拍品專文
“Mario Carreño is the most versatile, learned, and courageous of the new generation,” Alfred H. Barr, Jr. declared on the occasion of the landmark exhibition, Modern Cuban Painters, which he organized for the Museum of Modern Art (“Modern Cuban Painters,” Museum of Modern Art Bulletin XI, no. 5, April 1944, p. 4). Carreño had emerged at the forefront of the Havana School, whose adherents included Cundo Bermúdez, René Portocarrero, and Mariano Rodríguez, and he was already an established presence in New York. He had first landed in New York four years earlier, on his way to Havana following an extended stay in Paris, and what had initially been intended as a stopover turned into a prolonged, if at times intermittent residence of more than ten years. His paintings from this decade, which preceded his return to Cuba in 1951 and subsequent departure for Chile in 1957, constitute his most celebrated body of work and an outstanding contribution to the development of Cuban modernism. Carreño would later describe his New York years as “one of the most fruitful periods” of his career (Cronología del recuerdo, Santiago, 1991, p. 46).
Settling quickly into a studio on Bleecker Street, in Greenwich Village, Carreño made his New York debut in 1941 at Perls Galleries, where he showed twenty-two paintings and drawings, Couple on the Beach among them. “Made up of work done within the past twelve months,” the catalogue states, the exhibition “shows Carreño’s personal style as it has evolved from his study of the Italian Renaissance, his contact with Cuban, Mexican, and other South-American art, and the influence of modern French painting, especially that of Picasso’s ‘classical’ period.” Describing him as “Cuba’s outstanding young painter,” the gallery boldly proclaimed that “thus, at the age of twenty-seven, Carreño has arrived at the point where he has absorbed the lessons of the past and has successfully set out on his career of adding a new page to the History of Art” (Mario Carreño, exh. cat., Perls Galleries, New York, 1941, n.p.).
“He follows his classical ideas of shapes but is not governed by any minute, exacting sense,” explained curator José Gómez Sicre of Carreño’s New York debut. “His backgrounds are handled delicately and without emphasis, the main design being painted vigorously and with great freedom. His figures have a particularly robust style more akin to the Pompeiian Picassos than the Raphaeline designs he painted during his early days in Paris. Carreño’s New York paintings manifest the sparing use of colour, a terra-rosa often contrasting with a background painted in an intense blue. This is a period of large still-lifes and nudes”—notably Couple on the Beach—“bearing no reference to time and space” (“Carreño,” Cuadernos de plástica Cubana I, 1943, n.p.). Suggestively timeless and universal, the couple hold hands and recline here in gentle repose, the contours of their bodies rising and falling in harmony with the rippling waves and the dunes of ashy-blond sand that rise behind them.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
Settling quickly into a studio on Bleecker Street, in Greenwich Village, Carreño made his New York debut in 1941 at Perls Galleries, where he showed twenty-two paintings and drawings, Couple on the Beach among them. “Made up of work done within the past twelve months,” the catalogue states, the exhibition “shows Carreño’s personal style as it has evolved from his study of the Italian Renaissance, his contact with Cuban, Mexican, and other South-American art, and the influence of modern French painting, especially that of Picasso’s ‘classical’ period.” Describing him as “Cuba’s outstanding young painter,” the gallery boldly proclaimed that “thus, at the age of twenty-seven, Carreño has arrived at the point where he has absorbed the lessons of the past and has successfully set out on his career of adding a new page to the History of Art” (Mario Carreño, exh. cat., Perls Galleries, New York, 1941, n.p.).
“He follows his classical ideas of shapes but is not governed by any minute, exacting sense,” explained curator José Gómez Sicre of Carreño’s New York debut. “His backgrounds are handled delicately and without emphasis, the main design being painted vigorously and with great freedom. His figures have a particularly robust style more akin to the Pompeiian Picassos than the Raphaeline designs he painted during his early days in Paris. Carreño’s New York paintings manifest the sparing use of colour, a terra-rosa often contrasting with a background painted in an intense blue. This is a period of large still-lifes and nudes”—notably Couple on the Beach—“bearing no reference to time and space” (“Carreño,” Cuadernos de plástica Cubana I, 1943, n.p.). Suggestively timeless and universal, the couple hold hands and recline here in gentle repose, the contours of their bodies rising and falling in harmony with the rippling waves and the dunes of ashy-blond sand that rise behind them.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park