José Mariano Manuel Rodríguez Álvarez

===BODY===
Mariano is the fifth of eight siblings: six females and two males. His mother, Amelia Alejandrina Álvarez Álvarez was the daughter of Asturian parents and was a student of Cuban academic painters Leopoldo Romañach and Armando Menocal. His father, José Mariano Rodríguez Cabrera, was born in Santa Cruz de la Palma, La Palma, Islas Canarias.

He resided in Islas Canarias, Spain, with his entire family for five years, from 1915-20, during which he traveled with his parents to other places in Spain, including Barcelona. In 1917 his brother Aníbal was born in Islas Canarias.

From 1921-1926 he studied at the Marista Brothers school in La Víbora until the sixth grade. In 1928 he enrolled in the Instituto de Segunda Enseñanza de La Habana to pursue his high school diploma.

He began his studies at the Academia de San Alejandro in 1928 and, although he disagreed with the teaching methods used there, he enrolled in some subjects such as Modeling and Life Drawing. At the same time, he published his poems. In 1935 he worked as a collector for the Club Náutico de La Habana. He received lessons from painter Alberto Peña (Peñita).

Shortly after, in 1936, he began working as artistic director at the magazine Ritmo, where Mariano's first known drawings appeared. In October he traveled to Mexico with sculptor Alfredo Lozano. There he met Juan Marinello in Mexico, who introduced him to the group of assistants to Diego Rivera, headed by Pablo O'Higgins, and to Manuel Rodríguez Lozano, who would become his teacher at the Academia de San Carlos. This decision distanced him from European learning and confrontation spaces, but Mexico had a powerful artistic tradition and a practice, muralism, that was internationally recognized.

Upon returning to Cuba, now equipped with technical knowledge, he joined the artistic pedagogical experiment of the Estudio Libre de Pintura y Escultura (1937), which carried out a teaching conception tributary to the paths opened in Mexico and the achievements of the preceding avant-garde. He became known at the Salón Nacional de Pintura y Escultura (1938) with the work Unidad, which was awarded a prize. He also participated in 1939 in a muralist experience carried out at the Escuela Normal de Santa Clara, with an unusual theme for the time: Sexual education.

He joined a group of poets, painters and musicians to which critics were linked, who had emerged in the cultural sphere since the magazine Verbum (1937). In that collective converged searches, related experiences, editorial projects and other concerns. From there he enlisted in the editorial venture of José Lezama Lima, which enjoyed fifteen years of systematization.

He was part of the leadership of Espuela de Plata (1939-1941); continued as a regular illustrator for Nadie Parecía (1941-1944) and later for Orígenes (1944-1952). In literary publications he was nourished by new skills, developing a graphic and at the same time exploratory work that resulted in the powerful reprographic gallery and the fluid dialogue between illustration and painting that he produced in those years: La hebra and Los niños del pozo (1939); La paloma de la paz and Mujer con pajarera (1940). A year later his work El gallo pintado appeared.

Criticism and historiography—both Cuban and foreign—have identified Mariano's painting with the representation of the rooster ever since.

He held his first solo exhibition at the Lyceum in 1943. There he exhibited La mujer de la sombrilla and Paisaje con figuras, among other later emblematic works.

A year later he participated in the Cuban exhibition presented at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MOMA) with Paisaje, and also in the exhibition Les peintres modernes cubaines, organized by José Gómez Sicre in Port au Prince, Haiti.

During the second half of the forties he traveled several times to the United States, where he exhibited in galleries; he also traveled through Mexico, and exhibited again in La Habana toward the end of the decade.

With his work Pescador he won a prize at the IV Salón Nacional de Pintura y Escultura (1950) and undertook the mural of the Edificio Odontológico de La Habana, which he titled El dolor humano.

He participated in the exhibition Plástica Cubana Contemporánea, organized at the Lyceum, known as the "Anti-Biennial", because of its artists' refusal to exhibit at the II Bienal Hispanoamericana de Arte sponsored by the governments of Cuba and Spain.

In the fifties Mariano incorporated plural procedures of abstraction into his solid plastic discourse. Cazador and Hombre con guitarra set the new dynamic of the image. The roosters were transmuted in garb and scene: now geometrized plumages invaded his pictorial field, and broad brushstrokes of defiant and energetic gaze emerged from a neutral background.

As an active participant in the revolution that triumphed in 1959, he was tasked with representing Cuba in India. Contact with this new world led him again to colors—particularly white, in opposition or balance with black. The Jama Masjid mosque and La mujer del sari blanco thus confirmed this.

In the early years of the sixties his painting was marked by clarity. Since each moment was transmuted into an epic page, Playa Girón, Asamblea Popular, II Declaración de La Habana referred to the way in which Mariano repositioned history in his poetics, as daily occurrence, and expressed a new notion of time and discourse, in systematic innovation from informalism.

Toward the end of the sixties he began his Frutas y realidad series, on which he continued working in the following decade.

In 1976 he traveled to Mexico, where he created a stained glass window twenty-three meters long by two meters wide, in acrylic colors, for the building of the Cuban embassy.

He assumed the direction of the Casa de las Américas in 1980. That same year the grupo-de-experimentacion-sonora-del-icaic created the documentary Mariano, directed by Marisol Trujillo, and the artist exhibited works from a new series, Masas, at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de La Habana. He participated in actions such as Arte en la carretera and Telarte, and began designing lamps and stained glass windows that he exhibited at the II Bienal de La Habana (1987).

He also exhibited an anthological exhibition of his work in Islas Canarias (1937-1987). He received the title of Doctor Honoris Causa in Art from the Instituto Superior de Arte.