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拍品专文
This work is sold with a certificate of authenticity signed by the artist, dated 9 December 2007.
Combining still life, portraiture, and genre scene elements, La cena by Cundo Bermúdez depicts an habanero couple at repast. Positioned frontally, the male figure at left holds a stringed instrument, and takes up slightly more space than his companion. At right, the woman turns her head in his direction, raising a glass to her lips while angling slightly toward him. This bodily position echoes the shape of the pitcher set out on the table below, alongside a piece of cut mamay fruit, a whole fish, and a second wine glass. Such carefully constructed composition, executed in a limited palette of reds, greens, yellows, and browns, presents an image of meditative tension from quotidian life.
Such everyday tableaus are representative of Bermúdez’s practice, which took inspiration from urban life in the artist’s natal city of Havana. Born in the Cuban capitol in 1914, Bermúdez is regarded as a member of the second generation of Cuban modern artists. Following a brief stint at the San Alejandro Academy of Art, Bermúdez studied in Mexico, and returned to Cuba as one of the nation’s premiere painters during the 1940s. Accordingly, paintings by Bermúdez were featured in the canonical Modern Cuban Painters exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art curated by Cuban art historian José Gomez Sicre, who later continued to support the artist in the United States after Bermúdez’s exile from the island in 1967.
Among the paintings featured in Modern Cuban Painters were Bermúdez’s “The Balcony” (1941) and “The Barber Shop” (1942), which like “La Cena” are each centered on paired figures. Both now in the Museum of Modern Art’s Permanent Collection, these works reflect the artist’s initial mature style, characterized by decorative interiors and rounded, classicized figures. With its undifferentiated background and stylized figures (who nevertheless retain Bermúdez’s characteristic aquiline noses), “La Cena” dramatically departs from this earlier aesthetic. Instead, it reflects Bermúdez’s absorption of abstraction, in keeping with contemporary trends both on and off the island. The artist’s mid-century evolution also reflects the experiences of his travels in Europe in the early 1950s, when his work was exhibited in Paris (Musee de Art Modern, 1951) and at the 1952 Venice Biennale. The artist also spent time in the Netherlands and Spain, where he was exposed to the work of both modern artists and Golden Age masters firsthand.
In the case of La cena, it is thus interesting to consider the influence of an artist such as El Greco on Bermúdez’s elongated figures, while the work’s textured yellow background perhaps not only resonates with the warmth of a tropical sun, but may also recall the artist’s exposure to Byzantine art while abroad. Similarly, the spare still life scene along the canvas’s lower edge seems linked to the work of Zurburán, as well as Bermúdez’s more recent artistic forebear and compatriot, Amelia Peláez. Carefully displayed before the couple, these objects are rife with symbolically gendered connotations that allude to the couple’s union. Indeed, complementing one another in clothing, colors, and gestures, Bermúdez’s couple are suspended in a state of enduring permanence.
Susanna Temkin, Ph.D., Curator, El Museo del Barrio, New York
Combining still life, portraiture, and genre scene elements, La cena by Cundo Bermúdez depicts an habanero couple at repast. Positioned frontally, the male figure at left holds a stringed instrument, and takes up slightly more space than his companion. At right, the woman turns her head in his direction, raising a glass to her lips while angling slightly toward him. This bodily position echoes the shape of the pitcher set out on the table below, alongside a piece of cut mamay fruit, a whole fish, and a second wine glass. Such carefully constructed composition, executed in a limited palette of reds, greens, yellows, and browns, presents an image of meditative tension from quotidian life.
Such everyday tableaus are representative of Bermúdez’s practice, which took inspiration from urban life in the artist’s natal city of Havana. Born in the Cuban capitol in 1914, Bermúdez is regarded as a member of the second generation of Cuban modern artists. Following a brief stint at the San Alejandro Academy of Art, Bermúdez studied in Mexico, and returned to Cuba as one of the nation’s premiere painters during the 1940s. Accordingly, paintings by Bermúdez were featured in the canonical Modern Cuban Painters exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art curated by Cuban art historian José Gomez Sicre, who later continued to support the artist in the United States after Bermúdez’s exile from the island in 1967.
Among the paintings featured in Modern Cuban Painters were Bermúdez’s “The Balcony” (1941) and “The Barber Shop” (1942), which like “La Cena” are each centered on paired figures. Both now in the Museum of Modern Art’s Permanent Collection, these works reflect the artist’s initial mature style, characterized by decorative interiors and rounded, classicized figures. With its undifferentiated background and stylized figures (who nevertheless retain Bermúdez’s characteristic aquiline noses), “La Cena” dramatically departs from this earlier aesthetic. Instead, it reflects Bermúdez’s absorption of abstraction, in keeping with contemporary trends both on and off the island. The artist’s mid-century evolution also reflects the experiences of his travels in Europe in the early 1950s, when his work was exhibited in Paris (Musee de Art Modern, 1951) and at the 1952 Venice Biennale. The artist also spent time in the Netherlands and Spain, where he was exposed to the work of both modern artists and Golden Age masters firsthand.
In the case of La cena, it is thus interesting to consider the influence of an artist such as El Greco on Bermúdez’s elongated figures, while the work’s textured yellow background perhaps not only resonates with the warmth of a tropical sun, but may also recall the artist’s exposure to Byzantine art while abroad. Similarly, the spare still life scene along the canvas’s lower edge seems linked to the work of Zurburán, as well as Bermúdez’s more recent artistic forebear and compatriot, Amelia Peláez. Carefully displayed before the couple, these objects are rife with symbolically gendered connotations that allude to the couple’s union. Indeed, complementing one another in clothing, colors, and gestures, Bermúdez’s couple are suspended in a state of enduring permanence.
Susanna Temkin, Ph.D., Curator, El Museo del Barrio, New York