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Angel Acosta León
ArtNexus July-September 1959, p. 59.
by Graziella Pogolotti, Samuel Feijóo
Angel Acosta León
The articles written by Graziella Pogolotti, Samuel Feijóo, Marisol Trujillo, Loló de la Torriente, and Bienvenido A. Rodríguez
ArtNexus No. 47
To María Elena Jubría, Adelaida de Juan, Oscar Morriña, and Graziella Pogolotti.
Acosta León’s figurative space has barely been considered within the rhetoric of representation of what constitutes a national notion. Evaluated more in terms of personal and epochal circumstances, his objects and machines are characterized as referring to the nation and are seen almost exclusively from this perspective. Rarely are they discussed or thought of as other non-temporal symbols of what is Cuban.
After almost 40 years after his death, the unconditional praise of Ángel Acosta León’s oeuvre doesn’t appear to be justified merely by a consensus of taste or a sort of tacit legitimization of its magnificence. The hint of nostalgia with which he is evoked is not shared by any other Cuban painter. Lam, as with the rest of our avant-garde artists, is always remembered in critiques of art; others, such as Roberto Diago or Juan Francisco Elso, are remembered by laments over their disappearance. Acosta León, on the other hand, is remembered through the memory of a better time and a creative act that was assumed more by emotion than theoretical deference. Such privilege would be enough if it weren’t due to the fact of being practically restricted to the Cuban context, and of corresponding with a certain definitive reasoning regarding Acosta León’s exceptional importance to the island’s culture. Of the numerous dichotomies emerging from his work, this one is undoubtedly the most unexpected: Criticism has been exceptionally scarce for Acosta León. Aside from the dozen articles published in Cuba during the sixties, and the obligatory analysis found in textbooks on contemporary Cuban painting1, few have argued for or properly consider the complexity of his work.
The approach to his work could be summed up in two constants. On the one hand, the myth of the anguish, generally described as “inexplicable,” that projects directly into the canvas, and which concludes with a suicide surrounded by little-known circumstances. On the other, the objects and machines generally associated with his work that have joined the rest of individual topics of Cuban avant-garde: Amelia Peláez’s stained-glass windows, René Portocarrero’s cities, or Mariano Rodríguez’s roosters. But unlike them, Acosta León’s figurative space has barely been considered within the rhetoric of representation of what constitutes a national notion. Evaluated more in terms of personal and epochal circumstances, his objects and machines are characterized as referring to the nation and are seen almost exclusively from this perspective. Rarely are they discussed or thought of as other non-temporal symbols of what is Cuban.
Acosta León’s formation and development coincides with the violent and repeated debates surrounding Cuban abstraction that took place during the 1950s and 60s. Accused of being easy, of lacking a genuine artistic practice, and of mimicking the tendencies in vogue, abstraction was insulted, above all, because it did not express an evident affiliation to nationality. From 1959, two more accusations were added—the evasion of responsibility before the convulsed situation of the Batista regime, and the absence of humanism that implied a type of painting too close to “capitalist alienation” and wasn’t helping in the formation of the “new man.” In 1961, the writer Edmundo Desnoes assumed some related justifications: “If painters of undeniable talent such as Hugo Consuegra, Raúl Martínez, and Guido Llinás (...) have expressed themselves in the style of painting from New York and Paris, this is not gratuitous and it has a reason—first, the lousy environment within our country, and secondly, the artist’s natural restlessness to incorporate into his form of expression the latest discoveries of his craft.”
Restlessness and not aesthetic conviction. Contradictory, even for Desnoes, Cuban abstraction lacks autonomy: “The only thing we can reproach them is for not taking advantage of the previous generation’s advances in terms of form and reality.”2 Considered against the rigid duality on which the polemic was based, Acosta León’s work would entitle not a third possibility, but a very coherent problematization of many of the stereotypes that continued, with the same requirements, throughout the following decades.
Acosta León was born in Havana in 1930. He finished his studies in sculpture at the Academia de San Alejandro in 1956, and died eight years later. His artistic life spans barely nine years, about five of them within his mature period. The tree-lined parks, views of the sea, and harbor areas of his first oil paintings constitute eventual points of departure of what would become his biggest conceptual supports: the city, urban travelling, the sea, and the ambivalence between what’s natural and what’s man-made. Between 1958 and 1959, he developed, in the most exceptional series of self-portraits of Cuban art, a feverish introspective stage that later decanted into the extreme tensions of his figures, and in the particular symbolism that appeared after the landscapes. This would include intersections and crosses, syringes, fingerprints, and brief or unfinished texts that add other meanings to the main motifs or tend to operate as private notations through which Acosta León confirms those meanings to himself. Occasionally—appearing barely perceptible or as extensions or marks inside the main figure—such signs display themselves as sorts of graffitos on the margins, giving the canvas an exclusive muralistic feel, or even a diary page.
Whether his style derives from an apparent or a real automatism3, the origin of many of these initial signs is less stylistic and more a description of the proverbial anguish used to characterize Acosta León’s place in Cuban painting.
There are, indeed, two main obsessions. One is the persistent need for intimacy and isolation. It isn’t until 1959, after he rented a room in one of the many mansions in downtown Havana, that Acosta León was able to gain independence from his family and to somehow distance himself from the extreme poverty in which he had lived. The lack of understanding by his elders regarding his wish to become a painter, and the lack of privacy needed by his introverted character in order to paint without being seen, are part of the underlying drama in the 1959 Familia en la ventana (Family on the Window), one of his first works to gain critical acceptance. Secondly, there is illness and death. Besides the direct use of texts or his fingerprints, thus imposing himself physically on the canvas, the crosses and syringes make up his most suggestive symbols. The crosses are “the death he always carried inside,” a vision whose background is more real than mystical. 4 In a situation that was never quite determined as being real or fictitious, Acosta León, according to his own statement, suffered from the aftermath of syphilis inherited from his father, who lived in agony and the impossibility of getting medications with which to cure himself. His disease worsens between 1961 and 1962, and the idea of committing suicide begins to take shape. “He even said that he wanted to jump from the third floor.
That means that even back then he was obsessed with the idea of suicide (…) The crosses may have been a consequence of the disease. It is said that syphilis is identified with crosses. It could be true, but I don’t know for sure.”5 Independent from the possibility of being read within an atmosphere of religion or within the context of other works that have a certain mystical inclination6, a piece like Rostro con cruces (Faces and Crosses) is a summary of his self-portraits and the crosses —an invocation of an inner uneasiness as well as death by means of one of the symbols most closely associated with it.
Excluding his self-portraits, around 1959, Acosta León busies himself with abstractions, still lifes influenced by Cubism and Modigliani, and portraits of friends and family which are, along with his landscapes, his least-known works.7 But that year also sees his first painting of objects and machines, Guarapera o impactos (Guarapo Maker or Impacts)8 and with it a completely new theme in Cuban art. To pay for his studies in painting and sculpture, an even in later years, Acosta León worked as a welder, tinsmith, and conductor at a bus station. 9 “I’m a conductor; I live on a set of wheels. That’s where this style of painting came from —reality.”10 The linearity and relative expressive moderation of his paintings until then give room to huge formats, brightly colored, metallic, with patinas, as well as to twisted and ambiguous figures that recall a metal that has been barely repaired, tortured and applied to the fire. The wheel as a fundamental motif, vegetation, and human traits fused with mechanisms make up the essence of the many dichotomies underlying in his work —the tension between movement and stillness, between what’s natural and what’s man-made, between the useless and the useful. Supported by all sorts of elements and signs, all of these tensions, along with others, manifest themselves at the same time. Within the ambivalence of their representation, we have four main objects or mechanisms that maintain an immediate identification with their referent: cars, coffee makers, guarapo makers, and cots.11 Palm trees, circus tents, toys, or any other object can be transformed by being propped onto cars or carts with unequal wheels. The coffee and guarapo makers, closely related to public transportation employees (the cup of coffee was one of the rituals at the end of the line), were also found constantly throughout the urban landscape at the time. The cots, on the other hand, were an intrinsic element in the country’s backward areas and the life in the city’s old mansions and boarding homes. The tour de force of Acosta León’s painting rests around these themes.
Above all, we have the city. Not Havana illuminated as in Portocarrero’s works, but the city evoked through its dynamics, with an attitude corresponding more to the urban traveler than the flaneur. It is not an enumeration of its spaces but rather the implications of its visual richness and transformations. None of the attributes usually identifying the city within Cuban art is at the foreground. The attributes of a concrete Cuban time are indeed suggested, but they are, above anything else, contemporary. The way Acosta León assumes the phenomenon and the playfulness with which he works the theme (inherent, also, in most of his works) place him within the latest tendencies of the reassessment of urban art: Jean Dubuffet’s works on the perspective of the man on the street, since the 1940s, and during the mid-1950s, Guy Debord’s and the Situationists’s drift theory and playful considerations on the city. The cots constitute an important part of this universe; their twisted iron bars are not only reiterating the misery they represent, but they also possess an affective nearness by virtue of being humanized and assumed in a playful fashion. They are, perhaps, the best example with which to confront the ambivalence found in Acosta León’s painting and its salvation from the object itself.
They’re also an insinuation of a typical urban interior never before assumed as such. Those spaces of poverty, implicitly understood as spaces of exception and used exclusively to present or denounce a given reality, are observed by Acosta León from an unusual vantage point, transgressing a good part of the artistic imagery on which the nation’s symbolism was trying to settle.
At the same time, the coffee and guarapo makers, ever-present in the Havana landscape at the time, sum up two of the main traditions in the island’s culture and history—coffee and sugar. Similar to the treatment of the city, these traditions and not described by previously assimilated figurative components, but they are gathered as process and use. These two capital themes for the notion of “Cubanness” are conceived by Acosta León the same way he appropriates all his themes—the coffee and guarapo makers are objects and processes recovered from both his own experience and everyday life. Artistically speaking, these objects are virgin, since, until then, their physical presence had not been involved in the representation of the notion of what’s national.12 Cuban lack of temporality is no longer announced through that which implied stability (the landscape, human component, or architecture), but through manipulate-able, even corruptible, objects that were part of the instability of the urban context. When referring to Lam, Alejo Carpentier talks about a cosmogony “that isn’t far from a System of Creation—a system of re-creation. It departs from the most concrete and everyday elements of our reality. An important painter is the one who, at any given moment in the history of art, creates a cosmogony (…) to name things so they become or become again.”13 It appears that Acosta León is the only Cuban painter who shares such cosmogony with Lam, not only for the location of its essence but also for the magnitude of its bestiary.
Perhaps the difficulty in evaluating Acosta León’s work as a renewing force within the representation of Cuban tradition, and in reasoning it by inserting it in a contemporary dimension that goes beyond Cuba’s international standing, obeys to the convulsion of the moment.14 According to Graziella Pogolotti, the generation of artists who reached adulthood in 1959 participated in two “phenomena of conscience:” Having lived “under extreme tension derived from constant threat” and “under a creative effort that has reached like never before, a tremendous degree of intensity at every level —educational development, economic transformation, cultural creation and dissemination, and even less noticeable things.”15 Though he never conceptualized it as such, it is possible to say that Acosta León fuses these two “phenomena of conscience.” Converging naturally in his work are the present and what had begun abruptly to be seen as the past, a past still contained within the present and that in many cases never ceased to exist. It is here that Acosta León could be considered as the best reflection of such an important transition. His pictorial maturity coincides with the social changes, and the deep tensions and antagonisms found in his work are at the core of the events taking place in the artistic arena. They represent the strife that personal experience and historical circumstance convey (ultimately they are the same).
Even if we focus our interest on a tortuous search for a coherent representation of the notion of national, Acosta León goes beyond the debate between avant-garde figurative art and abstraction. In him we find what the previous generation has sought for—the search for innovative forms without imitating Europe and North America. In his works, tradition reveals itself as an ample spectrum of daily life and not as the fragmentation with which we build cultural and self-recognition spaces. Nevertheless, and despite the fact that avant-garde works would continue being regarded as all-Cuban, the social transformation that took place since 1959 still implied a new reconsideration on the making of the notion of national and its symbolic referents. Essentially, a reconstruction that did not go beyond the stereotypes used to debate abstract painting. Without being completely analyzed even within this context, and aside from being admitted as part of a personal anguish, Acosta León’s work was considered an importantecho of the situation, praised for both its optimism and its doubtless artistic quality. But there cannot be any dichotomies or ambiguities in the impersonality timelessness found inherently in thought or in the construction or adoption of a symbol, especially when it implies a nation or the ideological guidelines sustaining a social change. Luis Martínez Pedro’s territorial waters, or Raúl Martínez’s work in pop art—immediately recognizable because they offer solutions to the persistent problem of adapting international trends into the Cuban context— certify more truly this new symbolism, not so much for their evidently optimistic vision but for the lack of ambiguities with which they reflect it. This makes Luis Martínez Pedro’s case the more notorious, because he was able to combine successfully abstract concepts with the theme of “Cubanness.” His territorial waters, understood as the frontal recovery of the sea in Cuban art, are also the definition of a political territory.16
Differing from both, Acosta León’s affiliation with other trends, not only artistic but also esthetic, does not occur by re-elaborating a trend but by a coincidence on the way of appreciating the world of industry and the components of urban culture—something that the Cuban aesthetic panorama at the time was absolutely oblivious to. Perhaps the complexity and newness of the phenomenon made it more difficult to establish this relationship, but the fact remains that Acosta León’s work was never appreciated from this point of view. Critics of his shows in Europe were the ones who first saw it. Aside from the enthusiasm that the Cuban Revolution generated within the post-war crisis, the Europeans did not hesitate to relate Acosta León’s work with the new figuration and include it in their important reevaluation of cultural archetypes. While it’s true that Acosta León coincides with the new figuration in its playfulness, it does shy away from it by lacking irony and, above all, by not reproducing the object through its denial. To pigeonhole Acosta León inside a trend has been an impossible undertaking. Neither Graziella Pogolotti’s surrealization of his work17 nor the expressionistic way in which his objects are deformed, satisfy the vastness of his oeuvre. Ignoring the specifics of the context, only one of his works’ critiques, appeared in Holland, best defines his affiliation to a phenomenon larger than the Cuban space. In it, Acosta León is seen as “possessed, a tormented individual who sways from the glory and the refuse characterizing our new culture—machines, shrapnel, high-speed engines, high-tension sexuality.”18
To have thought out Acosta León’s work and bestiary in this fashion—as a clear identification and insertion of what is Cuban into the contemporary context, similar to the way the works by Wilfredo Lam, Amelia Peláez or Carlos Enríquez are thought of—would have required the huge effort of overflowing the modern discourses used to define cultural frontiers and to admit an all-encompassing plurality, not limited to cultural and racial components. Ultimately, it would have required the understanding of Acosta León’s spontaneity as the intrinsic query of that very notion of symbol, and also probably its transcendence. It also would have required to understand it as the assimilation of the underground spaces through which social changes traveled, and not as a mere reflection of such changes, e. g. a superficial testimony of the most obvious political or social events. In this sense, Acosta León’s work constitutes an approach to the problematization of the phenomena understood as approximate variations of an ideal, and the consideration of such variation as being the true essence. Perhaps the gradual distancing of critics, and the fact of having been held hostage by stereotypes—even by those that, according to the possibilities of his work, have been set as representing the ideals of “Cubanness”—have contributed to that plain acceptance of Acosta León. But the nostalgia or the emotion that his work is remembered doesn’t correspond only to the aesthetics certified by his talent, but also to the spontaneity contained within: The recovery of spaces shared joyfully even in drama, tasted in fable and origin, expressed with the same limpidity with which they were felt.
With the help of the painter Roberto Matta, in 1963 Acosta León travels to France. From there he goes on to The Netherlands, armed with a scholarship granted by UNESCO. He exhibits in prestigious galleries in Paris, Amsterdam, and Brussels with a critical success comparable only to the one Lam had experienced on the international circuit. The circumstances surrounding his disappearance seem to follow this sequence, unconfirmed in all but few details: During his stay in Paris, Acosta León participates in an homage to José Martí. Organized by opponents of the Cuban government, the event is covered by the press, and some photographs are printed. Someone close to the artist, someone who supposedly accompanied him during most of the trip, insisted that from that moment on he couldn’t return to the island. Acosta León then visits Haydée Santamaría, who was in Paris at the time, and she tells him to return to Cuba and prepare a great exhibit that would travel throughout Europe the following year. She also promises him a studio in Havana, along with all the necessary conditions to continue working. During the voyage back, Acosta León tries several times to commit suicide and has to be placed in the crew’s custody. But ultimately he succeeds in his mission: On December 5, 1963 hurls himself to the sea, a scarce few hours from reaching port.
* All images illustrating this article are courtesy of Cernuda Art Consultants Inc., Miami.
NOTES
1. Basically, the articles written by Graziella Pogolotti, Samuel Feijóo, Marisol Trujillo, Loló de la Torriente, and Bienvenido A. Rodríguez; the analysis by Adelaida de Juan in her texts about Cuban art, and María Elens Jubría, in both her publications on the same subject and the two Acosta León retrospective shows held at the Museo Nacional de Cuba in 1967 and 1975. In 1989, this author concluded his bachelor degree’s thesis on Ángel Acosta León’s painting, and two of his articles related to the subject appeared in the Cuban press in 1991.
2. Edmundo Desnoes: “Cuban Painting: An Interpretation,” in Casa de las Américas #8, September-October, 1961, pp. 44-45.
3. “I first paint something and then add other things. That’s what I like the most. To the car I’m painting now I’ve added a sort of tutti-frutti or whatever you want to call it.” (María Elena Jubrías: Words included in the catalog of Ángel Acosta León retrospective show held at the Museo Nacional, February 1967, p. 2.)
4. Interview with Ida Gloria Ramos Acosta, Ángel Acosta León’s niece. Havana, April 1988.
5. Interview with artist and ceramist Alfredo Sosabrado. Havana, April 1988.
6. “He didn’t follow a particular religion, but my grandmother was very religious. In her house she had all types of saints. He rebelled against all that. He used to say, ‘why do you believe if you don’t have anything?’ He didn’t believe in anything. It was another way of revealing himself.” (Interview with Ida Gloria Ramos Acosta, op. cit.)
7. “Sometimes he was working simultaneously on three paintings. He’d begin two new pieces on the same day.” (Interview with Ida Gloria Ramos Acosta, op. cit.)
8. Marisol Trujillo, “Acosta León’s Anguish,” in Unión VI, #3, June 1968, p. 58. Nevertheless, Loló de la Torriente talks of, since 1958, “coffee makers and guarapo makers in white and black with gray. Allusions more than representations”. (Loló de la Torriente, “Acosta León’s Double Trench,” in La Gaceta de Cuba IV, #42, January-February 1965, p. 69.) [Translator’s note: The word guarapera comes from guarapo, or sugar-cane juice. Guarapera is the contraption that squeezes out the juice from the sugar cane.]
9. A conductor was not a chauffeur but the employee who distributed the tickets inside the bus and called the stops.
10. Samuel Feijóo, “Brief Interview with the Painter Ángel Acosta León,” in Islas VII, #2, January-June 1962, p. 83.
11. Known as columbinas in the Cuba of back then. The extreme ambiguity of Acosta León’s figures makes it impossible, at least for the purposes of this article, to delve in-depth into the analysis or classification of his different objects.
12. All interviewees have coincided that the coffee makers were imported, though without specifying a country of fabrication or origin. It probably was the United States.
13. Quoted from “From Rivera to Portocarrero in Carpentier’s Chronicles” by Adelaida de Juan. In Revolución Cubana #127, March 1983, p. 18.
14. Samuel Feijóo was the only one that somehow was able to notice the relationship between Acosta León and the tendencies mentioned before. While presenting three drawings by Dubuffet, he wrote: “(…) down here Acosta León’s with his rolling machines, over there Dubuffet with his wobbly automobiles.” (Samuel Feijóo: “Dubuffet,” in Islas IV, #2, January-June 1962, pp. 198-200.)
15. Graziella Pogolotti, “Expressionism in Cuban Painting,” in Revista de la Biblioteca Nacional José Martí, third epoch, Vol. VII, #4, October-December 1965, p. 42.
16. Such recovery also happens with Acosta León. As stated before, the sea is another of his recurring themes, like the city, and with the exception of his first landscapes, it appears more by suggestion than description. The sea also was one of the constants in his private life: “He was a great swimmer. That was the reason why we could not believe the story of his death by drowning. He loved to dive. He could remain a long time under water. Sometimes he spent entire days at the beach.” (Interview with Ida Gloria Ramos Acosta, op. cit.)
17. Graziella Pogolotti, op. cit.
18. Samuel Feijóo,
“An Intimate Acosta León,” in Islas VII, #2, July-September 1959, p. 59.
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