Landaluze, Víctor Patricio de (1828–1889)

Víctor Patricio de Landaluze (b. 1828; d. 8 June 1889), Cuban painter and cartoonist who is considered the precursor of graphic political satire in Cuba. Born in Bilbao, Spain, Landaluze emigrated in the 1850s to Havana, where he founded the newspaper Don Junípero (1862). Between 1868 and 1878, he was the political cartoonist for La Charanga, El Moro Muza (under the pseudonym of Bayaceto), Don Circunstancias, and Juan Palomo, weekly journals through which he satirized the Cuban struggle for independence. He was both professor at and director of the Academy of San Alejandro in Havana.

In oil and watercolor paintings, he depicted popular Cuban stereotypes such as the guajiro (a rustic type), the landowner, the slave, and the ñanigo (a member of a secret black society), and illustrated the books Tipos y costumbres (Types and Customs) and Cuba pintoresca (Picturesque Cuba), both published in 1881.

His ironic attitude toward the Cuban independence movement earned him the antipathy of art critics. Ironically, his painting of the backward campesino Liborio became a Cuban national symbol. With the exception of an oil painting of a fugitive slave cornered by dogs and soldiers (El cimarrón [The Runaway Slave]), Landaluze's work is often considered biased in his presentation of blacks as lazy and lascivious. Much of his production, however, recorded with exactitude the costumes and rituals of the different nations of Cuban blacks. He died in Guanabacoa.

See alsoCampesino; Journalism.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dawn Ades, Art in Latin America: The Modern Era, 1820–1980 (1989), p. 85.

Adelaida De Juan, Pintura cubana: Temas y variaciones (1980), pp. 25-26, 33-36, 46.

Additional Bibliography

Landaluze, Víctor Patricio de. Víctor Patricio Landaluze. La Habana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1991.

                                           Marta Garsd