Quick Facts
Born:
August 4, 1912, Cárdenas, Cuba
Died:
October 18, 1979, Havana (aged 67)

Virgilio Piñera (born August 4, 1912, Cárdenas, Cuba—died October 18, 1979, Havana) was a playwright, short-story writer, poet, and essayist who became famous for his work as well as for his highly bohemian lifestyle. His life was one of his most outrageous creations.

Piñera’s father was a railroad engineer, and his mother was a schoolteacher. He attended the University of Havana but refused to defend his dissertation before a “bunch of donkeys.” Thereafter, he found it difficult to find suitable employment and sometimes was forced to rely on family and friends for financial support. Piñera was not one to belong to literary groups or to associate himself with artistic and philosophical movements, and his frequent troubles with Castro’s regime came as a result of his irreverence and refusal to follow a party line.

Piñera was better known for his avant-garde theatre, such as the play Electra Garrigó (1943), than for his poetry or short stories, though his admirers recognized him as a master of the latter. His best collections are Cuentos fríos (1956; Cold Tales) and Pequeñas maniobras (1963; “Little Maneuvers”).

4:043 Dickinson, Emily: A Life of Letters, This is my letter to the world/That never wrote to me; I'll tell you how the Sun Rose/A Ribbon at a time; Hope is the thing with feathers/That perches in the soul
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In the 1950s Piñera lived in Buenos Aires, where he came to know Jorge Luis Borges, and his work was published in the prestigious journal Sur. This period in Argentina—encompassing his friendship with Borges and others in Buenos Aires, including the exiled Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz—was an influence on his work. Piñera returned to Cuba after the triumph of the revolution in 1959. But in 1961 he was jailed for “political and moral crimes.” After his eventual release, he went on living as a marginal figure with few defenders among those in power, although in 1969 he did win Cuba’s most important literary award, the Casa de las Américas Prize, for his play Dos viejos pánicos (“Two Ancient Panics”).

Piñera’s stories blend the fantastic with the grotesque, with touches of paranoia, and even with madness. The world seems to collapse on his protagonists, who resort to drastic measures, such as that taken by the main character in “Carne” (“Meat”) who progressively eats himself to avoid starvation.

Roberto González Echevarría
Quick Facts
Date:
1920 - 1939
Significant Works:
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Top Questions

What was Surrealism and its goal?

What are the characteristics of Surrealism?

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Which artists practiced Surrealism?

Who first used the word Surrealism?

Surrealism, movement in visual art and literature, flourishing in Europe between World Wars I and II. Surrealism grew principally out of the earlier Dada movement, which before World War I produced works of anti-art that deliberately defied reason; but Surrealism’s emphasis was not on negation but on positive expression. The movement represented a reaction against what its members saw as the destruction wrought by the “rationalism” that had guided European culture and politics in the past and that had culminated in the horrors of World War I. According to the major spokesman of the movement, the poet and critic André Breton, who published The Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, Surrealism was a means of reuniting conscious and unconscious realms of experience so completely that the world of dream and fantasy would be joined to the everyday rational world in “an absolute reality, a surreality.” Drawing heavily on theories adapted from Sigmund Freud, Breton saw the unconscious as the wellspring of the imagination. He defined genius in terms of accessibility to this normally untapped realm, which, he believed, could be attained by poets and painters alike.

Characteristics

In the poetry of Breton, Paul Éluard, Pierre Reverdy, and others, Surrealism manifested itself in a juxtaposition of words that was startling because it was determined not by logical but by psychological—that is, unconscious—thought processes. Surrealism’s major achievements, however, were in the field of painting. Surrealist painting was influenced not only by Dadaism but also by the fantastic and grotesque images of such earlier painters as Hieronymus Bosch and Francisco Goya and of closer contemporaries such as Odilon Redon, Giorgio de Chirico, and Marc Chagall. The practice of Surrealist art strongly emphasized methodological research and experimentation, stressing the work of art as a means for prompting personal psychic investigation and revelation. Breton, however, demanded firm doctrinal allegiance. Thus, although the Surrealists held a group show in Paris in 1925, the history of the movement is full of expulsions, defections, and personal attacks.

Surrealist artists

With its emphasis on content and free form, Surrealism provided a major alternative to the contemporary, highly formalistic Cubist movement and was largely responsible for perpetuating in modern painting the traditional emphasis on content. The work of major Surrealist painters is too diverse to be summarized categorically. Each artist sought his or her own means of self-exploration. Some single-mindedly pursued a spontaneous revelation of the unconscious, freed from the controls of the conscious mind, while others, notably the Catalan painter Joan Miró (though he never officially joined the group), used Surrealism as a liberating starting point for an exploration of personal fantasies, conscious or unconscious, often through formal means of great beauty.

A range of possibilities falling between the two extremes can be distinguished. At one pole, exemplified at its purest by the works of the French artist Jean Arp, the viewer is confronted with images, usually biomorphic, that are suggestive but indefinite. As the viewer’s mind works with the provocative image, unconscious associations are liberated, and the creative imagination asserts itself in a totally open-ended investigative process. To a greater or lesser extent, the German artist Max Ernst, French painter André Masson, and Miró also followed this approach, variously called organic, emblematic, or absolute Surrealism.

At the other pole the viewer is confronted by a world that is completely defined and minutely depicted but that makes no rational sense: fully recognizable, realistically painted images are removed from their normal contexts and reassembled within an ambiguous, paradoxical, or shocking framework. The work aims to provoke a sympathetic response, forcing the viewer to acknowledge the inherent “sense” of the irrational and logically inexplicable. The most direct form of this approach was taken by Belgian artist René Magritte in simple but powerful paintings such as that portraying a normal table setting that includes a plate holding a slice of ham, from the center of which stares a human eye. Spanish artist Salvador Dalí, French painter Pierre Roy, and Belgian artist Paul Delvaux rendered similar but more complex alien worlds that resemble compelling dreamlike scenes.

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French-born American painter Yves Tanguy’s style was somewhere between the two poles. He often painted with painstaking detail ambiguous forms, which resemble marine invertebrates or sculpturesque rock formations, and set them in barren, brightly lit landscapes that have an infinite horizon.