Mario Carreno Art

1913-1999. Mario Carreño studied music and art at the Academia de San Alejandro in Cuba from 1925 to about 1930. He attended the Academia de San Fernando in Madrid (1932-1935), and while in Spain worked as a commercial artist. His posters and broadsides of that time reflected his democratic ideals. When back in Havana, he worked in the engraving department of the newspaper Diario de la Marian. Then, from 1936 to 1939, he studied the Mexican Muralists in Mexico and Italian Renaissance art in Paris and Rome.

He returned to Cuba and executed such nationalist works as Sugar-Cane Cutters (1943), clearly influenced by the Muralists. His works were included in the 1944 exhibition Modern Cuban Painters at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, giving him international recognition. From 1944 to 1948, Carreño taught at the New School for Social Research in New York, teaching painters such as the Puerto Rican Julio Rosado del Valle (b. 1922). Later in the 1940's, Carreño's work became more cubist, and in the 1950's he moved toward abstraction and later constructivism. In 1958 Carreño moved to Chile and served as a stimulus to the group "Rectángulo" (Rectangle), which had sought since 1955 to eliminate natural forms and establish color harmonies in painting. Carreño's later paintings, such as the Images of the Beginning, of 1961, show a rigorous use of purely geometric forms. Carreño taught at the Catholic University in Chile and received Chile's National Prize for Art in 1983. His work is to be found in museums throughout the hemisphere.