Antonia Eiriz
Havana 1929-Miami, USA 1995
Antonia Eiriz was born in Juanelo, a humble community in the Havana municipality of San Miguel del Padrón. She graduated from the San Alejandro National School of Fine Arts at the age of 28. From her student days, she stayed in close contact with other painters and artists of her generation who were searching out new approaches to art. Her first group show took place in 1952; the other artists included Fayad Jamis, Manuel Vidal, Antonio Vidal, and Guido Llinás, the last two being among the founders of the celebrated group Los Once (The Eleven).
Focused on advancing abstractionism from the early 1950s, Los Once were Eiriz’s true colleagues. It was with them that she met, discussed, and occasionally showed her work, although during that time she also experimented with other styles. “I have been catalogued as an expressionist, but I always wanted to be an abstract painter,” she said in an interview with Giulio Blanc in 1995, not long before her death. Eiriz explored a shadowy meeting ground between expressionistic figuration and abstraction. In 1957 she presented her first solo exhibition. Though figurative, her work had little in common with the traditions of either the Havana School or San Alejandro. As years went by, Eiriz maintained a powerfully expressive painting style, close to the fervent, muscular approach of her countrymen Ángel Acosta León and Umberto Peña.
It is important to understand how Eiriz’s expressionistic figuration was forged in her relationship with Los Once. Her work is somehow infused with abstract art. She painted many straightforwardly abstract pieces—particularly on paper—which were exhibited on many occasions. But in Eiriz’s work another dynamic is more pronounced: when her figurative violence reaches its boiling point, it becomes so breathtaking that it precludes analysis of other aspects of her art. We stand before an artist of exceptional personality who has become a myth in more than one sense. Eiriz was a prolific creator of drawings, watercolors, lithographs, assemblages, oil paintings, and miscellaneous crafts, and also an extraordinarily influential teacher at the National School of Art (1962 - 1969) as well as in the School of Art Instructors.
Eiriz’s art is ideally suited to the expression of terror, deformity, angst, misfortune, and sarcasm. Where others see unity, enthusiasm, or nostalgia, she perceives the brutal, the scatological, solitude, or oppression. The historical events of her day served as inspiration for her art. She transformed events such as the 1953 attack on the Moncada Barracks and the killings that took place under Fulgencio Batista’s dictatorship in the 1950s, the 1961 explosion of the ship La Coubre, and the militia marches of the early 1960s, in paintings brimming with a power that was new to Cuban art. Works like Ni muertos (Not Even After We’re Dead), Fragmentos de La Coubre (Fragments of La Coubre), Cristo entrando en Juanelo (Christ’s Entry Into Juanelo), or La anunciación (The Annunciation)—all in the collection of the Museo Nacional in Havana—introduced an unprecedented form of expression, an emotional and pictorial excess never before imagined in Cuban art: superb, unrelenting brushstrokes; somber hues; misshapen characters; burnt, punctured canvases; tragic settings; stately formats; evocative titles. Her poetic persona resonated with that of artists like Jean Dubuffet, Willem de Kooning, Francis Bacon, and abstract painters like Jackson Pollock.
Observing a work like this untitled ink drawing from 1960, one realizes that nothing is indeed obvious. A human torso appears to rise from what seems to be a sea of human heads, in a gesture full of pain and despair. This human sea has the grayness and the anonymity of a sightless procession, from which this tortured torso is perhaps trying to flee, or it has perhaps been sucked into; we do not know. His or her scream, or rather the simple act of screaming, appears to be frozen in time, and a deep silence shrouds the whole composition, which emanates a strong feeling of impotence. Strangely, the figures’ volume, their saturation, the substance trapped within their contours, are all reminiscent of the abstract drawings in ink that Eiriz was making at that time.
Eiriz portrayed many human heads. She made them blurred, devoid of recognizable features, instinctively denying them any individuality to add to the extreme humiliation, the complete abandonment, or the profound suffering in which she portrays them. It is a possibility that this image somehow alludes to Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1893), the well-known work of the Norwegian painter that has inspired so many reinterpretations throughout the history of modern art. In any case, this is not the only ink drawing in which Eiriz attempts to do so; many showcase a similar intent.
In addition to the innovative streak evident in her monumental canvases, Eiriz was a pioneer in the use of ephemeral or decaying materials and found objects. Her assemblages and sculptures reveal her to be very much attuned to contemporary popular culture—from which she drew inspiration, without prejudice or primness—as well as Pop Art.
Eiriz was active from the late 1950s. In 1961 she was awarded an Honorary Mention at the sixth São Paulo Biennial, and in 1963, together with her colleagues from Los Once, she took part in the landmark exhibition Expresionismo abstracto 1963 (Abstract Expressionism 1963) at the Galería de La Habana. The same year she received first prize for wood engraving in the print and engraving contest held by the House of the Americas. And in 1964 she presented the milestone solo show Pintura/Ensamblaje (Painting/Assemblage) at the Galería de La Habana, reaffirming her status as an innovator, while the Museo Nacional showcased her fantastic Assemblages in its “Artist of the Month” slot. She participated in the May Salon in Paris in 1967, as well as in the Latin American Space in the same city. In 1994 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.
In the Giulio Blanc interview of 1995, Eiriz succinctly commented that, given the criticism that some of her canvases had received—particularly Una tribuna para la paz democrática (A Tribune for Democratic Peace)—she stopped painting around 1969. But she never stopped creating. Inclined by temperament toward a domestic, everyday environment, she started working almost by chance with papier-mâché and in 1972 began a community art project unprecedented in Cuban history. Her neighborhood of Juanelo became an experimental hotbed of art, in which murals, jewelrymaking, drama clubs, and works in cloth, enamel, and papier-mâché—all by children and adults alike—substantially enhanced the quality of life in the community. The fact that one of the country’s greatest artists focused for so many years, and with such passion, on a project that was then undervalued by the art world, was just another of the great lessons that Eiriz left us.
—Corina Matamoros Tuma
