307 - Augustin CARDENAS (1927–2001)

Augustin CARDENAS (1927–2001) "The Family" Bronze cast with brown patina Marked "E.A." and monogrammed on the base 25.5 x 14 x 10 cm (Scratches from use, wear on the patina) The condition report is available upon request at the following email address: contact@neo-encheres.com PROVENANCE French private collection. This sculpture belonged to a friend of the artist, a food critic, and was later inherited. BIBLIOGRAPHY José Pierre, *La sculpture de Cárdenas*, Éditions La Connaissance, 1971, listed under reference “39-40.” DESCRIPTION Agustín Cárdenas was born in Matanzas, Cuba, in 1927. Trained at the San Alejandro Academy in Havana from 1943 to 1949 under the sculptor Juan José Sicre—a former student of Bourdelle—he turned to a modernized form of figurative art at a very early stage. A scholarship brought him to Paris in December 1955; he settled in Montparnasse, where André Breton immediately took notice of him and exhibited his work as early as 1956 at the À l’Étoile scellée gallery. After joining the Surrealist group, he became one of its leading sculptors; Breton compared the freedom of his hand to “the flight of a dragonfly.” His vocabulary of vertical and totemic forms, with polished and interlaced volumes, found expression in wood—whether charred or raw—then in marble and granite, which he carved in Carrara beginning in the 1960s, and finally in bronze cast in Pietrasanta. He participated in numerous international symposia and received commissions for monumental works in Japan, Austria, Israel, and the Canary Islands. A Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters, he returned to Havana toward the end of his life and died there in 2001.