Cundo Bermúdez, whose modernist brush strokes evolved from Matisse, Picasso and Dalí-influenced forms into a recognizable style -- puro Cundo -- was easily the best-loved Cuban painter in Miami, and the recent opening of an overdue retrospective at the Freedom Tower seals his place in the city's art history.

On what would have been his 95th birthday, Bermúdez was celebrated with an exhibition worthy of the master of color whose magnum opus, Ways of Performing, greets Box Theater audiences at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts.

Among the 104 works in Under a Brilliant Sun: Cundo Bermúdez into the 21st Century, organized by Miami Dade College's Gallery System, are sketches and studies for the Arsht mosaic mural and various public-art projects uncompleted at his death in 2008.

``He was 94, but he was full of ideas and proposals,'' says Vivian Donnell Rodríguez, who commissioned the Arsht Center mural in 1997 and is now executive director of Miami Dade College Cultural Affairs. ``He was very, very productive.''

LIVED FOR HIS ART

Even as he became ill and weak, Bermúdez still asked Conrado Basulto, his artistic representative and aide, to take him to his drawing table.

``He lived for his art,'' says Basulto, who in 1994 and 1995 ran a gallery of rafter works named for Bermúdez at the U.S. Navy's Guantánamo Cuban refugee camps.

No less captivating than the colorful artwork -- ribbon paintings, harlequins, early portraits, a ceramic table and bronze sculpture -- is Under the Brilliant Sun's re-creation in an alcove of Bermúdez's painting studio in his modest Westchester house.

Every detail has been transplanted here, down to the glasses of water he always kept nearby, the chest where he stashed his paint tubes -- open drawers marked rojo, azúl, amarillo, etc. There's the gray sweater he wore and his white paint-splashed apron; his favorite classical music plays in the background.

``Every day of his life, he read the newspaper in the morning, and then he went to his studio to work,'' Basulto says.

Only one detail of the re-created studio has been altered. Instead of a work in progress, the easel displays a framed picture of the Cundo Bermúdez Gallery at Havana's National Museum of Fine Arts.

Art lovers paid their respects at the studio replica throughout the exhibit's opening night. One woman ignored the rope, stepped inside the studio and began to touch Bermúdez's possessions with religious reverence. Even Cuquita, the artist's terrier, was at the event, and when taken off the leash she sprinted in circles around her master's easel and drawing table.

The crowd sang Happy Birthday, and a teary Basulto blew out a candle on a chocolate cake. The buffet table offered Bermúdez's favorite dessert, the sugary puff balls merenguitos.

Not that Bermúdez -- a man so humble he didn't even want students to call him ``maestro'' -- would have been comfortable with all the fuss.

``He shunned stardom,'' Basulto says.

One of the last surviving masters of Cuban Modernism, Bermúdez was born into a middle-class family in Havana. His father insisted that he study diplomacy and social sciences, and he graduated from the University of Havana in 1941. But Bermúdez, who as a boy collected bits of tile at demolition sites and arranged them into patterns, longed to become an artist.

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