Mario Juan Carreño y Morales

MARIO JUAN CARREÑO Y MORALES (Havana, Cuba, 1913 - Santiago de Chile, 1999).
"Figure and palm trees", 1941.
Oil on cardboard.
Signed and dated in the lower left corner.
With certificate of authenticity from the author's widow in 2019.
Measurements: 38 x 28 cm, 51 x 41.5 cm (frame).
Carreño was a Cuban-Chilean painter, winner of the Chilean National Art Prize 1982. He studied art at the San Alejandro Academy in Havana (1925-1926), where he was taught by Antonio Rodríguez Morey, but after conflicts with some academics, disappointed, he dropped out and was accepted first as a retoucher and then as an illustrator at the Diario de la Marina. In 1932 he travelled to Europe to continue his studies in Graphic Arts at the San Fernando School in Madrid, but four years later he left Spain due to the Spanish Civil War. In 1934, he met the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, with whom he became close friends. From Madrid, Carreño went to Mexico, where he came into contact with the main representatives of muralism: Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, Rufino Tamayo. He spent a brief period in Cuba and in 1937 returned to Europe, this time to Paris, where he joined the Académie Julien and became a pupil of the painter Jean Souverbie. Two years later he held an exhibition at the famous Berheim-Jeune gallery, which established him as an artist. He left Europe again with the outbreak of the Second World War and settled in New York. During the 1940s he spent long periods in his homeland, and in 1942 he was visited in Havana by the Mexican David Alfaro Siqueiros, with whom he painted a mural. In 1946 he became a professor of painting at The New School for Social Research in New York, which marked the beginning of an outstanding teaching career in Havana, where between 1951 and 1954 he taught modern art at the San Alejandro School, and later in Chile. At that time he also began to write art commentaries in a weekly column for the magazines Carteles and Noticias de Arte. Carreño first travelled to Chile in 1948, invited to exhibit in Santiago at the Sala del Pacífico. Later, in 1956, he visited Chile again to give courses on the evolution of contemporary art at the University of Chile, and two years later he settled there permanently. In 1958, the same year of his arrival, he gave art courses at the Summer School of the Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María in Valparaíso, and the following year he gave a series of classes on the Evolution of Contemporary Art at the Universidad de Concepción. In 1959 he also founded, together with other artists such as Nemesio Antúnez, the Escuela de Arte de la Católica, where he taught painting workshops until 1969, when he was appointed deputy director of the school. That same year he became a Chilean citizen and the following year he took up the chair of History of Contemporary Painting in Latin America. At that time, he wrote for a short time for the newspaper El Mercurio, replacing the critic Antonio Romera. Mario Carreño stopped painting in 1994 after suffering several strokes; he died in Santiago five years later. He had been married since 1965 to Ida González, who, like his previous wife, María Luisa Bermúdez, is a Chilean painter. His first wife, the Cuban millionaire María Luisa Gómez-Mena, had left him in 1944 for the Spanish poet Manuel Altolaguirre. His works are in a number of museums in the United States, Latin America and Europe, as well as in important private collections around the world.

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