Amelia Peláez

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Amelia Peláez del Casal, born in 1896, died on April 8, 1968, making her a leading Cuban painter of the Avant-garde period.

Student life in Paris

After being given a government grant in order to pursue art, Pelaez and Cuban writer Lydia Cabrera moved to Paris. At École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, both students took painting and art history classes. At the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and the École du Louvre, she also took drawing and art history courses. Pelaez was enrolled, as well as Cabrera, in Fernand Léger's Academie Contemporaine in 1931. Alexandra Exter, a Russian painter, whose friendship and classes in color theory and design had a major influence.

In 1933, Galerie Zak hosted a solo exhibition of her paintings, where she exhibited thirty-eight works. She appeared in the 11th Salon des Tuileries and "was also included in an exhibit of illustrated manuscripts by calligrapher Guido at the Galerie Myrbor" in which she illustrated Sept Poemes of Leon Paul Fargue. French writers lauded her work in her time in Paris.

Life in Havana

Pelaez returned to live in her mother's colonial-style house in Cuba in 1934 after a performance at the Salon des Independants. The Cuba Pelaez returned to a time of economic uncertainty and political turmoil. Cuban artists were searching for a new art that would represent the country's identity from the late 1920s to the present. Pelaez moved away from earlier vanguard tactics and towards new ones that involved images of Afro-Cuban and pesant (pesant) people while defending them in the adoption of European modernism. Pelaez's vibrant colors as well as thick lines are derived from Spanish-colonial architecture "combining domestic objects with architectural decorations," according to Ingrid Williams Elliot. Peláez uses "Baroque ornamentation" in her use of domestic colonial interiors to engage and blend multiple traditions and styles, both old and present, to arrive at a contemporary Cuban idiom.

Pelaez held the Lyceum in Havana, 1935, which helped increase the visibility of her new Cuban style.

Peláez was playing with "patterns, shapes, and geometric relationships of tablecloths and fruit dishes, laying the groundwork for the geometric constructions and rhythmic patterns that have been associated with her architectural ornamentation in her forties" during this period. Her signature still life paintings were praised for the use of native fruits and flora that refer to her Cuban roots.

Pelaez's paintings and drawings in 1935-1936 mainly revolved around the use of ink and pencil. These drawings differ from her earlier oil paintings, by distorting and exaggerating the figure with "sinuous line and light shading" that refer to Cubism and European Modernism.

Peláez received a medal in the National Exposition of Painters and Sculptors in 1938 and has worked on several art magazines in Cuba, including Orgenes, Nadie Parec, and Espuela de Plata. She began a workshop in San Antonio de los Baos, a small city near Havana, where she dedicated herself to her favorite pastime, pottery, until 1962. She exhibited her artworks at the Venice Biennale in 1951 and 1957, as well as in 1952. She was a guest of honor and jury member at the First International Biennial of Painting and Printmaking in Mexico City in 1958, but she stayed out of the raucous and turbulent jury discussions based on what she described as "an openly Communist bias in the decisions." A ceramic mural at the Tribunal de Cuentas in Havana (1953) and the Habana Hilton hotel's facade (1957) are her two most notable works of this kind. She had a difficult time selling her paintings as a living artist; Amelias, later identified as Amelias, rose to fame much later in life.

Peláez died in Havana in 1968.

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