Havana’s annual film festival always attracts cinephiles from around the world, but 1999 was a particularly crowd-drawing year. With the premiere of Julia Mirabal’s documentary “Los Picassos Negros” (“The Black Picassos”), film lovers were in for a treat: the first visual evidence corroborating that there is a Cuban branch of the same Picasso family that produced the masterful Spanish artist Pablo Picasso. Although the film was short, running 19 minutes total, the news that Pablo Picasso’s maternal grandfather had left his family in Spain and had a love affair with a Cuban woman that produced four children, sent historians, art lovers, and journalists alike scrambling for a scoop.

There were plenty to be had.

First, Francisco Picasso Guardeño, the maternal grandfather of Pablo Picasso, had not fallen in love with just any woman. He had fallen in love with a Black Cuban woman, Cristina Serra. Second, Serra was a free woman, not a slave, and while interracial relationships between white Spaniards and African-descended Cubans were not unheard of, it was still uncommon at that time for such couples to marry or live together. Third, the descendants of their four children were soon documented to include at least 40 living Cubans as of 2005. Fourth, one of those “Black Picassos” seemed to be following in the footsteps of his famous relative, establishing his own foothold in the world of art, and struggling with the blessing and burden of the famous name and justly renowned reputation of Pablo Picasso.

There’s no reason, of course, to think that Juan Antonio and Pablo would have anything in common other than their surname, but the attempts to draw comparisons are frequent, says Juan Antonio. While Pablo Picasso was considered to be a bohemian who enjoyed the company of others, especially female companions, and was quite the public man-about-town when we wasn’t busy painting prolifically, Juan Antonio is a quiet, reserved, unattached, man-about-home, who spends most of his time painting. In May of this year I visited him at his home in Havana and learned that the similarities between the two artists ends where their shared name begins.

I first learned about Juan Antonio Picasso from my husband, Francisco, who represents Cuban artists and photographers living on the island and who is Cuban himself. He, in turn, first learned about Juan Antonio while reading Cuba’s state newspaper, Granma, in August of 2005. The article in the “Culture” section of Granma introduced the thirty year old Juan Antonio to the Cuban public for the first time, celebrating the opening of his first solo exhibition, “Ecos Pueriles” (“Childish Echoes”) at the Yoruba Cultural Center Gallery, located just on the edge of Habana Vieja. My mission was to track down Juan Antonio Picasso during my upcoming visit and learn a little bit more about him. What did his work look like in person? Would he be interested in representation outside of Cuba? Francisco’s interest in Picasso was not so much in his name, although to say that one is not at all interested in a name like Picasso would be untruthful, but rather in Picasso’s self-declared identity as an Afro-Cuban artist and his commitment to representing distinctly Afro-Cuban themes in his work.  Read More...