Mario Carreño Morales

Biography

Mario Carreño won his first prize at the age of nine: in 1922, at a drawing competition held by the Havana newspaper El Mundo. Soon afterwards he entered the Academia de San Alejandro in Havana, but he studied there only in 1925–1926.

His father was Spanish, his mother Cuban. After conflicts with his academic teachers he reportedly left the academy and found work as a retoucher, then as an illustrator, at the Havana newspaper Diario de la Marina, while also contributing to the magazine Orbe. His first solo exhibition took place in Havana, at the Merás y Rico gallery, in 1930.

He went to Europe to study graphic art at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid; the year of his departure is given as 1932 or 1934, and I cannot say more precisely. In Madrid he met the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, and the friendship lasted for decades. The Spanish Civil War forced him to leave in 1936. He went to Mexico, where he was drawn to mural painting, and by report he met Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and Rufino Tamayo there. For a time he lived in Cuba.

In 1937 Carreño was in Paris, where he studied at the École des Arts Appliqués and the Académie Julian, and, by some accounts, with the painter Jean Souverbie as well. In 1939 he was exhibited at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery in Paris.

The outbreak of the Second World War again made him change continents, and he settled in New York. He lived there for about ten years, often staying in Cuba for long periods. The date of a mural he painted in Havana with David Alfaro Siqueiros is uncertain, variously given as the mid-1930s or 1942; the mural was later destroyed. In 1943 his work was shown in “The Latin American Collection” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and in 1944 in the “Exhibition of Modern Cuban Painters” there. In the 1940s he painted “Cortadores de Caña” (Cane Cutters), “Danza Afro-Cubana” and “Fuego en el Batey” (Fire in the Batey), while pictures such as “La Siesta” and “El Azulejo” were built on classical and Cubist models. “The Birth of the American Nations” also belongs to these years: by his own later account, he put into it everything he had learned in Europe about the craft of painting, as if presenting a doctoral thesis, and he recalled Mantegna and Piero della Francesca while working on it. He moved in the circle of the Origenes group. In 1946 he began teaching painting at the New School for Social Research in New York. In 1947 he had a solo exhibition at Perls Galleries.

In 1951–1954 he taught modern art at San Alejandro in Havana and wrote a weekly art column for the magazines Carteles and Noticias de Arte. In 1951 and 1953 he took part in the São Paulo Biennial, and in 1952 in the Venice Biennale. In 1956 he received the Guggenheim International Award.

In the 1950s his manner moved towards geometric abstraction (“Equinocio”), and in the 1960s towards a poetic, surreal-metaphysical painting (“Los Olvidados”, “Mar y Luna”, “La Caída de los Grandes Mitos”). After 1970 the landscapes of northern Chile became a constant subject, as did female figures set against the sea, inspired by the figureheads in Neruda’s house at Isla Negra.

He first came to Chile in 1948, invited to exhibit at the Sala del Pacífico in Santiago. In 1956 he gave a course at the University of Chile on the evolution of contemporary art, and in 1958 he moved to the country for good. In 1959, with Nemesio Antúnez and other artists and architects, he founded the art school of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, taught the painting workshops there, and in 1969 became its deputy director. That same year he obtained Chilean citizenship. Later he taught a course on the history of contemporary Latin American painting.

In 1966 he is named as a member of the Diagonal Cero movement. In 1982 he was awarded Chile’s National Prize of Art. In 1987 he received a Cintas Foundation Fellowship in New York, and in 1993 he became professor emeritus of the Faculty of Architecture and Fine Arts of the Catholic University.

Carreño died in Santiago on 20 December 1999. He had stopped working as early as 1994. In 2013, for the centenary of his birth, a foundation in his name was created in Chile; it took on his archive and the preparation of a catalogue of his works.