Carlos Enríquez was born in Zulueta, Las Villas, on August 3, 1900, and died in Havana on May 2, 1957. After completing high school, his family decided to fund his engineering studies in the United States. Once there, he moved to Pennsylvania to enroll at the city’s School of Fine Arts, from which he was expelled due to disagreements with the professors, centered on aesthetic issues.

Upon returning to Cuba in 1925, he was accompanied by the American painter Alice Neel, whom he married shortly afterward and with whom he had two children, Santillana del Mar (named after a Spanish town) and Isabel, the former of whom died before her first birthday. By 1930, Carlos Enríquez had abandoned his wife, and she, after also being separated from her daughter, attempted suicide several times, requiring hospitalization on more than one occasion.

In 1927, he participated in the Second Salon of Fine Arts and the New Art Exhibition, receiving critical acclaim, despite his depiction of the nude being controversial at the time. He traveled to the United States for the second time, and also to Europe for the first time, visiting France, Spain, Italy, and Great Britain, thereby coming into contact with diverse pictorial worlds and artists of the most varied tendencies.

Back in Cuba in 1934, he attempted to exhibit his works at the Havana Reporters Association, but the center’s director ultimately refused, arguing that they were immoral, given the rigid concepts of the time. However, the value of his painting was recognized the following year with the National Salon prize awarded to the piece “El rey de los campos de Cuba” (The King of the Fields of Cuba) by Manuel García.

In 1938, his work, “The Rape of the Mulatto Women,” won an award at the Second National Exhibition of Painters and Sculptors. It epitomizes Enríquez’s aesthetic essence: transparency, a sense of communicating movement, a distinctive sensuality, and a deep Cuban touch; although classical reminiscences of the myth of the Rape of the Sabine Women are also present. The piece is one of the most important in our heritage and is permanently on display at the National Museum of Fine Arts.

Other significant pieces by this artist include Happy Peasants, The Lagoon Bathers, Two Rivers, and Combat. Other works worth mentioning include The Drowned Woman, Isabelita, Woman of Marble, Carmen of Spain, Love in Pirindingo, Banao Lagoon, Daughters of the Antilles, Atarés 1926, Nancy and Phoebe, Bourdoir, and L’Ecuyere, among others. Carlos Enríquez was one of the leading exponents of the Cuban avant-garde and the most conscious of the meaning of the act of creation itself, in terms of originality and imagination, beyond academicism and strictly technical concepts.