4: Art and revolution: Cuba’s ‘cultural democracy’ and artistic production 1959-89

 Art and revolution: Cuba’s ‘cultural democracy’ and artistic production 1959-89



This final lecture surveys Cuban revolutionary art and its antecedents and how the revolution of 1959 ushered in a new era of artistic production in which the state played an active role in socialising artistic practice through what became known as ‘cultural democracy’.
Picture shows “Rosas y Estrellas” (“Roses and Stars”) by Raúl Martínez. It depicts 19th-century Cuban revolutionary José Martí (centre) flanked by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, with Latin American and Cuban freedom fighters including Simón Bolívar and Antonio Maceo behind them.

1. Antecedents Pogolotti and Lam


Marcello Pogolotti was one of Cuba's most interesting and politically engaged painters in the 1930s. Watch this sequence of paintings form the 1930-35 period and enjoy the futurist nature of an art that captures the alienation and struggles of the classes in Cuba of the time. 



Wifredo Lam was born in Cuba in 1902 of mixed heritage, and pursued a successful artistic career on both sides of the Atlantic. In this film the artist’s son recounts his father’s story and shares his memories.

Lam was closely associated with Pablo Picasso and members of the surrealist movement like André Breton. His work poetically addresses themes of social injustice, nature and spirituality, and was greeted internationally with both consternation and acclaim. A witness to twentieth-century political upheaval throughout his long career – including the Spanish Civil War and the onset of World War II – Lam defined a new and unique way of painting for a post-colonial world. Lam’s work now brings a historical perspective to contemporary issues


2. Revolutionary Cultural Policy


The literacy campaign


The Cuban Art Institute


Interviews with the architects of the Art Institute


Revolutionary cinema- For the First Time



Revolutionary cinema- De Cierta Manera

3. Lazaro Saavedra


Lázaro Saavedra, one of Cuba's foremost conceptual artists and painters, has created a number of important works, notably Detector de ideologías (Ideology Detector, 1988) —a machine that purports to measure a person's degree of ideological acceptability. Rendering verdicts such as No Problem, Problematic, Counter-revolutionary or Heretical, Saavedra's piece was a daring breakthrough in Cuban art and political commentary. The Detector de ideologías is in the permanent collection of Cuba's Museum of Fine Arts. http://www.havana-cultura.com/en/int/...

4. Celebrating Cuban Culture

This website has a lot of links to films about things I talked about in this week;s lecture. Well worth a look:

CUBA 50

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