Víctor Manuel García Valdés

File:Víctor Manuel García Valdés, Cuban painter.jpg

Víctor Manuel García Valdés, Havana, Cuba, 1933. Photo by Walker Evans. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

For other people named Victor Garcia, see Victor Garcia (disambiguation).

Víctor Manuel García Valdés (October 31, 1897–February 1, 1969) was a Cuban painter of the Avant-garde movement.

Life and career

Born in Havana, at age six Victor Manuel already showed a precocious aptitude for drawing. At age 12, he started studying art at Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes "San Alejandro", the most recognized art school in Cuba. When he was 14, he started to act as an unofficial professor of elementary drawing.

Manuel studied with Leopoldo Romañach, a famous Cuban painter, and by age 19 his talent started to become evident. Nevertheless, he didn't have his first personal exhibition until 1924, when he was 26 years old. In 1925 he traveled abroad, visiting France. It was in Montparnasse that a group of French artists advised him to sign his paintings only as "Víctor Manuel" (until then, he had used his entire name and surname).

La Gitana Tropical, 1929, Victor Manuel.

Manuel returned home in 1927, and participated in an exhibition of the Painters and Sculptors Association of Havana, which is considered to be one of the starting points of the Cuban modern painting era. In this period he dedicated himself, for almost two years, to the training of other Cuban painters, free of charge. Afterwards, he went back to France, visiting Spain and Belgium before returning to Cuba again in 1929. It was in that year that he created his most famous painting, La Gitana Tropical (The Tropical Gipsy), popularly known as "La Gioconda Americana" ("The American Mona Lisa"), which is in the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana. It is considered by critics to be one of the defining pieces of Cuban Avant-garde art.

In 1935, Víctor Manuel began to reap awards for his work, receiving prizes in the first two exhibitions of painting and sculpture, held in 1935 and 1938 respectively, at Havana's Lyceum. He was given solo exhibitions at the University of Havana (1945), the Association of Reporters (1951), and the Lex Gallery (1959), and was the subject of a career retrospective at the national galleries in 1959. In 1964, he began a new stage in which he expressed himself through lithography, holding experimental graphic workshops in Havana's Plaza de la Catedral. He also continued exhibiting his works abroad.

He died in 1969, in Havana.

Style

Víctor Manuel's style was not monolithic, but evolved greatly during his lifetime. His early paintings show a tendency to mix European styles with an earthy primitivism, such as La Gitana Tropical (1929). In the 1940s and 1950s he adopted the more stylized look that became distinctive of his work. During the last years of his life, his style became almost abstract, with his portraits suggesting cubism.

He was very inconsistent in signing his work, ranging from a simple "VICTOR MANUEL" in all capitalized letters, to fluid and complicated script, to not signing his paintings at all. He even used a pseudonym in a period of his life [1].

His subjects were the constant point of his work. He was eminently a portraitist of female faces, as well as painter of landscapes, both rural and urban.