Skip to main content
ANOTHER (NEW) SHORTCUT TO POGOLOTTI
09October
Articles

ANOTHER (NEW) SHORTCUT TO POGOLOTTI

Cuba’s visual arts are going through an interesting moment as far as publishing matters are concerned. Today’s underpinnings of our art are being little by little rescued and studied, presented and promoted in a time that came after them, the same time in which certain living artists can get kicks out of building their visual universe on luxurious monographs. Getting over the article, the exhibit, the occasional interviews –for instance– is part of the thesis of what we usually call a book that tells a story in a more relaxed, embracing and sufficient fashion, even though when it connects to those three proceedings. In any of them, however, there’s credibility, shared efforts and, of course, huge spending. But a book lasts forever; it’s a far-reaching racetrack. Our publishing logic has not followed the perspective of showcasing step-by-step successive processes. It’s all been done based on moments and opportunities. We count on our registries of the past and the present, all of them sprinkled with the right-on-track or off-the-beam criteria wielded by the critics. Lacking far more than what we have in terms of art books, each and every one of them is no doubt a major oasis of knowledge. One of the latest editions is Marcelo Pogolotti: An Adventurer of Modernity (2008), a hybrid that sways between a catalog and a book. Either way, it’s a bilingual volume (Spanish-Italian), the outcome of contemporary cultural ties we now have with other parts of the planet, in this case between the developed Italian region of Piamonte and the always eclectic Cuban capital. On the one hand we received the funds and the design of the product; on the other hand, we got the guidance and the advise, the experience and an edition heavily focused on the National Museum of Fine Arts (NMFA) in Havana and on Pogolotti the intellectual (just like that because words such as painter and writer are too short for his breeches). He thought of his time through lineal and pictorial art, and stripped of a vision his writings became the perfect vehicles to depict his state of life. To be more exact, though, this volume carries a visual weight and verges on an anthology of works. Around the imago, the written correlate features the index of the 171 pages of superb quality, peculiar smell and great printing conducted by a couple of well-known entities that have made the dreams of many Cuban collaborators and editors come true time and again: Escandón Impresores and Ediciones Vanguardia Cubana. Two minuscule texts act as gateways to the book: visions, explanations, opinions, reasons… that, far beyond this publishing fact, are offered by Gianni Oliva, a cultural official from Piamonte, and Luz Merino Acosta, professor and NMFA official. Their judgments serve as a threshold to the bigger brunt of the volume, a heading on page 3 that reads: “Introductory Essay/ Graziella Pogolotti Jakobson// Chronology, Bibliography and Artwork Selection/ Ramon Vazquez Diaz.” This collective effort that provided just another crossing moment in the careers of Graziella and Ramon Vazquez –they pulled off a similar endeavor back in the 1980s– as essayists and data compilers, respectively, but on that occasion working on a book about the great Rene Portocarrero. This time around, they huddled to work on Marcelo Pogolotti, an artist Graziella can write about extensively for being such a lucid essayist and the daughter of the painter and writer, while Vazquez is a man of visual sharpness and a wisdom that has built on a variety of sources (originals, archive documents, testimonies, and so forth). Those texts are informative cores that come to the readers along other effective images (drawings, paintings, documents, facsimiles, photographs) that smoothen and spruce up the yarn of ideas both experts spin on Marcelo Pogolotti. The two of them contribute, enhance and give new shades. Those cores must be read to bear this out. Compiling Marcelo Pogolotti’s creation is a longstanding desire many have cherished, a work by various artists from Havana, Turin and Paris. Thus, we set out to cull the greatest selection of the artist’s artworks ever made, based on pieces exhibited at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana, others provided by private collectors, and a documentation review that helped to track down the missing pieces with a view to offer a rigorous documented chronology. That was written by Luz Merino Acosta in the first paragraph. That is, this volume has taken on “the largest selection ever published about the artist,” something clearly and mostly seen in the “Works” section (pages 69 to 137), that feature a selected assortment of Pogolotti’s artworks of contrasting grays and blacks –distinguishing elements in this thick monograph. It’s indeed a vital printed gallery that sheds abundant light on the artist and rescues him from oblivion, an intellectual whose writings –I’m confident of– has for long years been far more visible than his own visual creations. Like all painters and drawers anointed in the NMFA halls –let alone in other collections– the review of the compilation is only for a handful of selected people. A number of reasons conceal and reveal tiny glimpses of the whole work. And a monographic book can be just another tool to teach, educate, promote and spread a collection of national-heritage class. Nonetheless, not everything is at the NMFA and that explains why a good book should always count on the remaining collections that are owned by only a few. Therefore, view sharing and balancing have been the criteria of choice wielded to put in black and white a segment of Pogolotti’s artistic iconography through the collections. The result has presumably been the most effective of all. There was a need to search in all directions in order to achieve the best graphic upshot –something subtly announced in both the cover and the back cover. Marcelo’s pieces at the NMFA will always remain there, in their place, visibly in permanent halls or in the vaults, together with the rest of the treasures of this major art collection. In the meantime, the private collections could change hands as time rolls on, move from one place to another, yet a printed registry can also protect the nature of the piece. Marcelo Pogolotti: An Adventurer of Modernity comes at the closing of a cycle that has embraced a decade of remembrance and homage recently paid to the intellectual through expositions, articles, the rescue of information, the making of a Doctorate Thesis Work on him and the reprinting of some of his books. The 2000s paved the way for such actions that, from the perspective of today, articulate an adding and organic process. Pogolotti has been favored. This volume does not undo future and possible initiatives that would complement our vision of the humanist who thought of and mulled over texts and images in his days. And right now, this is by far the best publishing ally of one of his finest creations: Clay and Voices, autobiographic memoirs, one of the most accurate and polyhedral ones ever made about certain artists, like Domingo Ravenet, Conrado W. Massaguer, Hugo Consuegra, Guido Llinas and Raul Martinez. There’s still a lot to know about Pogolotti. However, the fog covering his cultural orbit has faded away a little bit, and is thinning and thinning. That’s a fact. Marcelo Pogolotti: An Adventurer of Modernity: Introductory Essay: Graziella Pogolotti Jakobson; Chronology, bibliography and work selection: Ramon Vazquez Diaz, Ediciones Vanguardia Cubana, Madrid, 2008.