Modernismos periféricos. Claves para reescribir la historia del modernismo catalán en La Habana

Résumé 0

"In this work we perform a critical assessment of the literature on the development of Catalan Modernism in Havana in two stages, one which strives to discover the national identity of architecture and a second one that accepts the Havanan urban space as a complex universe made up of varied fragments. We discuss the conception of the unprecedented architectural image and its relation to the adherence to historicism in peripheral contexts, a concept present in the assessment of Havanan Modernism, explaining it with primary sources and establishing its limitations. We present the question of the opposition of art to industrial reality, analyzing how it behaves in the Cuban case and what kind of documents—literary, in the analyzed case—provided guidelines for taste and a demand not connected to the Caribbean colonial tradition, but to the desire to build a space to “live on a large scale”, according to European models and the urgency to modernize the capital of the new republic. We support the argument with unpublished and little-known images, this being the prevailing criterion in the selection of images."