Energy and Abstraction in the Work of Dolores Soldevilla

Abstract:Dolores (Loló) Soldevilla (1901-1971) was among the first Cuban artists to work in geometric abstraction, a member of the short-lived Grupo de Diez Pintores Concretos, and someone who continued working in abstraction until her death. In 1957 she also made an important trip to exhibit her art in Caracas, Venezuela, where local aesthetic and political debates would inform the founding of her own gallery in Havana that same year, Galería Color-Luz. After the 1959 Cuban Revolution, however, Soldevilla also penned articles and an experimental novel, and briefly designed toys for the Instituto Nacional de Industrias Turísticas (INIT), an institution that in the early years of the Revolution fostered and oversaw artistic production in a number of unlikely spaces. This article examines Soldevilla's oeuvre from the late 1950s through the mid-1960s to reveal how her foundation in abstraction came to be inflected by three connected pressures: a revolutionary ideology of realizing immediate change and production, debates about the merits of figuration versus abstraction, and mid-century energy-driven developmentalism in an era of petroleum exploration. National plans for energy extraction and tourism in Cuba, philosophical understandings of energy as both actualized and potential, and period debates among Latin American artists and critics over figuration and abstraction all informed both ruptures and continuities in Soldevilla's work during these critical years, manifest in her painting, her novel El farol, her sculptures and in a design for a toy.