Strong-Cuevas: A Prolific Artist with An Extraordinary Life
A Prolific Artist with an Extraordinary Life
Strong-Cuevas hasn’t had a boring life. Her parents were poles apart culturally, her family history is replete with intellectuals and innovators, and she’s been acquainted with the likes of Salvador Dalí, Charles James, Alfonso Ossorio, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Louise Nevelson and other visionaries.
She has no doubt been influenced by the creative and intellectual genius that has surrounded her since her youth. She began sculpting in the 1960s when she enrolled at the Art Students’ League of New York and continues to produce to this day. Her Long Island studio is filled with hundreds of works, including stainless steel sculptures that stand more than 13 feet tall and ink drawings that line the studio walls.
Work Exhibited Across from the United Nations
The art of Strong-Cuevas explores inner consciousness, outer space, and communication through space and time. In the words of distinguished art critic Donald Kuspit, “Strong-Cuevas’s sculpture is rooted in primitive art, with its bold structures, expressive directness, communal symbolism, and conviction of cosmic absolutes.” The influence of ancient civilizations – the Egyptians, Aztecs and Mayans – is particularly evident in Strong-Cuevas’s abstract faces and large-scale works, such as her ten-foot bronze, Arch III, which was recently exhibited in Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza across from the United Nations.
This past year, her work at Grounds for Sculpture was artfully illuminated as part of the exhibition, “Night Forms: dreamloop by Klip Collective.” The exhibition, described as “an after-hours multisensory experience created between art and nature,” was covered by The New York Times, Barron’s, PBS, and other outlets.
Greta Garbo & Balls in Biarritz
“A strong personality, very intelligent, opinionated, and theatrical like her father.” Strong-Cuevas doesn’t mind this description of herself, culled from the pages of a letter her late brother once sent to a friend. Her father, the Marquis George de Cuevas, was born in Chile and founded the Grand Ballet du Marquis de Cuevas in Paris, where he met her mother, Margaret Strong, years earlier. The family spent time between Saint-Germain-en-Laye, where Strong-Cuevas was born, her grandfather’s house in Fiesole, Manhattan where they hosted the likes of Salvador Dalí and Greta Garbo, and Biarritz, where her father threw a costume ball no less grand or theatrical than the productions put on by the Grand Ballet.
The Cuevas Ball in Biarritz
“It was more of a theatrical event than a party,” recalls Strong-Cuevas about the 1953 ball her father gave in Biarritz. “There was a stage, and all the people who had been invited had got themselves dressed in remarkable costumes by the French couturiers — Balmain, Dior, Lelong.”
Strong-Cuevas was photographed at the ball by the illustrious fashion photographer Madame D’Ora, wearing a costume by Balmain with a feathered headpiece. Some of the photographs from that evening were part of an exhibition of Madame D’Ora’s work at the Neue Gallerie in New York last spring and also appeared in Vogue.
Why the Mind Has a Body
Her mother was highly educated and was one of the first four women ever admitted to Girton College at the University of Cambridge, where she studied chemistry. Her maternal grandfather was
Professor Charles Augustus Strong, the philosopher, psychologist, and author of Why the Mind Has a Body.
Strong-Cuevas appears in the documentary, “Secrets d’Histoire,” which exalts the lives and legacies of American entrepreneurs including Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and her own great-grandfather, John D. Rockefeller.
In the documentary, Strong-Cuevas describes a feeling of indebtedness to her ancestry for having passed on an ability to think and reflect. She later said of her art, “Like Balanchine, whose birthday I share, I am an innovator within a classical tradition.”
Surrounded by Creative Genius
Growing up, Strong-Cuevas and her family spent time with close friend Salvador Dalí and his wife, Gala, who would visit them in New York and spend summers vacationing with them in Wyoming, New Hampshire, and elsewhere. She can still sing the lyrics to a Catalan folk song Dalí taught her as a child, and when Strong-Cuevas began her work in sculpture, Gala commented at a dinner party, “She always had talent.”
Later Strong-Cuevas counted among her friends and peers Alfonso Ossorio — the famous Philippine painter she remembers fondly as her close friend — Max Ernst, Lee Krasner, Isamu Noguchi, Françoise Gilot, and Leonora Carrington — the famed surrealist whose vision inspired the theme of this year’s Venice Biennale.
A Work Tinged with Mysticism
“I think we are all born with destinies,” says Strong-Cuevas of how she became a sculptor. “We may think we are choosing our lives, but I do not believe that. Who knows why, but maybe our past lives influence the present. I may have been a sculptor in Renaissance times or before. Who knows? In any case, I believe I have been given a mission for which I am so grateful.”
Strong-Cuevas once had a horoscope done by a renowned astrologer, recommended to her by the graphologist and master of the Tarot, Mary Steiner-Geringer. (She’d had her handwriting analyzed by Geringer years earlier. “She analyzed handwritings brilliantly. I had sent her mine, as well as that of four other men across the Atlantic so there was no possibility of collusion. She reported back with one-to-one portraits of each of them. Remarkably accurate.”)
Geringer sent Strong-Cuevas’s dates to the astrologer without telling him the horoscope would ever be passed along to Strong-Cuevas. “He thought it was only for her. So he did not hold back. He said everything he thought. And of course, as soon as she got his report, she sent it directly on to me.”
“In that horoscope, he says that I would have been restless, unhappy all my life if I did not find ‘a work, gratuitous, perhaps tinged with mysticism.’” For Strong-Cuevas, sculpture was that work. “Every day I thank the Gods for having given me such a mission.”
Strong-Cuevas: Heads
During her time at the Art Students’ League of New York, Strong-Cuevas studied under the acclaimed sculptor John Hovannes. Later, she met through Charles James the Swiss French sculptor Marcel “Toto” Meylan. They partnered for the next five years and worked together on her large-scale sculpture series, Heads I-V. Their work together is documented in the book, Strong-Cuevas: Heads, which followed the publication of two other books on her art published by Abrams, Strong-Cuevas Drawings: Ideas on Paper and Strong-Cuevas Sculpture: Premonitions in Retrospect.
A friendship with Charles James
Strong-Cuevas met Charles James when she was 13 years old and forged a lasting friendship. “I never bought a dress from him in my life,” she says. “The ones I have, he gave to me.”
She was also a patron of his work, and often served as a model for his designs. “He never used a commercial dummy for his dress-making.” He used Millicent Rogers to create the first dummy, and
Strong-Cuevas for the second. She recalls being wrapped in bandages while he pricked her with pins. “He was clumsy with his fingers… ‘Ouch, Charlie! Be careful!’” She tells a story of a dinner she hosted that Lee Krasner and Charles James attended. While Strong-Cuevas was trying to serve dinner with a platter held high in the air, Charles James was trying to pin a green satin bra on her, much too large for her form. Lee Krasner later said she dined out on that story for years.
“When he went to an opening of his own work, he would put one of his dresses on me.”
Photographed by Bill Cunningham
Strong-Cuevas was photographed in those dresses by Bill Cunningham and featured on the front page of The New York Times fashion section when the paper covered the “Charles James: Beyond Fashion” exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute in 2014.
In a letter he sent to her in the 1970s, Charles James told Strong-Cuevas, “What counts most in your life is your work, which is of far more excellent quality than you modestly think… not only because of an understanding of beautiful line and volume but because of an infinite strength which reflects your character at its best.”
The Collection of Peggy and David Rockefeller
Strong-Cuevas’s work has been represented by Leonard Tourné Gallery since 2014 and is represented in the collections of Grounds for Sculpture, Bruce Museum, Heckscher Museum, and the Smithsonian-affiliated Long Island Museum. It has also been exhibited at the IIème Biennale de Sculpture in Monte Carlo, Island Weiss Gallery, and dozens of other solo and group exhibitions. Her works have an increasingly active secondary market and frequently beat estimates at major auction houses including Christie’s, Sotheby’s, Doyle, and Bonham’s. In 2018, her bronze, “Othello,” sold alongside works by Delacroix, Monet, and Picasso as part of the Collection of Peggy and David Rockefeller sale at Christie’s.
She just completed a series of essays she intends to have published, and an exhibition of her sculpture and drawings is set to open at the Southampton Arts Center on July 30th. Strong-Cuevas’s work was the subject of a documentary by filmmaker Lana Jokel.
Her works can be viewed on Leonard Tourné Gallery’s website, www.leonardtournegallery.com, and inquiries can be directed to the gallery by calling +1 (212)219-2656 or emailing info@leonard-tourne.com.
