Jaime Valls
23 February 1883 Tarragona, Spain–31 October 1955 Havana, Cuba
In 1901, Catalonian Jaime Valls arrived in Havana with his family. It was a far from casual trip. The island, freshly freed of Spanish domination, had become a destiny sought by numerous immigrants fleeing a crisis-ridden Spain, as well as workers from the United States, Sweden, the Middle East, China, Haiti, and Jamaica. Prominent Catalan master builders and architects—Gaudí disciples among them—started construction companies in Cuba and left their imprint on the design of Cuban cities.
Valls had studied sculpture in Barcelona and taken classes at the Gassó workshops under Apeles Mestre. In Cuba, his talent and skill quickly earned him a successful career. Already in 1904, El Fígaro magazine published a photograph of the artist in his fin-de-siècle atelier, near the coat of arms he had designed to represent the products of Catalonian entrepreneurs José and Ramón Crusellas at the World’s Fair held that year in Saint Louis, Missouri.
Jaime Valls became one of the active founding fathers of design, comics, and modern advertising in Cuba. In 1918, Cuban art critic Bernardo G. Barros identified him as one of the top modern artists in the island, together with Rafael Blanco and Conrado Massaguer, and in 1925 Jorge Mañach, a true arbiter of culture, lauded him in his article “Jaime Valls or the Insuperable Mastery.” By following the comics and ads he published in the pages of La Discusión newspaper and in magazines such as Fígaro and Social, and the posters he designed to advertise Cuban merchandise, we can trace his artistic evolution from the canon of Art Nouveau to the most streamlined Art Deco. The true protagonists of his paintings are lines and visual dynamics. He transformed advertisements—which were managed by his own agency—into a chronicle of picturesque, everyday characters in tune with the Cuban minstrel shows known as teatro bufo, while at the same time honoring the emancipation of Cuban women.
Paris, the City of Light, drew Valls for a lengthy stay in 1926-1927. Like many Cuban and Latin American artists, he ardently explored the latest trends in modern art. Havana had yet to experience the Exposición de Arte Nuevo (Exhibition of New Art) or Revista de Avance magazine, milestones in the process of cultural renovation. But a ferment of change was already in the air, and artists were trying to achieve a fusion of modernity and cubanidad.
The Cuban “colony” in Paris was varied, but its members shared a scarcity of economic means. Valls wandered through museums and galleries with painter Eduardo Abela, musician Diego Bonilla, and architect Bens Arrate. In a letter published in Social in December 1927, then-columnist Alejo Carpentier defined Valls’ visual references: “After studying the work of Picasso and Foujita, and going to the sources of many modern concerns (Cézanne and Renoir, amongst others), Abela applied himself to painting female gladiators, while Valls, with the finesse of someone who has realized many things, went on to converse with the primitives at the Louvre.”
Along with the vestiges of the past kept in museums, at the time Paris added two live cultural influences: the triumph of Art Deco, enthroned since 1925 at the Salon of Decorative Arts, and “black art” fever. Josephine Baker’s sensuous nudity and the clamor of American jazz and swing music, along with Igor Stravinsky and the lessons of Cubism, stimulated in Valls a drive to “purge” his favorite subject, the human figure, of all descriptive or superfluous elements. He achieved this through a firm line and the use of sanguine crayon to nuance the illusion of volume. The expressive skills apparent in Orchestra, Paris were developed even further upon his return to Havana.
The image of the street scene also reflects one of Valls’ constants: popular music. However, the band, typical of French street fairs, is represented here with a pensive, weary air—very different from the swirl of movements and gestures he would later use in portraying Cuban musicians.
Valls had already included in his advertisements typical Cuban musical instruments. But it would be in his paintings, and especially his drawings, where black musicians of both sexes would occupy center stage. That was the golden age of Cuban son, which became publicly accepted by the white affluent class before taking Paris and New York by storm. Valls’ drawings follow the evolution of the music as well as its humble creators and interpreters. In numerous drawings made in Paris and Havana, he evoked musicians grouped in sextets, maraca players, trios who played and sang for a few cents, and particularly rumba dancers, both male and female—dignified, sweaty, and absorbed in the dance.
Shortly after his return to the island, in December of 1927, historian Emilio Roig de Leuchsenring, Valls’contemporary, defined him in the pages of Social magazine as “...a specialist in Afro-Cuban types.” His exhibition at the Cuban Press Association March 5-15, 1930, Dibujos de tipos y costumbres afro-cubanos (Drawings of Afro Cuban Types and Customs), established him in his own right as a pioneer of the Afro-Cuban “Negrismo” wave that shook “high culture” between 1927 and 1930. Fifteen years after the racial war of 1912, Cuban society extended recognition—although not without tensions—to the contribution of the African ethos to the history and culture of the island.
—Abelardo G. Mena Chicuri
