Geographies of Cuban Abstraction

Abstract

ion may appear superficially coincidental, in other words a mere product of historical circumstance, . . . they were in fact deeply imbricated within a historicist national discourse— cubanía—that provided both an idealist order and the grassroots impetus for action” (3). McEwen traces cubanía to an inaugural, more militant form of cultural nationalism obversely shaped by active resistance to U.S. economic and military imperialism. In McEwen’s exegesis, this cubanista temperament would be nurtured and transformed in the 1940s and 1950s by subsequent polemical engagements with notions like cosmopolitanism, gangsterism, consumerism, and Americanism. This period witnesses the emergence of a second philosophical variant of cubanía, associated as a matter of course to Cuban writer José Lezama Lima and to the intellectual group around the journal Orígenes. This origenista view of culture—the pursuit of a quasi-mystical, transformative aesthetic grounded in teleological ontologies of the national—also runs through the Cuban abstractos profiled in the book, argues the author, albeit conceptually and ideologically adapted to these visual artists’ more politically active endeavors. By historicizing cubanía, McEwen lays the groundwork for an interpretation of the situated politics of abstraction and outlines a comparative framework for the political engagement of three distinct generations of cultural vanguard. And though the author relies on Antoni Kapcia’s descriptive terms of generational cultural nationalisms, her juxtaposition of these categories with the ideological clout of abstraction is a welcome correction to the otherwise reductive tendencies of Kapcia’s taxonomies. These claims are advanced mainly through the story of Los Once, a group of painters and sculptors who emerged in the visual arts scene of Havana in the early 1950s. In this sense,