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Lot Essay
Del mar vendrán caballos y de la manigua sirenas.
Mario Carreño*
In his essay for the groundbreaking exhibition Modern Cuban Painters at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1944, Alfred H. Barr, noted that the modern art movement in Havana was indeed very young but also remarked that, “It has something of the brashness, but even more the virtues of youth—courage, freshness, vitality, and a healthy disrespect in a country which is very old in tradition and a very new independence.”[1] Barr notably praised Mario Carreño’s versatility and his ambitious compositions. Although still fairly young, the artist was at a very important juncture in his artistic trajectory in a city that was fast becoming the center of the art world.
A precocious and gifted child, Mario Carreño learned to play the violin at the age of six and by eight became interested in sketching and drawing so much so that he began to neglect his music exercises. Carreño’s convincing abilities led his well-to-do family to consider other plans for their talented son. Although far too young to enroll at Cuba’s official training ground for artists, the Academia de San Alejandro at the age of eleven, Carreño began to study under the tutelage of landscape artist Antonio Rodríguez Morey who was also a professor at the Academia. In 1925, when he turned twelve, Carreño at last arrived for his formal training at San Alejandro. Not too long after at the age of 18, the young artist, who had been working as an illustrator in various newspapers and graphic magazines in Havana, headed for Europe just as Victor Manuel and others who rebelled against the dogmatic methods and orthodoxy of the Academia de San Alejandro had.
Carreño’s numerous travels, first to Spain in 1930 where he met artists, writers and intellectuals such as the poet Rafael Alberti, and playwright Federico García Lorca, and found employment as a graphic designer of political posters and illustrator of the magazine Octubre, among others; then to Mexico in 1936 which proved to be a turning point in the artist’s career. In Mexico, the most progressive country in the Americas at the time, Carreño worked with the muralists and met Jaime Colson, the Dominican modernist artist who became his teacher and mentor and encouraged him to immerse himself in the study of the classical world.[2] When he arrived in Paris in 1939 where his work was on exhibition at Bernheim Jeune Gallery, he began to discover the masterpieces of the great painters at the Louvre just as the winds of war were blowing fast and forced him and his friends to retreat to the south of France and finally to Italy. Italy proved to be fundamental in his search of the timeless classical knowledge Colson had encouraged him to embrace. Through his rigorous exploration of the classic nude in the work of the Renaissance artists, Carreño’s developed a love of human form that found expression in so many of his great works of the forthcoming decades.
The artist’s oeuvre dating to the 1940s reveals Carreño’s extraordinary maturity for someone relatively young. His classical ideas are distinctly modern, his nudes robust and dynamic and his colors, intense, and full of the light of the tropics. Descubrimiento de las Antillas (Discovery of the Antilles), La muchacha del caballo (Young Girl with Horse) and, El azulejo (The Bluebird) all from 1940 are such outstanding works. His commercial success in New York through his dealer Perls Gallery only added to his prestige back home in Cuba. After his exhibition at Havana’s Lyceum in the spring of 1942, art historian and curator José Gómez Sicre later recalled that the artistic circles in Cuba realized that a “new painter of positive merit” had arrived in their midst.[3] He had finally returned home to discover its irresistible splendor and paint its guajiros, verdant landscapes, and record Cuban myths in a modern visual language.
El caballo en el pueblo (1946) denotes a new phase in Carreño’s aesthetic. His carefully ordered almost cubistic landscape prefigures his dazzling geometric abstraction which he later embraced. For the most part Carreño’s palette is subdued and restrained and helps create a sense of mystery. Only nature, the palm trees and ceibas appears lush as does the azure sky that creates a mantle over the tropical pueblo. The artist has fashioned a composition that resembles a theatrical stage, recalling perhaps some of the scenic designs he had undertaken years earlier. The protagonist of this enigmatic and surrealistic opus which stands at the center or heart of the unfolding drama is a horse, a symbol of male power and virility. Although it is saddled, it is without a rider. The magnificent animal is majestic and noble, its splendid head and full mane endow it with stunning force as it resembles an ancient profane god surrounded by devotees who are partly hidden behind windows and balconies in utter worship and awe. The overall construction of a small town also heightens the similarities to a Baroque altarpiece but exists to invent a space where reality is alluded to but more importantly, suspended. This may be, after all, a small provincial town in Pinar del Río or Matanzas or any of the small villages of Cuba where guajiros with their prized horses journeyed to barter or sell their animals and other goods. On the backs of these superb animals, the mambises led their fierce charges during their revolutionary struggles for independence against the Spanish colonial forces, and Cuban fondness for these exquisite creatures has never waned. In El caballo en el pueblo, Carreño pays homage to a potent emblem of lo cubano.
Margarita Aguilar, Doctoral Candidate, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
* M. Carreño Morales & R. Romera, Antillanas, Santiago de Chile: Cuaderno del Pacífico, 1949, 10. Translation: “From the sea shall come horses and from the countryside mermaids.”
1 A. H. Barr, The Bulletin of The Museum of Modern Art, Vol. 11, No. 5, “Modern Cuban Painters,” (April 1944). 2-14, p. 2.
2 J. Gómez Sicre, Cuadernos de Plástica Cubana, I: Carreño, Havana: Ediciones Galerias del Prado, 1943.
3 J. Gómez Sicre.
Mario Carreño*
In his essay for the groundbreaking exhibition Modern Cuban Painters at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1944, Alfred H. Barr, noted that the modern art movement in Havana was indeed very young but also remarked that, “It has something of the brashness, but even more the virtues of youth—courage, freshness, vitality, and a healthy disrespect in a country which is very old in tradition and a very new independence.”[1] Barr notably praised Mario Carreño’s versatility and his ambitious compositions. Although still fairly young, the artist was at a very important juncture in his artistic trajectory in a city that was fast becoming the center of the art world.
A precocious and gifted child, Mario Carreño learned to play the violin at the age of six and by eight became interested in sketching and drawing so much so that he began to neglect his music exercises. Carreño’s convincing abilities led his well-to-do family to consider other plans for their talented son. Although far too young to enroll at Cuba’s official training ground for artists, the Academia de San Alejandro at the age of eleven, Carreño began to study under the tutelage of landscape artist Antonio Rodríguez Morey who was also a professor at the Academia. In 1925, when he turned twelve, Carreño at last arrived for his formal training at San Alejandro. Not too long after at the age of 18, the young artist, who had been working as an illustrator in various newspapers and graphic magazines in Havana, headed for Europe just as Victor Manuel and others who rebelled against the dogmatic methods and orthodoxy of the Academia de San Alejandro had.
Carreño’s numerous travels, first to Spain in 1930 where he met artists, writers and intellectuals such as the poet Rafael Alberti, and playwright Federico García Lorca, and found employment as a graphic designer of political posters and illustrator of the magazine Octubre, among others; then to Mexico in 1936 which proved to be a turning point in the artist’s career. In Mexico, the most progressive country in the Americas at the time, Carreño worked with the muralists and met Jaime Colson, the Dominican modernist artist who became his teacher and mentor and encouraged him to immerse himself in the study of the classical world.[2] When he arrived in Paris in 1939 where his work was on exhibition at Bernheim Jeune Gallery, he began to discover the masterpieces of the great painters at the Louvre just as the winds of war were blowing fast and forced him and his friends to retreat to the south of France and finally to Italy. Italy proved to be fundamental in his search of the timeless classical knowledge Colson had encouraged him to embrace. Through his rigorous exploration of the classic nude in the work of the Renaissance artists, Carreño’s developed a love of human form that found expression in so many of his great works of the forthcoming decades.
The artist’s oeuvre dating to the 1940s reveals Carreño’s extraordinary maturity for someone relatively young. His classical ideas are distinctly modern, his nudes robust and dynamic and his colors, intense, and full of the light of the tropics. Descubrimiento de las Antillas (Discovery of the Antilles), La muchacha del caballo (Young Girl with Horse) and, El azulejo (The Bluebird) all from 1940 are such outstanding works. His commercial success in New York through his dealer Perls Gallery only added to his prestige back home in Cuba. After his exhibition at Havana’s Lyceum in the spring of 1942, art historian and curator José Gómez Sicre later recalled that the artistic circles in Cuba realized that a “new painter of positive merit” had arrived in their midst.[3] He had finally returned home to discover its irresistible splendor and paint its guajiros, verdant landscapes, and record Cuban myths in a modern visual language.
El caballo en el pueblo (1946) denotes a new phase in Carreño’s aesthetic. His carefully ordered almost cubistic landscape prefigures his dazzling geometric abstraction which he later embraced. For the most part Carreño’s palette is subdued and restrained and helps create a sense of mystery. Only nature, the palm trees and ceibas appears lush as does the azure sky that creates a mantle over the tropical pueblo. The artist has fashioned a composition that resembles a theatrical stage, recalling perhaps some of the scenic designs he had undertaken years earlier. The protagonist of this enigmatic and surrealistic opus which stands at the center or heart of the unfolding drama is a horse, a symbol of male power and virility. Although it is saddled, it is without a rider. The magnificent animal is majestic and noble, its splendid head and full mane endow it with stunning force as it resembles an ancient profane god surrounded by devotees who are partly hidden behind windows and balconies in utter worship and awe. The overall construction of a small town also heightens the similarities to a Baroque altarpiece but exists to invent a space where reality is alluded to but more importantly, suspended. This may be, after all, a small provincial town in Pinar del Río or Matanzas or any of the small villages of Cuba where guajiros with their prized horses journeyed to barter or sell their animals and other goods. On the backs of these superb animals, the mambises led their fierce charges during their revolutionary struggles for independence against the Spanish colonial forces, and Cuban fondness for these exquisite creatures has never waned. In El caballo en el pueblo, Carreño pays homage to a potent emblem of lo cubano.
Margarita Aguilar, Doctoral Candidate, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
* M. Carreño Morales & R. Romera, Antillanas, Santiago de Chile: Cuaderno del Pacífico, 1949, 10. Translation: “From the sea shall come horses and from the countryside mermaids.”
1 A. H. Barr, The Bulletin of The Museum of Modern Art, Vol. 11, No. 5, “Modern Cuban Painters,” (April 1944). 2-14, p. 2.
2 J. Gómez Sicre, Cuadernos de Plástica Cubana, I: Carreño, Havana: Ediciones Galerias del Prado, 1943.
3 J. Gómez Sicre.