Revolutionary Horizons by Abigail McEwen

Author:Abigail McEwen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2016-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 80

Installation photo, Luis Martínez Pedro, dal 5 al 14 agosto. Galleria del Cavallino, Venice, 1955.

PARIS INTERLUDE: SOLDEVILLA AND ARCAY

While Martínez Pedro cast a wide net within postwar Constructivism, Soldevilla and Wifredo Arcay found their early, foundational bearings in Paris, where they too immersed themselves within a milieu of geometric abstraction. Soldevilla embarked on her own, perspicacious path within abstraction in 1949 when she arrived in Paris to take a position as cultural attaché at the Cuban Embassy. Inasmuch as she kept close personal company with Latin American artists and intellectuals—recounted in her memoir Ir, venir, volver a ir: crónicas (1952–1957), dedicated to José A. Baragaño—she studied and later exhibited within an international community of artists spanning different generations.36 Soldevilla took classes in 1949 at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière under the Russian-born artist Ossip Zadkine (1890–1967), a principal of the School of Paris and early adept of sculpture drawn on Cubist geometries. She also worked between 1951 and 1953 at the Atelier d’art abstrait, founded by Jean Dewasne (1921–1999) and Edgard Pillet (1912–1996) in 1950 near the Grande Chaumière. Oriented around a collective approach to aesthetic research, the Atelier organized both “visites-dialogues” with elder-generation artists such as Auguste Herbin (1882–1960), Alberto Magnelli (1888–1971), and Vasarely and focused discussions around the work of the Atelier’s younger students, among them Arcay, Yaacov Agam (b. 1928), and Pascual Navarro (1923–1985).37 She received informal guidance from others, including Vasarely, Jacobsen, and Arp, likely facilitated through her association with the Atelier.38 Through Pillet, Soldevilla would also have come into contact with Groupe Espace, founded by Bloc and Félix Del Marle (1889–1952) in 1951 around the promotion of collaborative, social values within geometric abstraction.39 The group’s advocacy of a synthesis between art and architecture and its public orientation suggests a precedent for the group Espacio, which Soldevilla founded in Havana in 1964.

Like Soldevilla, Arcay arrived in Paris in 1949, in his case on a grant to study painting, and he too developed his artistic identity under the auspices of the School of Paris. His career took a decisive turn following a propitious, early meeting with Bloc, the architect and sculptor well known as the cofounder (with Le Corbusier) of the avant-garde journal L’architecture d’aujourd’hui. Bloc offered him work as a print-maker and, despite initial misgivings—“I had left a really good job in Cuba as a silk screen printer . . . and I wasn’t going to fall right back into what I had just given up”—he took the job and a studio at Bloc’s villa in Meudon, a suburb of Paris.40 Meudon was home to a number of artists—Alberto Magnelli, Fernand Léger, Sonia Delaunay (1885–1979), Robert Delaunay (1885–1941), Jacques Villon (1875–1963)—and Bloc cultivated a community there into which Arcay was warmly received. His first album, Art d’aujourd’hui: maîtres de l’art abstrait (1953), included prints by sixteen artists whose work he had known only from books in Cuba, among them Kandinsky, Klee, and Mondrian.41 Arcay’s study of historical abstraction at first hand unquestionably inflected his

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