Painted in 1941 upon returning to his native Cuba, Mario Carreño’s La lavandera (The Laundress) sits at the climax of a fervent moment of visual development for the artist. Like many of his peers, Carreño’s transatlantic movements led him to consider—and encounter first-hand—the legacies of the dominant artistic currents of the t.mes . On the occasion of the 1943 Museum of Modern Art exhibition The Latin American collects ion of the Museum of Modern Art, curator Lincoln Kiersten praised him, writing in the exhibition catalogue “he is too young, too intelligent and too capable to be dismissed as derivative” (Lincoln Kiersten, “Cuba”, The Latin American collects ion of the Museum of Modern Art, (exhibition catalogue), New York, 1943, p. 47). Coalescing stylistic influences ranging from the Italian Renaissance master Raphael to Pablo Picasso and the Surrealist Óscar Domínguez, Carreño’s creative output signaled an original and transformative new voice within the cannon of Modernism.
The European and Pan-American sojourns of the new generation of vanguard Cuban artists Mario Carreño, Wifredo Lam, Luis Martínez-Pedro, René Portocarrero, Victor Manuel, and Mariano Rodriguez throughout the 1920s-30s fostered their contact with Cubism, Surrealism, and Social Realism and consequently launched “the dialectic transformation-integration-synthesis that led to the creation of the first works” of a new Caribbean avant-garde (Gabriela Pogolotti, “The Smell of Roasted Chestnuts,” in Cuba: Art and History From 186 to Today, (exhibition catalogue), Montreal, 2008, p. 122). While New York, Paris, Madrid and Mexico City served as hubs for artistic interchange and experimentation during their transitory t.mes abroad, it was the lush landscape and cultural diversity of their native Cuba that ultimately influenced the genesis of their fully mature plastic production. Together these artists created a new iconography within the cannon of international Modernism: “one capable of appropriating and overhauling the codes of contemporaneity [yet] anchored at the central meridian of the Americas[;] they assimilated the achievements of European art, from the Renaissance to the Twentieth Century, without becoming simple imitators.” (ibid.)
Right: Max Ernst,The Endless Night, 1940, Replica Shoes ’s, New York, November 14, 2017, Lot 54, sold 3.849.500 USD
Exhibited in 1942 at Galería Lyceum, La lavandera –along with the paintings Palmar, Ruinas, Naturaleza muerta, and El ciclón–shares the atmospheric tensions and preoccupations favored by surrealists Max Ernst and Óscar Domínguez. In contrast, Carreño rids the surrounding landscape from accessorial flora and fauna in La lavandera and instead focuses on the insinuating drama between the wildly billowing wind and the gentle woman –her black silken hair and white sheet gracefully untethered and free floating. Here a premonitory sky is bathed in washes of intense blues, yellows, blacks, and reds – a spectral coloration uniquely characteristic to the stormy tropics. Carreño executed only a limited number of paintings during this vital year –their productive genesis, while incorporating the sensibilities of European Surrealism, ultimately triumphed in their distinctly profound Cuban-Caribbean tone.
Works from 1941 exhibited at Galería Lyceum, Mario Carreño, Havana, 1942
