Inventing
Wifredo Lam: The Parisian
Avant-Garde's Primitivist Fixation
Michele Greet
© 2003
"It is — or it should
be — a well-known fact that a man hardly owes anything but his physical
constitution to the race or races from which he has sprung." 1
This statement made by art critic Michel Leiris could
not have been further from the truth when describing the social realities
that Wifredo Lam experienced in France in the late 1930s. From the moment
he arrived in Paris on May 1, 1938, with a letter of introduction to Pablo
Picasso given to him by Manuel Hugué, prominent members of the
Parisian avant-garde developed a fascination with Lam, not only with his
work, but more specifically with how they perceived race to have shaped
his art. 2 Two people in particular
took an avid interest in Lam—Picasso and André Breton—each
mythologizing him order to validate their own perceptions of non-western
cultures. This study will examine interpretations of Lam and his work
by Picasso, Breton and other members of the avant-garde, as well as Lam's
response to the identity imposed upon him.
*******
In 1931, the Colonial Exposition
set the mood for a decade in which France asserted its hegemony –
in the face of Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and Fascist Italy –
through a conspicuous display of control over its colonial holdings. The
exposition portrayed the colonies as a pre-industrial lost arcadia, occupied
by noble savages who were untouched by the industrial advances of the
western world. They were represented as existing only to provide France
with the raw materials of commercial success. Any view toward colonial
hybridism 3 was deliberately concealed.
The 1937 World's Fair, in turn, perpetuated this showcasing of “the
foreign” as distinguished from the essentially French by presenting
the cultures of Africa, Asia, and the Pacific Islands as exotic, uncivilized,
and historically constant.
France's perception of Caribbean
and Latin American peoples paralleled views of its own colonial subjects.
With the craze for negrophilia in the early twentieth century, Latin American
blacks in particular were sexualized and infantilized. 4
Yet French fascination with this assumed exotic culture
was balanced by fear. They became alarmed at the number of Cubans and
Brazilians coming to France in the 1920s and accordingly attempted to
control or contain the portrayal of their cultures. 5
For example, in 1930 a law was implemented stating that
foreign musicians could only perform as "variety artists" and
were therefore required to wear ethnic costumes. Under such conditions,
the famous Tango musician, Carlos Gardel, amongst others, was obliged
to play dressed as an Argentinean cowboy. 6
Indeed, in an article on Cuban music written for Documents, the
surrealist magazine that claimed to support anti-racist ideologies, Cuban
Alejo Carpentier himself was party to these racist stereotypes. He asserted:
"In the Negro's eyes this [profane music] takes second place. He
needs esoterism, incantations, mystery... And when they are among themselves,
far from white men, they know how to make their drums produce rhythms
having a much deeper meaning. Certain drums, covered with magic signs
can only be used for secret percussions." 7
Despite the prevalence of racial
stereotypes, interest in non-western cultures in the Parisian art world
of the 1930s acquired a level of complexity that it had lacked during
prior decades, when exploration of such art was primarily formal (i.e.
Picasso’s use of African masks) rather than cultural. Yet as conceptions
of non-European expanded, those interested in such art required a greater
knowledge of its cultural origins.
The surrealists, in particular,
took an interest in non-western arts and cultures. As a means of resistance
to France's blatant assertion of global imperialism in the 1930s, the
surrealists began to question traditional beliefs and engaged in an attempted
reshuffling of cultural hierarchies. They sought, through their artistic
experimentation, a de-centered perspective that critiqued European ethnocentrism.
Moreover, with the completion of the Dakar-Djibouti mission in 1933 and
the inauguration of the Musée de l'Homme in 1938, newly established
ethnographic methods were made readily available to these artists. Yet,
as I argue below, by assuming the position of privileged viewer of both
the modern and the primitive, they perpetuated the ethnocentrism that
they were trying to undermine. 8 The
surrealists concealed, through the guise of ethnography, their continued
use of the exotic “other” in opposition to the western. 9
Instead of employing ethnography to reformulate their
conceptions of the primitive other, the Parisian avant-garde used it as
a means of extracting from the non-western those forms and ideas beneficial
to their own objectives.
Thus when Wifredo Lam arrived
in Paris in 1938, it is not surprising that notions of race were clearly
defined. Those who met him identified Lam by the color of his skin, and
assumed, because of this, that he himself and his work had an innate connection
to primitive culture. Although Lam was only one quarter black (his father
was Chinese and his mother a mulatta of Spanish and African descent),
because he physically appeared more African than Asian, European artists
and critics aligned their visual perception of the man with their own
interpretation of African societies.
The first person to express an interest in Lam in Paris was Picasso. 10
Picasso openly asserted his admiration for Lam and
later remarked to him, "Even if you hadn't brought me a letter from
Manolo, I would have noticed you in the street, and I would have thought:
I absolutely must make a friend of this man." 11
Picasso certainly went out of his way to assist Lam.
He introduced him to numerous members of the Parisian avant-garde including
Braque, Matisse, Léger, Eluard, Ernst, Tzara, Breton and Leiris
amongst others. 12 Picasso also
insisted that Pierre Loeb become his dealer, and when Lam was forced to
leave Paris before World War II, he entrusted Picasso with all his works
completed at that time. The two artists even exhibited together in New
York in November 1939, at the Perls Gallery, in a show entitled Drawings
by Picasso and Gouaches by Wifredo Lam. 13
Lam's deliberate decision to
explore Picasso's artistic techniques and Picasso's encouragement of Lam's
artistic development led to a period of intense interaction between the
two artists. Lam's work during his residence in Paris displays a strong
visual resemblance to Picasso's early paintings. Lam severely simplified
his forms and reduced three-dimensional figures in a way similar to Picasso,
as seen in a comparison between Picasso’s Head of a Woman
[fig.
1] of 1907 and Lam's Self-Portrait [fig.
2] of 1938. Yet despite similarities, Lam’s work displays a penchant
for geometrical shapes, right angles, and bilateral symmetry, whereas
Picasso’s forms are more fluid and asymmetrical. Like Picasso, however,
Lam’s self-portrait appropriates the modernists’ vision of the
primitive, and thus seems to acknowledge the primitivist perception of
him by his Parisian colleagues. But his use of a mask, which acts as a
hiding or transforming mechanism, actually serves to negate the validity
of the identity imposed upon Lam. His decision to paint a self-portait
as a mask, I argue, indicates that this particular representation is neither
a depiction of his true appearance nor his real identity. Rather, by using
a mask, he has presented a self that is both invented and malleable. And
although Picasso frequently used the African mask as a motif in his work,
he never associated the mask with the self, but rather as a reference
to something outside the European tradition. The leap from mask to painted
self-portrait is therefore unique to Lam. This work, I argue, appears
to be Lam's first reaction to the primitivizing identities imposed on
him, an idea that he did not fully develop until he later returned to
Cuba.
Lam's Paris compositions usually
comprised an individual or a pair of female figures, as in Woman and
Child [fig.
3] of 1939, and Woman with Long Hair [fig.
4] of 1939-40. His figures can be characterized by their flat, geometricized
bodies, teardrop-shaped heads, long, angular noses, flat, linear eyes,
extremely long hair or no hair at all, and oversized expressive hands.
Lam employed bold black outlines to define essential forms that emphasized
geometrical planes. Yet as Jacques Leenhardt has pointed out, Lam's experimentation
with Picasso's Africanizing style was not merely formal; Lam also began
to capture the expressive quality present in African masks. 14
Two such examples are The Awakening [fig.
5] and Madame Lumumba [fig.
6] both of 1938.
Yet during his time in Paris,
Lam did not employ Africanizing forms as a reflection of his Afro-Cuban
heritage, but rather he engaged these forms as a means of emulating the
modernity of the Parisian avant-garde, and in so doing, definitively breaking
with his academic training. Lam was attracted to Picasso's incorporation
of primitive forms to invent visually new and challenging images.
15 As I explore further below,
it was only in response to the repeated voicing of primitivizing perceptions
by Paris artists that Lam began to explore the possibility of imbuing
these formal constructions with meaning specific to his identity as an
Afro-Cuban. 16
Beyond their artistic connections,
there were other reasons that a bond formed between Picasso and Lam. The
most obvious of these was their common language. Lam arrived in Paris
speaking little French, emphasizing the aura of mystery that surrounded
his persona. 17 Thus, Lam's ability
to communicate his ideas to Picasso in his native tongue certainly led
to a mutual understanding that he did not immediately achieve with his
French-speaking colleagues. 18 Also,
although Picasso was well-established in Paris, he was nonetheless still
a foreigner and could relate to Lam’s sense of alienation. While
jointly being identified as other, Picasso and Lam were united in their
Spanish nationalism. Their political views also aligned. When Lam was
studying in Spain he joined the Republican Army in the defense of Madrid
during the Civil War, a cause that Picasso adamantly supported. 19
A final connection between the two artists resulted
from Picasso's family ties to Cuba, since his great-grandmother was Cuban.
20
Yet the nature of the relationship
between Picasso and Lam was continually manipulated in then contemporary
criticism of the latter’s art. In November 1939, for example, Cahiers
d'art featured a brief article on Lam that not only defined him by
his ethnic background, but also categorized his art within the context
Picasso’s oeuvre. Indeed, Lam’s own work is not even represented.
The essay concludes with a photograph of an iron sculpture by Picasso
rather than Lam. 21
American critics also co-opted
the French reliance on Picasso to validate Lam. In a review of the New
York exhibition in which they both participated, Lam is understood only
as a follower of Picasso. In discussing Picasso's contribution to the
exhibition the author states, "Ten or a dozen follow the artist's
course" and in the next paragraph proceeds to discuss Lam's work.
The writer then refers to Lam as "a young Cuban artist, who has been
a protégé of Picasso since the end of the Spanish war, and
now lives with him." His paintings are described as "harking
back faintly to Picasso's cubist phase." 22 Although
Picasso was never Lam's teacher, rather he was a friend and confidant,
and Lam never lived with Picasso, references to Lam as the elder artist's
protégé persisted. The term “protégé,”
although in this context referring to a person in whose career another
takes interest, also implies protection and thus serves to relegate Lam
to the position of one in need of supervision. Varian Fry later referred
to Lam as "the tragic-masked Cuban Negro who was one of the very
few pupils Picasso ever took." 23 This
particular description of Lam not only places him under the tutelage of
Picasso, but actually conflates the artist with the images in his paintings,
stripping him of all creative autonomy.
In another review of the same
New York show, published in November 1939, Picasso is actually credited
for Lam's exploration of Africanizing forms. The author states: "Picasso
was impressed by Lam's work and encouraged him from the start, urging
the younger man to develop his self-expression in keeping with the cultural
characteristics of the mixed racial strains of his native Cuba."
24 By presenting the relationship
in this manner, Lam is denied his power of conscious discovery. Positioned
as the passive follower of a more renowned and experienced artist, Lam
is ostensibly infantilized.
Yet, in reality, Lam deliberately
chose to embrace this particular aspect of Picasso's art as a vehicle
for establishing his own means of creative expression and engagement with
modernism. He first viewed Picasso's paintings in a traveling exhibition
that came to Madrid in 1936. 25
Before electing to employ the stylistic techniques of Picasso's Africanizing
works from 1906-07, Lam had engaged in a systematic process of stylistic
investigation and simplification of forms. Prior to coming to Paris, Lam
spent fifteen years studying art in Spain where he became a member of
the Spanish avant-garde group called the "Generación del Veintiseite."
26 During that period he rejected
the conservatism of his academic training and experimented with fauvist,
cubist, and surrealist styles. Unfortunately, Lam left all his early work
in Barcelona when he left Spain. French and American critics were therefore
unaware of Lam's artistic progression and conscious development; they
only saw his then current interest in Picasso. From their perspective,
the younger artist was merely a passive protégé.
When Lam first began to experiment
with Picasso's Africanizing forms, he did so as a means of engaging with
modernism. Initially, the formal characteristics of African art were as
foreign to him as they were to his European colleagues. Yet, as Lam began
to realize that his counterparts and critics aligned their conception
of him as a person with the Africanizing elements in his work, he decided
to explore new means of imbuing these primitivizing forms with meaning
relevant to his heritage, a meaning that differed fundamentally from those
imposed on him by the Parisian avant-garde. 27
Yet despite the fact that Lam
was a mature artist and that he had made a deliberate decision to explore
Picasso’s forms, the latter often treated him not as a capable colleague,
but rather as an ingénue who required instruction and encouragement.
Picasso took an interest in Lam's artistic process and was curious to
observe how an artist of African descent would proceed when presented
with African sculpture. While showing Lam his collection of African sculptures
Picasso remarked, "You should be proud! ...Because this sculpture
was made by an African and you have African blood." 28
Picasso also introduced Lam to the prominent French ethnographer Michel
Leiris with instructions to teach Lam about African art and accompany
him on a tour of the Musée de l'Homme. 29
Leiris had a long history of engagement with ethnography and surrealist
thought. Since 1934, he had directed the Black Africa department at the
Trocadero (which became the Musée de l'Homme in 1938) and had been
the archivist for the Dakar-Djibouti Mission from 1931-33. He had also
been a contributor to the surrealist journal Documents. 30
Of the people who came to know Lam well, Leiris developed the most complex
understanding of Lam's cultural heritage, although his fixation on Lam's
race became almost obsessive. Even in 1969, when he published a book on
Lam, Leiris dedicated more than half the text to Lam's ethnic background
rather than his art. He painstakingly detailed Lam's parents' heritage
and emphasized the fact that Lam came from a hybrid colonial society,
not a tribal society. Leiris viewed Lam’s work not as derivative
of primitive culture, but rather as the result of a unique cultural amalgamation.
31 Leiris thus wondered whether
Lam's mixed race allowed him to look at the world in a privileged way—neither
exclusively European nor “primitive— and therefore create art
from a unique perspective. Perhaps Leiris' fascination with Lam resulted
from his own desire to rupture the boundaries of European experience and
to challenge the construct of the cosmopolitan/primitive dichotomy.
Another key contact Picasso
established for Lam was Pierre Loeb, who became Lam's dealer and sponsored
his first solo exhibition in Paris in the summer of 1939. 32
For Loeb, the perceived connection between Lam's art and his race was
of primary significance. From the moment he met Lam, Loeb's assessment
of the Cuban artist was influenced by his appearance. In describing his
first impression of Lam, Loeb exclaimed, "Your African face drawn
by a refined and subtle Chinese, your pin of a head topped with a smooth
matted helmet of black cotton wool." Loeb maintained that he visited
Lam's studio at Picasso's insistence and while looking at Lam's paintings
remarked, "He is influenced by blacks!" to which Picasso responded,
"He has the right, he IS black!" 33
As it was for Leiris, Lam’s race played a critical role in Loeb’s
understanding of his art.
Yet Leiris’ and Loeb’s
understanding of Lam’s work as “African” was misleading.
Ironically, as I stated above, Lam was learning about these cultures for
the first time through people like Loeb and Leiris 34
, as well as the work of Picasso, not through an inherent connection to
the tribal. Lam’s understanding of these “primitive” methods
and forms, in short, was acquired rather than intuitive.
Lam's first exhibition in the
Pierre Loeb Gallery was well-received and attended by various members
of the Parisian avant-garde, including Le Corbusier and Marc Chagall.
35 Yet those who attended made
the same assumptions about Lam’s art as had Loeb, Leiris, and Picasso,
especially since the gallery had a consistent history of hosting exhibitions
of non-western art. For example, in a review of the show published in
Marianne, Charles Théophile explored the relationship between
Lam's paintings and Pre-Columbian sculpture. He comments that Lam painted
with the "force of primitive peoples" without "false ingenuity"
or "false archaism," since Lam was "liberating the atavistic
meaning of the forms." 36
This reading of Lam clearly stems from preconceived European notions of
primitivism rather than from an objective assessment of Lam's newfound
interest in the Africanizing elements of Picasso's style. The comparison
of Lam's work to Pre-Columbian forms is clearly the result of the author's
awareness of Lam's Latin American origin rather than any actual relationship,
since Lam had never traveled to other regions of Latin America before
living in Europe and no monumental Pre-Columbian art was ever produced
in Cuba. Although Lam may have been familiar with Pre-Columbian art through
textbooks, he would have had no more access to it than the reviewer of
the exhibition. By stating that Lam's connection to primitive forms was
genuine, as opposed to European artists' false engagement with the primitive,
the author perpetuates the idea that, through his race and culture, Lam
had an inherent connection to this nebulous concept of primitive society
defined by European minds.
Clearly, Picasso's decision
to present Lam to a circle of intellectuals with a vested interest in
non-western art led to the conception of Lam as a quasi-primitive artist.
Picasso had opened many doors for Lam, but at the same time, in the eyes
of his critics, his association with Lam eclipsed the Cuban artist’s
creative autonomy. Yet, as I have suggested above, Lam’s engagement
with Africanizing forms and ostensibly primitive imagery was learned,
not instinctual. It was through critical and very conscious evaluation
of Picasso's art that Lam explored means of achieving modernism through
African forms. Moreover, Lam’s work during this period was not his
ultimate style, it merely served as a transition to what would become
his signature aesthetic, one that blossomed after his return to Cuba in
1941. 37
In July 1940 Lam traveled to
Marseilles to escape persecution by the Nazis and attempt to obtain a
passage back to Cuba. While in Marseilles, Lam frequently visited the
Villa Air-Bel, the official headquarters for the “Defense of Intellectuals
Menaced by Nazism” run by Varian Fry. 38
There he met Pierre Mabille, René Char, Max Ernst, Victor Brauner,
Oscar Domínguez, André Masson, and Benjamin Péret,
but developed a particularly close relationship with André Breton.
39
During his visits to Air-Bel,
Lam participated in surrealist games organized by Breton. These activities
were intended to penetrate the unconscious and eliminate self-censorship,
and included the “Game of Truth,” the “Exquisite Corpse,”
and automatic writing. 40 Breton
in turn selected Lam, along with Brauner, Domínquez, Ernst, Herold,
Lamba, and Masson, to participate in the creation of a new game and its
playing materials: a deck of cards. Lam designed the Genius: Lautréamont
card, which replaced the King, and the Mermaid: Alice in Wonderland
to replace the Queen. 41 Soon after
viewing these works, Breton chose Lam to illustrate his poem Fata Morgana.
42
The drawings for Fata Morgana
provide a key to understanding the development of Lam's mature style.
He made numerous preparatory drawings for Breton's poem and eventually
chose six for the final publication [fig.
7]. The dynamic line drawings Lam created mark a transition from his
exploration of Picasso to his signature style, a style that challenged
the European interpretation of the primitive. Under the creative inspiration
of the Marseilles surrealists, Lam began to invent horse-headed females,
horned hybrid creatures, and visual puns involving sexual organs that
later became distinguishing features of his paintings. 43
Yet Breton's initial interest
in Lam may have stemmed not solely from his talent, but also from Picasso's
unwavering support of the artist. Although Picasso never officially joined
the surrealists, Breton declared him as "one of our own." And
Breton's connection to Picasso went beyond admiration. 44
During Breton's exile in Marseilles, he received significant financial
assistance from Picasso. 45 Therefore
Breton may have felt some need to include Lam as a favor to Picasso. In
his writings on Lam, Breton also gave priority to Picasso's opinion; however,
in attempting to explain Picasso's connection to Lam, Breton sheds light
on his own construction of Lam as inherently primitive. Breton writes:
It seems probable that Picasso found in Lam the only confirmation acceptable to him, that of a man who, in relation to his own work, had traveled the same path in the opposite direction. Lam started off with a great fund of the marvelous and the primitive within him, and sought the highest point of consciousness by then assimilating the most skillful discipline of European art, this point of consciousness being also the meeting point with the artist – Picasso – who commenced his own journey with perfect mastery over his disciplines but has always insisted on the necessity of a constant return to basic principles in order to retain the power of rejoining the marvelous. 46
Breton ponders whether Picasso
developed a special interest in Lam because of his desire to experience
a primitive vision. Yet, ironically, this explanation also exemplifies
what Breton himself wished to find in Lam. Breton claims that Picasso
began with a "perfect mastery of a discipline" and through his
art arrived at a comprehension of the primitive; whereas Lam already possessed
an inherent primitive vision and only had to master European technique
in order to express it. By structuring his argument in this way, Breton
denies Lam the conscious choice to employ primitivist forms, as well as
the creative ability to arrive at these ideas as an artist. Lam, in short,
merely becomes a conduit for the expression of his innate ethnic identity.
Before meeting Lam, Breton
had already developed an interest in “non-western” cultures.
In 1938 he traveled to Mexico where he met Frida Kahlo, whom he subsequently
dubbed a surrealist. 47 When he
returned, Breton exhibited Pre-Columbian and popular Mexican objects that
he had collected during his travels at the Galerie Renou et Colle in Paris.
48 According to Charles Merewether,
"By that time [1939], the Grand Époque — the great historical
and theoretical age of Surrealism — had passed, the movement was
in search of a second breath, one that would be found in the 1940s in
the Americas through the discovery of the art and myths of non-European
cultures in Mexico, among Native North Americans, in the Antilles, and
in Oceania." 49 If we extrapolate
from Merewether’s assessment, it seems more than likely that Breton's
engagement with foreign cultures, women artists, and marginalized groups
and individuals, including Lam, was strategic, a means of revitalizing
surrealism at a moment when the movement was in decline. In other words,
Breton’s interest in Lam’s work was not the result of its innate
quality or artistic interest. It was a way of stimulating interest in
surrealist activity by forging a connection with the primitive.
At the time he met Lam, Breton
had been exploring notions of the primitive as a means of achieving a
state of “pure mental representation.” In Surrealist Situation
of the Object (1935), Breton states that one of the goals of the Surrealist
movement is to “liberate instinctive impulses” by eliminating
the boundaries of consciousness found in “civilized” society.
He concludes that primitive peoples could express themselves in a purely
instinctual manner, and thus through the study of primitive societies,
civilized man could emulate the intuitive state. 50
His 1937 publication L’Amour Fou again theorized the primitive
mind. 51 In this work, Breton invented
exotic worlds in which subjects were free to explore their dreams and
unconscious desires. 52 This creation
of marvelous settings, unaffected by the modern world, reveals Breton’s
affection not for the formal aspects of non-western art, but rather his
interested in the assumed world-view of primitive societies. 53
Yet as Hal Foster has pointed out, by equating primitive
vision with the unconscious mind, the exotic other serves the ethnocentric
needs of the West by assisting in the establishment of a contrasting western
identity or in this case Breton's intellectual identity. 54
Beyond Foster’s statement,
more specific problems also result from Breton’s assessment of Lam
and other “non-western” peoples. The first stems from the creative
value that Breton, like Picasso and the rest of the Parisian avant-garde,
placed on primitive vision. By attributing Lam’s creative ability
to his “primitive” heritage, Breton denies Lam a conscious and
learned approach to art. Although Breton advocated a conscious probing
of the workings of the unconscious mind 55,
in Lam's case, Breton believed that he had an innate link to the unconscious
through his race and culture. He supposed that Lam’s artistic process
was linked to his ethnic heritage in a way that other surrealist artists’
were not. Highlighting this fact is information gained from a 1945 interview,
in which Breton was asked which sciences influenced avant-garde artists.
He ascribed metaphysics to Kandinsky, embryogenetics to Arp, optics to
Magritte, mineralogy to Herold, cynegetics to Toyen, antiquity to De Chirico,
alchemy to Carrington, but to Lam he assigned Voodoo. 56
Breton singled out Lam as the only artist whose influence was dictated
by what Breton perceived to be his heritage rather than personal artistic
preference.
The second problem stems from Breton's misconception of Lam's background,
since Lam did not actually originate from a so-called "primitive"
society. Cuba, in the early twentieth century, had only recently emerged
from nearly four hundred years of Spanish colonial rule. Cuban society,
although hybrid, was governed by conservative Spanish customs. Lam's family,
although of modest means, was economically stable. 57
His father was an educated man who spoke several Chinese dialects and
worked as a public scribe. 58 The
art Lam was exposed to as a boy in Cuba was not tribal but rather it consisted
of Christian paintings and manufactured statuettes. 59
In 1916, Lam moved to Havana to study law, which he abandoned in favor
of painting. Lam's artistic training in Cuba could not have been more
conservative. He enrolled in the Academia de San Alejandro where he studied
with Armando Menocal and Leopoldo Romañach. 60
In 1923 he received a government grant to study in Spain, where he continued
his academic training under F. Alvarez de Sotomayor the curator of the
Prado. 61 His Self-Portrait
[fig.
8] of 1921, as well as his 1927 Portrait of Eulalia Soliño
[fig.
9] demonstrate Lam’s early naturalistic style. His career, in
other words, progressed in a manner similar to any other artist of his
generation.
Yet despite Lam's colonial
roots and conservative academic training, Breton chose to focus on the
one aspect of his background that was aligned with his theories on the
primitive. Lam's godmother was a priestess in the Lucumi religion, which
combined elements of Afro-Cuban spirituality with Catholicism. 62
Nevertheless, although Lam had witnessed ritual visions, trances, and
animal sacrifices, he never joined the Lucumi religion. Later in his career,
after his contact with the surrealists, Lam clearly chose to exploit and
re-appropriate this aspect of his history as a means of developing an
art that expressed, through a technique developed by contact with the
European avant-garde, the hybrid quality of Cuban identity. Lam's decision
to explore this aspect of his heritage, however, was a conscious choice
with a specific artistic and intellectual purpose. It was not, as Breton
would have wanted, a liberation of his inherent primitive nature. The
perspective he gained during his years in Europe, in other words, allowed
Lam to rediscover his own culture, while the Parisian avant-garde's repeated
assessments of Lam as aligned with the primitive inspired him to re-evaluate
his own use of both primitive and modern forms.
Regardless, therefore, of the
surrealist engagement with non-western cultures, their definition of the
primitive state was clearly contrived to conform to their theories on
artistic creativity. Indeed, according to Jean-Claude Blanchère,
the surrealists chose amongst then current theories set forth by ethnographers,
naïvely supporting some hypotheses and rejecting others in accordance
with their degree of relevance to surrealist thought. 63
Their fascination with non-western cultures, in turn,
resulted in the continued exoticization and mystification of the primitive
other. 64
When Lam returned to Cuba,
he began – through his studies of ethnography, his contacts with
Aimé Cesaire of the Negritude movement, and the anthropologist
Lydia Cabrera – to employ modernist forms to construct a new Afro-Cuban
identity. From the 1920s onwards, literary journals such as Camagüey
Gráfico and Lis, as well as Revista de Avance
(published by the vanguard group, Grupo Minorista), had been engaged with
the issue of defining Cuban national identity through the assertion of
Afro-Cuban culture. 65 These publications
presented a challenge to the west and the colonial dynamic. Thus, when
Lam arrived in Cuba in 1941, the intellectual environment encouraged him
to further pursue his exploration of Africanizing forms. Nevertheless,
due to his long absence, Lam stood apart from the established Cuban avant-garde.
He once again experienced the severe racism of Cuba's conservative society
and was not even granted a solo exhibition until 1946. 66
According to Lowery Stokes Sims: "What sustained Lam in Cuba was
the reputation he had established during his two year residence in Paris"
which was reinforced by the arrival of Pierre Loeb in Cuba. 67
Ironically, in Cuba, Lam was once again an outsider, an “other”
to the members of his own society.
Lam's residence in Europe and, accordingly, his later return to Cuba,
transformed his perception of both modernity and national identity. In
an unpublished interview Lam states:
I went to Europe to escape from my homeland. I thought this journey would resolve everything. But in Europe I encountered other problems as oppressive as those I left behind. My return to Cuba meant above all, a great stimulation of my imagination, as well as the exteriorization of my world. I responded always to the presence of factors which emanated from our history and our geography, tropical flowers and black culture. 68
In Cuba, Lam challenged and
re-configured western perceptions of his race through his art, a discourse
that those not familiar with western modernism could never enter. Lam
reinterpreted the identity of the primitive imposed on him not as a dichotomy
between the western and non-western, but rather as a fusion of the two.
He inverted the primitive, re-appropriating the Africanizing forms employed
by European artists and transforming them into specific symbols of his
Afro-Cuban identity. Lam's employment of signifiers of his own cultural
heritage, in the place of an unidentified or vaguely identified exotic
other, transformed the relationship of the modern to an imagined primitive.
And once signs for the primitive are invested with culturally specific
meaning, they no longer embody the “uncivilized” character of
the other. They therefore take on a new relationship to the European modernist
idiom, thereby challenging western constructions of the primitive.
In conclusion, Wifredo Lam arrived in France in the late 1930s, a time of increasing political and social turmoil. In this period of national insecurity, race served as a visible determinant of the other. The French were both intrigued and wary of people from non-western cultures and thus invented an understanding of these people in opposition to their conception of Frenchness. Although Lam was readily accepted into the ranks of the Parisian avant-garde, their perception of him was directly linked to his race. Yet in spite of this distorted vision, he was never the passive victim of primitivist speculations. Lam certainly benefited from his relationship with Picasso in Paris and the surrealist group in Marseilles. Through their creative intensity and revolutionary spirit, as well as in response to their primitivist vision, Lam was able to arrive at a new approach to his own art. It is up to contemporary art historians, however, to re-write Lam's history with an understanding of the forces that led to certain Eurocentric constructions of the artist by those who knew him in Paris.
Michele Greet is a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU,
specializing in twentieth-century European and Latin American Art. She
is currently working on her dissertation entitled Painting the Indian
Nation: Pictorial Indigenism as a Modernist Strategy in Ecuadorian Art,
1920-1960, a section of which will be presented at the College Art
Association’s annual conference in New York in February 2003. She
also teaches art history at various New York institutions including Pratt
Institute, the Fashion Institute of Technology, and Baruch College.
- Michel
Leiris, Preface to Lam (Fratelli Fabbri, 1970) quoted in Max-Pol
Fouchet, Wifredo Lam (New York: Rizzoli, 1976), 28.
- Maria-Luisa
Borrás, "Lam in Spain" in ed. Lou Laurin-Lam, Wifredo
Lam: Catalogue Raisonné of the Painted Work (Lausanne: Sylvio
Acatis, 1996), 46-49.
- As defined
in Post-Colonial theoretical writings, hybridism refers to the merging
of cultures through contact, a process that, although most often characterized
by the oppression of native traditions by the colonizer, was clearly
not solely unilateral.
- In advertisements
for tropical liqueurs such as Panama Vermuth and Jamaican Rum, for example,
blacks are portrayed as grinning natives, concerned only to perpetuate
the good life.
- Eugen
Weber, The Hollow Years: France in the 1930's (New York: Norton,
1994), 104.
- Jacques
Leenhardt, Pierre Kalfon, Michèle et Armand Mattelart, Les
Amériques Latines en France (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 44.
- Alejo
Carpentier, "La Musique Cubaine" in Documents (Paris,
1929), 327.
- “Anti-ethnocentric”
refers to the surrealists’ awareness and rejection of Europe’s
perception of other cultures as inferior and less civilized.
- David
Richards, Masks of Difference: Cultural Representations in Literature,
Anthropology and Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994),
231.
- Although
Lam developed a long and sustained friendship with Picasso, unlike Breton
and Leiris, Picasso did not write about his relationship with the Cuban
artist. Thus, Picasso's assessment of Lam must be derived through his
actions and the observations of others.
- Max-Pol
Fouchet, Wifredo Lam (New York: Rizzoli, 1976), 110.
- Sebastià
Gasch, Wifredo Lam à Paris (Barcelona: Ediciones Poligrafa
S.A., 1976), 43.
- Lou Laurin-Lam,
ed. Wifredo Lam: Catalogue Raisonné of the Painted Work
(Lausanne: Sylvio Acatis, 1996), 182.
- Jacques
Leenhardt, Pierre Kalfon, Michèle et Armand Mattelart. Les
Amériques Latines en France (Paris: Gallimard, 1992).
- Gerardo
Mosquera maintains that even though Lam employed the geometry of African
masks, he derived his ideas mainly from Picasso. Gerardo Mosquera, "Modernidad
y africanía: Wifredo Lam en su isla" in Museo Nacional
Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Wifredo Lam (Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura,
1992), 31.
- Although
not until his return to Cuba in 1941.
- Lowery
Stokes Sims, "Wifredo Lam: From Spain Back to Cuba" in ed.
Maria R. Balderrama, Wifredo Lam and His Contemporaries 1938-1952
(New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992), 19.
- Even
after spending two years in and France Lam was still not entirely confident
with his command of French. He required a translation of André
Breton's poem Fata Morgana before he began to illustrate the work.
- Jacques
Leenhardt, "Introduction." in ed. Maria R. Balderrama, Wifredo
Lam and His Contemporaries 1938-1952 (New York: Harry N. Abrams,
1992), 13.
- Fundación
Cultural Televisa, Wifredo Lam obra sobre papel (México
D.F.: Fundación Cultural Televisa, 1992), 135.
- "Wifredo
Lam." Cahiers D'Art 14 no. 5-10 (nov. 1939) 179.
- "Picasso
footnotes: his drawings, Lam's painting" Art News (New York,
Nov. 18, 1939): 22.
- Varian
Fry, Assignment Rescue (New York: Four Winds Press, 1968), 121-22.
- "Wifredo
Lam." Pictures on Exhibit vol. 3, no. 2 (New York, Nov.
1939): 16.
- Laurin-Lam,
179.
- Fouchet,
118.
- Yet it
was not until he returned to Cuba that Lam established a visual language
that specifically expressed his hybrid colonial identity through a modern
visual idiom, a process that received its impetus from the perceptions
formed of Lam in Paris.
- Wifredo
Lam, "Mon amitié avec Picasso, 1938" in Wifredo
Lam 1902-1982 exh. cat. (Paris: Editions Amis du Musée d'art
moderne de la ville de Paris, 1982), 13.
- It was
during this time that Lam became a collector of African sculpture, although
like Picasso, many of the pieces he owned were fakes. Thus, Lam's initial
interest in African art seems to have been aesthetic rather that ethnographic.
William Rubin, "Modernist Primitivism: An Introduction" in
ed. William Rubin, "Primitivism" in Twentieth-Century Art:
Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern (New York: Museum of Modern
Art, 1984), 14.
- His articles
employed categorical juxtapositions—a means of reordering and thus
destabilizing conventional classifications of people and objects—to
undermine bourgeois hierarchies. In an essay entitled “Civilisation,”
Leiris compared the savage's use of a telegraph pole as a poison arrow
to the western practice of removing ethnographic objects from their
context and putting them on display in a museum. The two photographs
that accompanied the article by Leiris exemplify this idea through the
juxtaposition of semi-nude showgirls with semi-nude African school children.
Leiris's preoccupation with categorical juxtapositions, however, clearly
dictated his fascination with Lam, in particular with his ethnic heritage.
Michel Leiris, "Civilisation,"
Documents (Paris: 1930): 221.
- For more
on Leiris’s writings on Lam see http://www.devillez.be/lam.htm
- \Pierre
Loeb's exhibition of Lam's work was the last held before Loeb was forced
to close the gallery and move his family to escape the Nazis. He then
traveled the Cuba, where he stayed with Lam for a period. Galerie Albert
Loeb, Wifredo Lam oeuvres de 1938 à 1946 en hommage à
Pierre Loeb (Paris: Galerie Albert Loeb, 1974), unpaginated. The only
other time Lam exhibited in Paris before World War II was as part of
a group show entitled "Art représentatif de notre temps"
at the Mai Gallery. Laurin-Lam, 183.
- Pierre
Loeb's statement was originally written in 1942 and published in 1943
in Tropiques (Galerie Albert Loeb 1974), unpaginated.
- It is
possible that Lam visited the Archaeology Museum in Madrid while living
in Spain where he would have seen African sculptures; however, at that
time he was not interested in the ethnography of these images. Suzanne
Garriques Daniel, "The Early Works of Wifredo Lam 1941-1945,"
Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation (University of Maryland, 1983), 20.
- Antonio
Nuñez Jiménez, Wifredo Lam (Habana: Editorial Letras
Cubanas, 1982), 143.
- Charles
Théophile, "Wifredo Lam: Peintures et dessins," Marianne,
Paris, July 12, 1939.
- José
Martínez, Cuban Art and National Identity: The Vanguardia
Painters, 1927-1950 (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1994),
140.
- Daniel,
26.
- Laurin-Lam,
183. Lam's passage out of the country, as well as that of many of the
artists and intellectuals trapped in Marseilles, was facilitated by
the American Emergency Rescue Committee founded by Eleanor Roosevelt,
the American Federation of Labor and MOMA. Lam, Breton and Levi-Strauss
finally left Marseilles on a boat bound for Martinique on March 24,
1941. Helena H. Benítez, Wifredo Lam: Interlude Marseilles
(Copenhagen: Edition Blondal, 1993), 12-14. Interestingly, in the literature
on Lam, this list of Parisian avant-garde artists is repeated over and
over again as a means of validating Lam through his documented association
with acclaimed European artists.
- Benítez,
14.
- Benítez,
21.
- Fata
Morgana was banned
by the Vichy government in 1941. Benitez, 16.
- Sims
in Balderrama, 23.
- Fouchet,
148.
- Marcela
Godoy Divin, Breton Entre dos Estrellas: Presencia de Hispanoamérica
en el Surrealismo Francés (Santiago: Ediciones Manquel, 1997),
32.
- Breton,
Le Surrealisme et la Peinture, 171.
- Martica
Sawin, Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), 19.
- Charles
Merewether, Wifredo Lam: A Retrospective of Works on Paper, exh.
cat. (New York: The Americas Society, 1992), 42.
- Merewether,
42.
- André
Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. by Richard Seaver,
Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Press, 1969), 273.
- Philippe
Peltier, "The Arrival of Tribal Objects in the West: From Oceania"
in ed. William Rubin, "Primitivism" in Twentieth-Century
Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern (New York: Museum of
Modern Art, 1984), 114.
- Mauer
in Rubin, 548.
- Mauer
in Rubin, 541.
- Hal Foster,
"The Primitive Unconscious of Modern Art," October
34 (Fall 1985): 59.
- Robert
Goldwater, "Primitivism in Modern Painting" Ph.D. Unpublished
Dissertation (Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 1939), 257.
- André
Breton and André Perinaud, Entretiens 1913-1952 (Paris:
Editions Gallimard, 1952) 302.
- Divin,
91.
- Fouchet,
23.
- Michel
Leiris, Wifredo Lam (Paris: Didier Devillez Editeur, 1997) 49-50.
Originally published in 1969.
- Laurin-Lam,
173-174.
- Daniel,
18.
- Laurin-Lam,
174.
- Jean-Claude
Blanchère, Les Totems d'Andre Breton Surréalisme et
primitivism littéraire (Paris: Editions L'Harmattan, 1996),
109.
- Indeed,
by 1955, Breton had despaired of European artists' ability to recreate
primitive states and advised artists to return to their European heritage.
Maurer in Rubin, 584.
- Lowery
Stokes Sims, "Wifredo Lam and the International Avant-Garde 1947-1982."
Unpublished Ph.D Dissertation (City College of New York, Graduate Center,
1995) 21-22.
- Sims,
"Wifredo Lam and the International Avant-Garde,” 40 and 47.
- Sims,
"Wifredo Lam and the International Avant-Garde,” 43.
- Lam in
an unpublished interview in Spanish. Archives SDO Wifredo Lam, Paris.
Translated and quoted from Sims, "Wifredo Lam and the International
Avant-Garde,” 21.
