Dulce Beatriz

Biography

In August 1959 the Havana newspaper Excelsior printed a favourable review of an exhibition by a young woman painter. A few months later she married, and a year after that she left Cuba with her husband.

Dulce Hernández Moreno de Ayala was born on 17 March 1931 in Havana, into a family of Spanish descent. Her father, José María Hernández, managed a bakery; her mother, Dulce Moreno Ayala, was a teacher. She too first prepared to become a teacher: in 1949 she graduated from the Kindergarten Teacher’s School in Havana, then studied music pedagogy at the Carlos Alfredo Peyrellade Conservatory. At that time she also showed her work in the Hall of Mirrors at Havana City Hall. She then entered the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes “San Alejandro”, graduated in 1955 and received a scholarship for further study abroad. By some accounts, her diploma was awarded with distinction (“Summa Laude”). In 1959 she married Leonardo Beatriz, a concert guitarist, art restorer and appraiser. From him she took the surname under which she became known as an artist. In 1960 the couple emigrated to the United States and settled in Florida.

She went on exhibiting in her new home. In October 1963 her work was shown at the Loft on the Mile gallery in Coral Gables. In 1971 an exhibition of her paintings opened in Managua, at the Rubén Darío National Theatre. In 1972 the art dealer and collector Jean Tiroche held a show in his gallery in Palm Beach. In the exhibition programme he wrote that the gallery was making an exception for the first time by presenting a painter of the Spanish School: until then it had shown only Impressionists and Post-Impressionists of the Paris School. Her autobiographical book, “A Quarter Century of My Life”, was also published in 1972.

In the 1970s and 1980s her paintings were shown by galleries in South Florida, in Miami, Fort Lauderdale and Palm Beach. Two works, “El monasterio del Parral” and “Paisaje floridiano”, were acquired by the Museo Español de Arte Contemporáneo in Madrid, now the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. In 1979 she was written about in the Miami Herald and in Diario Las Américas, which ran an interview and a report by Carmencita San Miguel. Later, local publications turned to her regularly, Spanish-language ones in particular. Her works are described as including oil paintings, drawings, silverpoint drawings, sculpture and engravings in diamond point; in 2009 a volume of such works appeared, with a foreword by Charles Szabo, compiled by her together with her husband.

A number of her Madrid exhibitions were opened by the Marquis of Lozoya, director of the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts. He was also the first to propose her for the Order of Isabella the Catholic; the proposal was supported by Carlos Martínez de Irujo, Duke of Huéscar, and by Stephen Clark, mayor of Dade County. She received the order in 1983. In 2007 the magazine La Isla Times (Key Biscayne) published an interview and an article about her, “Light from the Depths of the Soul”. Her papers are held in the Cuban Heritage Collection of the University of Miami, and her paintings are in several museums, among them the Dayton Art Institute.

Dulce Beatriz died in Miami on 19 October 2021, at the age of ninety.