Lot Essay
Ponce studied drawing and painting at Havana's San Alejandro School of Fine Arts between 1915 and 1917, where his enthusiasm for the baroque Spanish painter Murillo and his undisciplined ways earned him the nickname of "Murillo el loco". Unlike most of the painters of his generation, Ponce did not travel to Madrid and Paris in the 1920s and early 1930s, acquiring his knowledge of European Modern and pre-Modern art via reproductions. He acknowledged his debt to the art of El Greco and Rembrandt, while refuting the often made claim that his paintings looked like those of Modigliani. Ponce turned his limited artistic and traditional cultural education from a handicap into an asset. By 1934, when he had his first one-man show at the Lyceum in Havana, Ponce had developed a unique brand of expressionism. In paintings such as Two Women 1934, in the collection of the Museum of Modern art in New York, and Beatas 1934, an award winning painting at the First National Salon of Art held in Havana in 1935, he created a mysterious world of intense light and shadows revealing a fragile, muted, and indefinite humanity. The most unique aspect of Ponce's style is his replacement of "tropical colors", so much a part of Modern European and Cuban Expressionism, for white and ochre-light and dark. He discovered that through a very personal re-working of chiaroscuro it was possible to express strong emotions and moods. Also different from most of the art of his contemporaries is the absence in Ponce's paintings of "Cuban themes" per se -- the Cuban landscape, the peasant, the Afro-Cuban, Colonial architecture, etc. His subject matter, although grounded in the artist's immediate life and environment, tends to more universal themes, like Christian subjects, bourgeoisie ladies, the sick and children.
The representation of children is a recurrent theme in Ponce's work and his best known painting on the subject is Niños of 1938, which earned him a purchase award that same year at the Second National Salon of Art. From that Salon the painting passed into the hands of the state and today it is in the collection of Cuba's National Museum. The similar painting reproduced in the opposite page is a larger (actually the largest Ponce I have seen) and more than likely later version of the 1938 Niños. In the later version Ponce set his elegantly dressed and seemingly lost children in a wider and more defined, if not less arid landscape. Among other things, this canvas attests to Ponce's mastery of painting: his fluid use of the brush and fingers to apply the pigment, his expressive use of light and dark, and his most subtle use of color -- in this case, a variety of whites, burnt siena, and touches of venetian red and earth green.
The aforementioned state-purchase-award given to the 1938 Niños meant both recognition for the painting and its immediate acquisition. The later version is probably a commissioned piece from one of Ponce's patrons, who liked the original but could not purchase it. In that case, it would have been painted around 1939-1940.
Juan A. Martinez, Ph.D.
Miami, 1996
The representation of children is a recurrent theme in Ponce's work and his best known painting on the subject is Niños of 1938, which earned him a purchase award that same year at the Second National Salon of Art. From that Salon the painting passed into the hands of the state and today it is in the collection of Cuba's National Museum. The similar painting reproduced in the opposite page is a larger (actually the largest Ponce I have seen) and more than likely later version of the 1938 Niños. In the later version Ponce set his elegantly dressed and seemingly lost children in a wider and more defined, if not less arid landscape. Among other things, this canvas attests to Ponce's mastery of painting: his fluid use of the brush and fingers to apply the pigment, his expressive use of light and dark, and his most subtle use of color -- in this case, a variety of whites, burnt siena, and touches of venetian red and earth green.
The aforementioned state-purchase-award given to the 1938 Niños meant both recognition for the painting and its immediate acquisition. The later version is probably a commissioned piece from one of Ponce's patrons, who liked the original but could not purchase it. In that case, it would have been painted around 1939-1940.
Juan A. Martinez, Ph.D.
Miami, 1996