Word: gonzalez
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With his studied style, Roberto Robaina Gonzalez looks more like a manager of a rock band than a Marxist model. Yet Robaina, at 37, exemplifies the new face of Cuba. Two months ago, Fidel Castro surprised Havana by picking the man he affectionately calls Robertico, a math teacher who speaks only Spanish, as Foreign Minister. U.S. diplomats dismissed him as "dynamic but dumb." Havana's bureaucrats were speechless: in his previous job as head of the Union of Communist Youth, Robaina had wooed the young with discos and salsa music -- and those T shirts. Even Fidel had a public laugh...
...Picasso's famous rusty tin Cubist Guitar of 1912 -- all planes and interstitial spaces. But it wasn't realized until 1928, when Picasso, who had spent much of that year making diagrammatic drawings for sculptures that would be executed in nothing but wire, sought out the help of Gonzalez, who taught him to weld iron. Picasso's energies, in turn, seem to have inspired in Gonzalez the daring to become an inventive sculptor in his own right. The Picasso-Gonzalez link was as important for sculpture, in the end, as the earlier Picasso-Braque partnership had been for painting...
Both men realized how things already made of iron could be brought into sculpture, thus extending the aesthetics of assemblage and the found object. To see Picasso's joining two tin half-spheres -- kitchen colanders -- to form the cranium of Head of a Woman, 1929-30, or Gonzalez's recycling what appears to be a pair of scythe blades as the wings of a creature midway between angel and praying mantis, is to witness plays of the dreaming, free-associating, punning mind that seem fundamental to modernism. Iron, in the form of objects that could be almost randomly brought together...
...fragility; in extreme cases, like the wonderful Tightrope, 1937, with its wire personages balancing on a string between two balks of wood, they are so fine as to be almost unphotographable. Real as the pleasures of early Calder are, however, they don't have the imaginative force of Picasso, Gonzalez -- or Smith...
Smith remains the true primary heir of Picasso and Gonzalez -- and, to some extent, of Giacometti, whose space constructions like The Palace at 4 A.M. inspired the young American artist in the '30s to make a series of small iron precincts and even a miniature iron house, complete with iron paintings on the walls. Curator Gimenez's choice of his work is an exemplary condensation. Beginning with those initial Surrealist images, it picks up on the early sculptures that clearly indicate the bent of his talent, such as Amusement Park, 1938, a small work that both remembers Picasso's iron...