Attributed to René Portocarrero, private collection, no coa, medium: oil measurements:30"hX40"w no frame, mint condition Biography: René Portocarrero was a Cuban artist recognised internationally for his achievements. As well as a painter and sculptor, Portocarrero 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 Habana Hilton. His artworks form part of the permanent collections of galleries in Argentina (Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires), Brazil (Museums of Modern Art, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro), Canada (National Gallery, Ottawa), France (Modern Arts, Paris), Peru (Instituto de Arte Contemporaneo, Lima), the United States (Museums of Modern Art, New York and San Francisco; Milwaukee Art Center; Union Panamericana, Washington; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Art Museum, Indianapolis), Uruguay (Bellas Artes, Montevideo) and Venezuela (Bellas Artes, Caracas), as well as his native Cuba (Museo Nacional, Havana).Essentially self-taught, he held his first exhibition at Havana’s Lyceum in 1934 and emerged as a member of the Havana School in the wake of his participation in the city’s landmark Primera exposición de arte moderno (1937). As part of the second-generation vanguardia, he participated in numerous traveling exhibitions of Cuban art during the 1940s, including Modern Cuban Painters, organized by Alfred H. Barr, Jr. at the Museum of Modern Art in 1944. He held a solo exhibition at Julien Levy Gallery in New York in 1945. Early paintings, such as Casablanca (1939), suggest the influence of Mexican muralism and neoclassical Picasso. With Mariano Rodríguez, Portocarrero was closely associated with the circle that developed in the 1940s around the literary magazine Orígenes and the writer José Lezama Lima, whose book Enemigo Rumor (1941) he illustrated.