Cundo Bermudez

Secundino "Cundo" Bermudez y Delgado was born on September 3, 1914, in Havana, Cuba. He was admitted to the Instituto de La Habana in 1926 and, in 1930, enrolled at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes San Alejandro in Havana, where he studied painting for about two years. In 1934 he entered the University of Havana to study law and social sciences, graduating in 1941 with a degree described in institutional sources as diplomatic and consular law. In 1938 he traveled to Mexico City for a brief period of study at the Academia de San Carlos, where he encountered the murals of Diego Rivera and befriended Rufino Tamayo.

Bermudez helped open the landmark 1943 exhibition of modern Cuban painting and sculpture organized by Jose Gomez Sicre at the Institucion Hispano-Cubana de Cultura in Havana. His international reputation grew quickly afterward: in 1944 he was included in the Museum of Modern Art's Modern Cuban Painters exhibition in New York, and through the rest of the 1940s and into the 1950s he showed at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City and in Buenos Aires, at the Sao Paulo Biennale in 1956, and in Paris and Munich.

He left Cuba in the 1960s and lived in Puerto Rico for nearly thirty years before moving to Miami in 1996. He died of a heart attack at his home in the Westchester area of Miami-Dade County, Florida, on October 30, 2008, at the age of 94. Multiple sources, including Wikipedia, Invaluable, Swann Galleries, and ArtNexus, corroborate the date, place, and cause of death.

Bermudez's inclusion in the Museum of Modern Art's 1944 Modern Cuban Painters exhibition placed him early among the artists credited with bringing Cuban Modernism to international attention, alongside showings that followed in Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, Paris, and Munich through the 1950s. Later institutional attention, including a print-focused exhibition at the Harn Museum of Art in 2016 and 2017 drawn from its own holdings, points to sustained academic and curatorial interest in his work well after his death. Secondary sources describe critical acknowledgment from figures associated with MoMA and with Mexican muralism in his lifetime, though no exact, independently verifiable quotation from a named critic could be confirmed for this profile.

Bermudez's auction activity trades mostly in the low to mid five-figure range, with Phillips recording a result of roughly USD 44,450 for the painting Arlequines, the highest price documented in this research. Public auction databases do not provide a complete, sortable record of every sale, so no single result can be confirmed here as his definitive all-time high. There is no single primary-market gallery or estate representative for Bermudez as of 2026. His work instead moves through specialist secondary-market dealers, including Cernuda Arte in Miami and RoGallery in New York, alongside standard auction-house channels such as Phillips, Christie's, and regional Latin American art sales.

There is no published catalogue raisonne for Bermudez and no single gallery or estate that exclusively represents his market, so provenance research and expertise in Cuban modern art carry unusual weight when evaluating a work. Public auction records for Bermudez are incomplete, and no single result can be confirmed as his definitive all-time high; the highest price documented in this research is roughly USD 44,450 for the painting Arlequines at Phillips, well above the bulk of his sales, which trade in the low to mid five figures. Works are actively bought and sold through Cuban-art specialist dealers such as Cernuda Arte and RoGallery as well as through general and Latin American art auction sales, and museum holdings at institutions such as MoMA and the Harn Museum of Art remain the strongest evidence of his lasting institutional standing.