Sculpting Solidarity: Anna Hyatt Huntington's Ibero-American Presence

The American sculptor Anna Hyatt Huntington (1876-1973) was best known for her large public statues such as El Cid Campeador (Madrid/New York) and the Torchbearers (Cuba/Madrid/Valencia/US cities). Among her most famous and controversial and the last of her major commissions, is the monumental bronze equestrian sculpture of Cuban patriot, José Martí (Central Park, NY). The statue depicting Cuba’s national hero at the moment of his death was begun when Huntington was over eighty years old and was completed in 1958, the year she was named “Woman of the Americas” by the Union of American Women, a Pan-American organization founded in 1934 with the purpose of promoting solidarity and friendship among women of the New World.

Despite her renown and status as the wife of celebrated Hispanist, Archer Huntington, the artist’s oeuvre presents a number of challenges for art historians. She was an artist working in traditional conventions when modernism and abstraction were in vogue and she was a female sculptor working in a field dominated by men. This paper seeks to better understand the artist, by looking at the intersection of her work with authoritarian regimes in the Ibero-American world. Huntington was a committed advocate of hispanismo. And while she maintained that her sculptures transcended politics, she nevertheless served as an artistic bridge between the authoritarian worlds of Spain and numerous countries in Latin America. Building off of the artist’s private archive, this essay unravels the complicated politico-artistic legacy of one of the 20th century's most understudied female artists.