A Companion to Modern and Contemporary Latin American and Latina/o Art - Группа авторов

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the vanguard may not have been possible without a woman's touch. But when intellectuals – including those who regularly spoke at the Lyceum – were routinely persecuted by the Machado dictatorship, why would their host institution be exempt? The answer may have something to do with the traditional respect accorded Cuban women, which Cuban feminists had recently embraced as a part of their political strategy. The Cuban women's movement capitalized on women's traditional roles in their arguments advocating for women's potential to make a unique contribution to the nation.

      Machado's respect for women's traditional roles, and also Cuba's elites, is illustrated by his response to women protesters in the tense political standoff resulting from the 1930 death of student leader Rafael Trejo González, for which the government was largely held responsible. Feminist leaders turned the funeral eulogy into a platform to decry Machado's repression and to call for united action against the regime. Just as Machado permitted the women mourner‐protesters to make these statements and participate in the funeral proceedings, he may have permitted the Lyceum's activities out of fear for how an attack on a women's cultural organization might be perceived by the general public. Even while responding to his opponents with extreme violence, Machado was not indifferent to public opinion. For example, in 1932 the dictator‐president released political prisoners in an attempt to rectify his image. Just as the mourner‐protesters at the Trejo González funeral were acting as caretakers, so too were the Lyceistas in their protection of national culture.

      The Lyceistas themselves cited women's traditional life‐giving and child‐rearing roles as a model for their work as caretakers of Cuba's intellectual and cultural patrimony (Mederos de González 1936). Journalists, from the inauguration of the Lyceum's first clubhouse in 1929 throughout the history of the organization, repeatedly heralded the warm home and the hospitality the Lyceistas offered to the vanguard, and national culture more generally. The February 1929 coverage of the inauguration of the clubhouse and the celebratory New Art Exhibition in Avance heralded the Lyceum's domestic ambiance and the presence of many young women and young intellectuals, signaling the Lyceum's partnership with the vanguard:

      The Lyceum was housed in a neoclassical home in the prestigious Vedado neighborhood, which the writer pointedly noted predated “chalets” – a US building style. Photographs of the interior reveal traditional Cuban living room furniture; from the inauguration through at least the 1930s, the domestic nature of the Lyceum's headquarters was frequently mentioned in journalistic accounts of the group's activities, and the club was often referred to as a “home” to Cuban culture (Almanaque 1929; Florit 1936; Mederos de González 1936; Borrero 1939; Arocena 1949a, b). In 1936, vanguard artist and children's art instructor Alfredo Lozano remarked that at “the Lyceum, intense focal point of national culture, there is also the warmth of home.”

      As they had done at the funeral of Trejo González, the members of the Cuban women's movement were adept at using women's traditional roles to create a voice for themselves in national politics; the Lyceum was as much a partner to the women's movement as it was to the vanguard. In her history of the Cuban women's movement, Lynn Stoner (1991) argues that rather than targeting the patriarchy or the traditional Hispanic family, Cuban women embraced their self‐proclaimed femininity, lauded motherhood, and extended their caretaking roles to the public sphere, where they positioned themselves as authorities on social welfare issues, such as education, maternity hospitals and childhood disease research, charity and welfare, cultural events, and the morality of politics. Delegates of the National Women's Congress in 1923 and 1925 capitalized on their assumed moral superiority to argue that women could be the moral saviors of a new, more democratic, and more socially just Cuba. This position was in fact predicated on women's traditional roles, and as such, the majority at these congresses advocated the protection of marriage, the traditional family, and female chastity. From this platform, the feminists positioned themselves as matriarchs of a more socially progressive Cuba (p. 70).

      Editorials in Avance occasionally addressed the women's movement, arguing that women offered the vanguard advantages in their struggle for sociopolitical change. In fall 1927, contributor Enrique José Varona (1849–1933) heralded feminism, associating it with the broader social revolution for which he and the journal's intellectuals fought. His praise brought the weight of a veteran of the Independence Wars, a former vice president (1913–1917) known for criticizing political corruption, a positivist philosopher and professor at the University of Havana who mentored contemporary students in the opposition. In a 1929 editorial on the women's movement's effort to win the right to vote for women, the editors argued that women were key to the democratization of Cuba as a means of escaping Cuba's history of political corruption, expressing that the “feminization” of Cuban politics could make the process more human (Directrices: Feminismo y democratización 1929a); another article from the same year praised the Lyceum, noting that “one must have deep faith in the public action of women” (Almanque 1929). Stoner argues that such positive assessments of women's abilities to aid the nation were pervasive throughout the twenties and thirties and resulted in the inclusion of many feminist reforms in the Constitution of 1940. The articles suggest that women were considered to exist outside the realm of historic corruption plaguing national politics and that their participation offered advantages in the opposition's quest for reform.

      A key aspect of the potential for women's unique contribution to the nation seems to have been their perceived distance from the corruption that the vanguard sought to address in national politics. Critic Manuel Bisbé remarked that the Lyceum was a “refuge” from contentious national politics, a neutral place where diverse viewpoints could be expressed in a tolerant atmosphere (Caballero de Ichaso and Bisbé 1939). He said that such a refuge was necessary at that time more than ever; Cubans needed a “home to the spirit.” The only condition of debate was that “the passions have to remain outside, [as do] the shameless clothing, dirty from the blood and sludge of the fight” (pp. 29–30). His description gives the sense that uncensored and thus authentic debate was only possible in the safety of the private sphere, in locales like the Lyceum, where the scrutiny and compromised nature of public life could not interfere.

      The traditional associations of women's domestic lives with the private sphere may have also affected how critics discussed a woman's place in the vanguard's contemplative pursuit of national art. Contemporary art criticism suggests female figures and domestic spaces were couched in terms of the emotional, inner reality of the artist that vanguard critics urged forth. One of the earliest examples of this is in a 1932 review of an

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