Carbonell approved the critical admission exams and was admitted to La Escuela Nacional de Bellas Arts “San Alejandro”, where he had the opportunity to study under Professor Jose Sicre, a former student of Bourdelle. Sicre was a great influence in his career, first as a classical and religious sculptor and then later the influenced his modern and contemporary style, as he taught him that if you threw a sculpture down a hill, what you would find at the bottom is the form and the strength of the sculpture, not the detail. He graduated in 1945 with the Degree of Professor of Drawing and Modeling.
His work during those years in contrast with the movement of the Cuban Vanguard that was taking place, was classical and religious. The Vanguard which commenced in the early part of the 20th century grew as a movement characterized by the mixing of modern artistic similarities in form, style and subject matter.
Carbonell instead consecrated himself to create religious works that he strongly felt was a pure expression of his art. His classical work brought him, among others, an award at the Exposición Nacional de Pintura y Escultura for the bust of Mr. Ruston and he won his first international award for his life-size carving of the sculpture “Fin De Una Raza” representing Cuba at the II Bienal de Arte Hispano-Americana, Barcelona, Spain. Carbonell also won a competition to do a Pieta and the 13 Stations of the Cross for La Loma del Jacan, San Miguel de los Baños, Matanzas, Cuba.
Carbonell’s exceptional and diverse artistic talent moved him during these years to others endeavors as making the first comic strip to be presented in Cuba’s television, having a television program where he interviewed artists including Wifredo Lam, and earning the best television set designer for two years in a row. Later on, he opened Carbonell Studios where he combined classical interior designs with furniture design. All these endeavors together with his ever-present religious commissions brought him comfortable financial situation in comparison with other artists of the Vanguard.
Carbonell is considered among the most important Latin American Masters, together with Wifredo Lam and Agustin Cardenas, he belonged to a generation of artists that studied at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes “San Alejandro” between 1915 and 1950.
In 1959, Carbonell left Cuba upon the take-over of Castro communist regime with the allowed $200. Arriving in New York, Carbonell moved from his classical and religious period in Cuba during the 1940’s and 1950’s through the commencement and development of his contemporary and modern expression of the 1960’s culminating in Madison Avenue, then pinnacle of the art world. At the former renowned Madison Avenue Schoneman Galleries, starting in 1963, he celebrated the first of 5 biannual “One Man Shows”. At the gallery, Carbonell was the only exhibiting sculptor next to another gallery artists such as Picasso, Chagall, Braque, Monet, Matisse, Gauguin and Renoir.
Upon retirement and the closing of the New York gallery by Dr. Schoeman, Carbonell went into a period of self -imposed isolation from 1976 to 1987, moving away front the active art market and concentrated in the creation of important commissions and private sales. In 1976, at a formal ceremony in the Gardens of the White House, Carbonell presented “The Bicentennial Eagle” as his gift to his adopted country the United States of America. The sculpture is presently part of the Gerald Ford Library, Grand Rapids, Michigan. The following year Carbonell created the “Madonna of Fatima”, his first bronze monument in America: a 26-foot-high statue located at The Blue Army Shrine in Washington, New Jersey. The statue is one of the largest works cast in bronze in America during the twentieth century.
In 1987, the Miami gallery Beaux Arts Gallery, owned by his nephew Ricardo J. Gonzalez III began representing Carbonell. In 1990, Carbonell won a competition to carve the statue of Cuban Apostle Jose Marti, a 6- foot marble statue for the San Carlos Institute in Key West, Florida.
Carbonell won a competition in 1992 to create the 53-foot bronze monument “The Pillar of History and the Tequesta Family Sculpture” for the Brickell Avenue Bridge, Miami, Florida, together with 12 bronze bas- reliefs of the Florida Fauna located at the base of the flagpoles and the four 8-foot by 4-foot bronze bas-reliefs of Miami’s pioneers located at the supports of the bridge. He also created the 21-foot bronze and alabaster sculpture “El Centinela Del Rio” located in Brickell Key at the entrance of the Miami River.
In Carbonell’s modern works, his free approach to form and beauty highlights his unique personal style and defines the quality of his forms. In his sculptures he searched for the essence of the form and the absence of details while empowering a feeling of monumentality to his sculptures.
In Carbonell’s work, you can experience the monumentality of Moore, the simplicity found in the works of Brancusi, Archipenko and Arp, but in the quality of his forms, Carbonell represents a very distinctive and personal style, which makes his work highly recognizable, defines his own art and renders permanence and transcendence in the art world.
Carbonell’s contemporary sculptures form part of important national and international private, corporate and museum collections.
