Amelia Peláez

Amelia Peláez del Casal (5 January 1896 – 8 April 1968) was an important Cuban painter of the Avant-garde generation.

Biography Salón de Mayo, 1967. Sidewalk insert in front of Radiocentro CMQ Building by Amelia Peláez. Amelia Peláez was born on 5 January 1896 in Yaguajay, Cuba, in the former Cuban province of Las Villas (now Sancti Spíritus Province). She was the fifth born of eleven siblings in a family that was part of the Cuban-Creole middle class. Her father was a doctor, Manuel Pelaez y Laredo, and her mother, Maria del Carmen del Casal y Lastra, stayed at home with her children. Amelia's uncle was Julian del Casal, who was a poet and included her family in Cuba's intellectual circles.

In 1917, her family moved to Havana, to the La Víbora district, and this gave her the opportunity to enter the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes "San Alejandro" at the rather late age of 20 years (students at this academy usually start at 12–13 years of age). She was among Leopoldo Romañach's favorite students. In 1924, she graduated from San Alejandro and exhibited her paintings for the first time, along with another Cuban female painter, María Pepa Lamarque, at the Association of Painters and Sculptors in Havana. Receiving a small government grant, she travelled to New York City in the summer of 1924 and began six months of study at the Art Students' League. In 1927, after being awarded a larger grant, she began studying in France, while paying short visits to Spain, Italy, and other countries.

Student life in Paris Pelaez moved to Paris, accompanied by Cuban writer Lydia Cabrera, after she received a grant from the government in order to pursue art. Both took painting and art history courses at École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. She also took drawing and art history courses at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and the École du Louvre. In 1931, Pelaez enrolled, along with Cabrera, in Fernand Léger's Academie Contemporaine. She then began studying with Russian painter Alexandra Exter, whose friendship and classes in color theory and design were an important influence.

Galerie Zak hosted a solo exhibition of her paintings in 1933, where she exhibited thirty-eight works. In that same year, she participated in the eleventh Salon des Tuileries and “was also included in an exhibition of illustrated manuscripts by the calligrapher Guido at the Galerie Myrbor”, in which she illustrated Sept Poemes of Leon Paul Fargue. In her years in Paris, her work was highly praised by French critics. The Cuba Pelaez returned to was in a state of economic uncertainty and political unrest. Beginning in the late 1920s, Cuba was searching for a new art that would reflect the national identity. In response, Pelaez departed from earlier vanguard strategies and turned to new approaches that involved depictions of Afro-Cuban and guajiro (peasant) subjects, while representing them in the adoption of European modernism. According to Ingrid Williams Elliot, Pelaez’s vibrant colors as well as thick lines are derived from Spanish-colonial architecture “integrating domestic objects with architectural decorations”. Peláez uses "Baroque ornamentation in her use of domestic colonial interiors to engage and merge multiple histories and assorted styles -- past and present -- to arrive at a contemporary Cuban idiom.”

In 1935, Pelaez had a solo exhibition at a women’s club in Havana called the Lyceum, which helped gain exposure of her new modernist Cuban style. Aside from painting and pottery, she dedicated time to murals, located mainly at different schools in Cuba. Her most important works of this type are a ceramic mural at the Tribunal de Cuentas in Havana (1953) and the facade of the Habana Hilton hotel (1957). 2013 Amelia Peláez: The Craft of Modernity, Pérez Art Museum Miami

Collections (selection) The works of Peláez are held in the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de La Habana, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.