Lot Essay
This painting is sold with a photo-certificate of authenticity from Ida Gonzalez de Carreño, dated 'Santiago Chile 1995'.
Carreño, who in 1930 changed his name to Karreño, had strong socialist views which he expressed in his drawings and paintings using a modernist streamlined language. Cuba of the early 1930s was going through an economic depression, the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado, and a brief revolution in 1933. Carreño's work of the early 1930s was a "genuine product of the times, of that actual moment." (A. Aguilar, Orbe, July 1933, p.9).
The Cuban vanguardia generation (ca. 1925-1938) saw in the sugar-mill the metaphor for most of Cuba's ills -- a one-crop economy, foreign intervention, and hand labor at its worst. Thus the sugar-mill became the subject of some of the best literature, illustrations, and paintings of that generation, including Agustin Acosta's La Zafra 1926, the illustrations for that book by his brother José Manuel Acosta, and Pogolotti's Paisaje Cubano 1933. The painting by Carreño reproduced here, originally entitled Los que Trabajan (Aguilar), deals in part with the sugar-mill seen from the worker's point of view. This homage to workers, and to modern industry, is in tune, both in form and content with the international current of social-oriented art of that time, particularly that which took place in the United States under the sponsorship of the Workers Progress Administration.
Although from the late 1930s onward Carreño abandoned the socialist vision of his early works and started signing his name with a 'C', he has returned over and over again to their geometric forms and composition, reaching a total abstraction or non-objectivity in the 1950s. One of the constant elements in the many-faceted art of Carreño is a strong sense of structure and order, which in the early paintings reinforced the socio-political message and in his later more abstract paintings became the content itself.
Juan A. Martinez, Ph.D.
Miami, 1996
Carreño, who in 1930 changed his name to Karreño, had strong socialist views which he expressed in his drawings and paintings using a modernist streamlined language. Cuba of the early 1930s was going through an economic depression, the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado, and a brief revolution in 1933. Carreño's work of the early 1930s was a "genuine product of the times, of that actual moment." (A. Aguilar, Orbe, July 1933, p.9).
The Cuban vanguardia generation (ca. 1925-1938) saw in the sugar-mill the metaphor for most of Cuba's ills -- a one-crop economy, foreign intervention, and hand labor at its worst. Thus the sugar-mill became the subject of some of the best literature, illustrations, and paintings of that generation, including Agustin Acosta's La Zafra 1926, the illustrations for that book by his brother José Manuel Acosta, and Pogolotti's Paisaje Cubano 1933. The painting by Carreño reproduced here, originally entitled Los que Trabajan (Aguilar), deals in part with the sugar-mill seen from the worker's point of view. This homage to workers, and to modern industry, is in tune, both in form and content with the international current of social-oriented art of that time, particularly that which took place in the United States under the sponsorship of the Workers Progress Administration.
Although from the late 1930s onward Carreño abandoned the socialist vision of his early works and started signing his name with a 'C', he has returned over and over again to their geometric forms and composition, reaching a total abstraction or non-objectivity in the 1950s. One of the constant elements in the many-faceted art of Carreño is a strong sense of structure and order, which in the early paintings reinforced the socio-political message and in his later more abstract paintings became the content itself.
Juan A. Martinez, Ph.D.
Miami, 1996