Carlos Enriquez
Havana, August 3 (RHC)-- August 3rd, 2021, marked the 121st birthday anniversary of Cuban Avant-garde painter and novelist Carlos Enríquez Gómez.
Considered one of the pioneers of Cuban modern art, Carlos Enríquez is best known for his use of transparent color forms and dynamic compositions, representing landscapes, equestrian figures, peasants, and nudes.
Enríquez studied art briefly at the Pennsylvania Academy of Art in 1925, where he met his first wife, the American painter Alice Neel, lived in New York from 1927 to 1930, and then resided in Madrid and Paris between 1930 and 1934, before returning to Cuba for the remainder of his life.
Some of his best-known paintings like El Rey de los campos de Cuba (1934), Rapto de las mulatas (1938), Dos Ríos (1939) and Bandolero criollo (1943) all painted upon his return to his homeland, are icons of Cuban modernism.
El rapto de las mulatas (1938)
In the late 1930s, Enríquez built a house-studio on the outskirts of Havana, which he named El Hurón Azul (The Blue Ferret).
The Hurón Azul is a small house with a studio on the second floor, surrounded by gardens and beyond that open fields with palm trees. Among the house’s outstanding features are a colonial ironwork grill in the front window, a large colonial style half circle stained-glass window on the back door, and a fresco painting of nude bathers in the living room.
The high point of Enríquez’s life in the Hurón Azul was the early 1940s. During that time the multifaceted artist wrote several novels, notably ‘Tilín García’, ‘La vuelta de Chencho’ and ‘La feria de Guaicanama’ --this last one published after the triumph of the 1959 Cuban Revolution.
He also held Sunday afternoon gatherings at the Hurón Azul, attended by noteworthy artists and intellectuals from Cuba and abroad, among them artists Félix Ayón, Marcelo Pogolotti, Víctor Manuel, Felipe Orlando, and Wifredo Lam; the caricaturist Juan David; poets Nicolás Guillén and Félix Pita Rodríguez; the novelist Enrique Labrador Ruíz; the engineer and cultural activist Jorge Fernández de Castro; the cultural critic, essayist Juan Marinello; the attorney and cultural folklorist Agustín Guerra; and the socialite Sará Hernández Catá.
Carlos Enriquez died in Havana on May 2nd, 1957, at the age of 56.
In the 1980s, the Hurón Azul was restored and converted into a house museum.
In 2000, on the 100th birthday anniversary of Carlos Enríquez, the house museum was declared a National Monument.
