Exiled Cuban Artist Baruj Salinas Dies at 89, Made Coral Gables His Home

Works in the gallery. Baruj Salinas: 1972-2022 (American Museum of the Cuban Diaspora, Miami, 2022). (Photo courtesy of Ismael Gómez Peralta)

Baruj Salinas (Havana, 1935-Coral Gables, 2024), one of the great Cuban artists of the most lyrical abstraction of the second half of the 20th century, passed away in Coral Gables on Sunday, Aug. 18. He was 89.

Salinas left Cuba in 1953, when he was 18 years old, to study architecture at Kent State University, Ohio, where he graduated in 1958. Still, since childhood, he filled numerous notebooks with drawings. Later, as a teenager, inspired by his mother who painted, he began to add paint to his images: “Landscapes, street scenes, street markets, old buildings…  were some of the things I painted,” he said in an interview.

Of Sephardic Jewish origin, he was born in Havana in 1935 during turbulent times. Two years earlier, after the fall of dictator Gerardo Machado, Cuba was immersed in significant political instability. Several governments succeeded each other until the 1940 elections when Fulgencio Batista y Saldívar was elected president of the republic, a position he held until 1944. Batista returned to power as a military dictator in 1952 and, finally, was defeated in 1959.

Salinas went into exile in Miami that same year, where he lived until 1974. From there, he began to exhibit extensively —above all, with Latin American and American galleries—and co-founded the Group of Latin American Artists (GALA) with other abstract artists such as Rafael Soriano and José Mijares.

His work in painting, sculpture, and engraving is immersed in the sources of abstraction, influenced by the paintings of Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and Willem De Kooning. But it is an abstraction of lyricism with a halo of transcendent poetry, combining the ethereal and the intangible, where spirituality becomes a sacred human value as a convergence of culture and nature.

From this stage, exhibitions stand out, such as those presented at the National Institute of Fine Arts (INBA) in Mexico D.F., today Mexico City (1971), the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art (1969), the Centre Culturel Editart, in Geneva, Switzerland (1977), and the Pecanins Gallery, in Barcelona, Spain (1975).

In 1969, he received the Cintas scholarship and repeated it the following year. Then, he decided, in his own words, “to realize the dream of my life, to move to Spain.” He ended up in Barcelona, where he came into contact with artists such as Joan Miró, Antoni Tàpies, and Alexander Calder. In 1992, the year of the Barcelona Olympics, he returned to Miami, where he began teaching at Miami Dade College, InterAmerica Campus.

From left to right, Arturo Mosquera and Baruj Salinas at the opening of the exhibition “Baruj Salinas: 1972-2022” (American Museum of the Cuban Diaspora, Miami, 2022). (Photo courtesy of Ismael Gómez Peralta)

Meanwhile, he intensified his collaborations with great poets and essayists such as the philosopher from Malaga, María Zambrano (1904-1991), whom he met during his exile in Geneva and for whom he painted several covers of her books. But he also became close friends and collaborated with great names in Hispanic American poetry, such as José Ángel Valente, Pere Gimferrer, and José Lezama Lima.

Valente, in an article for the Spanish leading art magazine “Descubrir el Arte,” observes that Salinas’ painting was made of “centers and circles, spheres and rotating spaces, explosions, and orbits, sudden energy or concentrated light where the force that condenses on high suddenly takes shape.” It is a painting loaded with forms containing expressionism combusts, whose colors transmit affection and warmth despite the abstract thought that generates them.

Zambrano, in the same piece, described it this way: “The longing that becomes love in Salinas’ painting finds no other starting point than that which follows from the deepest and original part of his human being, to dispossess himself as much as possible, to go back to a time before his action, which is looking, above all, to an agreement with reality, to a congenital appearance with it and not before it; not having created solitude in himself, to see better.”

Back in Miami, he resumed contact with other Cuban abstract artists such as Rafael Soriano and Gay García, whose abstract art also has the poetic halo of lyricism.

A tireless artist, he never stopped painting, not even in his last days. With a jovial and determined character, he continued to work on large solo exhibitions, among the most notable being the retrospectives “Baruj Salinas: 1972-2022” (American Museum of the Cuban Diaspora, Miami, 2022) and “Encounter with Beauty” (Center for Contemporary Art, Vélez-Málaga, Spain, 2022).

His work has been exhibited and is widely known in Latin America, the United States and Europe and is present in important museums and contemporary art foundations such as, among others, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Library (Madrid), the Museum of Contemporary Latin American Art (MACLA), the Museum of Modern Art (Mexico City), the José Luis Cuevas Museum (Mexico City), the Joán Miró Foundation (Barcelona), the Museum of Israel (Jerusalem), and the Museum of the Americas (Washington).

Salinas leaves an important legacy in painting, sculpture, and drawing. A vast and deeply poetic work that inspires future generations.

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