“We must reckon with climate and with race,” pronounced Edward Alden Jewell in a glowing review of the landmark exhibition, Modern Cuban Painters, in 1944. “The Cuban show at the Museum of Modern Art kindles the walls with brilliant color, the like of which, in such concentrated abundance, has, I should say, never before been seen there.” He praised the “uninhibited delight” with which Carreño applied color, “a sovereign element in modern Cuban painting,” in his two panels, Cortadores de caña and Danza Afrocubana. They epitomized the chromatic “consanguinity” of the tropics in their “fortissimi, with their plangently stepped-up color,” and their dynamic, “semi-cubistic” composition, seeming to “madly vibrate within frames that seem hard-pressed to confine activity so irrepressible” (E. A. Jewell, “Cuba’s Pacemakers” in The New York t.mes s, March 26, 1944 ). Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the founding director of MoMA and the exhibition’s organizer, declared Carreño “the most versatile, learned, and courageous of the new generation,” naming the “heroic” Cortadores de caña “among the most ambitious and powerful compositions in Cuban painting” (A. H. Barr, “Modern Cuban Painters” in Museum of Modern Art Bulletin, vol. XI, no. 5, April 1944, pp. 4-5).

Modern Cuban Painters canonized Carreño among the vanguard of the Havana School, celebrated for its heady, expressionist renderings of cubanidad, denoted in fighting cocks and hurricanes, baroque ornament and folk rituals. Like his contemporaries Cundo Bermúdez, René Portocarrero, and Mariano Rodríguez, Carreño adapted the neoclassicism of Picasso and the School of Paris to the Cuban scene with painterly aplomb and sophistication. Trained at San Alejandro, he traveled widely through the 1930s, first to Madrid and then to Mexico, Paris, and New York, where he held a solo exhibition at Perls Galleries in 1941 before returning to Cuba later in the year. “Eager to grapple with the artistic problems and possibilities of his native soil,” wrote the young Cuban curator and critic, José Gómez Sicre, Carreño began to explore “the seductive and capricious nature of the tropics” in still-lifes, portraits, and landscapes “flushed with unique and dramatic tints” (J. G. Sicre, Carreño, Havana, 1943, n.p.).

The arrival in Havana of the Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros in April 1943 stimulated a brief, but seminal, body of work highlighted by the production of three large panels in Duco on wood: Cortadores de caña, Danza Afrocubana, and Fuego en el batey. Carreño invited Siqueiros to stay with him and his wife, the heiress María Luisa Gómez Mena, and assisted him in the painting of a mural in the foyer of their home in Vedado. Siqueiros introduced him to the technical possibilities of Duco, an industrial lacquer designed for automobiles, and airbrush, which he assimilated to extraordinary effect in these panels, now recognized among the most iconic works of Cuba’s historic vanguardia. “With Duco he cannot obtain subtle color saturations,” Gómez Sicre explained. “He uses it in a superimposition of successive layers.” Not unlike the young Jackson Pollock, who had earlier studied with Siqueiros in New York, Carreño made “full use of the ‘accidents’ that result from the fast-drying nature of this medium…, producing spectacular efforts by his skillful handling of its irregular, crusty surface” (ibid., n.p.).

“After Siqueiros left Cuba,” Carreño recalled, “I was enthusiastic about continuing to paint with synthetic lacquer.” Citing the “extraordinary texture and transparency” afforded by the new medium, he determined “to paint, on portable wooden panels, large pictures comparable in dimension to murals.” Carreño capitalized on the sculptural possibilities (what he termed the “third dimension”) of Duco in Cortadores de caña, ennobling his subjects with sinewy grace, their laboring bodies set rhythmically in motion (M. Carreño, Mario Carreño: cronología del recuerdo, Santiago, 1991, p. 62). “Sugar cane, the center of gravity of Cuban social, economic and political problems,” had featured in Carreño’s first solo exhibition in 1930, Gómez Sicre observed, noting that “sugar mills at work and laborers harvesting the cane in the fields of Cuba are subjects that Carreño has developed and repeated even in his panels of 1943” (Sicre, op. cit., n.p.).

Here in a dense, verdant field of sugar cane, Carreño portrays the drama of the seasonal harvest: workers slice the slender, jointed stalks with gleaming machetes as they stride forward, the precious crop grasped in their sturdy hands and borne lengthwise overhead. This kinetic quality is amplified in the brilliantly colored central figure, whose depiction in successive phases of movement nods to the Futurist concept of simultaneity. Stoic and monumental, the figures betray none of the hardships and privations of the plantation. A scene of excruciating manual labor is instead transformed into a tropical tableau vivant, its heavy bodies posed almost as if in a dance, revolving in prismatic, three-dimensional space.

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