Eduardo Abela
Eduardo Abela studied at the San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts,
graduating in I921. He lived in Spain from 1921 to 1924 and
France from 1927 to 1929 to expand his artistic and cultural
horizons. In Paris he socialized with a group of vanguard Cuban
writers and artists including Alejo Carpentier, who encouraged
him to paint Cuban themes and introduced him to the latest
currents in art. After experimenting with various modern styles,
Abela developed his own, under the inspiration of Jules Pascin
and Marc Chagall. His Parisian stay culminated with an
exhibition at the Galerie Zak in November 1929, where he showed
a series of paintings and drawings drawing on Afrocuban and
Creole culture. Like many of his colleagues, he discovered Cuba
in his art while living abroad, apparently motivated by a
combination of distance and nostalgia.
On his return to Havana, Abela turned to political and social
cartooning and invented a character called El Bobo (The Fool),
which appeared in the pages of El Diario de la Marina from 1930
to 1934. El Bobo gained national recognition as a critical voice
against the Gerardo Machado dictatorship. In the second half of
the 1930s Abela returned to painting, employing a naturalistic
style influenced by early Renaissance painting and the Mexican
mural movement. At this time he focused on an idealized view of
the Cuban peasant and the countryside, as seen in his most
renowned painting, Los guajiros (1938). In 1937 he directed the
short-lived Free Studio of Painting and Sculpture, which briefly
offered an alternative to the elitist and highly structured
artistic training provided by San Alejandro.
Abela served as Cuba's cultural attache to Mexico from 1941 to
1946 and to Guatemala from 1947 to 1952. The last and most
productive phase of his artistic career began in the early 1950s
and lasted for a decade. This so-called magic period was
characterized by an expressionistic representation of a fantasy
world inhabited by women, children, and animals.
The paintings and caricatures of Abela have been extensively exhibited in Havana since the 1920s, and to a lesser extent in Spain. France, Mexico, Guatemala. and the United States. He won a number of awards for his paintings, including prizes at the National Salons of 1938 and 1956. His works are housed in numerous private collections in Cuba, where he is also well represented at the National Museum in Havana. Outside of Cuba, his paintings reside in private collections in the Caribbean, Central America, the United States, Spain, and France.