Continuing the legacy of Cuban artist Amelia Peláez, Cundo Bermúdez paid attention to the details of Havana’s 19th-century architecture, still in use in the 1940s when the artist was exploring a narrative and pictorial language of robust figures. In these works, the architectural details served as clues of identity of the Spanish legacy on the island: ornamented stained glass, shutters, and ceramic floors surrounding everyday characters. Lunes 21 de diciembre is a painting dominated by an oneiric (dream-like) imaginary, taken from surrealism, and with a pictorial treatment that fractures the space-time continuity of the scene. Despite this stylistic difference regarding his work from the forties, Bermúdez’s interest persists in depicting domestic spaces and local characters. At the center of the painting, there is a character dressed in feminine attire that evokes the Cuban Rumba dress and a naked female figure with a turban. In the background, a musician is carrying a cello. There are also two red shapes that evoke the characteristic folding shutters found at the entrance of Cuban houses. They were conceived in 19th-century architecture to allow air to enter houses while protecting the privacy of the space from the view of passersby. It could be said that the shutter is an element that functions as an intermittent barrier between the public and the private. In that sense, the allusion to the shutters in the painting goes beyond the architectural reference as a sign of identity and becomes a symbolic element between the real and imaginary worlds.
Born in Havana, Secundino Bermúdez y Delgado, known as Cundo Bermúdez was a Cuban artist who produced most of his work through painting, drawing, and lithography. He took courses at the San Alejandro Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes, but graduated with a degree in diplomatic and consular law from Universidad de La Habana. He briefly attended the San Carlos Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes in Mexico in the 1930s, which gave him the opportunity to see the work of the Mexican muralist movement first-hand. In 1962 he began living outside Cuba, first in Washington, D.C. and later in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where he lived for almost three decades before moving to Miami in 1996. Cundo Bermúdez was one of the most renowned artists of the Cuban vanguard art scene of the thirties and forties, which broke away from the academic tradition and developed modern pictorial languages within an intellectual environment that was looking at Cubanness and national identity. His work thus involves popular characters, domestic scenes, and everyday situations through pictorial treatment that is characterized by the appropriation of elements from the Parisian and the post-revolutionary Mexican vanguard. In the fifties, his work veered toward more abstract painting at times, with symbolic elements of surrealism, but without abandoning models alluding to Cuban culture. Bermúdez participated in the Modern Cuban Painters exhibition that took place at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1944, an exhibition that firmly introduced Cuban artists to the United States and served to broaden views on Latin American modern art.
