Micah Carpentier

Though dead for the past 30 years, the work of Cuban artist Micah Carpentier remains fresh, provocative, unusual and sublime. Born in Santiago de Cuba in 1924 to a Nigerian mother and a Russian Jewish father, Carpentier spent his early childhood loitering around the lively literary salon of his aunt, the writer Yvette Martinez. Before he was a teenager, he had already met the likes of Neruda, Rilke, Svevo and Joyce. Educated at the University of Turin, Carpentier returned to Cuba before the outbreak of World War II and settled in Havana. Jailed in the sixties after curating the now famous “After Dada” exhibition at the State Theatre for the Performing Arts, Carpentier moved to New York in 1968, having no stomach for the politics of dissidence. An aesthete and master draghtsman, his was a world of sensuality and delight. His luminous color, strong vivid line and his oddly peripatetic imagination all conspire to make Carpentier one of the most unclassifiable of our 20th Century masters.