La academia de Bellas Artes de San Alejandro de la Habana (Cuba)Fundación, evolución y producción pictórica (1818-1899)

Résumé

The 19th century is vital for the history of Cuban painting. The economic development achieved in that century on the island made it possible to reach higher levels also on the cultural level. An expression of this was the founding in January 1818 of the San Alejandro Academy in Havana city, the first in the Caribbean space and the second in all of Latin America. This institution made possible, in a decisive way, the transit of the manifestation through the paths of the artistic by consolidating, in addition to training, promotion and criticism about painting. Thus, began the official History of painting in Cuba, which can be verified through the multiple publications that from the colonial period itself were in charge of recording facts, authors, works and styles that began to diagram a process that arrived in 2018 to its two hundred years of existence. However, today the Academy, its artists and their production, are not prosecuted considering the importance they represent in the genesis and subsequent development of Cuban painting. The evaluative gaze is eminently synchronous without considering diachronic factors. We therefore propose in this thesis a historiographic study that allows us to give answers to the many questions that still persist around the subject. This research aims to analyze the historiography on academic painting of the 19th century carried out in Cuba and determine the characteristics, evolution and particularities that refer to the San Alejandro Academy, its graduates and its pictorial production. The analysis and evaluation that is carried out contributes to just appreciating the criteria that currently exist around the Cuban Academy of Painting of the colonial period; in the same way, it covers the persistent gaps on this issue. As a result, a systematization and periodization of the literature on the subject is obtained. In addition, we determined two fundamental stages in the San Alejandro Academy, which we have called "period of emergence and first steps" that includes from the creation of the institution to the inauguration (1859) of Juan Francisco Cisneros, director with whom San Alejandro had the greatest advances and "period of evolution and consolidation" comprised until 1899 when La Colonia ends. The institution and its artists contributed both in works and in the introduction of new styles, methods and artistic conceptions to the history of Cuban art, especially to pictorial art.