Energy and Abstraction in the Work of Dolores Soldevilla

rachel price princeton university

olores (Lolo´) Soldevilla (1901–1971) was among the first Cuban artists to Dwork in geometric abstraction and a member of the short-lived Grupo de Diez Pintores Concretos, which succeeded the early 1950s group of abstract painters known as Los Once.1 Recently Soldevilla’s paintings, reliefs, sculptures, and mobiles have received fresh attention, as a lesser-known history of Cuban abstraction continues to be folded into a now decades-long, comprehensive documentation of non-figurative art throughout Latin America.2 Soldevilla embarked on her art career relatively late, beginning studies at the Acade´mie de la Grande Chaumie`re in Paris in 1949. She returned to Cuba in 1956, and after 1959 participated enthusiastically in the Revolution, making abstract work until her death, despite the style’s dimming in the eyes of a revolutionary art world that privileged pop and figuration. Her work in various media constitutes a varied but coherent oeuvre characterized by preoccupations that are all staples of a concrete vocabulary: spheres, lines, color, light.3 Although Soldevilla rarely wavered from a visual vocabulary inspired by prewar abstraction, in the early 1960s her experiments subtly shifted. The realignment was not exactly a move from abstraction to figuration, but closer to an effort to instantiate universals in particular examples. Color was attached to nationalist landscape; movement was, at least in name, connected with social movements; and Soldevilla’s writing incorporated language overheard and reproduced ver- batim, eschewing mediation.

1 Thanks to Sylvia Llanes, Abigail McEwen, Irene Small, Megan Sullivan, Pedro de Oraa´, Martha Flora Carranza, Natalia Brizuela, Yornel Martıńez, Javier Guerrero, the staff at the Archivo CIFO-Veigas, and the members of the University of Chicago’s Latin American Studies seminar for assistance in researching and revising this article. 2 See, for instance, the recent book by Abigail McEwen, Revolutionary Horizons: Art and Polemics in 1950s Cuba, as well as the gallery exhibitions Concrete Cuba, David Zwirner Gallery, New York, January 7-February 20, 2016, and Dia´logos constructivistas en la vanguardia cubana, Galerie Lelong, New York, April 28-June 25, 2016. 3 Max Bill re-elaborated Theo van Doesburg’s concrete art manifesto and principles in a 1936 catalog essay, which Marıá Amalia Garcıá cites: “llamamos arte concreto a las obras de arte que son creadas de acuerdo a una tećnica y a las leyes que le son enteramente propias. . . . Los instrumentos de esta realizacioń son los colores, el espacio, a luz y el movimiento” (Garcıá 137).

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This article investigates how certain of Soldevilla’s works from the late 1950s through the mid-1960s were inflected by three pressures that were, in perhaps surprising ways, connected. These include a revolutionary ideology of realizing immediate change and production, debates about the merits of figuration versus abstraction, and mid-century energy-driven developmentalism.4 Many art historical studies have focused on the links between mid-century modernization ideologies and the emergence of Latin American geometric abstraction, particularly in Brazil and Venezuela.5 Yet only recently have scholars begun to link the twentieth-century economic philosophies such as developmentalism to energy policy, especially that related to petroleum extraction. A singular contribution to this new, more wide-ranging thinking is Energy Dreams: of Actuality, in which philosopher Michael Marder plumbs underlying assumptions about what “energy” is, helping us to read together a series of coeval movements that include Latin American mid-century geometric abstraction, developmentalism, and beliefs about the promises and tasks of representation. Marder suggests that a set of common beliefs drive resource exploration and inflect politics and aesthetics. These include, especially, an impulse to pull value from the depths. “Be it labor or truth,” he writes, “we extract value from the universe outside us and from the human, destroying the material ‘shells,’ the unacknowledged substantive expressions of energy that enclose its active ‘kernel’” (16). Modern energy regimes have been characterized by a dialectical impulse to dig deep and extract (to capture) and to actualize (often called release) potential energy, now and infinitely, as if the world’s resources were infinite. All of this, Marder notes, is in opposition to a classical vision of energy as rest and accomplishment. Aristotle famously inaugurated Western philosophical thinking about energy by proposing two concepts, dunamis and energeia,or potential and actual energy. As dunamis transits from potentiality to actuality, possibilities fall away: a thing loses its ability to be something else (Marder 8). Such an ontology of energy has had unexpected parallels for twentieth- century debates about representation. Figuration, for instance, attempts to some degree the actualization of ontology that happens in the move from dunamis to energeia, since it shears off interpretive possibilities in the name of mimesis. Once a recognizable image of an apple, say, is reproduced, it is hard for the red paint to represent anything else. Figurative art’s putative opponent, abstraction, should in theory be full of generative potentiality, as it need not eradicate possibility through actualized representation. But in fact, it imagines itself as self- actualized and fully realized—autonomous. Although it closes off no interpreta- tive possibilities, its existence for itself, independent of an extra-aesthetic world, is itself the kind of completion that Aristotle saw as limiting futurity.

4 The Cuban Revolution was paradoxically both invested in realizing change immediately, and was framed as pure (futural) potential inasmuch as, per Giorgio Agamben’s reading of Aristotelian notions of potentiality, “[a] thing is said to be potential if, when the act of which it is said to be potential is realized, there will be nothing impotential”: revolutionary leaders, while describing the Revolution as a process, nonetheless often excluded the possibility of the impotential, the non-revolutionary potential (147). 5 See, for instance, Marı´a Amalia Garcı´a, El arte abstracto intercambios culturales entre Argentina yBrasil; Heloı´saBuarquedeHollanda,Impresso˜es de viagem: CPC, vanguarda e desbunde,

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Tracing links between philosophies of energy and aesthetic debates illumi- nates some of Soldevilla’s early 1960s work. In particular, her more documentary writing, her renaming of a pre-revolutionary artwork, and her brief stint as a toy designer for Cuba’s National Tourism Institute (1962–1963) all reflect the artist’s grappling with questions of actuality versus potentiality, figuration versus abstraction, and revolutionary developmentalism—which, the influence of Soviet planning in the Cuban case notwithstanding, was otherwise similar to period economic programs in Brazil, Venezuela, and Mexico, all of which were substantially supported by petroleum. In 1964 Soldevilla penned a quasi-testimonial novel, El farol, which details one boy’s participation in the 1961 literacy campaign. The fragmented narrative is intercut with collaged passages of appropriated language actually voiced during the campaign: an attempt to seize the real not through representation but reproduction.6 In a parallel turn towards concretization, around 1963 Soldevilla renamed Silencio en diagonal, her 1957 wood-and-vinyl assemblage, Homenaje a Fidel. In so doing, she effected what Osbel Sua´rez has deemed a “radical” transformation of an artwork.7 The renaming did not alter the content of the work, of course, and making an homage to a historical figure was not new for Solde- villa: in the 1950s she had made a number of collages titled as homenajes to modernist artists and poets (Malevitch, Arp, Kandinsky, Kafka, Rimbaud, Sandu´ Darie´). But the name change framed the artwork’s likely interpretations: while the first title was centered around atemporal themes such as silence and rhythm (diagonality), six years later the relief made of black and white circles honored a current revolutionary leader. A final instance of Soldevilla’s exploration of the relations between abstraction and figuration or a documentary realism can be seen in her design of toys for the newly founded Instituto Nacional de Industrias Turı´sticas (INIT). At the end of this article, I examine what may be her only remaining toy design—a model train—and suggest that it thematizes Soldevilla’s shift towards anchoring the building blocks of concrete art, such as elemental form and color, in recognizable things in the world. Soldevilla thus echoed the Russian avant-garde’s interest in both the abstract and non-referential, and the actualized—in dunamis and energeia. Her toy design is particularly intriguing in this regard, as it was the result of her incipient collaboration with Revolutionary programs to foment artesanıá and production of national goods, yet clearly translates her longstanding obsessions (circles, lines, spheres, movement) into a product design. It is, then, both a rupture and a

1960–1970; Irene Small, He´lio Oiticica, Folding the Frame; Ronaldo Brito, Neoconcretismo;Se´rgio Martins, Constructing an Avant Garde: Art in Brazil 1949–1979. 6 Soldevilla also wrote columns for the official newspaper Granma and published an anthology of crońicas from her Paris years, Ir, venir, volver a ir (1963). In 1965 she wrote a revolutionary-themed play, Samuel dos veces, and a ballet, Filo diez mil, while also working as a journalist for Granma, the Revolution’s official newspaper (Veigas). Abigail McEwen has suggested that Soldevilla’s shift to literature might be part of a number of the Grupo de los Diez’s post-revolutionary turn away from abstraction (Revolutionary Horizons 170). 7 Osbel Sua´rez notes that the work in question still appears as Silencio en diagonal in the 1962 book Pintores Cubanos and thus concludes that the title was likely changed the following year (31).

...... 19364$ $CH4 11-15-19 14:20:35 PS PAGE 163 164 Revista Hispańica Moderna 72.2 (2019) continuation. If some of Soldevilla’s post-1959 works seem to strive for mimesis or a documentary reproduction of the real (through the use of citation, proper names, or figurative design), her designs for toys and for a playground affirm what Aristotle proposed as a “generic potentiality,” the not-yet-realized nature of children, who necessarily morph and take shape through learning (Agamben 100). Soldevilla’s toy design suggests that the potential not to “pass into actuality” was consistent with certain investments in abstraction. These, in turn, defy some of the Revolution’s more propagandistic cultural policy and its own drive to production, to the real, and to the actualized.

Caracas, 1957: Abstraction and Petroleum

Soldevilla had just begun her post as cultural attache´ at the Cuban Embassy in Paris when her friend Wifredo Lam encouraged her incipient painting practice. Soldevilla then studied at L’Academie de la Grande Chaumie`re with the Russian artist Ossip Zadkine and others from the School of Paris, including Victor Vasarely, Jean Arp, and Sophie Taeuber-Arp. Soldevilla’s early figurative sculptures and portraits ceded to abstract kinetic works and mobiles designed to be manipulated (Vega). In Paris, she overlapped with members of the Venezuelan group Los Disidentes (founded in 1950), including Jesu´s Rafael Soto, Omar Ca- rrenõ, Alejandro Otero, Carlos Cruz-Diez, and Vıćtor Valera, with whom she exhibited metal mobiles at Galerie Arnaud in Paris in 1953 (Veigas). In addition to a standard exploration of geometric forms, Soldevilla pursued investigations in light, and she would have been familiar with prior constructivist interest in its creation of prismatic color. By 1955 she was working with artificial light (Vega). With the Spanish kinetic artist Eusebio Sempere, she published a manifesto which plotted “an evolutionary history of light from Leonardo da Vinci through Caravaggio” and proposed light as a promising new direction for non-figurative art (McEwen, Revolutionary Horizons 155). Back in Cuba, meanwhile, several artists had turned to abstraction. The Romanian-born, Paris-educated painter Sandu´ Darie´ had settled in Havana and sustained a close exchange with Gyula Kosice of Argentina’s MADI´ movement. Though geometric abstraction did not find in Cuba the rich reception it did in Argentina, Brazil, or Venezuela, Havana hosted a few exhibitions of concrete art in the early- to mid-1950s: Miguel Gastoń in 1953, a group show that same year establishing “Los Once,” and another featuring Darie´ and Luis Martıńez Pedro in 1955. When Soldevilla moved back to Cuba in 1956, she joined these artists and influenced the course of abstraction on the island. She brought back from Paris original works, reproductions, and documents of geometric abstraction, op art, and kinetic art, which she exhibited at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Havana in 1956 as Pintura de hoy: vanguardia de la escuela de Parı´s, and later in her own gallery Color-Luz (Oraa´, Visible e invisible 114). In 1957 Soldevilla and her then partner, the poet and abstract painter Pedro de Oraa´, traveled to Venezuela at the invitation of the architecture journal Inte- gral. It was the height of Venezuelan abstraction, spearheaded by Otero, Soto,

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Cruz-Diez, and others, all of whom were explicitly interested in color and light.8 Soldevilla had personal connections with many Venezuelan artists from her Paris days, but Cuban abstraction was also arriving in Caracas via the dealer and critic Florencio Garcıá Cisneros, who organized an exhibition of Cuban art at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in 1957 and owned Galerıá Sardio, where Soldevilla and Oraa´ exhibited (McEwen, Revolutionary Horizons 128). Soldevilla and Oraa´’s trip to Venezuela unfolded in an atmosphere of charged aesthetic debate. Just months before the two arrived, Caracas’s art and literary circles had been galvanized by an important polemic concerning abstract versus figurative art. The epistolary exchange between visual artist Alejandro Otero Rodrı´guez and his friend and relative, the novelist Miguel Otero Silva, was published in El Universal in March 1957. The debate pitted the novelist’s defense of a strict realism against the artist’s defense of abstraction. Otero Silva’s critique of abstraction condemned its “imported” nature, its complicity with decorative evasion, its escapism amid Pe´rez Jimeńez’s dictatorship. Alejandro Otero defended abstraction, in turn, as being about color and line rather than figuration and called it a new language for a new reality. He claimed, too, that abstraction’s theme was life, but life understood as totality, “in its multiple relations,” non-individualist, even non-subjective: a calculated jousting for the quasi-Marxist moral high ground staked out by Otero Silva’s realism. Realism, for the abstract artist, implied life reduced to anecdote, allegory, or symbol (90; 64; 67–8). The Otero Rodrı´guez vs. Otero Silva polemic quickly resonated in Cuba. Critic Juan Marinello used it as fodder for a critique of Cuban abstraction in his 1958 Conversaciones con nuestros pintores abstractos. For Marinello, the Venezuelan polemic was relevant for Cuba “no so´lo por su contenido sino por producirse en ambiente similar al cubano” (60). Although Marinello was the head of the Par- tido Socialista Popular, his take on the debate was less materialist or even Marxist than nationalist: he impugned abstract art for being cosmopolitan and not engaging with Cuba’s reality. He also weighed in on the exhibitions that included Oraa´ and Soldevilla, calling the Cuban art shown in Venezuela necessarily toothless, since anything more biting would have been banned by Presi- dent Pe´rez Jimeńez. Marinello’s charges had obvious implications for concrete art in Batista’s Cuba, despite the fact that the Grupo de Diez, founded in 1958 and associated with Oraa´ and Soldevilla’s gallery Color-Luz, was actively anti- Batista. Marinello wrote dismissively:

Las recientes exposiciones de Caracas y La Habana hablan de una flagrante reinoculacioń, presidida por los mismos signos y acunãda por similares situaciones. Casi no hay que decir que un arte veraz y fecundo, hijo de parecidas circunstancias y alimentado del mismo impulso libertador, no hubiera encontrado cobijo y aplauso en la Venezuela actual. El sıńtoma es muy denunciador. Nos dice co´mo la

8 McEwen has documented efforts by Cuban art critic and MoMA advisor Jose´ Go´mez Sicre to organize a substantial exhibit of Cuban art in Venezuela, whose “oil-driven economy promised a lucrative market for the vanguardia,” scuttled by oncen˜os in protest of the Pe´rez Jimenez dictatorship (Revolutionary Horizons 91).

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distraccioń geome´trica es una vıá excelente para retardar una trans- formacioń de fondo en la que esta´ envuelto el futuro de la pla´stica americana. (110)

Marinello and Otero Silva decried abstraction’s embrace by dictators, perhaps sensing its strategic brandishing by an anti-Communist Cold War US. They seemed less concerned, however, with its instrumentation by petroleum-funded modernization programs. Art historian Sean Nesselrode Moncada has argued that the outstanding signs of Venezuelan modernity, “namely its fetishization of abstraction and technological invention, were constructed in dialogue with and largely due to the circumstances generated by the oil industry” (“Oil, Abstracted” 58). Nesselrode Moncada uncovers how petroleum companies supported Cara- cas’s famous abstraction, noting that the magazine El Farol, for instance, published since 1939 by the Creole Petroleum Corporation (a subsidiary of Standard Oil), constituted “perhaps the most literal imbrication of the oil industry in Ven- ezuela and an emergent notion of artistic modernism” (Nesselrode Moncada, “Oil, Abstracted,” 1). A typical issue of El Farol included paeans to the abstract artists and modernist architects working in Caracas—Calder, Arp, Vasarely, Villa- nueva, Manaure, etc.—alongside articles about petroleum exploration and proc- essing (Cruz-Diez was the magazine’s art director in the early 1950s) (Nesselrode Moncada, “Oil, Abstracted” 60).9 Soldevilla and Oraa´ may well have seen El Farol during their Venezuelan sojourn, but they need not have to have perceived the links between the oil economy and a booming art scene.10 Even as their aesthetic positions differed starkly, both realist author Otero Silva and abstract painter Otero Rodrı´guez were, then, constructing their aesthetic oeuvres within the shared context of the petroleum-driven urban development of Caracas. It was this Caracas that some saw as foretelling a possible future for Havana: the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier published essays on Caracas’s urbanism during the years he lived there (1945–1959), while Oraa´ deemed Caracas and Havana to be “identical” (Rogers; Oraa´, Cifra 99). Just four years after the polemic, Otero Silva published a historical novel, the second in a trilogy narrating Venezuela’s twentieth century, titled Oficina nu´ mero 1, a fictionalized history of Gulf’s 1933 eponymous well and the oil town it gave rise to. Otero Silva’s novel explored not only the social forms that oil extraction produces but the materiality of oil itself. He described petroleum’s prehistoric formation through gradual accrual in terms that contrast with the novel’s rendering of mid- century modernization as a speedy and teleological national project: “Infinidad de pequenõs organismos muertos, corpu´sculos animales y vegetales aventados

9 Nesselrode Moncada notes that El Farol “was conceived as a sibling of Standard’s bi- monthly English-language journal The Lamp” (“Oil, Abstracted” 60). 10 Luis Pe´rez-Oramas also reads exemplary works of Venezuela’s abstract art as an alle- gorical commentary on notions of modernity. He sees, for instance, the reticulate structures made by Gego (Gertrud Louise Goldschmidt) with their “uncertainty of structural origin, and precarious stability” as suggesting a “symbolic resistance against the ‘planning expecta- tions’ of developmentalism” that was otherwise dutifully rendered by much of Venezuela’s kinetic art (61).

...... 19364$ $CH4 11-15-19 14:20:37 PS PAGE 166 price, Energy and Abstraction in the Work of Dolores Soldevilla 167 por los cataclismos, quedaron extendidos sobre los pie´lagos secos y fueron arro- pados por espesas capas de limo verdoso en cuyas hondonadas de terciopelo se estremecıán vidas gelatinosas y embrionarias” (40). For Otero Silva, oil was both a millennial-old substance and the fuel for an uneven twentieth-century modernization, a catalyst that organized labor and lives by stimulating a modern reset- tling of the nation’s rural interior. Petroleum—solar energy stored in organic matter and transmuted over millennia through slow compression—enabled the intensification (or increased speed) of modern work. Oil was a less explicit theme in or pressure on Alejandro Otero’s visual art, but he designed a sculpture for a gas station, and his work more obliquely but more significantly was arguably influenced by the petro-state. Megan Sullivan has argued that because modernization in Venezuela was carried out through the administration of extracted resources rather than massive labor organization or import substitution industrialization—as was the case in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico—Venezuelan abstraction lacked either industrial products or labor col- lectives as models for art. As a result, Sullivan argues, Venezuelan abstraction looked different, favoring color and spectacle.11 Sullivan reads the color splashed onto Caracas’s monumental, midcentury buildings, such as Carlos Rau´l Villa- nueva’s Universidad Central, as producing disembodied spectators rather than participants in the changing environment. For Sullivan, even Alejandro Otero’s kinetic art ultimately denied “materiality, labor, or the viewer’s body” and “[didn’t] present a way forward, or even a goal to be worked toward,” its literal dynamism aside (“Locating Abstraction” 151). In other words, both Sullivan and Nesselrode Moncada have made important interventions by proposing that specific forms of non-figurative art arose in Vene- zuela as a result of its petroleum-driven economy. The idea that different energy regimes may shape aesthetics has recently been advanced by a number of literary and art critics too.12 As early as the 1930s, Lewis Mumford proposed that a “car- boniferous capitalism” shaped modernist art. Mumford argued that the modern exploration of color unfolded, paradoxically, in a muted landscape of contami- nation.13 The Impressionists gleaned their color theory from Michel Euge`ne Chevreul’s nineteenth-century research chromatics, Mumford wrote, producing paintings that their contemporaries found unbelievable since the images were

11 Sullivan echoes Fernando Coronil’s claim that Marcos Pe´rez Jimenez’s modernization sought to offer visual proof of the nation’s realization in the form of imported products funded by oil, rather than through import substitution industrial production, common else- where in the region in the period between the 1920s and until the 1970s (Sullivan, “Alejandro Otero’s Polychrome” 78). 12 For recent inquiries into a “petroleum aesthetics” see Stephanie LeMenager, Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century; Karen Pinkus, Fuel: A Speculative Dictionary; Reza Negarestani Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials; the Canadian journal Reviews in Cultural Theory’s March 2016 issue on “the Energy Humanities”; and the related After Oil by Edmonton: Petrocultures Research Group, some of whom have now edited Energy Humanities an Anthology, which includes a section on “The Aesthetics of Petrocultures.” Literary scholar Patricia Yaeger has similarly asked how we might rethink the frames for literary production and periodization: “what happens if we sort texts according to the energy sources that made them possible? (Szeman and Boyer 441). 13 My thanks to Megan Eardly for this reference.

...... 19364$ $CH4 11-15-19 14:20:38 PS PAGE 167 168 Revista Hispańica Moderna 72.2 (2019) not “subdued by fog, mellowed by age, smoke, varnish: because the green of their grass was yellow in the intensity of sunlight” (201). Mumford’s was a literal understanding of the relations between a carbon economy and aesthetics. Sullivan suggests a more oblique translation of political economy into art: a unique emphasis on color emerges from a lack of domestic industrial production. Still other translations of links between oil and art are conceivable too. Movement and rhythm, for instance, both concrete preoccupations, might also reflect a discourse of “energy” (Coronil 167, 237). If Venezuelan artists were opposed to the dictatorship, oil facilitated fabrication in 1960s Caracas. Indeed, for non-figurative artists color itself was compelling precisely because it was movement and animation: light waves in motion. Venezuela’s mid-century abstract artists echoed pre-war European interest in movement and rhythm as organizing principles. Otero, Soto, and Cruz-Diez all based their work on light. Cruz-Diez argued that color—because it was light in motion—was superior to paint itself (Sullivan, “Locating Abstraction” 130–31). In his polemic with Manuel Otero Silva, Alejandro Otero celebrated sculpture’s plasticity and mobility: “Hoy la escultura . . . se apoya en medios intrıńsecamente pla´sticos, precisamente para realizar aquellos imprevistos valores de movimiento y expresioń que posee la materia” (Otero and Otero 27). He claimed that in abstraction a painter “paints rhythm itself” (Rottner 83). Rhythm and animation had long been central to abstraction, of course.14 Robert Delaunay’s 1912 essay on light also claimed that art, in nature, was rhythm. Hans Richter’s early twentieth-century works suggested a link between abstraction and railway movement. The fusion of movement, train, and color was illustrated by Sonia Delaunay in the 1913 La prose du Transsibe´rien et de la Petite Jehanne de France (Kirby 134).15 These antecedents resonate in Oraa´’s cycle of six “objective” poems published during his visit to Venezuela and inspired by what he called the “dos realidades ideńticas” of Caracas and Havana (Oraa´, Cifra 99). “Paso del tren nocturno” is a paean to the power of trains and rhythm: “El ferro- viario impa´vido ante el cumplido estruendo / de la ma´quina en belfo y cornamenta / espumantes de humor ferruginoso, / aguza en la desgana de un gesto de sahumerio / el doćil desvarıó de la linterna” (103). The poem renders onomatopoeically the train’s rhythmic chugging along the rail, a verbal analogy to the rhythm Oraa´ sought to create in his paintings. Oraa´ and Soldevilla were thus immersed, during their visit to Venezuela, in debates about abstraction, rhythm, and light that were in direct dialogue with Caracas’s petro-modernism. They carried back these lessons to Havana.

Havana, 1957: Color-Luz

At Caracas’s Galerı´a Sardio Soldevilla exhibited alongside local poets and writers opposed to the Pe´rez Jimenez dictatorship in an exhibition on “the collage

14 Hans Richter’s optically-printed 1920s ﬁlms Rhythmus were inﬂuential for the Brazilian kinetic artist Abraham Palatnik, for instance (Morais). 15 Thanks to Efthymia Rentzou for this observation.

...... 19364$ $CH4 11-15-19 14:20:39 PS PAGE 168 price, Energy and Abstraction in the Work of Dolores Soldevilla 169 poem.” The visit inspired the two Cubans to open their own gallery upon return to Havana, a space designed to exhibit art and resist Batista, “ma´s como nućleo de accioń cultural y menos como entidad mercadista” (Oraa´, Visible e invisible 103). In 1957 Soldevilla also joined clandestine mobilization against the government (“Microbiografıá”). The gallery’s name, Galerıá de Arte Color-Luz, was meant to evoke Soldevilla’s relieves luminosos, begun in collaboration with Sempere. Oraa´ recalls the reliefs as “cajas herme´ticas . . . las cuales emitıán intermitentemente colores diversos mediante un regulador elećtrico adosado en su interior y a trave´s de orificios practicados en su lado frontal, de formas geome´tricas —cı´rculos, cuadrados—, cerrados con pantallas nevadas de pla´stico” (Visible e invisible 102). Oraa´ and Soldevilla hung a relief beside the gallery name in neon, juxtaposing Soldevilla’s light boxes with the gallery’s signage and creating an equivalence between an avant-garde space for cultural action and a modernizing urban landscape. In an essay on the history of their gallery, Oraa´ recalls a mid-century Havana of urban expansion and dreams of consumerist plenitude—an assessment that might equally hold for 1950s Caracas (Visible e invisible 102). And if in Cuba sugar was king, the island also witnessed fantasies about petroleum’s power. Although Cuba had quickly followed Mexican president La´zaro Ca´rdenas’s 1938 creation of a nationalized Petro´leos Mexicanos with its own Law of Fossil Fuels, limiting concessions to thirty years and denying them to foreign states, during World War II Cuba allowed the United States to survey oil fields for possible urgent needs (Nuń˜ez Jimeńez 183). By the pre-revolutionary 1950s, US oil held a prominent place on the island. As Cuba entered a second stage of petroleum exploration, oil made inroads into the larger culture. The Esso Standard Oil Company com- missioned a series of murals by prominent artists in 1951 (McEwen, Revolutionary Horizons 110). In 1957 a pamphlet titled “El petro´leo cubano y sus problemas” detailed how a US oilman and his Venezuelan colleagues had founded the company Cuban-Venezuelan and asserted that if in 1956 Cuba had lived under the influence of “una fiebre petrolera,” by 1957 petroleum deposits were confirmed (A´ lvarez Acevedo 7–8; 16). In this context of urban development and petroleum fever, Soldevilla continued to work with rhythm and color. Repercusioń por el color (1957) explores repetition and difference in both color and form. The mixed media work depicts rows of alternating circles and rectangles in blue, purple, yellow, green, and burnt umber against a tan background. A horizontal march of colored discs is suspended within each band’s barely-visible ground, composed of delicate lines of the same color. Form and color compete as organizing logics: because group- ings are created by the horizontal bands of color but also by vertical columns of like shapes (discs or rectangles), the eye moves horizontally as it follows the band of color, and vertically, guided by repeating forms. A yellow band through the painting’s middle may allude to a horizon, though each line of colored circles and rectangles might also suggest a train’s wheels and cars, the thin lines serving as couplings. In Soldevilla’s kinetic sculptures and mobiles these same elemental shapes take three-dimensional forms, burst apart, and scatter, like the planets in the cosmos she evoked in paintings titled Firmamento (1958), Noche en el cosmos

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Figure 1. Dolores Soldevilla, Repercusio´n por el color. Mixed media on paper, 1957. 18 1/8 x 24 inches 6 x 61 cm. Courtesy David Zwirner Gallery.

(1958), or Los planetas (1959). Osbel Sua´rez sees the inﬂuence of Sophie Taeuber-Arp in Soldevilla’s celestial bodies, but one can also see in them echoes of Kandinsky’s metaphysics—Soldevilla published an article on his painting in the early 1960s (Sua´rez 30). Soldevilla’s interests in rhythm, color and light, and outer space—no longer mystical but now referencing the Soviet sputnik— continue in Soldevilla’s post-revolutionary work, indicated in the titles for paintings and sketches: “Homenaje a los cosmonautas sovie´ticos” (1961), “Estudiantes en la Luna” (1966), “Trabajadores en la Luna,” “Cosmonauta en la Luna” (1966), etc.; in an exhibition at Galerı´a Habana (“Op-art, pop-art, la Luna y yo”) (1966); and in passages from her novel El farol.

El farol

In 1964 Soldevilla published El farol (no relation to the Venezuelan magazine). The loosely structured, quasi-testimonial, and propagandistic “novel” registers key events from the early years of the Revolution, and marks a turn towards a documentary realism. It, therefore, seems, at ﬁrst glance, to contrast with Solde- villa’s visual abstraction. Yet, like her abstract art or her collages, the novel also eschews representation, albeit paradoxically: in aiming to render an absolutely

...... 19364$ $CH4 11-15-19 14:21:28 PS PAGE 170 price, Energy and Abstraction in the Work of Dolores Soldevilla 171 realistic portrait of the moment, it reproduces word-for-word period slogans and discourses. El farol follows a young urban protagonist into the countryside as he educates peasants during the 1961 literacy campaign. As period copy put it, the novel sought to narrate “the life of the campesinos in their own words and poetic sensibility,” while simultaneously attempting “a complete summary of the national news”: e.g., the literacy campaign, the Bay of Pigs invasion, the sugar cane harvests, the First Congress of Cuban Writers and Artists, etc. The eponymous “farol” of the title—presumably the kind of lantern or lamp used by volun- teers in non-electrified rural areas of the campaign—is a polysemic signifier that now indicates the enlightenment project of literacy, now Soldevilla’s interest in planets (72), now electrification projects (“nos hablo´ de electricidad, del Com- unismo. . . . Era la voz marxista-leninista en un dıá claro de sol brillante” [33]). To achieve such testimonio, the novel becomes an aural and visual collage. It incorporates language from the campaign and studs its narrative with rhyming blocks of ditties used to motivate and instruct workers (Soldevilla would publish an article on visual collage techniques in the newspaper Revolucioń in 1965, echoing the theme of poetic collage from her 1957 Galerıá Sardio exhibition). Both world historical events and minor happenings are recorded. The novel even includes a transcription of an official speech by Fidel Castro confirming the April 15, 1961 bombing that announced the Bay of Pigs invasion, rendered in uppercase letters and yellow ink. Like the visually arresting pages of Castro’s speech, the novel’s cover art was indebted to concrete poetry strategies. The cover was designed by Rau´l Martıńez, an early abstract expressionist whose fame owes to his subsequent position as the foremost pop artist of the Revolution (he makes a cameo in the novel as well). The same year that he designed El farol’s cover, Martıńez produced his well- known series Homenajes, which depict in vibrant colors the stylized portraits of revolutionary leaders alongside the artist himself, his boyfriend, and other civil- ians. Martıńez’s cover for El farol is a yellow disc within a square, whose borders are constructed by a running alphabet. The disc is written over with swirls (or shrapnel) of blue letters. The square and disc and the explosion of letters hint at both the purpose of the protagonist’s journey—to spread literacy—and at a kind of synergy with concrete poetry’s interest in the materiality of language. El farol manifests its interest in language’s materiality in the use of different cases and colors and in aspects of the book design, which spells out page num- bers: setenta y seis instead of 76. It thematizes this interest by featuring poets and novelists Nicola´s Guillen, Alejo Carpentier, one of Cuba’s only concrete or visual poets from the era, Manuel Navarro Luna, and discussions of “poetic materi- alism” (91). It also repeatedly seeks, in avant-garde tradition, to establish poetry’s truth as scientific: “Todo cientı´fico es un poeta”; “La angustia insaciable en el encuentro de la verdad en cualquier fase de la ciencia o el arte”; “Yuri [Gagarin] dice simplemente: ‘LA TIERRA ES AZUL--˜ NO PUDE VER LA LUNA˜ EL SOL RESPLANDECIA AUN MAS . . .˜ ¡Todo poesıá pura . . . el ‘Vostok’ convertido en la imagen de lo artı´stico-cientı´fico’ (54–57). Soldevilla’s own explorations of geometric abstraction and concrete art are ventriloquized by a peasant who asks

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Figure 2. Dolores Soldevilla, El farol. Ediciones Revolucio´n, 1964. Cover design by Rau´l Martı´nez.

...... 19364$ $CH4 11-15-19 14:23:12 PS PAGE 172 price, Energy and Abstraction in the Work of Dolores Soldevilla 173 naive questions of great philosophical import to the young man teaching her to read. The campesina’s inquiry into God’s identity yields answers that would please an abstract artist: God is “el gran geo´metra” who traces “cubitos y triańgulos maravillosos en las nubes, en los montes y en las flores’” (65). If in the novel geometric abstraction is divine, color comes down to earth. Soldevilla roots color in nationalist imagery. An extensive passage, evocative of Federico Garcıá Lorca’s poem “Romance sona´mbulo,” anchors green in the par- ticulars of the Cuban landscape. Even a partial citation of the passage remains lengthy, but merits reproduction in order to gain a sense of Soldevilla’s interest in color:

¡Verde es mi Patria . . . verde como un lagarto jovenzuelo y feliz: cambiante, a´gil, brillante, estilizada . . . Verde de jade legı´timo, rubio, pa´lido y nuevo . . . verde de lejanıás, verde color de malva seca, verde . . . verdinegro, de las cortezas de los viejos a´rboles rotas por la mano del hombre o exterminadas por el tiempo . . . Verde-amarillo, de la tierra recortada como ninõs felices que juguetean —en un abandono inconsciente de una belleza uńica . . . verde cobrizo, en las chimeneas de los centrales azucareros, con los Bateyes verdes . . . Verde en las carretas de canãs reverdecida en claridad, verde el camino y la montanã y la palmera intranquila . . . verde el sapo que deja escuchar su quejido, desde el verde charco en las noches de luna . . . verdes! Verde . . . verde . . . verde un milloń de veces, Baracoa, la de los picos verdes con su Yunque reverdecido por siglos y siglos;˜de un verde botella, de un verde limoń...!... Verde la extensa llanura del Camaguëy; la loma de la popa en Tri- nidad, en Las Villas, verde azul la Bahıá de Matanzas, tranquila y bella, verde la Quinta Avenida capitalina —ahora llenando sus con- tornos verdeantes, estudiantes y campesinas de la Revolucioń. (104–05)

Far from a constructivist exploration of color, the passage reads green through a litany of its instantiations in a nationalist reverie—one in which “verde-oliva,” the olive green associated with the revolutionaries’ military garb, is implied, if unnamed. Yet if green is here marshaled for nationalist celebration, Soldevilla’s interest in color, surfaces, and reliefs might more generally be thought of as a kind of philosophy that stands in contradistinction to the twentieth century’s simulta- neous drive for the real, the deep, and the authentic. It is a contentedness with surface. Marder writes of a modern tendency to think that “superficial actuality, the actuality of the superficies, is never actual enough,” and suggests this quest for depth accounts for our readiness to extract oil from the ocean floor (16). Soldevilla’s work instead actualizes the surface and finds a joy in it, opposed to both the profundities of extraction and to what Alain Badiou called the twentieth century’s destructive “passion for the real,” an impulse to make immediate

...... 19364$ $CH4 11-15-19 14:23:12 PS PAGE 173 174 Revista Hispańica Moderna 72.2 (2019) and concrete, and which Duanel Dıáz claims only led to new illusions during the Cuban Revolution. In Soldevilla’s numbing celebration of green, moreover, one moment eschews nationalist literalism and points not towards extraction and actualization but towards openness. The author’s allusion to happy children playing in a startlingly beautiful “unconscious abandonment” (“Verde-amarillo . . . como ninõs felices que juguetean —en un abandono inconsciente de una belleza uńica”) bespeaks her interest in the childlike and playful, in Aristotle’s purely potential energy which he saw embodied in children, and to which I now turn.

Soldevilla’s Toys for the INIT

One of the least-studied chapters in Soldevilla’s career unfolded during the first years of the Revolution. The University of Havana reopened following its Batista- era closure. Students returned amidst an atmosphere of euphoria and possibility. In 1961 the Consejo Nacional de Cultura was founded, and the government opened twenty-five galleries; in 1962 the National Art Schools were founded (Saruski and Mosquera 40). A scholarship system trained 40,000 students, including art teachers, primed to promote the arts in rural areas (14). Between 1960 and 1961 Soldevilla taught fine art to architecture students at the University of Havana’s School of Architecture. One former student recalls a spirit of innovation and excitement defining Soldevilla’s classes, which alternated with others given by Guido Llina´s, Rau´l Martıńez and the Argentine architect Joaquıń Rayo (Artime).16 From 1962 to 1963 Soldevilla also designed toys for the Jugueterıá Nacional and the Taller de Artes Pla´sticas within the Instituto de la Industria Turı´stica, or INIT (1959–1972). Although it was, on the face of it, a surprising home for toy design, the INIT imagined tourism as an internal market—no longer just a foreign one—and as a means for consuming Cuban artesanıás. “Tourism,” moreover, encompassed quite a bit: the INIT took over management of the popular musical acts that performed at Havana’s hotels and opened an art gallery in the Habana Libre Hotel (formerly the Havana Hilton), showcasing many concrete painters in 1962—Sandu´ Darie´, Jose´ Mijares, Luis Martıńez Pedro, Salvador Cor- ratge´, and Soldevilla, as well as the more figurative painters Rene´ Portocarrero, Eduardo Abela, Alfredo Sosabravo, and Antonia Eiriz (Moore 61–2; Archivo CIFO-Veigas). Official celebrations of abstraction were short-lived, however: the 1963 show Expresionismo abstracto, held in Galerıá Habana, was “the final public appearance” of the oncenõs and, some scholars argue, the end of abstraction as a dominant tendency (Machado 23).17

16 In 1964 Soldevilla founded an art collective, Grupo Pla´stico Espacio, which McEwen suggests may well have been modeled on the Parisian “Groupe Espace,” advancing a “synthesis of art and architecture” (McEwen, “Lolo´” 201). 17 For a history of debates about abstraction in Cuba see, besides McEwen Revolutionary Horizons; Ernesto Mene´ndez-Conde, Trazos en los ma´rgenes.

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Figure 3. Galerı´a INIT 1961–1962. Courtesy Archivo CIFO-Veigas.

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Figure 4. Galerı´a INIT 1961–1962. Courtesy Archivo CIFO-Veigas.

The INIT was created in November 1959 by dissolving an entity that had pre- ceded it by just months, the Junta de Fomento Turı´stico (founded June 2, 1959). The Junta, in turn, had replaced the Instituto Cubano del Turismo (founded June 12, 1952). A 1959 pamphlet bundled the legislation creating the INIT (Law no. 636) with laws regulating the use of Cuba’s subsoil (Law 635) (“Disciplina jurı´dica” 21). The combined legislation shows that the government understood tourism, mining, and agriculture to be the island’s biggest industries. The immediately post-revolutionary subsoil laws claim that “[e]l desarrollo y control de la energıá, en particular de la industria petrolera, es condiciońba´sica indispensable y factor determinante para impulsar la industrializacioń y el desen- volvimiento armońico e independiente de la economıá nacional, ası´ como para elevar el bienestar de la poblacioń” (“Disciplina jurı´dica” 5). The language creating the INIT, for its part, acknowledges that tourism is “the highest grossing Cuban industry” and outlines the revolutionary government’s objectives in the tourism sector, which included the stimulation of “la artesanıá y otras actividades artı´sticas trascendentes turı´sticamente” (21). So it was that art and artesanıá were bundled together under tourism. The INIT quickly founded a series of talleres for artisans, about which Soldevilla wrote approvingly. How should we understand Soldevilla’s toy design in this context? Were the INIT toys simply products for internal consumption (and likely export) by a newly founded industry? Were they Soldevilla’s contribution to a revolution to

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Figure 5. Disciplina juridical del subsuelo and Instituto Nacional de Industrias Turı´sticas, 1959. Courtesy Biblioteca Nacional de Madrid.

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Figure 6. Dolores Soldevilla, design for a toy, 1962–1963. Courtesy Martha Flores Carranza and the Estate of Dolores Soldevilla. which she was committed, a marrying of design and fine art of the kind that many artists of the time, and the INIT itself, endorsed? Can we read the toy design as a sculpture alongside her other mobiles, another mixed-media, kinetic object? What appears at present to be the sole remaining sketch of one of Soldevilla’s toys is a traditional toy train, made of six connectable cars of possibly different colors (the reproduction of the sketch is in black and white). Yet the toy clearly sports the same shapes that do Soldevilla’s paintings and sculpture, attentive to color and discs, spheres and blocks. The sketch reinvents some of Soldevilla’s favorite forms as a useful toy. Consider the train’s connections with Repercusioń por el color, for instance: the background lines that almost created optical flicker in the mixed media work here connect the wheels through couplings that allow for physical movement. The avant-garde had long been interested in toys. In 1926 Ladislav Sutnar, sounding quite Aristotelian, argued that “‘[i]n art, the toy has a priority status because through it the artist, i.e., the anticipator of developments, directly approaches the child, who is the most important recipient of the developmental trends and creative forces that art exudes. For the artist, this is an opportunity to fashion human material for the acceptance of a new future, new ideas and new laws of form” (Knobloch 229–30). Sutnar both endorsed communist dreams of molding new people and accepted the radically unpredictable pure potential of both children and art. Children were important to Soldevilla as well. She tried to render a childlike consciousness in El farol’s child protagonist. In 1956 she designed a children’s park. With her 1962 work for the INIT, she designed actual toys. In so doing, she joined Dziga Vertov, Kurt Schwitters, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, and others. Joaquıń

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Torres-Garcıá famously designed toys for years for a New York game business and called some pieces “toys of art” (de Torres 265). Cecilia de Torres believes that her father-in-law’s toys helped the artist discover the principles for his abstract art (267; 271). Torres-Garcıá understood both the “concrete” (in his typology, representational) and “abstract” (non-figurative) to be common elements used in constructing visual art. His toys concretized some of his painting’s more abstract shapes, but both shared a constructivist vocabulary. Marie-Aline Prat argues that Torres-Garcıá’s work with toys was what led him to concrete paintings’ investigations of the line (de Torres 267). In Soldevilla’s art, however, the inverse may have occurred. She seems to have translated her constructivist interest in lines, circles, and other forms into the contours of a child’s toy. Her toy train yokes fine arts and artesanıá with mass production. Yet it was also designed to enable child’s play, exploration, “unconscious abandonment”—pure potential, dunamis, and constant rearrangement through the separable cars. It allows for mobility and for variations on the forms that in Repercusioń por el color, five years prior, remained fixed to the canvas. We do not have sufficient examples of Soldevilla’s designs or finished toys to draw many conclusions from the sample; indeed we do not even know how many she made.18 But involvement in toy design, far from a chance occupation during a period of changing institutions and employment, appears to have been part of a concerted effort to bring together fine arts and artisans in an iteration of the historical avant-garde’s investment in bridging life and art, high and low. If, as Megan Sullivan argues, Otero’s kinetic art in 1960s Venezuela was incapable of presenting a goal to work toward outside of some technocratic utopian notion of progress, Soldevilla’s toy attempts to move kinetic art into the space of invention and transformation. Soldevilla repeatedly associated these impulses with childhood, and they were emblematic too of a heroic early period of aesthetic innovation in post-revolutionary Cuba, that would, in subsequent years, often be closed down. This recuperation of the possibility and play inherent to childhood had already been a concrete principle—one overlooked by the movement’s realist detractors such as Marinello, to be sure, but which facilitated the style’s appeal in the first years of the revolution. Oraa´ recalls that for Cuban artists who continued making concrete art in the post-revolutionary period, the style’s impersonality allowed the works to be anonymous and unsigned. Furthermore, he writes, artists sought to create “active, participative” objects:

se estimulaba al espectador como autor otro —a este ﬁn respondı´an las “Estructuras transformables” de Sandu Darie—, y de tal manera

18 Carlos Artime, a former student of Soldevilla’s in the Architecture school, speculates that the toys were likely not her own devising, but part of a moment in which there was an impulse to make “Cuban” things, a trend that led to the opening of the School of Industrial Design, but which even prior to its founding led to a series of attempts to make objects for export. Artime himself gave classes at an artisan workshop in which he argued that artesanı´a might follow modern design rather than traditional or folkloric styles. Whether or not the initial motivation for the formation of INIT came from the needs of the music industry, Robin Moore documents a broader impulse, typical of the early years of the revolution, to bridge gaps between intellectuals and “the people.”

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entraba en materia, entraba en el juego. El ludismo, elemento raigal en la creacioń artı´stica, pasaba a ser mo´vil relevante de la obra decla- rada bien comuń. Desde esta proyeccioń, el arte concreto estaba llamado a ocupar otra dimensioń social. (Visible e invisible 119)

Marta Traba once witheringly observed the devolution of Venezuelan kinetic art into “un proyecto pasado de moda, despue´s de haber sido . . . prototipo para juguetes de navidad y adornos de supermercado” (17). But Soldevilla’s lone design for a toy gestures towards a widening beyond color and rhythm into a simultaneously pedagogical and ludic spirit. Against a backdrop of developmen- talist economic and energy policies, Soldevilla explored both the potential of light, color, insights from Venezuela’s petroleum-informed abstraction, and the Aristotelian potential energy of becoming, children, and recombinant potential. Her post-revolutionary ﬂicker between abstraction and concretion—testimonial, nationalist realism, an actualization that fused with propaganda—reveals the evo- lution of her work in response to changing philosophies, cultural policies and political economy, and the ways in which her abiding interest in color, light, and elemental forms were transmuted in a new era of revolutionary projects, during and beyond the Cuban Revolution itself.

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