jodedera commonplace among the popular white class.

2. Las comparsas de carnaval; their importance within the Afro-Cuban myth from 1936 on.

3. Literature: Discovery by Cubans of the importance of African themes in the French avant-garde: Picasso, Josephine Baker, le jazz hot, etc.; rise of Afro-Cuban themes; the new poesía afro-cubana (mostly by white poets); influence of Lorca in new types of versification and subject matter; adaptation of Lorca's ethnic poetical conception of the gypsy for the theme of el negro; the Euro-centered avant-garde: rise of the grupo minorista and el grupo de avance; the new Cuban novel.

4. Colonial and Afro-Cuban themes in avant-garde music as an expression of nationalism: Roldán and Caturla.

D. SYNTHESIS OF MYTHS IN PAINTING: 1927 THROUGH THE 1950s.
1. The paradox in the teachings of Leopoldo Romañach in the Escuela de San Alejandro endorsing academic subjects and composition but a free use of color; the cooptation by students of the second element of the paradox to foster their own interests in modern art.

2. La exposición de arte nuevo (May 1927) sponsored by el grupo de avance; the Estudio libre para pintores y escultores (1937-1938).

3. Progressive conflation of Cuban iconology and iconography with European avant-garde techniques of composition:

a) The Generation of 1927: Use of folk characters by Víctor Manuel and Arístides Fernández; sensuality and raw sexuality: Antonio Gattorno, Eduardo Abela, and Carlos Enríquez; the exorcizing of Spanish influences from the Cuban experience: the work of Fidelio Ponce.

b) The Generation of 1940: the idyllic in folk themes: Lorenzo Romero Arciaga and Cundo Bermúdez.

c) Further synthesis of myths by four artists: Mariano Rodríguez, René Portocarrero, Amelia Peláez, and Wifredo Lam.

III: AN APPARENT INTERLUDE OF POST-COLONIALISM IN LITERATURE AND PAINTING

A. LITERATURE
1. José Lezama Lima and El grupo de Orígenes: The transcendentalist movement of the late 1930s through the early 1960s; the poetry and novels of José Lezama Lima (Enemigo rumor, Muerte de Narciso, Paradiso, Oppiano Licario, etc.); Lezama Lima's poetry magazine Orígenes (1944-1956); the ten poets of the Group of Orígenes. Orígenes and music: Julián Orbón and his search for transcendentalist themes in his symphonic poems.

2. The isolated case of Virgilio Piñera as a writer of plays and short stories; influences from Kafka and others.

B. PAINTING The exhibition of El Grupo de los 11 (La Rampa, April 18-28, 1953); its expression of personal chthonic adumbrations through an introspective iconography; rejection of Cuban traditional iconography by El Grupo de los 11 as a sign of a possible end to a post-colonialist/nationalist communal identification in painting.

IV: ILLUSION OF UTOPIA AND THE REALITY OF POST-UTOPIA
A. The Revolution of 1959 and the arts: Rebirth of nationalism in an illusion of utopia achieved: El Departamento de Artes Plásticas del Ministerio de Obras Públicas (March 1959) as a government office establishing an official policy of integration of the plastic arts in public buildings;

B. Graphic arts of the 1960s; the revolutionary poster.

C. The end of revolutionary utopian feelings: Two speeches by Fidel Castro: Words to Intellectuals (June 1961) and Closing Speech to the First Congress of Cuban Builders (October 1964).

D. The Cuban post utopia: its political, economic, and social factuality; paucity of the arts in the 1970s.

E. Painting in Cuba since 1981: The rise of a new art: exhibition of Volumen 1 (January 1981); rise of a surrealism of despair;. marielitos (people from the Mariel exodus, 1980), balseros (boat people), and El período especial as new sources for imagery.

V. THE NATIONALISM OF EXILE

A. LITERATURE Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Zoe Valdés, Cristina García, and others.

B. ART

1. Ana Mendieta's esculturas rupestres; Marta María Pérez Bravo, and other women artists.

2. Themes of nostalgia; post-modern trends; and neo-dada.

3. Santería as religion and symbol of cultural identity.

4. Use of themes from the lyrical, heroic, and Afro-Cuban myths for political protest.

5. The desire to flee and the surrealism of despair.

C. GAY ISSUES
Thematic differences between Cuban and Cuban-American gays; social and psychological differences between the two groups; reasons for an appearance of explicitly gay content in literature and art in the 1960's (Lezama's Paradiso); Cuba and the US: from repression to expression; blossoming of literature and art with a gay content created by Cubans and Cuban-Americans in the US; main themes of Cuban gays in relation to Cuba: repression, political rage, and remembrance (Reinaldo Arenas); main themes of Cuban-American gays in relation to Cuba: transculturation and disidentification expressed through images of American reality conflated with personal inventions of a mythical Cuba often stemming from an oral tradition received from family members and friends (Coco Fusco and José Esteban Muñoz); the singularity of Severo Sarduy; correspondence between his novels and his paintings; importance "of the surface" in Structuralism.

VI. SUMMATION AND CONCLUSIONS The strength of tradition: persistence of insular fact and memory from sixteenth -century early ideas of the criollo to similarities in twenty-first-century post-utopian surrealism of despair and exilic remembrance, acculturation, transculturation, and disidentification. Acceptance by the Cuban government of queer subjects in literature and art since around 2000.

COURSE OBJECTIVES
The course aims to study the rise of a national identification through Cuban painting (style, iconography, and iconology) and the investigation of romantic post-colonialism, as stated in the course description.

The course is taught under two numbers, simultaneously: AH 500, for seniors, and AH 800, for graduate students. Undergraduate and graduate students from other departments are welcome, but individual interviews with the instructor are required as a prerequisite of acceptance. Students from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese who may not be familiar with methods of art history are encouraged to work on topics of Cuban literature germane to the subject matter.

ASSIGNMENTS
Each student will offer two oral presentations (15 minutes each) during the semester. The list of topics will be handed in advance. Students will also undertake a semester-long study of their choice on a topic related to the course. The topic is to be discussed privately with the instructor and approved by him. Once a topic is approved, students will submit a prospectus consisting of the title of the paper, a body of text indicating the nature of the research, the reasons for undertaking it, and a description of the method chosen for its development. This section of the prospectus should be at least two to three pages in length (double spaced, 12-pt. font). The prospectus will also include a minimum annotated. bibliography consisting of fifteen to twenty titles, (Two or three lines per title explaining what the work is about and why it was chosen.) The next step will be a submission of a thematic outline. This is a skeleton of the work in which each section leads organically to the next. The aim of this exercise is an as-full-as-possible outline, paragraph by paragraph. The thematic outline will be discussed in private with the instructor. The seminar paper will be turned in on the last session of classes. It will be approximately twenty pages long (double spaced, 12-pt. font) followed by end notes, illustrations, and bibliography.

GRADING
Each oral presentation is worth 10% of the final grade; the prospectus will be also 10% of the final grade; the thematic outline will count as well 10% of the final grade; the seminar paper will be worth 50% of the final grade; and the final 10% will be allocated to class participation and attendance. Standards of grading will be as follows: A represents exemplary work in which the student has successfully realized his or her stated objectives in terms of content, method, and writing style; B has a broader compass in which the intentions of the assignment are met adequately but with some weakness of content or style or reticence in approach; C recognizes effort but acknowledges serious problems in content or style; D and F reflect a fundamental lack of effort or ability.

TEXTS, READING ASSIGNMENTS, AND SCHEDULE OF SESSIONS Forthcoming.