Marcelo Pogolotti (1902-1988)

He was born in Havana in 1902 and died in the same city in 1988. Member of the first generation of Cuban painters. He passed his childhood between Cuba and Europe, mainly Italy where he made his primary studies, adquiring the secondary studies in USA.

In 1919, he started engineering and Philosophy studies in USA, but he promptly abandoned them and devoted his entire life to art, entering in 1923 to Art Students' League in New York. Around 1924, he travelled to Rótterdam, Paris and Madrid.

Pogolotti was an active fighter against the Academic painting together with the luminary painter Victor Manuel, demanding its renovation and the creation of a national art. In 1927, he participated on Exposición de Arte Nuevo, significant cultural event of the epoch in Cuba.

In Paris, he was attracted by Surrealism and at the end of 1929, he joined in Italy the Futurist Movement, later on, he went away machines and tried abstracts forms, making simultaneously the series of drawings Nuestro Tiempo (1930-1931), starting a new pictorial orientation and exhibiting at Róyale Gallery.

During 1934 and 1935 he exposes at Association of Revolutionary Writers and Artists in Paris, being considered as founder member of the first social painters group in Europe. In this epoch, he collaborated with Commune Magazine. In 1938, he offered a personal exhibition at the Carrefour Gallery in Paris. In this year he completely lost his vision.

Returning to Cuba, he presented numerous solo and group exhibitions, since then, he developed an intense labor as essayist, novelist and art critic, living in Mexico and Cuba.

Despite the short time of live that he could devote to the pictorial creation, his work possesses a high value on the Cuban Plastic Patrimony.

Paisaje Cubano, oil painting of 1933, is a significative exponent of this epoch`s social conditions. Other paintings that are worthy to mention: El Alba, El Muelle and La Zafra.

More information at National Council of Plastic Arts.