Cernuda Arte in Coral Gables will exhibit lost Cuban masterpiece

June 17, 11:25 PMMiami Travel ExaminerGeorge Leposky

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Fuego en el Batey by Mario Carreño, a ‘lost’ masterpiece
recently rediscovered and sold at auction, comes to the
Miami area for the first time.  Credit: Cernuda Arte.

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Cernuda Arte, a Coral Gables art gallery specializing in Cuban paintings, will open an exhibition featuring a ‘lost’ masterpiece, Fuego en el Batey (Fire in the Sugar-Mill Village) by Mario Carreño, at 7 PM on Friday, July 3.

This iconic Duco and oil work on a wood panel was painted in 1943.  Known to biographers, art historians and collectors, it was believed to be a lost treasure until recently, when it was found in the private collection of the late Milton and Nora Ward of New York. It had been hanging on a wall in their home for more than half a century.

Cernuda Arte and the Rudman Family from the Dominican Republic purchased Fuego en el Batey for $2.18 million at auction during Christie’s May Latin American sale in New York.

Fuego en el Batey portrays a scene of a family escaping a fire in the batey (a small village of precariously built houses and stables surrounding a sugar mill, where the cane cutters and their families lived). The mother rapidly hands the child to a guajiro peasant riding a gallant-spirited horse. In the eyes of the viewer, the guajiro and horse become the heroic figures of this scenario.

This dramatic image attests to Carreño’s desire of conveying a Cuban national ethos in some of his major works of this period. Art historian Alejandro Anreus says, “The overall meatiness of the figures recalls Picasso’s neo-classic phase, the evocation of movement… brings to mind the Italian Futurists, yet the end product is pure Carreño, a skilled and powerful picture that is both classical and baroque in its pictorial language.”

Painted in Cuba

Mario Carreño (1913-1999) was a Cuban-born painter who spent time in Spain, Mexico, Paris, and New York before settling in Chile, where he lived for 41 years.

Fuego en el Batey was painted in Cuba in 1943 and is one of three celebrated works for which Carreño used Duco and oil work on wood. It was shown, along with Danza Afrocubana and El Corte de Caña, in 1943 in Havana, and may also have been shown in 1944 at Perls Galleries in New York.  It has never before been seen in the Miami area.

Accompanying Fuego en el Batey, this exhibition will include museum-quality works by Carreño’s contemporaries, including Wifredo Lam, Víctor Manuel, Eduardo Abela, Amelia Peláez, Carlos Enríquez, Fidelio Ponce, Luis Martínez Pedro, René Portocarrero, Cundo Bermúdez, and Mariano Rodríguez.

Other galleries in Coral Gables also will be open July 3 for the area’s monthly First Fridays gallery walk.

Cernuda Arte’s Fuego en el Batey exhibition will remain on display through August 15. Cernuda Arte is at 3155 Ponce de Leon Blvd., Coral Gables FL 33134. 305-461-1050.

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