AMELIA PEL?EZ (Cuba, 1896 - 1968).
"Lady with a Fan, 1957.
Tempera on paper.
Signed and dated in the lower right corner.
Measurements: 57 x 54 cm.

Provenance: Manuel Reguera Saumell collection, recognised as one of the great Cuban writers and playwrights of the 20th century. As the set of photographs that accompany this collection testify, Reguera forged a close friendship with the most outstanding exponents of Cuban art during the years he spent in his native country. It was then that Reguera, backed by the bond that united him with Amelia Peláez, Rene Portocarrero, Carlos Abela and Antonia Eiriz, began his facet as a collector, giving birth to what would become his personal collection.

The present work belongs to the author's Baroque period, considered one of the most prolific of her career. In the image Peláez displays her characteristic pictorial imagery, offering the viewer a striking figurative composition made up of simplified lines that outline very marked contours. However, the painting does not abandon colour, which is the undisputed protagonist of the piece. Resembling a stained-glass window or a window that receives the light, it shows a lady whose contours are delimited by means of a thick, synthetic line. This resource, in the manner of stained-glass windows, favours a trompe l'oeil of light unique to the painting of Peláez, who, inspired by the architecture of her native Cuba, knew how to transform its cultural tradition into contemporaneity like no one else.
Amelia Peláez painted her most interesting works during her maturity. At first her aesthetics were closely linked to the academy. In 1916 she began her studies at the Academy of San Alejandro and in 1921 she went to New York. She initially commented that the United States brought her nothing, but there she came into contact with modernity, coming into contact with different, new and avant-garde art. She finally returned to the San Alejandro Academy, graduating in 1926 with honours from the hand of Romanach, that is to say, from the hand of the most academic art. He then travelled to Paris in 1927 and stayed there for seven years. She arrived with a state commission to investigate the schools and to find out how the art scene was constituted. During this period Amalia immersed herself in art, which for her was a renewal. She enrolled at the Louvre school, also in that classical environment, and in 1931 she entered a newly opened academy, the contemporary academy of Fernand Léger, where she met a teacher who was an artistic revelation for Amelia. Alejandra Exter (1882-1949), a Russian painter and designer who followed the ideas of constructivism and had a great influence on Amelia's education. Through her works of geometric character and superimpositions of planes. Amelia found in avant-garde Europe not the purism of the avant-garde, but something more post-modern, but she was still interested in it because it was a whole world of suggestions for her to assimilate and create a new aesthetic. In an article she wrote in a Paris newspaper about Cuban painters, she said that they were interested in the great masters of the contemporary in order to create a revolution in Havana. Those who returned to Cuba assimilated the classical tradition, but were inspired by the themes of their country, although they were also interested in Gauguin and the art of the blacks. In Paris he assimilated what he was seeing and produced paintings of this type, with a strong emphasis on figuration and post-avant-gardism. He opted for geometric rigour and broke with conventional space, opting for a purely plastic vision, typical of the avant-garde. In 1934 he returned to Havana in the midst of political change, when Batista was coming to power. He confined himself to his studio and devoted himself to shaping his definitive work. He eliminated his academic burdens belatedly. When the catharsis of arriving in her homeland took place, she began to produce her own language, as it was in Havana that she realised that she did not want to be a simple painter of the School of Paris, but a modern, avant-garde Cuban artist. She came into contact with Wilfredo Lam, who had a deep knowledge of Afro-Cuban traditions after coming from Paris, and she herself ended up finding her style, looking at her city.