Carlos Enriquez
Carlos Enriquez's formal artistic training was scant, yet he had
a college education and was an avid reader. In 1918-19 he took
painting classes while in high school at the Escolapios in
Guanabacoa and in 1924, after graduating from business school in
Philadelphia, he briefly attended the Pennsylvania Academy of
Fine Arts. He returned to Cuba in 1925 with the painter Alice
Neel, whom he married that year. In Havana, Enriquez worked at
the Independent Coal Company, drew and painted in his spared
time, and participated in the earliest manifestations of
modernism in Cuban painting. Conscious of the need to expand his
artistic knowledge and potential, he left Havana for the United
States and then Europe.
Enriquez lived in New York from 1927 to 1930 and in Paris and
Madrid from 1930 to 1933. Among the most important experiences
of those formative years were his visits to the Metropolitan,
Prado, and Louvre museums, his endless conversations with
artists and intellectuals of many nationalities at the cafe Le
Dome in Paris, and his contact with surrealism. Given the
evidence of his work, he was attracted to the surrealism of
Federico Garcia Lorca, early Salvador Dali, and late Francis
Picabia as far as their use of superimposed images and erotic
subject matter is concerned.
Enriquez returned to Cuba in 1934 and, like the case of the
other vanguardia artists, the rencounter with his native land
provided the catalyst for his mature style and his commitment to
express Cuban realities and myths. Using a personal visual
language of fluid lines, overlapping color forms, and dynamic
figure compositions, he represented the Cuban countryside, its
inhabitants, and folklore. Poor peasants, heroic legendary and
historical figures, sensual women, restless horses, and windy
landscapes of palm trees and rolling hills are the main
characters and setting for "creole ballads" of confrontation,
eroticism, and conflict. The subjects were often inspired by
popular myths and social realities. He also painted portraits of
friends, many nudes, and some still lifes. Although basically a
painter, Enriquez was an estimable writer. He published essays
and letters on his art as well as three novels: Tilin Garcia
(I939), La vuelta del Chencho (written 1942, published 1960),
and La feria de Guaicanama (written 1942, published 1960).
In the 1940s, Enriquez's style moved toward expressionism as his
palette became brighter, his brush strokes visible, and his
distortion of forms more prominent. During this decade he also
expanded his American subject matter as a result of a 1943 trip
to Mexico and a 1945 visit to Haiti. In both cases he recorded
his experiences in drawings and paintings that range from the
anthropological to the visionary. He paid close attention in
these works to details of nature-landscape, ethnic types, and
native myths and rituals. In the last decade of his life,
Enriquez's art suffered a steady decline due to alcoholism
related sickness and increased social alienation.
During his lifetime, Ennquez's art received a good measure of national recognition and some international exposure. He participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Havana attracting positive critical attention and at times controversy. He won purchase awards at the First, Second, and Third National Salons (1935, 1938, and 1946) for El rey de los campos de Cuba (1934), Rapto de las mulatas (1938), and La arlequina (n.d.) respectively. His drawings appeared regularly in the avant-garde magazine Revista de Avance (1927-30), and he illustrated a number of books including Alberto Riera's collection of poems Canto al Caribe (1936). He also executed a few fresco paintings, the most ambitious of which was La invasion (1937, destroyed soon thereafter) for the pedagogical school Jose Miguel Gomez. At the peak of his career in the late 1930s and 1940s, his art reached out into the international arena with personal and collective exhibitions in Mexico ( 1938, 1944, and 1946), the United States (1939, 1943, 1944, and 1946), Haiti (I945), Guatemala (I945), and Argentina (1946). However, the international recognition he sought, and that his art deserves in the context of early Latin American modernism, still eludes him. In Cuba, where he is considered one of the most significant national artists of the century, his work has been the subject of two major posthumous retrospectives in 1957 and 1979. His paintings and drawings are in the collections of the National Museum of Cuba, El Huron Azul (his home turned museum in the outskirts of Havana), the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Cuban Foundation Museum in Daytona Beach, and the Cuban Museum of Art and Culture in Miami. The latter institution organized a major exhibition of his work in 1986. His paintings and drawings are also in private collections in Cuba, Latin America, the United States, and Europe.