Sold at Auction: Mario Carreño

(b Havana, Cuba, 1913; d Santiago, Chile, 2000) Cuban painter. Mario Carreño’s work reflects a cross-cultural dialogue between vanguard modernist practices of the first half of the twentieth century and a unique subject matter rooted in the Caribbean’s rich syncretic cultural heritage. The precocious Carreño entered Havana’s prestigious Academia de San Alejandro at the age of twelve. His education continued as he traveled extensively throughout most of the 1930s and early 1940s, spending brief sojourns in Spain, Mexico, France, Italy, and later New York shortly after the start of World War II. As a member of Cuba’s second generation of vanguard painters, including such noted figures as René Portocarrero, Mariano Rodríguez, and Cundo Bermúdez, Carreño shared his contemporaries' interest in adapting and infusing the new international style with aspects of their personal and regional circumstances. In their quest to create an art that straddled both of these worlds and a nascent sense of national identity constructed around notions of afrocubanismo, these artists borrowed from a number of sources including European modern art (best exemplified by Picasso’s primitivism), contemporary Cuban literature and music, and Cuban colonial and nineteenth-century art. (Credit: Sotheby’s, New York, Latin American Art, May 30, 2007, lot 8)