I mages of boats and the horizon are a relative constant in Cuban art. For Cubans they're often an expression of longing for life beyond a geographically and politically enclosed space.
For the rare Americans who ever see Cuban art, the images can be a reminder of a place they may be unlikely to visit.
For the next five months, witnessing at least one aspect of Cuba will in theory be a bit easier for Americans. Cuba! Art and History from 1868 to Today, an exhibition that just opened at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, offers more than 400 images and objects from the island that Christopher Columbus is said to have called "the most beautiful land that eyes have ever seen."
Many of the paintings were lent by the National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana with encouragement from Cuban officials who want to promote the notion of Cuban culture, said Moraima Clavijo Colom, the museum director. "That Cuba was not just a place of sun, beaches, rum and dancing," she said.
It may seem provocative to dangle this forbidden fruit near the border of the US, whose citizens can face fines for traveling to Cuba under the latest version of a 46-year-old trade embargo. But Nathalie Bondil, the director of the Montreal museum and the curator of the exhibition, said "It's not a political show. It's just a show."
She declined to speculate on whether any museum in the US could cooperate legally on such a scale with a comparable Cuban institution. "It's not a question," she said. "Canada is a different country." Canada is one of Cuba's most important trading partners, and Canadians make up the largest group of tourists who visit Cuba.
Still, given Cuba's history, any exhibition of work produced there seems to become a show about Cuba and Cuban identity. The date of 1868 was anything but arbitrary, Bondil noted: it was the year in which Cubans in the town of Bayamo first declared independence from Spain. And by including "art and history" in the exhibition title, the curators also signal that the subject of much Cuban art is Cuba and Cubans.
"Cuban art cannot escape the necessary negotiation with the historical situation in which it occurs - that seems to be the defining element," said Stephane Aquin, the Montreal curator who selected the works made after 1959. "The best that I've seen of Cuban art is always negotiating its space or reacting to its historical condition."
Like any survey of art and history in a Western country, this one rolls through landscape painting, portraiture and genre scenes, beginning with folkloric images of Afro-Cuban rural life. (Slavery was not banned in Cuba until 1888.) Yet two mediums help to set Cuba and this exhibition apart from other marches through history.
Photographers have documented Cuban life since the middle of the 19th century, and some 200 photographs lent by the Fototeca de Cuba in Havana guide visitors from the 1860s to the present. Among them are Walker Evans' grim images of Havana street life, included in Carleton Beals' 1933 book, The Crime of Cuba, a lament for ordinary people living under the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado y Morales (1925-1933).
There are also abundant images from an inventive graphic arts industry that advertised to a growing consumer population in the 1920s and 1930s, deploying the new vocabularies of Modernism and Surrealism. Cuba's vibrant poster culture was so strong that it survived the transition to one-party Communism after Fidel Castro's takeover in 1959.
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