WASHINGTON, DC.- Dolores “Loló” Soldevilla (1901–1971) was one of the few women associated with the development and promotion of geometric abstraction in Cuba. The National Gallery of Art has acquired its first work by the artist: an untitled painted wood relief from 1955, one of the breakthrough painting-objects from her celebrated series. These works are composed of simple shapes, often black and/or white, that project out toward the viewer from a solid ground.

This composition features 28 circles of different sizes and one right triangle, all painted white. They are arranged in irregular rows and columns without an overall order, giving the work a sense of movement that contradicts the flatly painted, hard surface. Prior to these painting-objects Soldevilla’s work was influenced by the music-inspired abstractions of Wassily Kandinsky, the optic-kinetic work of Jesús Rafael Soto, and the primary-colored geometries of the De Stijl movement. The monochrome nature of this untitled work recalls the suprematism of Malevich and the constructivism of Aleksandr Rodchenko, while the grid-like arrangement and denial of spatial illusion is indebted to the work of Piet Mondrian and other modern abstract artists.

Born in western Cuba in 1901, Soldevilla moved with her family to Havana in 1912. Her early education focused on music and French language and culture. During the 1930s and 1940s, she became involved in women’s causes and leftist politics. She met fellow artist Wifredo Lam in 1945 and toured US museums in 1948, which opened her eyes to the history of modernist abstraction. In 1949 she was appointed Cuban cultural attaché in Paris, where she would live until 1956. Minimizing her official duties, she took full advantage of the artistic offerings of Paris, including seeing exhibitions of the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, which presented the work of the Madi Group of Argentina, Carmen Herrera, Ellsworth Kelly, and other important geometric abstractionists. Soldevilla had her first exhibition in 1950 in Havana, showing large painted heads as well as sculpture, and in 1951 she curated an important show of contemporary Cuban art at the Musée d’art moderne in Paris. In 1959 she founded the Galeria de Arte Color, a Havana center for constructivist abstraction. She was a professor at the University of Havana from 1962 to 1965 and a public intellectual, writer, and critic, albeit with a low profile. Soldevilla died relatively uncelebrated in her own country in 1971.