Cuban artist Enrique Rivrton 1902-1998: Born in Cienfuegos, Cuba in 1992, Enrique Riveron worked in every medium from oil paint, to clay and experimented with a number of styles and venues of art. Riveron received his early art training at the Villate Academy in Havana. In the early 1920s, he traveled to Europe where he attended school at the Academia de San Fernando in Madrid. Through scholarships, Riveron was able to study in Italy, France, Belgium and Spain, and picked up a number of styles and methods along the way.

Because Riveron’s main art education was not in Cuba, his work had a distinctly European flavor. He introduced his work to Cuba for the first time in 1927 at the Association of Painters and Sculptors in Havana. This was to be his first one-man show, at which he was well-received.

Early in his career, Riveron was known for his naturalistic depictions of city life in France and Cuba, and he gained quite a bit of attention from them. In the 1930s, Riveron began to create collages, and also experimented with Cubism and abstract art. In fact, Riveron was one of the only painters of the Vanguard era to experiment with Abstract art early on. During this time, he was also an illustrator for a number of newspapers, some based in Cuba, and other’s as prestigious as “The New Yorker”. Even more prestigious was his work in Hollywood during this time as an illustrator and storyboard developer for Walt Disney Pictures in 1938. By the 1940s, Riveron mainly focused on painting and sculpture, and this would be a trend that would continue throughout the rest of his career.