In 1957 José Gómez Sicre pronounced Amelia Peláez’s work “among the most outstanding painting Cuba has so far produced,” a signal tribute to its refined, transatlantic modernity and to the artist’s elevated stature among Cuba’s historical vanguardia. “What at first sight might seem, because of its baroque quality, an evasion of the objective is actually a careful transposition of domestic objects in a universal language,” he continued. “Little by little the tables and fruit began to find a continuation in the colonial stained-glass windows, and to these were added embroidered tablecloths, capitals, wickerwork, tufts, and fringes in an infinite interweaving sketched in a continuous line that invaded the whole picture, now widening, then narrowing, leaving zones of solid, brilliant color in a many-colored mosaic.” Working from her studio and garden at her family’s home in La Víbora, on the outskirts of Havana, Peláez reimagined Cuba’s tropical and colonial vernacular in the radiant still-lifes for which she is celebrated. The early 1940s witnessed a particularly fertile period of work, recognized by the critical plaudits that followed her debut in New York, at Norte Gallery in 1941 and her participation in Modern Cuban Painters organized by Alfred H. Barr, Jr. at the Museum of Modern Art in 1944. Like Fishes (1943) and Interior (1945), Marpacífico distills lush, lyrical color within an organic geometry structured by thick and thin black lines; its baroque exuberance flows through gradations of line and curve, emptiness, and decorative profusion. Distilled here in the brilliant red-orange petals that assert themselves against the cool blue and dark-green background, the hibiscus embodies the femininity and florid nationalism that long defined Peláez’s oeuvre.
Amelia Peláez was born in Yaguajay in the former Cuban province of Las Villas and moved to Havana in 1915. She graduated in 1924 from the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes de San Alejandro, where she studied under Leopoldo Romañach and worked in a loose Impressionist mode. She received grants to study at the Art Students League in New York in 1924 and to travel to Paris in 1927, where she enrolled in drawing courses at La Grande Chaumière and came into contact with the international avant-garde. Under the tutelage of the Russian Constructivist Alexandra Exter, from whom she took courses in design and color theory (1931-1934), Peláez experimented with Cubist and Expressionist elements in such paintings as Frutero blanco (1931). She held a solo exhibition in Galerie Zak in 1933. Returning to Cuba in 1934, she presented an exhibition of recent works at the Lyceum in Havana in 1935 and participated in the first Exposición Nacional de Pintura y Escultura in 1935 alongside fellow “modernos” including Víctor Manuel, Carlos Enríquez, and Fidelio Ponce de León. Peláez illustrated Léon-Paul Fargue’s Sept poèmes (1933) and her uncle Julián del Casal’s symbolist poem “La agonía de Petronio” (1936), among other volumes. As part of Havana’s historical vanguardia generation, Peláez took part in numerous exhibitions of modern Cuban art over the following three decades, including Modern Cuban Painters at the Museum of Modern Art in 1944. In mature paintings such as Still Life in Red (1938) and Interior (1945), she integrated modernist forms within familiar Cuban iconography, from tropical flora to baroque colonial architecture. Her work became more abstract and geometric in the 1950s, exemplified in the iconic mural Las frutas cubanas (1957-1958), commissioned for the façade of the Hotel Habana Hilton. Peláez was part of the Cuban delegations to the I São Paulo Bienal (1951) and the Venice Biennale (1952). She received prizes at Cuba’s National Salons in 1935, 1938, 1956, and 1959.
