National Museum of Fine Arts - Cuban Art

About this audio guide

This guide to the National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana opens with a small, unnamed painting: a woman dozing on a settee, captured by her husband Guillermo Collazo around eighteen eighty-eight in a work he simply called La Siesta. It follows Collazo's own restless life instead, from his teenage flight from Santiago de Cuba to avoid fighting for the Spanish crown, through years sketching for New York newspapers, to a Paris studio on the Avenue Victor Hugo that became a meeting place for exiled Cuban independence leaders plotting over turpentine fumes. Stand in front of the small painting itself and look for how little of that restlessness shows in her sleeping face.