拍品专文
The Cuban painter and writer Carlos Enrquez is yet to receive his proper due as one of Cuba and Latin America's pioneer and most original modernist artist. He was one of the leading contributors to the modernist art movement that emerged in Cuba in the late 1920s and his personal artistic vision is one of the most unique of his generation in all of Latin American art. That vision, which Enrquez called his romancero criollo or creole ballads, was aptly characterized by the founding director of MoMA, Alfred H. Barr, when he described Enrquez's paintings as "suggesting the legedary violence and sensuality of his country by fusing desperados, galloping horses, figures of women, and the windy, rolling Cuban landscape into tornados of irridescent color" (1944).
The general contours of Carlos Enrquez's brief artistic trajectory include a long formative phase from about 1925 to 1934, followed by his most creative and productive years from around 1934 to 1947, and a "late style" dating to the last decade of his life. Although an easel painter at his best, he also executed a number of frescos in Havana, illustrated books, and left a considerable body of works on paper. He was not a prolific painter, in part because he was also a writer, who left behind three novels, short stories, art criticism and descargas or very personal observations on a variety of subjects.
During his stay in Europe in the early 1930s, Enrquez assimilated the formal lessons of Expressionism and Cubism, as well as the conceptual ones of Surrealism, developing a highly personal figurative style of dynamic transparent color forms and narrative-symbolic content. While his visual language evolved towards Expressionism in the 1940s and in the direction of caricature in the 1950s, his main subjects remained constant: portraiture, the female nude, the horse, the Cuban countryside and Afro-Cuban popular culture. Through these subjects Enrquez explored his interest in human psychology, sexuality, myth, violence and mystery in connection to his search for a personal and collective Cuban cultural identity.
La Fuite of 1945 is a fine example of Carlos Enriquez's expressionistic and biographical paintings of the 1940s. Using a thick and varied palette as well as symbolic and narrative devices, Enrquez represents a painful moment in his life: the break-up with his second wife Eva Frjaville. The more symbolic and strongest images in the painting are the silhouetted nude on the bed crawling with sperms, the ghostly figure of the horse, and the eye and the lips on the upper part of the shack. The eye and lips belonged to a portrait which Enrquez painted over to make La Fuite. The nude supposedly represents a fresh imprint of Eva on the bed sheet, the horse alludes to sex and possibly to the artist himself, and the mysterious eye suggests a voyeuristic presence. On the narrative plane, the slim female nude walking out the door represents the woman who took Eva away and the running nude depicts Eva herself, thus the title of the painting. Enrquez suggest the tremendous psychological impact of his marital rupture by showing the site of the drama, his beloved home-studio known as the "Hurn Azul," with its walls literally falling apart.
In La Fuite, as in all of his best works, Enrquez transforms the personal into the universal and the mythical. In a strong expressionistic language and with unbridled imagination, he turned an incident of personal angst into a powerful image of human sexuality, passion, infidelity, and devastation. La Fuite is a significant example of Carlos Enrquez's 1940s production, which in this case contains certain unique characteristics, such as the incorporation of elements from a previous painting and the subject of his matrimonial rift.
Juan A. Martnez, Ph. D.
Miami, April 1998
The general contours of Carlos Enrquez's brief artistic trajectory include a long formative phase from about 1925 to 1934, followed by his most creative and productive years from around 1934 to 1947, and a "late style" dating to the last decade of his life. Although an easel painter at his best, he also executed a number of frescos in Havana, illustrated books, and left a considerable body of works on paper. He was not a prolific painter, in part because he was also a writer, who left behind three novels, short stories, art criticism and descargas or very personal observations on a variety of subjects.
During his stay in Europe in the early 1930s, Enrquez assimilated the formal lessons of Expressionism and Cubism, as well as the conceptual ones of Surrealism, developing a highly personal figurative style of dynamic transparent color forms and narrative-symbolic content. While his visual language evolved towards Expressionism in the 1940s and in the direction of caricature in the 1950s, his main subjects remained constant: portraiture, the female nude, the horse, the Cuban countryside and Afro-Cuban popular culture. Through these subjects Enrquez explored his interest in human psychology, sexuality, myth, violence and mystery in connection to his search for a personal and collective Cuban cultural identity.
La Fuite of 1945 is a fine example of Carlos Enriquez's expressionistic and biographical paintings of the 1940s. Using a thick and varied palette as well as symbolic and narrative devices, Enrquez represents a painful moment in his life: the break-up with his second wife Eva Frjaville. The more symbolic and strongest images in the painting are the silhouetted nude on the bed crawling with sperms, the ghostly figure of the horse, and the eye and the lips on the upper part of the shack. The eye and lips belonged to a portrait which Enrquez painted over to make La Fuite. The nude supposedly represents a fresh imprint of Eva on the bed sheet, the horse alludes to sex and possibly to the artist himself, and the mysterious eye suggests a voyeuristic presence. On the narrative plane, the slim female nude walking out the door represents the woman who took Eva away and the running nude depicts Eva herself, thus the title of the painting. Enrquez suggest the tremendous psychological impact of his marital rupture by showing the site of the drama, his beloved home-studio known as the "Hurn Azul," with its walls literally falling apart.
In La Fuite, as in all of his best works, Enrquez transforms the personal into the universal and the mythical. In a strong expressionistic language and with unbridled imagination, he turned an incident of personal angst into a powerful image of human sexuality, passion, infidelity, and devastation. La Fuite is a significant example of Carlos Enrquez's 1940s production, which in this case contains certain unique characteristics, such as the incorporation of elements from a previous painting and the subject of his matrimonial rift.
Juan A. Martnez, Ph. D.
Miami, April 1998