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Eduardo Abela.
 Eduardo
Abela. Born San Antonio de los Baņos, Cuba, 1889.
Died Havana, 196 .Eduardo Abela studied at the San Alejandro Academy of
Fine Arts, graduating in I921. He lived in Spain from 1921 to 1924 and
France from 1927 to 1929 to expand his artistic and cultural horizons. In
Paris he socialized with a group of vanguard Cuban writers and artists
including Alejo Carpentier, who encouraged him to paint Cuban themes and
introduced him to the latest currents in art. After experimenting with
various modern styles, Abela developed his own, under the inspiration of
Jules Pascin and Marc Chagall. His Parisian stay culminated with an
exhibition at the Galerie Zak in November 1929, where he showed a series of
paintings and drawings drawing on Afrocuban and Creole culture. Like many
of his colleagues, he discovered Cuba in his art while living abroad,
apparently motivated by a combination of distance and nostalgia.
On his return to Havana, Abela turned to political and
social cartooning and invented a character called El Bobo (The
Fool), which appeared in the pages of El Diario de la Marina from 1930 to
1934. El Bobo gained national recognition as a critical voice against the
Gerardo Machado dictatorship. In the second half of the 1930s Abela
returned to painting, employing a naturalistic style influenced by early
Renaissance painting and the Mexican mural movement. At this time he
focused on an idealized view of the Cuban peasant and the countryside, as
seen in his most renowned painting, Los guajiros (1938). In 1937 he directed the
short-lived Free Studio of Painting and Sculpture, which briefly
offered an alternative to the elitist and highly structured artistic
training provided by San Alejandro.
Abela served as Cuba's cultural attache to Mexico from
1941 to 1946 and to Guatemala from 1947 to 1952. The last and most
productive phase of his artistic career began in the early 1950s and lasted
for a decade. This so-called magic period was characterized by an
expressionistic representation of a fantasy world inhabited by women,
children, and animals.
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The paintings and caricatures of Abela have been
extensively exhibited in Havana since the 1920s, and to a lesser extent in
Spain. France, Mexico, Guatemala. and the United States. He won a number of
awards for his paintings, including prizes at the National Salons of 1938
and 1956. His works are housed in numerous private collections in Cuba,
where he is also well represented at the National Museum in Havana. Outside
of Cuba, his paintings reside in private collections in the Caribbean,
Central America, the United States, Spain, and France.
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