Raúl Martínez (artist)

Publio Amable Raúl Martínez González, known as Raúl Martínez, (1 November 1927 – 2 April 1995) was a Cuban painter, designer, photographer, muralist, and graphic artist.

He is best known for colorful pop-art portraits of leading Cuban political figures including José Martí and Camilo Cienfuegos.

Martínez was born in Ciego de Ávila and studied in Havana and at the San Alejandro Academy in Havana, Cuba, and later at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

His early works were abstract, moving towards figurative work later in his career.

Martínez was born Publio Amable Raúl Martinez González in Ciego de Ávila, Cuba, on 1 November 1927, as the son of a sugar-mill worker and a teacher.

Raúl Martínez studied at the Academy of Arts of San Alejandro, and later at the Institute of Design in Chicago, Illinois.

Raúl Martínez had his first exhibition in 1947, in the XXIX Salón de Pintura y Escultura de Círculo de Bellas Artes.

His earlier works were a typification of Cuban art of the time: the outcome of a play with expressionist and post-cubist devices, and has been described as "competent, stereotypical, and forgettable".

During the 1950s he worked in the advertising agency OTPLA.

Was the artistic director of the cultural magazine Lunes de Revolución.

Sporadically designed film posters for ICAIC.

The artist's more notable entrance into painting was in 1956, when he started his abstract-expressionist work, leaving the group Los Once to pursue more representational work, at which point he left behind any traces of the "stereotypical" aforementioned.

After the Cuban Revolution of 1959, Martínez helped the foundation of the Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC), Casa de las Américas and the Cuban Book Institute, through his career as a freelance graphic artist.

Raúl Martínez was a well-rounded designer, as he was successful in just about every art form he pursued: from the early abstract paintings to the later representative ones; from photography to college; from screen printing movie posters to freelance graphic design for government institutions such as the ICAIC.

During the 1960s was a professor of design in the School of Architecture of the University of Havana.

His work has participated in collective and personal expositions and the biennials of Mexico; São Paulo, Brazil; Venice, Italy and in the Salon de Mai, Paris, France.

His work has been rewarded on repeated occasions.

He obtained the Silver Medal, Cuban Painting Exhibition, 1960; Medal of Bronze, International Exposition of the Art of the Book (WENT), Leipzig, Germany, 1965 and the National Prize of Plastic Arts, National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC), 1995.

Briefly, during the 1960s, Cuba had been heavily influenced by the socialism of Soviet Russia.

The USSR had a heavy impact on the developing art scene in Cuba, raising the marvel of social realism as an art form soon after the liturgical awakening in Cuba, where the literacy in the country had undergone a massive overhaul, the likes of which the world had never seen.

(The literacy rate of the average adult went from 20%, to over an astounding 75% over the course of 12 years) When later asked why at the time he did not go with socialist realism, Martínez answered that "Cuban artists were building upon something that had not been built up yet; they could experiment, but they could not take anything for granted."

This idea of a national art form was nothing new to the Latin American Art World, as is evident through Colombian and Brazilian art during the same time period and years prior.

The development of icons was inevitable given the impact of individuals such as Che and Fidel to the developing Cuban culture.

During his time studying at the Institute of Design in Chicago, Illinois, pop art was just beginning to emerge in the United States.

Though this direct exposure to the emerging movement was rather brief, the inclusion of some of the devices of the movement found their way into the work of Martínez, who has been credited as a creator of "a very Cuban pop aesthetic", isolating popular elements of the time with the hope of returning them to the people as the true and original owners of the symbolic goods.

Though there were a few borrowed elements from the movement in the United States, Martínez simply borrowed the serial structure that was most apparent.

Like the artists in the U.S., Martínez used a preexisting popular image but did not really delve into mass-media aesthetics, nor into the desensitization methods utilized by other North American artists of the time.

Instead of taking images from the media, he sought images taken from display cases in Workers' Centers and Defense Committees, images that were produced without taking aesthetics into consideration, and sometimes lacking evident technical skills, to be included into his work.

The revolution had not influenced the work of Martínez until 1962 when the blockade between the United States and Cuba occurred.

Even then, the influence of the revolution did not, yet, have a substantial effect on the body of work.

Martínez simply began incorporating topical titles into his work (which becomes evident in his exhibition Expressionismo Abstracto in 1963).

Abstraction soon became the mode of expression of the Cuban artist, shifting from billboard advertisements to abstract paintings by 1964, when Rauschenberg-like symbols began to appear in the artist's paintings (first with the number 26 as a graphic symbol in 26 de julio).

Substantial to the progression of Martínez's work was the importance of his life-partner, Abelardo Estorino, a prominent playwright and poet in Cuba at the time.

It has yet to be determined how influential Estorino had been directed upon the work of Martínez, but substantial to the progression of the artist's work was the fact that he was homosexual.

During the homosexual paranoia in Cuba in the 60's and 70's, Martínez had lost his job as a teacher in the school of architecture in Havana, which caused him to further pursue his career as a freelance designer, while continuing his career as a prominent painter in Cuba, following his already well-known body of work.

By 1965, Martínez started losing interest in abstraction, but did not return to the "painting for the sake of painting" ideals of Los Once, who believed in "expression of aesthetic emotion through plastic means – form and color – so that the spectator faced with the work would be moved by its basic element: painting."

Figuration made its return to the work of the artist, who longed for closer communication with the public.

"Magic always has been important for me, the magic of the surface and the magic of an expressive life transmuted on it. But magic I define the process of looking for the unknown, which is what I always have done."

The Council of State of the Republic of Cuba offered him the Distinction of National Culture, 1981; the Medal Alejo Carpentier, 1983 and the Order Félix Varela, 1988.

Originally a member of a group that called themselves Los Once (The Eleven), Martínez found success in all of his artistic endeavors until the end of his life in 1995.