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Lot Essay
Mario Carreño’s La Siesta belongs to the traditional genre of a reclining nude woman. At rest on a simple bench, the protagonist of the canvas is swathed in white drapery, her arms comfortably cradling her head. An instrument and the elements of a simple still life lay on the ground before her, the round, bisected fruits echoing the perfect circles of her schematically rendered breasts. While these elements reflect the components of a seemingly classical composition, Carreño portrays the scene within a verdant landscape that evokes an imagined tropical garden inspired by the artist’s native Cuba.
La Siesta was painted during the ten-year interval that Carreño lived in New York, punctuated by visits back to his native Cuba. This period served to establish the artist’s reputation in the United States, where he was crowned by none other than Alfred Barr of the Museum of Modern Art as the “most versatile, learned, and courageous” of the younger generation of Cuban modern artists.[1] During this time, the artist served as a professor of art at the New School for Social Research. He also enjoyed numerous solo exhibitions at the Pan American Union in Washington D.C., the Institute of Modern Art in Boston, and at the prestigious Perls Gallery, where his art was promoted alongside work by such established names as Picasso, Matisse, and de Chirico. Indeed, La Siesta was first presented at the artist’s 1947 Perls Gallery show, his fourth exhibition with the institution.
Like the other paintings included in the Perls show, La Siesta reflects Carreño’s style of the late 1940s, characterized by flattened forms inscribed within rhythmic compositions. This style, with its decorative patterns and colors, departed from the artist’s earlier experiments with Duco industrial paint, as well as his previous volumetrically rendered allegorical paintings. In fact, over the course of his career, Carreño’s aesthetics continually shifted as the artist experimented with current trends and shifting artistic environments as the artist moved between Havana, New York, Paris, and later Santiago de Chile. Yet, particular themes such as the reclining female figure recur throughout his oeuvre, which also reflects a consistently balanced and sophisticated approach to color.
Carreño’s chromatic skill is on display in La Siesta in the lush green, purple, and ochre tones interspersed throughout the landscape. These colors contribute to the painting’s composition, which carefully hovers between exuberant rhythmic energy and peaceful stasis. Roughly split along its length, the painting is divided between an earth-toned lower section and an upper half of brighter, lush hues. Placed at center between these two sections, the white robes covering the figure’s body reflects the colors of her surroundings, suggesting the play of light as it filters through the leaves.
The outlines of the woman’s reclined form further balance the two sections of the painting. Her raised knees echo the verticality of the trees above, while her outstretched body and feet echo the horizontals of the ground below. However, the composition is fractured into further sections, as both the figure and ground seem to shift up and down across the length of the canvas. Accentuated by shifts in color, this contrapuntal rhythm creates a sense of movement, and indeed, it appears as though the butterfly’s golden wings will soon alight on the sleeping figure. However, it is precisely the relaxed pose of the woman at rest that synthesizes the overall dynamic tension of the painting, unifying the woman, her domestic surroundings, and the lush nature around her. Indeed, although an ornate garden gate near the figure’s feet suggests a sense of boundary, this division is not maintained, and instead, fusion is achieved through the repetition of sinuous curves and lines. In subsequent years, Carreño would continue to experiment with the carefully crafted equilibrium of his paintings, turning to pure abstraction in the early 1950s.
Susanna Temkin, Ph.D., Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
1 Alfred H. Barr, Jr. “Modern Cuban Painters.” Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art, Vol. 11, no. 5 (April 1944) p. 4.
La Siesta was painted during the ten-year interval that Carreño lived in New York, punctuated by visits back to his native Cuba. This period served to establish the artist’s reputation in the United States, where he was crowned by none other than Alfred Barr of the Museum of Modern Art as the “most versatile, learned, and courageous” of the younger generation of Cuban modern artists.[1] During this time, the artist served as a professor of art at the New School for Social Research. He also enjoyed numerous solo exhibitions at the Pan American Union in Washington D.C., the Institute of Modern Art in Boston, and at the prestigious Perls Gallery, where his art was promoted alongside work by such established names as Picasso, Matisse, and de Chirico. Indeed, La Siesta was first presented at the artist’s 1947 Perls Gallery show, his fourth exhibition with the institution.
Like the other paintings included in the Perls show, La Siesta reflects Carreño’s style of the late 1940s, characterized by flattened forms inscribed within rhythmic compositions. This style, with its decorative patterns and colors, departed from the artist’s earlier experiments with Duco industrial paint, as well as his previous volumetrically rendered allegorical paintings. In fact, over the course of his career, Carreño’s aesthetics continually shifted as the artist experimented with current trends and shifting artistic environments as the artist moved between Havana, New York, Paris, and later Santiago de Chile. Yet, particular themes such as the reclining female figure recur throughout his oeuvre, which also reflects a consistently balanced and sophisticated approach to color.
Carreño’s chromatic skill is on display in La Siesta in the lush green, purple, and ochre tones interspersed throughout the landscape. These colors contribute to the painting’s composition, which carefully hovers between exuberant rhythmic energy and peaceful stasis. Roughly split along its length, the painting is divided between an earth-toned lower section and an upper half of brighter, lush hues. Placed at center between these two sections, the white robes covering the figure’s body reflects the colors of her surroundings, suggesting the play of light as it filters through the leaves.
The outlines of the woman’s reclined form further balance the two sections of the painting. Her raised knees echo the verticality of the trees above, while her outstretched body and feet echo the horizontals of the ground below. However, the composition is fractured into further sections, as both the figure and ground seem to shift up and down across the length of the canvas. Accentuated by shifts in color, this contrapuntal rhythm creates a sense of movement, and indeed, it appears as though the butterfly’s golden wings will soon alight on the sleeping figure. However, it is precisely the relaxed pose of the woman at rest that synthesizes the overall dynamic tension of the painting, unifying the woman, her domestic surroundings, and the lush nature around her. Indeed, although an ornate garden gate near the figure’s feet suggests a sense of boundary, this division is not maintained, and instead, fusion is achieved through the repetition of sinuous curves and lines. In subsequent years, Carreño would continue to experiment with the carefully crafted equilibrium of his paintings, turning to pure abstraction in the early 1950s.
Susanna Temkin, Ph.D., Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
1 Alfred H. Barr, Jr. “Modern Cuban Painters.” Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art, Vol. 11, no. 5 (April 1944) p. 4.