Artist: Rene Portocarrero, Cuban (1912 - 1985)

Title: Ciudad de la Habana, 1961

Medium: Oil on Canvas

Size: 34 x 24 inches

Provenance:

Private Cuban Collection. The work was purchased this directly from Rene Portocarrero in 1961. The painting was sealed by Cuban Diplomatic Mail Customs on verso in order enter the United States.

Rene Portocarrero was noted for highly colorful, abstract paintings. Portocarrero began his artistic education at the San Alejandro Academy but left early and is hence considered 'self-taught'. As well as a painter and sculptor, he worked as a ceramicist, scenic designer and book illustrator, publishing his own Las Máscaras (The Masks) in 1935 and El Sueño (The Dream) in 1939. He was also a muralist, producing public artworks for the Havana Prison, a church in Bauta, Cuba, the Cuban National Hospital, the Cuban National Theatre and the Hotel Tryp Habana Libre. His artworks form part of the permanent collections of galleries in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Peru, France, the United States (Museums of Modern Art, New York and San Francisco, Milwaukee Art Center; Union Panamericana, Washington), Uruguay and Venezuela as well as his native Cuba (Museo Nacional, Havana). He put on his first exhibition in 1934, at the Havana Lyceum, beginning a long and fruitful career which included a 1937 collaboration with Mariano Rodríguez and work as a 'free studies' teacher of painting and sculpture. After travels in Haiti, Europe and the United States, he gave his first show to an overseas audience at Julien Levy’s gallery in New York City in 1945.