Emilio Sanchez in Cuba 1946-1959: Mid-Century Modernism and t he Search for Cultural Identity

Emilio Sanchez (1921-1999) was a Cuban artist who was born in the rural countryside of Camagüey, and left his native country in the late 1930s to study in America. After stints at Yale University (1939-40) and the University of Virginia (1941-43), he settled at the Art Students League in New York (1944) to study painting, a lifelong desire. Inspired by the mid-century New York realists such as Edward Hopper and Thomas Hart Benton, Sanchez took to drawing and painting architecture and quickly returned to his homeland in search of his cultural identity. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Sanchez travelled and lived in New York, Havana, and the Caribbean islands, establishing himself as the premier representative of daily life in the West Indies. His drawings and paintings of Cuban architecture, in particular, were exhibited in Havana and New York, but the Revolution brought an end to his direct relationship with the island. Though he never claimed any nostalgia for Cuba, his sexuality would have certainly made it impossible for him to continue visiting the island after 1960. He became a United States citizen and shifted his focus to New York City and other islands in the Caribbean. In 1965, A. Hyatt Mayor, the Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired some 50 prints and approximately 200 drawings by Sanchez, nearly all of Cuba in the 1940s and 1950s. This collection has remained in the Museum without having been catalogued, exhibited, or seriously considered. While Sanchez has received substantial interest in the last decade, very few of his works from Cuba in the 1940s and 1950s have ever been discussed in any significant way. Nevertheless, these architectural drawings, watercolors, and lithographs of Cuba shed enormous light on the cultural identity of the island in the last decades of the Pre-Revolutionary era, ranging from the vernacular farm structures of the interior to the fashionable architecture of Havana (Colonial, Neoclassical, and Modern). His reflections on the daily life of rural Cuba reveal a profound fascination with light, shadow and color, industrial buildings, farmer’s shacks, local businesses, dark interiors, landscapes, dancing and laundry. Similarly, his work in Havana continues these themes in both the residential interiors of the social elite, and in the bustling streets of the day-to-day working residents of the capital city.While proponents of this period refer to it as the “Golden Age” of Cuba and its critics as the “Mistress of Pleasure”, Emilio Sanchez was able to cut through the conspicuous consumption and tourism of the island and present an accurate face to what was a truly sad and beautiful place. In this sense, Emilio Sanchez in Cuba presents a unique insight into the complex character of a mid-century Modern artist who specialized in architectural representation as a way of searching for cultural identity in a land to which he would unwittingly never return.

Volume Editors
Anthony Abbate, Francis Lyn & Rosemary Kennedy

ISBN
978-0-935502-90-9