CONDEMNED INTO THE CHAOS

Among the many myths surrounding the life and work of the great Cuban artist Micah Carpentier is the one that has him laboring in noble squalor, deprived of the perquisites of fame and renown. People imagine my uncle in his baggy short-sleeved guayabera pacing the floor of a leaky Havana studio the approximate size of a New York City efficiency apartment.

Nothing could be further from the truth. For many years Micah Carpentier flourished in Castro's Cuba, enjoying all the benefits as befitting a luminary of the Caribbean socialist paradise. 

Oil painting of Micah Carpentier's  Casa Migadalia studio, Micah Carpentier, 1963 (courtesy of the Micah Carpentier Foundation, Barcelona)

His enormous atelier in the old Casa Migadalia el Cobre on Calle Lamparilla was a glorious space that could easily rival any of today's lower Manhattan beauty lofts. Tall, skylit ceilings, mahogany hardwood floors, 14 foot windows with northeastern exposure and a small, air conditioned alcove with a desk and a day bed. 

Micah Carpentier was the darling of El Tropical Izquierda, the fashionable left wing circles of mid-1960's Latin America.

Until, of course, he wasn't.

Carpentier in his tiny Las Piedras studio in east Havana, 1971

In the now famous 1970 interview with the recently defunct French arts journal Les Nouvelles Idées Crues Carpentier indiscreetly confessed to a grudging admiration of North American Pop Art, a style that was seen by the Left as flagrantly reactionary, hopelessly bourgeois and the quintessential expression of regressive consumer capitalism.

After that Micah's luminous star plummeted like a punctured bladder. His beautiful studio was requisitioned for a national ballet academy, his right to foreign travel was summarily revoked and his work was no longer collected by the well-heeled, intellectual disciples of Sartre, Russell and Marcuse.

Micah Carpentier spent his last lonely years in a cramped east Havana studio making watercolors of his two small fish tanks full of gliding guppies psychedelic loaches.

His fortunes may have faded but his visions remained grand and noble and exquisite to the very end.

Micah Carpentier Vive!!!