Amelia Peláez (1896-1968)
PROPERTY FROM THE BARBARA WALKER GORDON COLLECTION
Amelia Peláez (1896-1968)

Naturaleza muerta

Details
Amelia Peláez (1896-1968)
Naturaleza muerta
signed and dated 'A. Peláez 1947' (lower right) and titled 'Naturaleza muerta' (on the verso)
gouache on paper
21 7/8 x 29 5/8 in. (55 x 75 cm.)
Executed in 1947.
Literature
Exhibition catalogue, Amelia Peláez, 1896-1968: A Retrospective, Una Retrospectiva, Miami, Cuban Museum of Arts and Culture, 1988, p. 107, no. 31 (noted on checklist).
Exhibited
Miami, Cuban Museum of Arts and Culture, Amelia Peláez, 1896-1968: A Retrospective, Una Retrospectiva, 15 July-15 August, 1988, no. 31. This exhibition also travelled to Washington, D.C., Museum of Modern Art of Latin America, Organization of American States, 14 September-29 October 1988, included in checklist under no. 32.

Lot Essay

We are grateful to Fundación Arte Cubano for their assistance cataloguing this work.

Opulence, sensuality, baroque; the terms that qualify the way of life, the architecture, the decoration of Havana, seem to have been created to explain the paintings of Amelia Peláez.1

Amelia Peláez’s iconic works manifest a strong predilection for the craft of drawing. Tightly structured, her abstract compositions, such as Naturaleza muerta from 1947, make use of black bold lines that twist and bend while enclosing cells of crystalline colors that seem to trap Cuba’s tropical light. Her still lifes reflect her international training but more importantly, reveal the inspiration she found in her natural surroundings upon her return to Cuba in 1934 after spending nearly a decade in New York and Paris. The only woman within the Cuban vanguardia, Amelia created a sophisticated and lyrical modernism that illustrated a very personal and private life that her neo-colonial home in the Havana suburb of La Víbora afforded her. There, in her studio, she thrived as an artist, entertained friends, and received visitors such as Mrs. Barbara Gordon who paid a visit in 1943 and was thrilled to be in the artist’s haven which she described as “…surrounded by flowers and birds of many colors.”2

By the 1940s, Peláez was internationally recognized and included in numerous exhibitions in Cuba such as a retrospective of her works dating from 1929 to 1943 at the Institución Hispano-Cubana de Cultura but also abroad. The exhibition Modern Cuban Painters organized by Cuban scholar and curator José Gómez Sicre which was held at the Museum of Modern Art and opened in April of 1944, was a personal and artistic triumph as it made her work known to dealers and collectors in New York. Her work had been included in the museum’s collection since 1942 with the purchase of the painting Still Life in Red and a drawing Card Game.3

Her flat and elaborate compositions aid in creating an aesthetic based on Cubism that beyond expressing or implying a Cuban identity, also convey universal themes relating to a sense of place, the love of home and the everyday domestic accoutrements of life such as bowls filled with fruits and glass windows that let the air in and filter the rays of the sun through kaleidoscopic panels.

Margarita J. Aguilar, Doctoral Candidate, The Graduate Center, New York

1 M. Traba, exhibition catalogue, Dibujos de Amelia Peláez, Bogotá, Museo de Arte Moderno,1967 (introduction to the catalogue).
2 Mrs. Gordon’s own notes from unpublished essay, Amelia Peláez como artista universal, written in Spanish dated August 19, 1943.
3 G. V. Blanc, “The Secret Garden of Amelia Peláez,” in Amelia Peláez, 1896-1968, A Retrospective, Miami, The Cuban Museum of Arts and Culture, 1988, pp. 48-49.


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